Sumo wrestling is a very respected sport, beloved by all. I feel like it would be a great addition to the game.
I've heard a few people talk about it in game, I don't know how popular it would be to use but sounds like a new and interesting combat style. Thank you.
Should be like ~100-140 messages all told but there is a lot of duplication (a miss is a miss) so it's not quite so awful as it sounds like. Couldn't say if there's going to be interest in touching combat from a development perspective any time soon, but I don't mind writing them up if that part of it came together.
First, determine by posture if an attack is even made and if not, give an appropriate posture message from a small collections of possibly messages.
Second, determine the type of attack that will be performed.
Third, if it is a targeted attack and not just a full body attack like the throw, determine hit location with a different hit location table for each attack type.
Fourth, determine the effectiveness of the attack.
Finally, display a message that is made of the combinations above to give attacker, action or attack type, target if there is an attack, hit location if the attack is targeted, effectiveness of the attack and finally any random closing action or flavor tacked onto the end of the emote (like stepping back to ready for the next attack). Then it also has to do the math and random number checks for each stage and apply the results to the fatigue system and damage system which in turn, through those systems can then apply their own adjustments and messages, like fatigue or damage affecting cleanliness, descriptions message changes, etc. It is very unlikely that it is just a long list of possible messages that it picks from. And I'll note that this is all assuming with this explanation that the attacks are sucessfull, because failed attacks would generate their own whole message assembly tree, like whether or not it would have hit, whether or not it was dodged, whether or not it was blocked or deflected, or stopped by armor, etc.
Putting in whole new combat systems or weapon types would be pretty involved processes.
I believe Jinx, who was the game's quartermaster at the time, wrote the martial arts style messages themselves, but it's since possible to separate the bulk text from the actual nuts and bolts of the stat rolls for weapons so that builders or Fix-It can provide the prose without getting exposed to the code. It's basically what I've described above more or less though some weapon types will have messages that other won't.
Of course the topic is kind of burying the lede because there will almost certainly never be any will to spend time on expanding or changing stable and (somewhat) balanced parts of the on-foot combat system with so many other priorities, but as Reefer mentions there's a cadre of players who can work on it, if it did ever come up.
