Shades - A beginners introduction - Part 2 By Grimwold / Flasheart @~Continued from Issue 32 Fighting Shades is quite heavily based on fighting, and it is highly recommended that you learn how to fight. I'm no expert on fighting (ask any regular Shades player!) but I'll try to outline the basics. I'll not dally with the mobiles (The Non-Player-Characters), as these are quite boring to fight. If one attacks you, you just either retaliate with a weapon if you have one, or try and slug it out. There are a lot of mobiles, some more deadly than others. Most of those North of the river are quite easy to kill if you have a weapon, but some others are very difficult. The Hermit, the Morloch, the Lion, the Thief and the Beggar are all quite strong, but the worse by far is the leech. This particular mobile has a stamina of 50,000! (A novice player only has 100 Stam!) This means that it cannot be killed by normal means. Zapping it with the rod is one way to deal with it, but you will have to be quick or it will re-appear. The other way is to find something that keeps it away. First, I'll give some of the commands used in fighting: KILL plyr [weap] K plyr [weap] Starts a fight with or without a weapon. STEAL ST Steal the weapon in current use by opponent. STEAL weap[plyr] ST weap[plyr] Steals a weapon from the player. FLEE FL Run from a fight. You also have to specify a direction to flee in. Note that a flee will cost you 1/32 of your points. BERSERK BERSERK You can go berserk if you are the defender, but not if you attacked. A berserk kills both you and your opponent but without loss of score. RETALIATE RET Use this to start using a weapon. Note that you will have to RET (weapon) almost every time you manage to steal it back from your opponent. QUIT QQ Don't do this during a fight, a QQ will cost you about 1/16th of your points, so is very costly. If you want to get out of a fight that you know you cannot win, then it's best to FLee then QQ whilst not in combat. If you hang up during a fight, then it is treated as a QQ, so you lose the same points. Before you go out into the game attacking everything that moves, there are a few things to consider first. Try to get a SC, or SS of the person you intend fighting to see whether they are a good fighter or not. If they have lots of KILLS in their score (some players have well over 300 attacks!) then it's best to try and avoid them if you can. You will have to be very experienced to beat them in a fight. Many immortals keep several other personas on just for fighting, at all levels of the game. Also, attacking a level below yourself is considered bad form, and you can be sure that if you make a habit of this you will find yourself targeted quite often by other players. It is very bad form to intervene in a fight between two players, such as stealing the weapon, or casting spells at one of the players. Note also that you cannot attack a person if they are involved in a fight already, which is a good idea as then you don't get large gangs roaming around killing everyone. Right, so you're in a fight. Either someone has attacked you or you attacked them. It's useful if your opponent attacked you first as the defender gets more spells in a fight (I think it's 25 spells as opposed to 16 for the attacker) and since each attempt to steal a weapon uses one spell, these are very important. You get one more spell each time you are hit. You will notice that you will keep getting your weapon stolen. Don't worry about this, just keep trying to ST it back again. The ST command doesn't have a high success rate most of the time so you will usually have to try several times before you succeed. Once you've stolen the weapon you then have to RET (weapon) in order to use it in the fight. ST will only try to steal a weapon that is in use. Sometimes it is necessary to type the longer "ST weap plyr". At higher levels you can have a lot of fun casting other spells on your opponent, such as crippling, stripping, forcing them to do various things etc. Apparently you used to be able to force another player to WH ALL, which gave them screens and screens of text effectively stopping them from fighting for a while. Checking on their score during a fight gives you an indication of their stamina, your own stamina is displayed every time you are hit. Do this by typing QS (player). Another good thing to remember in the fight is to keep track of where the strange little girl is. She is the main way of regaining stamina in Shades, so typing WH GIRL will give you an idea of her whereabouts if you or your opponent flees. You then need to race to the girl, grab her and regain your stamina before the other player gets there first and attacks you on your way to her, thus gaining an advantage. If you have little chance of winning a fight, it's worthwhile trying to BERSERK a few times. This only works reliably at lower levels, and if it doesn't work you lose 10 stamina. However, if you are going to flee anyway, it sometimes can save you the loss of points incurred in fleeing. Try to avoid dying if possible, not only is it undignified, you also lose 1/16th of your total points. You will also lose 1/16th of your points if you QUIT or hang up during a fight. If you win a fight (that is, actually kill your opponent, not just make them flee) you will score points. The points made depend on the level of your opponent and also whether you attacked or defended. A defence kill gives more points. There are sneaky ways of getting out of a fight without losing points, one of which is to use the Ebony Rod to zap yourself. This, while killing you, doesn't detract from your score, whereas a flee or a death would. The speed of your modem does make a difference in fighting, at 300 baud you have little chance of winning, at 1200 you can do it, with practice but at 2400 you are equal with most of the other fighters. (Shades does not support higher speeds than 2400.) The results of recent fights are displayed at the Killers Den, one move East of Heloise's wine bar (where you start when you type CHAT upon entering Shades). To check this, type READ SCREEN. There are quite a few weapons knocking around. To check whether an item is a weapon, type POWER (object). Some weapons are for specific levels, such as the Junior Long Sword (JLS) which can only be used by low-levels, and the Finely Balanced Blade (FBB) which is for higher levels. Most of the weapons have abbreviations to make fighting easier (when stealing). Some of these are: Weapon: Abbreviation: Power: RAT RAT 25 FINELY BALANCED BLADE FBB 30 JUNIOR LONG SWORD JLS 20 LONG SWORD LS 30 WOODSMANS AXE AXE 20 SHORT SWORD SS 30 STONE STONE 15 CABBAGE CABBAGE 18 BRICK BRICK 10 If you really don't want to fight, then there is an option to change your character to a pacifist (you are automatically a Fighter to start with). A pacifist can flee from a fight without losing any points, but cannot start a fight and can only score half-points for T. Generally, Pacifist is a bad move. Changing your class automatically zeros your score. @~To be continued next issue - o -