Newbie Guide to Combat

[Delmon]

-Basics Combat Guide-

Geas can be confusing, so hopefully this helps get you started on killing things in geas.

Some basic commands before attacking:
To look at your inventory, type "inventory" or "i"
To look at your armor ratings, type “armourstats”
To look at your weapons’ ratings, type “weaponstats”

You will, excluding certain rare occurrences, want to have your weapon unwielded while walking around. This does not include wielding a one-handed “walking stick,” indicated by a ‘W’ in ‘hands’ column after typing ‘weaponstats.’ If your weapon has the walking stick capability, then you can wield the weapon in one hand, and if you move you should not gain as much fatigue.

Example of walking-stick:

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Weapon  | Hands 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
spear              | 2 * W | very good
_______________________________________

To wield your weapon, type ‘wield weapon.’ You can also type ‘wield weapon with both hands,’ ‘wield weapon with right hand,’ or ‘wield weapon with left hand.’ To see if you are wielding or how you are wielding, type “exa me,” or “I” (examine me or inventory).
Example:

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wield spear in right hand
You wield the spear in your right hand.
>
unwield all
You unwield the spear.
>
wield spear in left hand
You wield the spear in your left hand.
>
unwield all
You unwield the spear.
>
wield spear with both hands
You wield the spear in your right hand and left hand.
i
You are wielding a short silver spear with your right hand and left hand.

Using belts and scabbards and sheathes are nice because you can draw from a belt and use a ‘specials’ immediately. ‘Help belts’ will lead you through a lot of information concerning using belts and what to do with them. It’s a little confusing, so feel free to ask any questions on the newbie line.
Example:

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draw spear from belt with both hands
>You draw your short silver spear from the sheath of your wide leather belt
(with one sheath attached to it).
slide spear into belt
You slide your short silver spear into your sheath of your wide leather belt
(with one sheath attached to it).

Take a quick look at all the ‘specials.’ Type 'specials'.

The bottom half of the specials are limited to Shaolins or former shaolins, but the top half anyone can attempt if they have the right weapons for it. Most of the specials upgrade into better specials at skill 60. For example, you can use gore instead of impale at level 60, or plunge instead of leap attack at level 60. You can use the upgrade when an X appears in the box. Use specials when you fight. Look at below. They can do awesome stuff!

Example of the upgraded special 'gore':

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gore
You change the grip on your spear and thrust it with force towards the
menacing brown-furred female sphinx. You slash into her scalp and hurt her
critically. You then twist your weapon in her wound before you pull it out
again.
The menacing brown-furred female sphinx screams loudly!
The menacing brown-furred female sphinx is knocked out.
The menacing brown-furred female sphinx falls unconscious.

Example of a cool shaolin move 'spinkick' on 3 nymphs:

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spinkick
You jump up high into the air...
Spinning around you kick the graceful long-armed female nymph hard with
your foot and bruise her head severely.
The graceful long-armed female nymph falls unconscious.
You knock the graceful long-armed female nymph unconscious with your
hit.

Spinning around you kick the lithe slender female nymph hard with your
foot and bruise her head severely.
The lithe slender female nymph's wounds start to bleed.
The lithe slender female nymph falls unconscious.
You knock the lithe slender female nymph unconscious with your hit.

Spinning around you kick the beautiful delicate female nymph hard with
your foot and bruise her head severely.
The beautiful delicate female nymph's wounds start to bleed.
You land safely on your feet.

There is also a setting called ‘delaylimit,’ which varies the amount of delay between the ability to use a special. delaylimit 0 will make the delay the least possible but also causes the most fatigue. Delaylimit 100 will make the delay the most possible but also causes the least fatigue.

Example:

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delaylimit 0
You change your delay-limit from 0 to 0.

Type ‘combat’ to see your combat settings. You will notice you have offensive and defensive move settings. Offensive moves are swing, thrust, smash, and feint; and defensive moves are parry, dodge, and counter. You can change the desired percentage for your character to thrust by going ‘combat attack thrust 45’ (45% thrusting), or combat defend parry 50 (50% parry). ***to raise fencing skill, you will have to set combat like ‘combat attack feint 5’ and ‘combat defend counter 5’. You will be able to set higher values of countering and feinting as the fencing skill improve. You can also type ‘help combat’ for more information.

Wimpy sends your guy in a frenzied retreat if you’re badly hurt, sending you anywhere and everywhere! To change this, type ‘wimpy 0’. Your mood can be anything from defend to frenzy. This is fairly self explanatory, but one grants a greater chance of hitting and being hit, while defend you don’t even attack but have the least chance of getting hit.

