Re: CF: Direction, maps and balancing

[David Sundqvist <>]

On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Mark Wedel wrote:
>  Well, the way I envision the 'new' object structure when it is cleaned up is
> for the object itself to only have the basic information that all objects need
> (map it belongs on, above, below, face, etc.)  There is then a substructure
> which contains the item specific attributes (hp, sp, speed, etc for monsters,
> connected status, current state, reset status, etc for gates.
> 
>  The player and monster will diverge in that model, since there are so many
> extra thing the player has anyways, it didn't seem to make the player a
> subobject of the monster.

Yes, there will be a divergence when it comes to info, so having all info
for both players and monsters might be a waste.
 
>  That said, things should act similar for both creatures.  If a monster puts on
> a ring of regen +1, his regeneration rate should increase in a well behaved
> manner.  And so should the workings of things like weapons.

Yep. And the divergence becomes very appartent in monster-vs-monster
situations or avatar-vs-player situations. Pets are rather useless because
they are pretty much like monsters in general; they cause low damage and
are very slow. The avatar is more useful, but the imbalance is again
apparent when it happens to hit a player and you end up with a rapidly
dead player. 

>  Thats one reason I thought about making player speed a bit more fixed and not
> as variable.  I personally don't see having a high dex or agility really making
> you move any faster (most people in the world walk at roughly the same pace
> after all).  The other benefit I thought on a fixed speed is perhaps limit a
> players minimum speed to something that is still at least sort of quick (.1 or
> .2) so things never become too incredibly slow for the player.

It might be best to think through carrying capacity and set a good
limitation rather than let speed just go down until you're very slow. This
is also tied in to the number of monsters and lack of control on pricing;
the amount of loot you'll want to carry makes it important to be able to
carry a whole lot, the amount of loot you sell gives you a lot of money,
which also weighs unless you change it, which in turns results in price
inflation to keep the better items out of range of lowlevel characters in
shops. 

I think it would be easier and we'd be better off from a balance point of
view if we got to the point where items costing a few silvercoins or gold
coins would actually make sense. 
 
>  In theory, the times it takes to do certain actions should be much more
> variable than it is now.  A thought on this would be to have some terrain types
> actually decrease the time it takes to move accross it - an example might be the
> roads - maybe moving a space on the well maintained roads should actually take
> .8 time instead of the 1 time that most normal movement takes.  So this way, if
> you are walking accross the world on the well maintained road, it would be quite
> so slow.

This is a good idea, yes. A slight arrow fireing, spellcasting time and
wield/unwield/wear/unwear time wouldnt be too bad either. Not
prohibitively much, just to have some slight time between the actions.
This would also be to avoid the monster barrages of spells (and that
should probably be improved so they just use spells when they have a
chance to hit and balanced for sp regeneration too).
 
>  Generally, I don't find the pace moving long distances that annoying - usually,
> you try to trim down the amount of stuff you have to reasonable levels so you
> are heavily burdened, and away you go.

I agree. The only case when I find it annoying is when going on
routine shopping rounds, but that should be solved differently.

>  I think more than raw speed, more intelligence on the monsters would make them
> more interesting.  How often have you run accross monsters zapping the wand for
> no good reason, or reading scrolls of some effect that does no good?  If
> monsters were actually even marginally intelligent (use staff of healing when
> wounded, don't bother with the detect magic scrolls, etc), things could be much
> more interesting.  Think of that titan down to 100 hp from 2000 drinking that
> healing potion and going back up to 2000 hp.  Right now item use by monsters
> seems basically random and a hope that a good effect happens.

Yep. Some more intelligence in using spells should be applied too (and
spells are another reason we should move to similar stats and stats use
for monsters and players; since both are affected, the effects should be
similar). Spellcasting monsters should probably be more carefully designed
too; low to midlevel casters and magic item users easily vary between
deadly and and dogmeat depending on what items and spells they can effect. 

For more balance, a player shouldnt have to cover all angles in protection
if going up against known monsters; he should have a reasonable chance to
guess what kinds of protection should be needed. The extreme variation
makes it difficult to judge what a mapmaker can reasonably expect a player
to be able to deal with at a certain level.

>  But all the above seem to be more an issue in map design and not inherent
> unbalance in the monsters themselves.

In part, yes. The problem is that as things currently are, the balance
lends itself to use of many monsters as a way to reach a certain goal; to
create a combat situation with reasonable challange which will take a
while to resolve, while usually not killing the player outright if he
wanders in uncertain of wether he can handle the monsters. In the lower
levels it is difficult to find a monster that isnt disposed of at once by
a player, or doesnt dispose of the player at once. 

> At least a partial solution to the above is to remove most generators
> from most maps.  Or at least limit the use so that  there may only be a
> couple generators so that if the player leaves after killing
> a few, it will be a slow process for him to take out all the monsters and
> generators.  Most maps have so many generators that the issue isn't
> able to kill the monsters themselves, but being able to kill them fast
> enough/be tough enough so you can take out the generators.

