A combat always opposes two parties. It is resolved when all the party members of one party are all dead or able to flee.
There are different types of combat:
The combat is split up in rounds. In each round, actions are determined for every characters, either by way of their automatas or the player's decisions.
Once the character's actions have been picked, the turn is processed by the server and the outcome is determined. The determined outcome is then played back to the user. If combat must continue, another round starts.
When a character dies in combat it loses a small percentage of its experience accumulated towards the next level. If the whole party is wiped out, all characters also lose some gold in addition to the experience loss. If the party is exterminated, they are teleported back to the temple of the town in the region in which they are currently adventuring and are revived.
Back Row Protection[]
The front and back row are not simply for some visual aesthetic. They have a precise and important role in combat.
The front row can protect the back row from enemy physical attacks, providing "armor" bonuses to the characters in the back row by having the characters in the front row run interference with the attacks of the enemy, making it weaker.
The back row protection mechanism works as an on or off thing. So either all back row characters are protected or none are. Here is how it works:
- Characters have a game variable that represent the amount of back row protection it can provide. By default, it is set to 1. To determine the total amount of back row protection available for the whole party, the game adds up the back row protection value for every characters in the front row.
- Characters in the back row require an amount of protection from the front row to be considered protected. Thus, the game adds up the protection requirements from every characters in the back row to determine the total amount of protection needed to efficiently defend the back row.
- If the amount of back row protection is equal or greater than the required back row protection, then the back row is considered protected. Whenever that becomes false within the combat, the back row is not protected and thus those characters in the back row will not benefit from the armor bonus. Needless to say they'll be pretty vulnerable to enemy attacks!
Right now, there are only two ways of influencing the numbers. The Guard class has an inherent +1 bonus to back row protection and the use of some Horses also provide the same bonus (only Knights, Paladins and War Wizards can use Horses).