Are you creating a sort of Vandal Hearts or FF Tactics game? Stratigic land points...

Leftley wrote:

What Deadron describes (and what Lummox JR does too, in a broader sense) is mostly just a way to add more realistic strategic concerns to combat than, say, deciding whether to save your MP or to fireball an opponent.

Yup, and in a broader, perhaps more important sense, what we're both touching on is that it might be more interesting to change the nature of combat at higher levels than to make the combat the same but with higher numbers.

EverQuest provides a limited example...while they have a big problem with using the "make higher numbers" approach at the highest levels, their low and mid-level combat does progress in an interesting way. At first you solo for 5-10 levels, learning the basics of the game and of combat. Fighting at this point mostly consists of hitting auto-attack and wacking on the bat until it dies.

By level 10 you start dealing with tougher mobs who have magic abilities, and most classes can't handle all the different kind of mobs they might encounter, so you start needing to group.

Then you discover a new kind of combat, which is class-based combat. Each class has a primary and secondary job to do...some are "tanks" whose job early on is to deal damage while you keep them healed and keep the mob from running away with your spells. Later on tanks are primarily damage absorbers, taking hits while casters nuke the monsters. Also they have a responsibility for saving casters if a mob goes after them.

Each caster has a different kind of job...some are nukers, dealing out big damage, while some are healers, while some are crowd controllers (Enchanters). If your group is attacked by a large number of mobs, and Enchanter can "mesmerize" them so that you can fight one mob at a time.

In this way, combat evolves into an interesting team exercise, where people need to understand their task and execute it properly, or everyone may die.

Unfortunately, after this develops for a while (and it takes a while to learn your job well...and it was a full year before anyone really knew what Enchanters were for), EQ then just starts giving mobs insanely high hitpoints and magic resistance in order to make for high level combat. All the while, the mob still just stands there while your team whacks at it.

My proposal is aimed at this point...once people understand how to operate as a team, I propose making the mobs operate as intelligent teams, thereby making high level combat based on additional levels of strategy and tactics.

Dark Age of Camelot, my current MMOG, actually takes this basic approach, with an interesting way of providing intelligent AI opponents...they use humans! When you get to high levels, Dark Age moves into Realm vs. Realm combat, where you can fight players from other realms, and you can take and hold land, and steal magic artifacts that make your realm stronger.

Realm vs. Realm is very different from Player vs. Player, because you can only fight people from other realms and you don't know who they are...you don't see their names or anything, so they are anonymous enemies working in intelligent teams.

I'm very hopeful that Dark Age's approach solves the end-game curse of EverQuest...we shall see!

intelligent creatures (slimes, skeletons,

I seem to recall those particular creatures generally being "mindless" in just about any game...