Changing generator use would be a first step, yes. A modified concept
would work great for generating semi-random encounters tho. 

>  The ability for a monster to hold an action probably makes sense, especially in
> the swarms.  If the monster can't move because he is surrounded by his friends,
> he should be able to do something almost instantly when a space opens up.  Right
> now, I believe their speed is reset to 0 (or -1 or whatever) when they can't do
> something.
> 
>  The logic to check surrounding monsters for attacks when a player moves onto a
> space would not be that hard to do.  Presuming the speed of the monster is still
> reduced in such a situation, it doesn't really give the monster extra speed,
> just allows him to hold his attack for someone to approach.

This would be another step, yes. I believe it will result in a huge
balance change tho, since I think part of the reasons some monsters are so
easy is because they never even get a chance to hit. It would be very
interesting to see the effect tho, and I believe it's the right way to go.

>  Some monsters do regenerate very fast.  And for monsters with huge number of
> hp, a ring of regen +1 is not likely to make any difference for them.
> 
>  How monsters regenerate and the purpose of it could perhaps be rethought. 
> Probably the main reason for monsters to regenerate is to prevent players
> dinking the monsters with low damage arrows or coming up, hitting it a few times
> and the player then running away when they take any damage - regeneration
> prevents those methods from usually working.

Yep, that would be the main reason. I dont think we should care too much
about that tho, since we can consider it a map bug and it can be fixed by 
not having such maps. I think it's more important to achieve parity
between monsters and players. 

Rapid regeneration can also cause a balance problem that is in some
ways worse than the cheat possibility of trapped monsters; players compete
against the monster regeneration rate rather than the monster hp and
ability to inflict damage. This, I think, causes a more prominent
threshold level between where the player cant inflict enough damage to
keep up and where he can kill them fairly easily.

The ability to 'nibble a monster to death' should be acceptable, if it
requires some tactics. For example if a player is sufficiently much faster
than a monster to run away and keep firing arrows at it, while it has a
chance to follow the player, then that is ok (hmmm, maybe we should limit 
number of arrows it's possible to carry in some way tho, and increase
arrow damage instead. But that would require a new approach to carrying
capacity too. Hmmm, more on that later.). 
 
>  Having things like orcs regenerate probably doesn't make a lot of sense at this
> point in time - I don't think the regeneration rate of an orc is going to change
> my chance of defeating it.  

No, not really. Then again, reasonable regeneration rates dont help
players that much in combat either, it's more a way to get ready for the
next combat a bit faster. 

>  Remember that the player does have the handicate of the connection lag.  
> With the client, reality is pretty much that by the player sees something and
> types a command, by the time the server receives and executes the command, 2 or
> 3 ticks will have passed since the event first being seen.  And that presumes
> fast reflexes from the player.

Hmmm, true.

>  That seems a bit redundant to me.  If nothing else, I think player speed should
> be made a bit more constant - not nearly as variable as it is now.  If you put
> on a backpack for a hike that weight 10 lbs, your walking pace is not going to
> be slowed down by that extra 10 lbs.  If you put on 50, then maybe yes, but the
> other big area (which crossfire does not have) would be endurance - the distance
> you would walk with a 50lb load is likely to be shorter than with no load at
> all.  But the actual pace may be somewhat similar.
> 
>  Armor imposes a maximum movement speed.  Weapons should probably impose a
> maximum attack speed.  A high agility is not likely to help you much with a 2
> handed sword - the weapon is big and heavy enough that that is going to be the
> limiting factor.  In a realistic system, the strength might have an impact on
> how heavy a weapon you can use, while the agilty might have speed.

On the topic of encumberance, I think we've been over this before. The
current encumberance system allows for silly amounts of objects to be
carried, with only regards to how much they weigh (I just cant really see 
how that character is carrying 200 arrows or 60 swords witout even a
sack). I dont really like the slotbased concepts that are available in
many games, but it would be possible to have container filling instead.
The way such a system could work would be that player inventory was
limited to a certain amount of (invisible) encumberance points, which
would be decreased by object encumberance. Worn stuff wouldnt take any
points, but carried objects would. For example, a plate mail would pretty
much fill it up, and it should also fill up a sack, while rings would be
scarcely noticable. Some kinds of specific purpose containers could have
fairly high limits since they're aimed at carrying for example arrows, so
we wouldnt have to worry about the problem of a player fitting too many
objects into those just because they have a high capacity. Containers
would only take up their own encumberance points rather than the original
inventory points.

I think such a system could be made to work relatively sanely. For
example, a player might not be able to carry more than one platemail in
his original inventory, but with five sacks he might be able to carry five
platemails, at which point he'd rather start to get problems from weight.
Arrows could have a fairly high encumberance, not making it possible for a
player to carry more than 20 in inventory, but since quivers could have a
lot of capacity, he could fit up to 50 arrows in one.

Best regards,
David

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