Teaming

You will often find on Xyllomer that a monster or team of monsters is too powerful to be fought alone. And although several characters can walk into a room at the same time it helps them co-ordinate their fighting abilities if they are in a team. The commands used for teaming in combat are, like the basic combat commands, simple and logical. Teaming also helps characters to travel together. Instead of each player typing the direction independantly, the leader of the team chooses where the whole team will go and in most cases all the members follow them.

These commands are used to form a team. At the simplest level, any player may invite another into a team that they are leading or to join them if they are not currently in a team at all. The invited player will then join that person. By using the command team, you may see the heath status of all team members without having to look at them individually and pick the information out of their full description.
A member of a team who is not the leader cannot invite and be joined by another player. However .. if they leave their team and invite another player to join them, they may then rejoin the team and the person they invited may then join them in team.

This helps in large battles to split a huge team into manageable groups so that the team command can be used to watch for your personal team instead of everyone and so that if a teamleader dies, most people still recieve the benefits of teaming.

The assist command is useful if your team is in combat with more than one enemy. It may be difficult to know exactly who your teamleader is in combat with, most orcs look pretty similar to non-orcs and you might have a whole team fighting different enemies. If you have a nominated 'target picker' then the rest of the team can: assist <targetpicker> to concentrate on a single foe.

There are two good reasons for this. Firstly, the more attacks aimed at someone the harder it becomes to parry each one, especially with a slow weapon. Therefore a greater total damage will almost certainly be done by targetting a single foe. Secondly, common sense tells most people that if the enemies are strong enough to hurt you, it is better to reduce the number of incoming attacks as fast as possible.

Once in team you are able, at a very basic level, to choose whether you stand in an automatically protected position or not. Young, weak characters or non-fighters are safest in the back row, while older strong characters, especially members of combat-oriented clans would normally form the front row. It is not possible to take part in hand to hand combat from the back row, only missile weapons, spells or bard songs are effective from here.

You are able to change position during combat using the commands: advance to join the front row from the back and: back to move into the back row from the front. Moving from the back row to the front once combat has started is fairly safe. The enemy has already chosen a target for its attack and will probably not change its mind until the target is dead. However, if the target moves into the back row or leaves the room, the enemy will reselect a target from all those who stand in the front.

If this is a weak or non-fighter character who advanced to slip in a few blows while the enemy was otherwise occupied they may then want to go back themselves. This is not always possible! There may be no more members of the back row than there are in the front. Pretty obviously one fighter can't stand in front of two or three mages at the same time when half a dozen orcs are coming from all sides. Also your enemy may follow you .. effectively meaning that you stay in the front row. What I am saying is that the back command is not a guaranteed escape route.

Guarding another player can be useful in the above situation. If each back row character is guarded by another in the front row then if they are attacked the stronger character will attempt to intercept the attacker and take the blows themself. Although this technique cannot be relied upon completely it does at least give a chance that a weak character who is unable to fall back in team will not have to take attacks they might not be able to withstand.

The other way that guarding can be useful is for splitting the attacks of NPC enemies upon the front row. Most often NPCs will attack the teamleader as they are first into the room, or in the case of those who attack only if they are attacked they will attack the character who initiated combat. If this person is guarded, then the guard will attempt to stop each of the enemies from reaching their target. It is unlikely that they will manage to stop them all no matter how skilled they are, but it will help split the attacks of a powerful team between two people so that the rest of the team have enough time to kill the enemies before one of the tanks has to go back.

Once in a team your character will follow the teamleader through almost any exit, although you may leave a room through any exit you choose, you will automatically follow your teamleader if they enter the room you are in and leave again through one of the exits. To leave their team you must type: leave team. If you leave team in this way you are able to rejoin the team at a later time without needing to be reinvited.
If you are the leader of a team and you wish to disband the team completely you can type: leave all. If however you just want one person to leave the team you can select them by typing: leave <person>. They will no longer follow you, or be able to view the health status of your team without looking at them individually.

Content by Verdigris