Playing with nerfed archery, missile rebalance

[ewert]

Extra shots is and will always be near impossible to balance properly if the baseline is 1shot/rnd. Changing them to +might is a much more feasible balancing situation. I'm sure there are enough math geeks here who also have experience balancing games (I've been a coder in a couple of MUDs) who understand this to be so.

Same goes for melee but not as badly as there already is some baseline hits/rnd. But having +attacks around unbalances the situation so that warriors lose their melee edge vs. non-warriors, meaning the direction is wrong balance-wise. +extra attacks into +extra base dmg (as in might, or "slay everything a bit more") wanted.

[Pete Mack]

I like the diversity of shots and might.

My preferred solution is to make each might +.5x instead of +1x That would make slings and short bows 1.5x, longbows and light crossbows 2x, and a heavy crossbow of harad with +2 to might 3.5x. Making that only apply to base dice like a melee brand should cut damage enough.

Finish off by reducing the dice on seeker ammo or removing it entirely.

I figure the easiest way to nerf archery is to make multipliers add.
So an x5 launcher with x3 branded ammo does x8 damage (not x15).

This means that the value of branded ammo is still quite high in the early game (when you have an x3 launcher), but generally goes down as the game progresses.

[Atarlost]

I like the diversity of shots and might.

My preferred solution is to make each might +.5x instead of +1x That would make slings and short bows 1.5x, longbows and light crossbows 2x, and a heavy crossbow of harad with +2 to might 3.5x. Making that only apply to base dice like a melee brand should cut damage enough.

Finish off by reducing the dice on seeker ammo or removing it entirely.

[fizzix]

tl;dr version: Having archery damage at 400/turn is good enough to win.

full version:

I just completed a game as an elf ranger with nerfed archery. The dump is here:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=10314

Before this I played a normal game, and the dump is here:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=10301

I try to take decent notes while playing using the : command, so reading through the history should give somewhat of an account to how things progressed in both games.

The changes I made were as follows:

All ammo has to_dam value forced at +0 (except wounding, but that was a bug, it didn't matter)
Ranger's extra shots with bows are changed to extra might
All extra shots removed from weapons and randarts.

With a decent launcher and branded seeker ammo, I would get about 450 damage per missile (at 1 shot per turn). This was good enough to take down all the high uniques.

I picked up a very good randart bow at the end that allowed me to get 400 damage with seeker arrows of slay evil. That was enough to take down both Morgoth and Sauron. Also, that bow gave me 750 damage per missile per turn with slay undead seeker arrows, which made Cantoras a joke. Before that I was using a x5 xbow and would brand seeker bolts and I used those to take down most of the other high uniques, except for one or two whom I meleed. At the very least, reducing the to_dam values to 0 does not make archery too weak, it still is very strong. Alternatively, reducing the damage bonus for brands would save the same purpose.

In the benchmark game I happened to pick up a lothlorien bow and a randart with +1 shooting speed, giving me 4 shots a turn with a x5 bow. Everything was a joke after that. I could do something like 2000 points a turn with branded ammo. That's broken in my mind.

Anyway, I think if we're thinking about rebalancing missiles I think we should be looking at something like 300-400 max damage per single shot turn with low multiplier brands (slay evil, animal) and 400-500 max damage per single shot turn with high multiplier brands (everything else). Holy might can still be obscenely strong, they're rare enough. I don't know how to best incorporate extra shots besides just making them very rare.