Well, it's almost 5AM and I've stayed up the whole freaking night tweaking the battle system and a few other things. Here's a rundown of the updates:

* Attack damage now fluxuates, meaning a level 35 mage with 50 WIS won't always hit for 73 damage if he keeps attacking. Sometimes it might be more like 67 or 75 or whatever. Just random numbers, but you get the idea.

* Critical hits are now possible, both from the offensive and defensive sides of a fight. You have a better chance of getting critical hits if your luck rating is high, though you stand a chance of getting them even when that's not the case (your odds are just lower). Critical hits still shouldn't be terribly common, but you should start seeing them often enough that they should be factored into any strategy.

* Attacks can now be dodged. This is affected by your agility compared to that of the individual you are fighting. Anyone has the capacity to dodge attacks, but high agility greatly increases your odds. Even so, dodges should be relatively rare, showing up only on occasion... just often enough that you can't ignore the possibility.

* Battle messages have been changed so that everything should be in the past tense. Messages are now formatted more cleanly and you should be seeing more of the messages that I coded in behind the scenes. Some of them hadn't been shownig up properly.

* Battles now yield experience points. You'll gain more points if you defeat characters at higher levels, particularly those who have built levels quickly by focusing on energy and ignoring other stats. This should prevent people from adopting that strategy as frequently in the future, though it still may be a viable strategy in some instances... which is okay. I'm interested to see what different strategies people use.

* You also gain experience if someone attacks you. Whoever wins the fight gets the experience. It's looking like skill points and automatic attributes are automatically appearing where they should, which took several hours all by itself.

* Battles can only be started with people who have 10% or more of their HP in place, rather than the old 5HP minimum. Entering the URL of a favorite target to try and sneak in an attack will no longer work if the individual's HP is below that mark.

Those are the main changes relating to the combat system. I made one other change, as well, which you're all bound to notice almost immediately: level progression has been updated. It now takes longer to advance between levels.

Because of the many, many changes I made tonight, there may be a character wipe soon so that we can start fresh and see how the updated systems affect early level progression and strategy. Progression should at this point be much different than it was even a few days ago. I'm not sure when the wipe will occur. Probably soon.

I have a lot more tweaks I'm looking forward to adding, including some that will affect the battle system. This is most likely the last big update for another 2 weeks or so, though. Keep comments coming, as well as specific bug reports so that I can fix any issues you encounter... though my timeliness may not be exemplary now with other projects competing for my time.

Thanks, and enjoy the pre-beta version of HG Wars. Your participation is making it better already!