priestly ferric diving

[PowerDiver]

Unbelievable. I got both MoD +2 att and MoD HA. It seems criminal to toss either one!

[Pete Mack]

Unbelievable. I got both MoD +2 att and MoD HA. It seems criminal to toss either one!

Wow. Nevertheless, ditch the HA. +2 attacks is significantly better vs evil, and you can always pick up a branding ring. for huge damage.

Just don't let it get destroyed by acid or fire.

EDIT:

That collection is pretty hard to believe. I've only found one MoD (HA) and one MoD (+2 attacks), ever. Needless to say, each one made short work of Morgoth. Speaking of which: aren't you about ready to go in for the kill?

[PowerDiver]

That collection is pretty hard to believe. I've only found one MoD (HA) and one MoD (+2 attacks), ever. Needless to say, each one made short work of Morgoth. Speaking of which: aren't you about ready to go in for the kill?

It gets sillier. I found *another* MoD HA.

Q: How do you make a morningstar (9d6) interesting?
A: I don't know, but +9 speed isn't enough.

Well, I'll carry it as a swap in case I get slowed by inertia, but I really ought to toss it instead. I'm trying to get an upper bound on how many weapons I might use in a game.

As to M, I am playing a leisurely game where I am trying to maintain CL > DL / 100' before descending. I'm also trying to test things coding changes. So long as I maintained a pace toward 400K turns I saw no reason to hurry.


I had to kill Sauron on a level with 9 small rooms. It wasn't hard to kill him given my kit, but the cleanup took forever. Having made down this far, it is clear to me that small levels serve only to accentuate bad aspects and to minimize good aspects of the game.


Must try to restrain the ranting ...........

[Pete Mack]

!!
By the way, you can surely drop
u) The Pair of Iron Shod Boots of Haldagoth (+1,+4) [3,+19] (+3)

[PowerDiver]

By the way, you can surely drop
u) The Pair of Iron Shod Boots of Haldagoth (+1,+4) [3,+19] (+3)

I kept that earlier over +5 speed boots, but now decided to go to the +6 speed boots I collected off the floor this level. I must think it is a close decision. I think +3 speed might turn out to be only +1 energy, so I don't know whether it is as clearcut as you think it is. +4 damage on top of 70 is not insignificant.

In any event, it's time to make sure of the kit for M and toss most swaps. The bottleneck was sustain str + wis, disenchant, and ESP, while not losing too many stats in the process. Covering those was hard before this level. I was wielding an amulet of sustenance to do it! The weaponmastery [dropped by a demilich in escort of summoned Feagwath] and The Ring of Celkoron [dropped by Ugluk] that I picked up on this level sure solved those problems.

[Pete Mack]

D'oh! I'm so accustomed to seeing boots as defense only, I didn't even see the positive damage bonus. That's one hell of an improvement on Boots of Wormtongue!

[PowerDiver]

I finally achieved my goal of a 400K ironman win. I took it easy, but played with a diving mentality. I did not fully explore levels, and I killed what was convenient instead of trying to kill everything I could the way I did in my previous ironman wins.

So I go down to DL 100, and it's a TWO room level. With gravity hounds in the moat of one of them. The perfect way to cap this annoying game.

I was overpowered, and maybe I took excessive risks because I was annoyed, so I barely used any consumables. One mushroom of debility, one !rMana, one !berserk, one !hero, one ?destruct, and 3 arrows of acid.

Must try to restrain the ranting ...........

I can't restrain it any more. "Small levels" is the worst idea since haggling. The current implementation means many fewer vaults, incredibly stupid monsters, and requires hack and slay over tactics or strategy. Maybe it's a worse idea than haggling.

[Magnate]

Q: How do you make a morningstar (9d6) interesting?
A: I don't know, but +9 speed isn't enough.

Ooh, very interesting. I don't suppose you kept the randart.log file with that in? Or produced an artifacts spoiler at the end of the game?

[d_m]

I can't restrain it any more. "Small levels" is the worst idea since haggling. The current implementation means many fewer vaults, incredibly stupid monsters, and requires hack and slay over tactics or strategy. Maybe it's a worse idea than haggling.