There are a variety of body parts you can aim at. There is a also a skill called aim. Learning skill aim will improve your chances to hit the body part aimed at successfully. You can practice this skill by typing 'aim at right hand', 'aim at head' etc. You can also learn the skill protect, which intuitively protects one body part more than others. To use this skill, type 'protect right hand', 'protect neck', 'protect left foot' etc.

OK! Before you attack, appraise. This is will help you out a lot. Just go ‘Appraise object’. For example, appraise elf, or appraise gremlin. Some creatures are aggressive and attack automatically. You can ‘appraise foe’ or ‘appraise foes’ in this case. If they look tough, or likely to seriously hurt you, or likely to kill you, don’t attack them!

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appraise foes

You study the beautiful long-armed female nymph carefully.
She is physically barely alive and mentally in full vigour.
She is extremely alert.
You are much stronger than she is.
You are about as dexterous as she is.
You are more agile than she is.
You are a bit less healthy than she is.
You know she will bore you if you fight her.
You know her weight is 52 kg, her volume is about 46 liter and her height is
about 159 cm.

Notice it looks like it will bore me. So I should be good to go.

To attack, type ‘kill object’. Such as kill gremlin. Then the battle will begin. Don’t forget to be wielding your weapon and trying out specials!
Make sure to check your hp fairly often. To do this, type ‘hp.’ You will see your fatigue level, your hitpoint status, and your breathing level. If you are getting close to out of breath, it’s time to retreat. If you are ‘not in a good shape’ or ‘in a bad shape,’ its time to retreat.

To retreat or get out of there, just go back the way you came, like east, west, southwest etc. Sometimes the enemy will be too fast so you will have to try it again until it works. Most npcs won’t block the exits, so you will likely escape.

To block an exit, type ‘block exit’. For example, block west, block east, block up, block northwest etc. This will make it –harder- for someone to escape. You can also ‘hunt foe’, and this will cause your character to follow your enemy if they leave.

Healing up! You will want to ‘aid me’ to stop your bleeding as fast as possible. You can then ‘medical wounds of me’ to get a little aid bonus or something like that. Then you will want to ‘rest’ or ‘meditate’ to heal up. You can heal up the same whether you are wielding or not. To get out of meditation, type ‘rise.’ If for some reason you get a limb cut off, you can go to a temple and get it restored, or if you pick up the limb, you can get it attached back on. If you break a bone, type ‘medical right arm’ for example to put the arm in a splint. Again, if you’re confused you can ask through the newbie line.

Example of aiding and medical:

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aid me
You begin to aid yourself.
>You bandage your bloodloss.
You bandage your bloodloss.
You stop aiding since there are no bleeding wounds.
You stop aiding yourself.
medical wounds of me
The wounds are already bandaged.
You can't treat them any further.

After you take down the creature, you can loot the corpses. Type 'look at corpse' (l at corpse also works), and if there are two corpses, 'look at corpse 2'. Then 'get 'object'' from corpse 1.

Example of looting:

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It's Night.
In a forest.
 The trees and hills open out to form a well lit clearing. A mossy banked
 stream trickles past in the dappled shade of the trees. Lining the path are
 tall trees that seem to have been crammed in too close to one another.
 Despite that, they grow strongly with broad, straight trunks. Brightly
 coloured birds dart about high up in the tree tops, calling out their
 alarms as they are disturbed. 
There are two obvious exits: southeast, south.
A corpse of a bouncy white-furred male faun, a corpse of a horned
gray-furred female faun, some pieces of faun meat, a piece of faun meat and
a wooden club.
>
l at corpse
This is the dead body of a bouncy white-furred male faun.
The corpse contains:
Two silver coins and two wooden clubs.
>
l at corpse 2
This is the dead body of a horned gray-furred female faun.
The corpse contains:
Three silver coins and a wooden club.
>
l at corpses
This is the dead body of a bouncy white-furred male faun.
The corpse contains:
Two silver coins and two wooden clubs.
This is the dead body of a horned gray-furred female faun.
The corpse contains:
Three silver coins and a wooden club.
>
get coins from corpse 1
You get two silver coins from the corpse 1.
>
get coins from corpse 2
You get three silver coins from the corpse 2.

