Re: CF: Direction, maps and balcing

[David Sundqvist <>]

On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Mark Wedel wrote:
>  I certainly think there is incentive in crossfire to find the tough challenges
> - you get better exp and better treasure.  At level 10, it will take you a lot
> of orcs to get anyplace, but if you can find hill giants instead, not nearly so
> many are needed.

Agreed.

>  As I recall, probe basically told you some of the monster stats (attacktype,
> immunities, etc) - I think you still needed to extrapolate from that if you
> could actually kill it.

That's the percieve stuff :). The probe spell tells you if it's undead, if
it's higher or lower level than you (more powerful, less powerful), if
it's acidic, and if it's hurt or not. It's probably not very good
information to judge wether you can kill it or not from, especially with
spells and immunities and stuff.

>  The problem with trying to have the game guess whether you can kill something
> is pretty tricky.  You could do some quick calculations on damage each side can
> inflict and adjust according to ac and protections.  But when it then comes to
> special abilities, like firebreath, and whether the player is quick fingered and
> can get out of the area of affect quickly or isn't quick fingered and dies there
> is much tougher.

Yep, that's the problem.
 
>  One other possiblity is to have most treasure from the swarm type monsters to
> be of low quality (-1 or worse).  Chances are the players won't want to use that
> much, and the shops probably won't want to buy it (although on the shop
> discussion, and addition could be the ability to repair it or even improve it
> and make it fine quality (+1)).  So if that happened, you would kill all the
> orcs and basically get a large pile of junk of little value - save for the orc
> leaders who would have average, and the orc chieften who has fine.
 
Good ideas. As long as monsters can wear some more armour we can balance
the AC to improve it through archetype mods.  

>  (The @ take being an expansion to the @match stuff).  But this gets into a
> rewrite of the scripting language.

Yep. Well, it'll have to be done eventually. :)
 
>  But such connections have to be within the map.  So if you have a multilevel
> dungeon, the moodfloor (or whatever) can not be connected to the grim reaper on
> level 3.  That is probably one limitation which isn't that big but can be
> annoying - objects on one map can not communicate in any way with objects on the
> other, save for exits to move the player back and forth.

This is a sort of annoyance, yes. Maybe one thing to add if we add regions
would be to add a sort of region (or maybe global) semaphores that could
be set or unset via maps.

> > If we at some point add fatigue code (or just a modification to speed
> > depending on wounds), that could solve the problem of little danger. If
> > speed is decreased as you get wounded, the monster would be able to follow
> > you (especially if monsters are modified to get closer in movement speed
> > to players). So you'd better pull out in time, if you want to pull out. 
> 
>  I don't see fatigue code adding a lot to the game other than to make things
> more annoying.  But you could certainly make some simple adjustments to player
> speed based on damage (if less than 25%, reduce speed by 15% or whatever)

Agreed, I dont think a 'true' fatigue system would add that much. But a
simple mod on speed due to wounds would make it possible to add some more
tactics choice and danger in combat while adding hp to players. Being
chicken and backing out early would be possible, while gambling and hoping
you can take the monster out before you become too wounded and slow to
escape would also be possible. 

>  That could be done also - d20 is I guess historical, but for computer games
> where any range is easily determinable (not limited by what dice you can
> create), you could go to a d30 or something for attacks.  d100 seems excessive -
> then that +1/-1 is really meaningless, and seeing things like +20 to be good
> just seems to be too much inflation.  Going up to +4/+5 for a really good item
> just seems like a good number, but that may just be from my AD&D background.

Yep, a d30 might make sense. I think we'll have to think the ranges
through and balance the weapons pretty throughly anyway tho, so we should
probably test it a bit too.

/David

-
[you can put yourself on the announcement list only or unsubscribe altogether
by sending an email stating your wishes to ]