Forums: General Aethora Chat

Maybe I misunderstand what this skill is used for, or when I should see a benefit from it. Its description leads me to think it should effect character movement rates either by adding move points per round, or by lowering thier squares per point number… however it doesn’t appear to do either, nor can I see where it does help… so what does it do? Is it purely defensive… ie offset things like stone to mud? or something else entirely?

Thanks in advance.

Well, hello. Sorry, normally I check here daily, but currently, I don’t really have time.
Marathon should increase the move points of the affected character by the strength of the action each turn. There isn’t much space to do so. You get 50 points per turn, and have a cap of 100. Sadly I don’t know in what order the effects are executed, I just know that the standard increase happens at the very beginning, before everything else.

So, the easy stuff:
If you do not have any other effect on you that changes your move points, then it should just add some move points at the beginning of your turn. Be aware, though, that unless you have less than 50 move points at the end of turn, you won’t see any effect. With a strength of 50 or more, you’d even be able to use up ALL your movepoints and have a full 100 again at the next turn.

The hard stuff:
Again, I sadly don’t know the specifics there, if effects are executed as applied, or as created in the database, or alphabetically, or whatever other kind of sorting might come up. And that’s the tricky part.
Let’s say you finish your turn with 30 move left. You got Marathon (40) and Stone to Mud (30) on you.
Technically, you’d say, you get 10 points more from Marathon than you lose by Stone to Mud, so you should end up at 60 (10 + 50) more points than last turn, that’d be 90.
That’s of course true, but ONLY if Stone to Mud is processed first. (30 + 50 = 80. 80 – 30 = 50. 50 + 40 = 90.) If, however, Marathon is processed first, it’d be 30 + 50 = 80. 80 + 40 = 120. Capped. 100 – 30 = 70. Now, that’s still 20 points more than if you had not used it, but it can be irritating.

The problem is the high natural regeneration (50), and the cap (100). That leaves little leeway for any changes, if you don’t run around each turn like it was the only thing to do. We are, however, currently working on some balance updates (when we have the time, which is quite rare, currently), and this might be addressed within there.

Oh, and: It’s an area effect. Don’t worry, it only affects allies.

As always, don’t trust anything I say, unless Sheck says so.

well, here’s what I’ve been trying to do with it.

I get marathon cast at the start as an opening spell… try to allow my beefy heavily armored chaps to get into good positions. Except, when their turn starts, after the spell as been applied, they receive only 50 move on the first turn of the game. Subsequent turns I haven’t noticed an increase either… though that might be due to the effects of other spells in play. I’ll try to track that next time I use it. So maybe the first round they game doesn’t calculate added move?

That would be very odd. No, I guess there is rather some error preventing it from adding that move bonus altogether. I can only take a look at it in the administration interface, see if there is a spelling error or some other simple syntax problem, but if it’s something in the code, I can’t do anything about it. But regardless, I’ll inform Sheck, he’s the guy who can solve any problem. After all, he wrote the code.

EDIT:
Okay, I’ve found the problem. It is a simple fix that I should be able to do. Sadly, last time I tried this, I broke the game.

EDIT2:
Okay, this should have solved that problem. Please try if it works now, keep in mind the limitations I pointed out. And thanks for the report, by the way!
Oh, and if it doesn’t work right away, please try another battle. I don’t know if the change I made actually carries over into already running battles.

any word on why I can no longer even see the marathon skill?

Yeah, there was a word. That word was “weird”. Sorry, this is by far outside of what I can do now, and Sheck said he’d have a look at it.

I’ll take weird!

Thank you again for the effort!