Re: Incompatible objects (Was: Re: CF: Alternate proposal: MARK the power crystals)

[Mark Wedel <>]

Hwei Sheng TEOH wrote:

> 
> Hmm, then we'll have to reconsider artifacts like the Ring of Elements (Wizard
> tower in lake country), because that one ring alone gives you protection to
> fire, cold, electricity, poison, acid, and perhaps one or two other things.
> With that ring, you don't even need to wear "incompatible" equipment at the
> same time -- that ring in itself already gives you all those protections!
> 
> Maybe this is a case of an artifact which is too powerful and yet have no side
> effects... for balancing the game we probably want to fix artifacts like this,
> so that at least it makes you vulnerable to something, or gives you some other
> kind of disadvantage (like hunger-2 or something). And also make it
> incompatible with almost everything else, so you'd have no way (or have a
> harder time) to work around its side-effects.

 Certainly, that ring of the elements appear as too powerful of an item for me. 
It should certainly be weakened and/or given some disadvantages.

 The second paragraph actual made me think (or maybe restate someone elses)
interesting idea.

 I know it has been discussed to set up keycodes or whatever else to prevent a
single player from having multiples of the same object from the same map.  Other
ideas have been to have the code examine objects and try to figure out what to
do.

 The thought I had was a little more general and more specific from those
proposals.  Instead of unique keycodes or items, give items races.

 Crossfire has no mythos/creation story, but most games that do have artifacts
being created long ago with forgotten magics.   That could include gods creating
some artifacts, or just very powerful wizards, priests, or whatever else.  In
such a case, the creator may have had no problem with someone the variou
artifacts he created together, but may not appreciate mixing his artifacts with
those of his enemy.

 Implementation wise, this would be done by adding a race to artifacts.
You could use as many artifacts from a single race together without problems. 
Trying to mix artifacts of one race with the enemy race would create bad
things.  Mixing artifacts of one race with a neutral race would not cause full
benefit (some subset of the benefits).

 This then allows one set of equipment to be assembled and wearable without any
problem.  Problems only happen if you mix and match.

 The power crystal perhaps have to be dealt with.  Or maybe not - the original
issue on power crystals was the proposal of allowing them to be merged and
turned into one logical item with much higher capacity.  Maybe keeping them as
is works perfectly fine - before that proposal, I don't recall anyone seeing a
big problem.  Having 5 power crystals that are individual to each other makes
things a little more difficult on the player.  But the player chooses that
tradeoff - 5 power crystals with a lot more storage capacity but harder to use,
or 1 power crystal - not as much storage capacity, but very easy to use.

 As I said before, power crystal is probably one of the few artifacts which
multipes of it actually have an advantage (there may be a few rings that are
similar - but that could be easy to check - if equipped ring 1 == equipped ring
2, do something).

 I don't see any use for a character to have multiples of the same weapon - he
can only use one at a time.  Same for armor.  So limiting the player from only
getting one suit from a quest doesn't really fix any problem.

 The problem I think is that the player gets item A from quest A, item B from
somewhere else, and so on, and assembles a super character.   It could be asked
if that is really a problem - a character that reaches level 110 is probably
pretty might also.

 But if the problem is assembling too many good artifacts, adding races could be
a nice way to deal with it.  The advantage is that you can then balance a
complete set of artifacts 'the player can have the boots, armor, sword, helm,
and shield of gnarg and they work together'.
The map maker can then set up the artifacts so as a whole they are not
overpowering but perhaps instead complement each other.

 This works better than trying to determine conflicts based on attributes.
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