In the previous dev blog, I announced CampaignWar (CW), an experimental war plugin of ours that is currently in development and is designed for its own gamemode. The astute among you, however, may have noticed that Nations PvP is unsuitable for CW. The frontlines are fluid; provinces may exchange hands multiple times throughout a single war, and you may attack an enemy province surrounded by other enemy provinces. In short, there is no guarantee that a friendly resupply base capable of holding hundreds of chests of potions will be nearby. 

A different combat system is needed for CW; it is also an opportunity to try something different.¹ The objective of the one presented in this blog is to create a cohesive melee and guns experience while simultaneously expanding the number of possible playstyles and combat roles. Of course, remember that everything in here (particularly specific values) are subject to continuous change and balancing.

Changes

A good way to begin thinking about this system is to take Nations PvP and remove the following features:

• Potions
• Debuff arrows
• Shields
• Protection, Blast Protection and Fire Protection enchants
• Fire Aspect and Knockback enchants
• Sharpness 4 and 5

These removals might sound radical - perhaps even extreme at first - but there are some substitutes and replacements, as we shall see.

Melee Weapons

While vanilla’s swords remain, new melee weapons have been added alongside them: 

Katana

The Katana sacrifices damage for mobility: its crits inflict less damage but give their user Speed II for 2 seconds.

Most crucially, right-clicking with a katana will activate the Dash ability, which causes you to leap forwards. Hits made while dashing and jumping inflict twice as much damage and knockback. 

Cutlass

The Cutlass exchanges damage for a modestly increased attack speed and the ability to inflict AoE damage. When a Cutlass damages an enemy, it also damages all entities within the 2x1x1 cuboid centered on it. The Cutlass can also activate Dash – but whereas dashing with a Katana causes you to leap forwards, doing so with a Cutlass will cause you to leap backwards. 

M1 Trench Knife

The M1 Trench Knife is a throwable weapon with a high attack speed. Throwing the knife and scoring a hit gives the user Speed 2 momentarily. Like a loyalty trident, the knife returns to its user after being thrown. Hitting an enemy from behind inflicts double damage and gives the user Speed 3 momentarily; this bonus also applies to thrown knives.

Note, however, that the knife suffers from decreased base damage and reach (-1 block). It also does not deal knockback, which may be either good or bad depending on your playstyle. 

Cavalry Combat

Like on Nations, hits made while on horseback inflict more damage with the size of this boost depending on the speed of the horse (+1.5% per m/s). But unlike on Nations, the horse-rider also takes more damage at the same rate - there is a trade-off between offense and defence.

The damage boost is doubled for the two designated cavalry weapons: the Lance and Cavalry Sabre. 

Lance

The Lance is a weapon intended to be used from horseback. It can:

• Hit enemies up to 5 blocks away
• Skewer through multiple enemies
• Inflict more damage when damaging enemies from behind
  
• Activate a Cavalry Charge when right-clicked while on horseback

But these advantages are offset by its:

• Slow attack speed
• Penalty to movement speed while held
• Extremely low durability

Cavalry Charge

The Cavalry Charge ability has a duration of 6 seconds and has a 30 second cooldown. For its duration, the horse:

• Receives Speed 3
• Does not rear when damaged
• Damages and knocks back all enemies that it collides with. The size of both effects are determined by the horse's speed

After the charge concludes, the horse suffers from Slowness 2 for 3 seconds.

Cavalry Sabre

The Cavalry Sabre is a weapon intended to be used from horseback. Both its attack speed and reach are greater than normal (+13% and +0.5 blocks respectively), and it inflicts AoE damage similarly to the Cutlass - although the damage cuboid is 2.5 blocks wide rather than 2 blocks. However, it does not inflict extra damage on crits, making it less useful when dismounted.

Horse Armour

Horse armour is stronger than in vanilla, but in a different way than on Nations. For example, higher-tier horse armour has more defined drawbacks in the form of penalties to movement speed and jump height.

It is useful to see the effects of these values on a graph: the x-axis is damage inflicted (1 heart = 2 damage), and the y-axis is damage received after accounting for horse armour. The top line is leather, and each line downwards goes up a tier (so the bottom line is diamond).