Thanks for playing through despite hating the feature.

If I committed a "level-variance lite" patch would you be willing to play test that and see how angry it makes you?

[PowerDiver]

Thanks for playing through despite hating the feature.

If I committed a "level-variance lite" patch would you be willing to play test that and see how angry it makes you?

Sure. To start with, distance is distance, and monsters should not have their ESP or path-finding reduced. That makes them too stupid and doesn't make a lick of sense.

Then you have to figure out how not to reduce vaults so much. Imagine placing a greater vault after a few other rooms are placed Do you see that even scaling the dungeon to 80%x80% drastically reduces the likelihood it will be placed successfully?

Maybe place a normal dungeon, then remove some set of "boring" rooms and then
squish things together? At least that wouldn't result in fewer vaults.

Vaults are a much bigger deal in 3.1 than they were in 3.0 due to the changes in object generation. It's really important not to reduce them.

Small levels exaggerate the annoyance of over-summoning, so IMO the last two levels shouldn't be randomly scaled at all. Decide how big or small is desired, and hardcode it or read it from an edit file.

[Magnate]

Sure. To start with, distance is distance, and monsters should not have their ESP or path-finding reduced. That makes them too stupid and doesn't make a lick of sense.

IMO you're right that this shouldn't be a function of the level size, but their sense ranges need an overhaul anyway. There should be a *much* greater variety of detection range, wakeability (whatever you call that), directness of pathfinding (flowing by sound/smell) etc. But I guess that's already halfway to 4GAI territory ...

[d_m]

Sure. To start with, distance is distance, and monsters should not have their ESP or path-finding reduced. That makes them too stupid and doesn't make a lick of sense.

It isn't obvious to me how changing the area of the map that has open space changed the range of monsters' detection/ESP, so I'm not sure how to undo it (note that I don't scale DUNGEON_HGT, which is constant, just level_hgt). AFAIK the only code I changed was in generate.c and a couple of the other places where objects get randomly placed (to narrow the bounds). Could you point me to the general area of interest?

Then you have to figure out how not to reduce vaults so much. Imagine placing a greater vault after a few other rooms are placed Do you see that even scaling the dungeon to 80%x80% drastically reduces the likelihood it will be placed successfully?

I think your suggestions on how to fix this are good. All it really requires is to modify the generation algorithm to make sure that it tries to place the most exciting rooms first.

Small levels exaggerate the annoyance of over-summoning, so IMO the last two levels shouldn't be randomly scaled at all. Decide how big or small is desired, and hardcode it or read it from an edit file.

I will probably commit this change right away.

EDIT: I tried to clarify the first point.

[PowerDiver]

It isn't obvious to me how changing the area of the map that has open space changed the range of monsters' detection/ESP, so I'm not sure how to undo it. AFAIK the only code I changed was in generate.c and a couple of the other places where objects get randomly placed (to narrow the bounds). Could you point me to the general area of interest?

I know it was done that way for small levels in NPP, and the monsters seemed much stupider than usual, so I thought you had changed something. Maybe it is all in my head. It's easy for annoyance to skew one's perceptions.

It is most likely all in my head if you didn't do anything.

[d_m]

I know it was done that way for small levels in NPP, and the monsters seemed much stupider than usual, so I thought you had changed something. Maybe it is all in my head. It's easy for annoyance to skew one's perceptions.

I can certainly imagine the monsters' AI performing poorly when they are all crammed in together; it certainly makes their summoning/breathing more confusing.

Anyway, for now I will fix levels 99-100 and also lower the variance to reduce the impact of smaller levels while I work on improving vault generation.

EDIT: as of r1655 levels 99 and 100 (quest levels) will be full-sized. Also, smaller levels will be much less small (average scale is now 92.5%, up from 82.5%).

[Pete Mack]

I'm with Eddie on this one -- I got tired of small levels after playing NPP for a while -- it makes the game easier for non-ironman characters, and much harder for ironman. And it makes level-scumming pretty much a necessity.

The minimum level size certainly shouldn't be less than 1/2 a regular level size in area.