Thanks, Brian! I've had a fair number of people tell me that, which surprised me a bit: This is a game that's either crossed their mind, or always wanted to play. I even had a few people write me to tell me they created design docs for similar games years ago, but never followed through with it for whatever reasons. 2 of them even e-mailed me their design docs and their blessings on the project, which was very cool. Too weird though! Yay for procrastination!
The text will be quite intricate, yes, which is why I shyed away from the "3D graphic" approach to the fights early on. It would require huge resources to create graphics that would mirror all the text i've created (over 1,000 individual lines of text, with about 20 variances or variations of each, plus 10 more different variations of each of the 20 earlier variances that can happen based the warrior's stats; that's a lotta stuff!). It's written in a very Robert E. Howard (author of Conan, if you've heard of him) type style, maybe a tad bit graphic in some spots, but hey, these fights can be gruesome and I wanted to portray that.
Oh no...fights take around 2-5 minutes each or so, depending on the evenness of the stats and what happens. Some can be as quick as 1 minute or so. You can set the speed of the combat text as well, so that matters as well.
Your input to the battle comes right before the match, as you can set your fighter's "attitude" during the match (as well as matching-up one of your fighters against the upcoming opponent, something i've made easier with a match-up screen). You can set your fighter to be: Aggressive (try to get him quickly), Normal (tells the warrior to use his own judgement) and Defensive (try to win, but first try not to get hit). Each is useful in different situations.
Thanks, Brian! If you (or anyone) has any other questions, please feel free to post them!