Guns

Guns remain broadly the same - at least so far - but there are a few notable changes:

• Assuming you use no armour mods whatsoever (more on those later), gun damage received will be around 30% higher than on Nations. Armour mods can reduce this considerably.
• You can crawl (‘go prone’) using /crawl. This reduces bullet spread by 50%.
• If you are hit in melee while holding a primary weapon, you will be ‘stunned’ - prevented from using primary weapons for 3 seconds.
• There is an anti-tank grenade which sticks to ground vehicles. The grenade detonates after a few seconds, damaging concrete and terracotta.

Healing

While there are no potions, it is still possible to heal using bandages and medical kits. 

Bandage

• Heals 2 hearts.
• 24 second cooldown.
• Stackable to 3.

First Aid Kit

• Heals 4 hearts.
• 58 second cooldown.
• Stackable to 2.

Armour Modifications

Armour modifications (or “armour mods”) replace the Protection category of enchantments. Their purpose is to introduce meaningful choices into selecting combat loadouts by allowing players to specialise in mitigating specific kinds of damage. Each piece of armour can have one primary mod and one secondary mod. 

Primary Modifications

Heavy Ballistic Plating

• -12% damage from rifles and machine guns 
• -8% damage from sidearms 
• -3.5% movement speed

Light Ballistic Plating

• -4% damage from rifles and machine guns
• -12% damage from sidearms
• -1.5% movement speed

Chainmail Plating

• -12% damage from melee weapons and melee mob attacks
• -4% damage from sidearms

Secondary Modifications

Heat Resistant Plating

• +25% chance of gaining momentary Fire Resistance when damaged
• -0.75% movement speed

Blast Resistant Plating

• -12% damage from explosions (including from cannons)
• -1.5% movement speed

Lightweight Plating

• -1 armour defence point 
• +1.5% movement speed

Conclusion

We will be conducting a playtest of both this combat and the CW war system on Friday August 9 around 16:00 UTC. If you are interested in participating, feel free to reply to this post with your in-game and Discord usernames. Do also feel free to reply if you have any suggestions, questions or concerns regarding the features showcased in this blog.

¹ To be clear, this is designed for the CW 'test gamemode' mentioned in the previous dev blog. There are no plans to add this to Nations.

This would be a great addition if it's ever possible for nations, it would make combat unique to the server, and it would make spam of recruitment from PVP servers (like the Lokans people have complained about) less effective, and thus leveling the CCnet playing ground and require people to learn the CCnet system, I think this would be a great solution and I hope it works out, and can eventually be integrated. Keep up the good work you guys are doing on the dev team :D

IGN: ImGnomeAlone

DC: gnomeyallaloney

Few questions

1.) What about the casual players who rely on protection enchants and sharpness? 

2.) How are you going to remove speed potions? Making them non-existent makes horse travel waaaaay worse.

I get it if most of the features that you would be getting rid of would be only disabled during combat time (or just not allowing players to war with them) . 

Xze_g:

Few questions

1.) What about the casual players who rely on protection enchants and sharpness? 

2.) How are you going to remove speed potions? Making them non-existent makes horse travel waaaaay worse.

I get it if most of the features that you would be getting rid of would be only disabled during combat time (or just not allowing players to war with them) . 

1) Assuming you are talking about PvE, the chainmail armour mod protects against mob attacks. A full set of armour with this mod protects against these roughly as well as Protection 3.

2) There will still be custom foods. I haven't decided what their effects will be, but Speed is certainly on the agenda. For horses specifically, the idea is to add "road blocks" that give a speed boost to horses travelling upon them, just like the road blocks for Movecraft ground vehicles.

Looking forward to the test

Months ago, I suggested to nerf instant healing since many people spam potions jump down the ganks and redo the whole process. This... I want this... I want to be in the testing process. I volunteer. As a non-pvper who wants to see this server to adapt a more modern way to fight, I want to be in the process if I can help in any way in the testing, if I ever get invited, I will happily accept it.

discord: Miqa#0372

IGN: MMiqa

I want to participate in the testing

Small suggestion it would be great if the testing timings would be off battle session as more players can come. 

Ign: Dhiras

Discord: dhiras

I would love to see this in action.

IGN: phphphg

Discord: phphphg

I believe this could be an amazing addition for a new gamemode. (definitely should not replace nations at all) but this is very cool and having tried it i find it quite fun. Though i think the medkit and bandage cooldown should be lower