You can also fight in a team with others. To see your team status, type 'team'. To join a team, you must 'join character', such as 'join elf', 'join Delmon' , etc. To leave a team, you must 'leave'. If you are the team leader, and you want to boot people out of the team, use 'leave all'. You can position yourself in the front row, second, row, or third row. You can do this by typing 'back' and 'advance'. Certain weapons can reach certain rows. For examples, polearms can reach the second row, and bows can reach any row. Most weapons can only reach the front row. There is also a skill called guard, which if used such as 'guard elf', 'guard Delmon', your character will step in front and all enemies attacking the character you guard will now attack you. Guard sometimes works and it's a skill. Sometimes useful.

If you fall on the ground, your character will take some time to get up. To get up faster, use 'flickup' to make your character use some stamina and get back up immediately. You cannot use flickup with very heavy armours.

Example of a failing flickup from a failing knee special! oh no! Thankfully I can try again soon after.

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You try to ram your knee into the swift white male unicorn's right hind leg,
but it avoids your attack.
You lose your balance and fall down to the ground.
>
flickup
You twist your body trying to spring to your feet but fail and fall back to
the ground.
flickup
Slow down! You're not ready yet.
>
flickup
You twist your body and slam the heels of your hands against the ground
launching yourself to your feet.

***Read about weapons and armours. Think common sense here. If you wear platemail, your attacks won’t land as much or as hard. If you wear leathers, get ready for some bleeding when fighting. If you wield a great twohander, you will probably get some nice hits in, and maybe even a critical—every once in long time. If you use two weapons, expect less damage but more attacks.
***everyone wears a --tunic-- you'll probably want to find out how to get one IC and get one. It is a very efficient armour.
***The higher the constitution,the less you'll have to retreat, press hp, and so forth. Races with high constitution are tshaharks, dwarves, and humans. Elves and halflings have to watch their hp closely
***Arrows cannot stun

[Zehren]

Expand with notions about teams, guarding and flickuping, and I will award you that smiley.

[lili]

Thank you for this, there were a few things written that I hadn't known about yet:)

[Delia]

If your weapon has the walking stick capability, then you can wield the weapon in one hand, and if you move you should not gain more fatigue because of it.

In my understanding walking sticks do cause fatigue faster than travelling without wielding but less than wielding a non-walking stick of same size.

[Rastien]

Thanks, Delmon, it's a nice summary.

[ferranifer]

Very nice guide!

I'd like to expand a little on medical and critical wounds.

If you get hit very hard, you will accrue critical wounds. Critical wounds take time to heal and reduce your maximum health. Also, your wounds can open again if you have a large amount of critical wounds, which will make you spontaneously start bleeding. Using medical on yourself will reduce the amount of time it takes to heal your critical wounds.

Critical wounds are expressed as a percentage of your current wounds. When the game says:

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4% of your wounds are critical.

what it means is that of 4% of all your wounds (normal and critical) are critical. So, you can have 100% critical wounds if your normal wounds are healed, but your only wounds left are critical. You will rarely see this though, as it requires a pretty traumatic amount of damage to accrue a large amount of critical wounds.

[ferranifer]

On parrying and dodging:

A parried hit is completely ignored and does no damage. You need a weapon to parry. A dodged attack is also completely ignored, you step out of the way. You don't need a weapon to dodge. You can specify how likely you are to parry over dodging in 'combat defend', but keep in mind that you can only parry and dodge a certain amount of attacks in a given time frame.

Parry is governed by the 'parry' skill. Dodge is governed by 'defence'. 'Unarmed combat' improves your footwork and helps with both parry and defence (edit: verification needed for the impact on parry).

You can specify which weapon you want to use to parry with 'parry with weapon'. I.e.: 'parry with sword' or 'parry with shield'. Shields are extremely good at parrying and offer a chance to completely deflect arrows shot at you. Shield effectiveness is governed by the 'shield' skill.

You can learn more about parrying with the 'parrystats' command, which looks like this:

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  Item    | bad________________________________________________good
          | ....|....|....|....|....|....|....|....|....|....|....|..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     chain-whip-axe-club-hammer-shield-knife-sword-rapier-polearm-spear-staff
knife     |            <---------*---------->
     whip-axe-club-hammer-chain-shield-rapier-knife-sword-polearm-spear-staff
hand axe  |                <--------*-------->
     whip-rapier-chain-polearm-spear-staff-sword-axe-club-hammer-shield-knife
staff     |                    <-------------*---->

The bracketed area expresses how good the weapon is for parrying, in general. It's worth mentioning that different weapon types have different effectiveness against other weapon types. The weapon-to-weapon effectiveness is expressed from left to right. I.e.: knives are bad at parrying chains, but good against staves. Axes are bad at parrying whips and other axes, but good against staves. Staves are generally better for parrying than both axes and knives.

