Combat System

Combat in Smashball is different from a lot of other games.

Damage Types
The biggest difference is how players suffer damage. Traditionally, you take damage that reduces your health, and when it reaches zero, you die. We've split that into three components:


 * Health Damage reduces your health. Running out of health, however, doesn't automatically make bad things happen to you.  A player's health determines their resistance to the second kind of damage...
 * Shock Damage doesn't reduce anything, but has a random chance of causing Shock Criticals. Shock Crits are what actually cause negative effects.  You can also suffer shock damage from falling.
 * Force Damage doesn't directly hurt the enemy, but pushes them in the opposite direction. Heavier positions are affected less than lighter positions.

Weapons and Charging
There are two primary ways to hurt someone.


 * Shooting In The Face (guns). Anyone who has ever played a shooter will be familiar with this method.  The key difference: most of the guns of Smashball do more Health damage than Shock damage.  The idea is that you whittle down their health with a gun, then get close, and then...
 * Punching In The Face (turbo charge). We've got a 'Turbo' ability in Smashball, that lets players fly around like ninjas -- think of the Skulk's Leap ability in Natural Selection, but in any direction.  When you Turbo into another player, it causes a physical attack called a Charge.