Re: CF: Direction, maps and balancing

[Mark Wedel <>]

> 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.

 Perhaps that is the biggest problem with the current setup - player to player
combat, if it happens, pretty much means one player is killed almost instantly.

 Now player to player combat probably doesn't happen that often, but this
imbalance can even happen when players work together (a player mistakenly steps
infront of another casting some spell, and the player ends up dead)


> 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.

 There is now an upper carrying limit for players - but depending on the
strength, dex, and other abilities, reaching that limit could still make you
pretty slow.

 I seldom buy misc items from shops - with the large number of monsters out
there, you tend to be able to find most 'mundane' items in the maps  (mundane
are the basics like +2 high shiels, magical helmets, magic weapons, etc).

 The main thing I tend to buy in shops are stat potions and sometimes specific
spell books or food (but in the case of food, it is usually cheap enough.  Now
this point can be argued both ways - what is the point of having a shop if you
never buy anything from it, or conversely, what is the point of adventuring if
you can buy all the good items from the shop.

> 
> 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.

 I think there would be a better balance if there was more to buy from shops
than just specialty items or stuff of high cost.


> 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).

 As said, monsters are not very smart.  Some of the more potent monsters are
those that only have a few spells, but useful ones, so if they cast the spell,
it will do something not all that kind.


> 
> 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.

 I believe spell casting for monsters is similar.  The meaning of stats for
monsters is completely different but overloaded to the same name - that shold
probably be changed with perhaps monsters getting some additional abilities that
players don't have (perception to see hidden or in the dark for example)

> 
> 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.

 A player probably shouldn't be able to cover all bases.

 However, one thing that will change is the degree of protections.  With a
50%/100% damage reduction for protected/immune creatures, the difficulty of map
can depend tremendously on what protections the player may have.

 I also think the developers have to resist the urge to put in items to make
some areas more enjoyable.  At one time, before immunity to draining from the
strange ring, grimreapers were a major fear point.  Even the strange ring did
not change things that much - it was rare enough and only did that one thing, so
you tended not to wear it all the time.  But since that time, the ring of life
has been added, which also gives a very good regen rate, so probably most
characters at a respectible level go around immune to draining and grimreapers
have last any fear effect they might once have had.

 Now at one side, the ability to become immune to those is nice - I always
thought they were very nasty.  On the other, removing any reason to worry about
them at all changes the balance again.  I think we need to find restraint and
determine what parts of the game should be played.  Adding a bag with infinite
carry weight and 100% weight reduction because it is annoying to have to shuffle
you inventory is another such example - maybe it is annoying not being able to
carry everything you want.  On the other hand, such a container removes any
decision the player may have to make about what items he should carry on that
adventure.



> 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.

 I will agree with that point.  The question is can that be resolved in such a
fashion that game play is still reasonable in other aspects.

 What is the definition of 'take a while to resolve'?  Are we talking 2
seconds?  5 seconds?  30 seconds?

 From that data, we can pretty much figure out monster speed, damage it can do,
how often it can hit.

 Now one thing that could make combats longer would be to keep same movement the
same, but have attacks actually take longer than moving down (weapon speed <
normal speed).  If the same is true for monsters, that means the two can close
reasonably quickly on each other, but can not exchange blows all that fast.
 

> >  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.

 Monsters not being able to get to players probably is a problem.  I think there
are too many overly large monsters - while having a 3x5 monster may look
impressive, it basically means the monster is locked into its location - the
only way it can for sure get to the player is if the entire map is that big open
area.

 All maps should be able to handle 2x2 objects properly (this should be a map
standard) - this would let a lot more monsters through.

 But also, we should consider the fact that what resides on the squares
themselves is the footprint of a monster.  Just because a monster is really tall
probably should not mean it takes a 5 spaces - its footprint may still be 1 (or
may 2x2), and should still be able to navigate some way or another.  But this
then gets into the issue of monsters looking good vs playability.


> 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.

 Yeah - you could have a weight and space.  Containers have some amount of space
for objects they contain, and take up some space themselves (which could
potentially be variable or fixed - something like a sack is going to take up
more space as stuff is put in it (but it is easy to carry 200 orc chops in that
sack than on your body), while something like the luggage is fixed size.

 This would require updating all the items, but that probably wouldn't be too
hard to do (more busy work than anything really complicated.)  Having both a
weight and space (encumberance) is probably the closest to realism that can be
imitated.

 Some actions would need to be expanded.  For example, if there is a sword on
the ground and you have no weapon, you should be able to directly equip it
instead of picking it up then equipping it.  This could be more important for
armor, where having 2 unequipped suits in your inventory just wouldn't be
possible.
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