More on spell balancing

[Peter Mardahl <>]

I did a bit more work on measuring the destructive force of spells.
Here's the result:

maxdam:  total damage to the map from the spell 
sp:  spellpoints
ratio:  maxdam/sp
dam2:  damage to a monster at center of spell
ratio2:  dam2/sp

spell			maxdam	sp	ratio	dam2	ratio2
 magic bullet		 6	 1 	 6	6	6
 large bullet		 25	 3	 8	25	8
 small fireball		 536	 5 	 107	52	10.4
 medium fireball	 2584	 8 	 323	72	9
 large fireball		 7192	 13 	 553	116	8.9
 burning hands		 540	 5 	 108	36	7.2
 small lightning	 768	 5 	 153	52	10.4
 large lightning	 3072	 8 	 384	108	13.5
 magic missile		 10	 2 	 5	10	5
 create bomb		 672	 20 	 33	32	1.65 ??  I don't understand this
 icestorm		 852	 7 	 121	36	5.14
 destruction		 1000	 50 	 20	29	0.58
 holy word		 432	 6 	 72	36	6
 hellfire		 4504	 14 	 321	92	6.6
 dragonbreath		 7800	 30 	 260	84	2.8
 large icestorm		 7800	 30 	 260	84	2.8
 firebolt		 1080	 4 	 270	80	20
 frostbolt		 1584	 4 	 396	102	25.5
 shockwave		 38260	 45 	 850	161	3.6
 color spray		 6360	 35 	 181	220	6.3	--poisoning damage
 ball lightning		 320	 10 	 32	116	11.6
 comet		 75 + 250?	 13	 25	198	15.2
 meteor swarm	  9xcomet	 30	 97     --	--


The telling factor is the last column.  It's the damage a single monster
in front of the spell will take.

Shockwave in particular, which really rocks in maxdam, is shown to be
an ineffective weapon vs. one monster, and the fire/frostbolt spells
are shown to be powerful forces of destruction.

I'm going to recast the spellpoint cost to be something like:
<dam to one monster> + 1/4 * sqrt(maxdam), and see if I can get those
ratios to come toward 10.

I'll send out a new version of spell_params which you can stick
in your libdir which will take care of it.


Regards,

PeterM