On deflect:

Deflect is the uncanny ability to shrug off superficial damage by moving out of the way as the blow hits. A deflected attack will do less damage than normal. Deflect works better when you are wearing no or little armour and you are not encumbered. Deflect is governed by the 'deflect' skill. Higher 'deflect' skill increases your chance to deflect and reduces the damage you take when you deflect a hit. You can learn more at 'help deflect'.

On damage and attack types:

Certain weapons are restricted to specific attack types. For example, daggers can only swing and thrust and are unable to smash. Maces cannot thrust. The game will automatically choose attack types that match the weapons you are using, but you can adjust how often certain attack types are chosen with your 'combat attack' settings. If 'combat attack' shows values different than what you set, that's because it's automatically adjusting the settings to the capabilities of the weapons you're using.

Something that isn't commonly known is that armour types are affected differently by certain attack types. For example, leather armour might be good against slashing, but not very good against piercing. In general, it pays off to pay attention to your equipment and the equipment of your enemy.

[Aslak]

Now we just need some information about what kind of stats do influence what in the game, what the different weapon types connects to attack types. I have some 50 days online time and still am more or less clueless about many of these things, example mental stats, dex vs agi and many more.

[ferranifer]

Now we just need some information about what kind of stats do influence what in the game, what the different weapon types connects to attack types. I have some 50 days online time and still am more or less clueless about many of these things, example mental stats, dex vs agi and many more.

I have found that most things in Geas work as you would expect them to work based on their physical characteristics.

For example, with weapon attack types... well, daggers can't smash and clubs cannot thrust, as you would expect. If it has a pointy bit it can probably thrust. If it has any kind of length or bulk to it, it can probably smash. You can easily make your own list by equipping a weapon of each type and checking your 'combat attack' and see which attack types 'light up'.

As for stats, this is what I know:

STR modifies the damage you do in combat and allows you to perform feats of strength. If you're moving rocks, climbing or fighting things regularly with melee weapons, you want strength.
DEX represents your ability to do intrincate things with your hands. Among other things, it affects crafting and thievery. It also affects your ability to use ranged weapons.
AGI represents your flexibility and speed of movement. It affects your defense and your general combat ability. If it has to do with dodging, moving or doing acrobatics, it's very likely to be AGI. If you're trying to avoid getting hit or using 'fancy footwork' moves, you want AGI.
CON is your health. Also your resistance to traumatic physical damage. The more CON you have, the longer you live for and the harder it is to critically hurt you. If you're fighting, you want constitution.
INT represents your mental acuity. If it's a complicated task that requires focus and attention, it is very likely to be INT. Thievery included. If you're reading, singing or concentrating to cast spells, you need intelligence.
WIS represents your knowledge. If it's a task related with memorization or intuition then it's likely to be WIS. WIS also affects your intuitive connection with the gods, and certain feats of casting require wisdom.
DIS represents your willpower. If it's a grueling task that tests your morale, commitment and dedication, it's likely to be DIS. This can have an impact on both your body and your mind. High discipline will keep a warrior in combat against fear or certain soul-wrenching attacks, but it will also keep someone fighting through dire bloodloss. I believe DIS also directly affects how much you bleed, but not sure about this. If you're fighting you want discipline. If you're performing complicated mental tasks, you also want discipline. There is a certain amount of overlap between DIS, INT and WIS.

In general, I've found that these simple explanations cover pretty much every skill in the game. Things seem to just.. well, make sense.

[Skragna]

Discipline also helps to negate the penalties for fighting multiple foes.

[Noryb]

Indeed, nice guide. I will use this for the new tutorial/training area.
If you guys have more of this stuff we will gladly implement it in the new guide.

[Xog]

One thing that really wasn't mentioned here, is moods.
So, I have been learning allot from reading the forums during meditation times.
The one thing I haven't really found a topic on is moods.
I understand the basic topic about them as far as being in defend mood, you don't attack at all, where as being in frenzy, you will attack the majority of the time with some chance of parry/block.
What I am wondering is if lets say I am in balance mood.
If I want to have a better chance of getting a imp in shield or parry, is it better to stay in lower moods then frenzy mood?
Also, once in a while, someone should go back and give some of these forum posts a bump.
There is a great deal of information, and if a newbie doesn't know about the different topics already here, then it's a treasure not being used.

[Delmon]

Wow blast to the past. Moods like defend and wimpy will increase your chance of attempting and performing parry so I suspect it would increase your chance of increasing shield skill since you use would be using it more. Of course you can select the percentage between parry dodge and counter but the moods change the actual attempt percentage.