v4 - a few characters

[CliffStamp]

I ran up a few characters to DL 80 in the current v4 just to see how it played out (warrior, ranger, paladin), this was actually clearing some pits, vaults, etc. and not simply taking ever stair down. Average game turns about 175+ k to reach DL 60-80 :

-Item descriptions are off, you can get a shield of resist fire but it has a bunch of other flags. There needs to be a way to get a sensible description, i.e., of elements if it has res fire + one other resist, etc. .

-Squelch as been broken by the new rune based ID as you can't squelch on runes.

-Bows seem broken, the description is pretty amusing, arrow that does 4.5 damage to normal, 1875 to evil, etc. . This ultra damage doesn't happen and in general they seem pretty low powered.

-+blows doesn't do anything, it would be broken on the mega dice weapon anyway if they actually increased finesse to that extent. You could end up with something doing 2-4 k a round easily. +blows needs to be +finess but restricted to lighter weapons and just scaled to give +blows.

-Some of the artifacts have odd finess, the thanc daggers (one of them anyway) has 0% finess.

-Consumables seemed decent in that by this time there was usually 1-4 combined scrolls of genocide/mass and two runs had a staff of *destruction*. There was usually 3-4 combined potions of *healing* and life. Based on that, unless you really power dive I don't think you would stall.

-High level books are artifacts, would not be pleasant with preserve off.

-The fuzzy item detection is really nice, it encourages exploring and prevents pure item scumming. Fuzzy monster would be similar. It would be nice to see this change with CL and magic item (and class / race influence).

-The weapon system seams just as lop sided as before. Previously you would get max blows, now you get max power. After you pass DL 60 you start to see enhanced dice on weapons and you will eventually end up with something like 5d15 with slays. You can end up with ~2 blows but the damage is way higher than a max blows weapon.

-The item generation is a bit wonky. I found BoS +18 and BoE +14 to speed. You can also get weapons generated which are too heavy to wield even with max strength.

-The insanely high plusses just look silly, Dagger of Slay Evil (+75,+115), etc. . There is no way the difference between +74 and +84 is going to make a decision difference these can all be displayed as before +8, +12. Just a cosmetic thing. Of course you get used to it very quickly, still the first time you see +50,+75 it is a bit exciting.

-There are still a lot of useless items. Staves of Evil/Power for example are too rare/deep. It would be nice if they were more common/lower but used CL+magic skill as the damage output, similar with healing, etc. .

-Exp penalties need to be much higher, I would like to have you reach CL 50 at DL 100, but you have to move extremely fast to prevent that from not happening. If you attempt to clear at all then you level very fast. For the upper classes paladin/ranger (duna/h-elf) the exp gains should be much lower as they are way more powerful than the base classes/races.

-Dragon scale armors have very low AC now, look at them compared to normal armor it seems off.

-There are WAY too many buffs now. For example quaff potions of brawn, nimbleness + toughness and get the extra damage + health (and for mages the temp int/con boost), for a unique. But if you try to carry these, + mushrooms + bless/heroism (superheroism/speed, PfE, etc.), etc. you have your inventory gone. It also isn't possible to store them at home and use them for awhile and then switch to another buffer as you build up a pile of them as the home inventory is so small.

-Along that line, since there are no enchant in the stores, you end up also piling them at home which decreases inventory again. Basically it ends up feeling very much like Ironman where you are using vs storing and can not developing for later.

-Regen seems to be very rare as one of the ego flags, I never had it with any character and it is annoying if you don't want to rest. One of the chars was a paladin who was always in the red on mana.

-Rings of the dog are now pretty useless, it would be nice it they activated for heroism (and then aggravate without the haste, just wake everything up) basically you just yelled out "Leroy Jenkins!!!" at the top of your lungs.

-Some of the mushrooms have insanely long times which you can not cure (halluc, etc.). If you are turn counting they could basically cause a restart, otherwise you just recall and wait.

-There are a glut of low level wands, staves, etc. . I ended up junking (when not selling) and just keeping the highest damage. It would be nice if they were combined i.e., wand of elemental bolts which would fire all bolts but each one did reduced damage so you would end up with similar damage overall on average, same for staves of slow, confuse, sleep -> staff of bewilderment which would attempt slow, confuse, sleep, but each at a modified chance. Similar drain life would turn into annihilation as cl and magic device increased, no two wands (rods?).

-Item drops that are good can now drop consumables, that is nice.

-Weapon damage is also off, as a weapon can have a slay and it doesn't show up in the description, some do, some don't.

-There are also lots of new rooms, little mini-vaults (contain all scrolls, or food items), new pits, etc. (some of these may be in non-v as well, I just noticed as I wasn't clearing before).

-It would be nice if you could just "buy out" the store to reset it. You can do this manually, it just is annoying to buy and then junk (or drop and resell if you are still trying to conserve money).

This is obviously pre-alpha, but a lot of work has gone into producing some pretty interesting features and there is some very imaginative and clean coding (the way HA is generated as a themed ego).

A few places for development :

-Random abilities for monsters, create some of the feel for when you were new to Angband

-Gradual genocide (re-populate based on amount killed), makes the game more immersive

-Store item generation influenced by items bought/sold, similar

-Uniques grow in strength if they are ignored/skipped (makes power diving much more dangerous)

-Some inventory adjustment to be able to utilize all the new items

[Magnate]

-Item descriptions are off, you can get a shield of resist fire but it has a bunch of other flags. There needs to be a way to get a sensible description, i.e., of elements if it has res fire + one other resist, etc.

This is a well-known problem with v4. It's actually much much more difficult to solve than it looks: we need intuitive names for every combination of item properties, otherwise someone will complain that a sword with Fire Brand, Res Fire and Slay Demon has the same name as one with Fire Brand, Res Cold and Slay Dragon. Etc. Various suggestions have been made but nothing's been implemented, other than just using the name of the 'best' affix the item has. If you'd care to hash out a set of naming rules you'd like to see, I'd be happy to code them up until a more comprehensive fix comes along.

-Squelch as been broken by the new rune based ID as you can't squelch on runes.

I don't understand the problem here - once you know a rune you can go and squelch its affix - so once you know the rune for Feather Fall, you go and squelch Of Feather Falling. Do you mean that you can't squelch *unknown* runes? Or do you mean that you can't squelch *any* occurrence of a rune, regardless of what else is on the item? Or something else?

-Bows seem broken, the description is pretty amusing, arrow that does 4.5 damage to normal, 1875 to evil, etc. . This ultra damage doesn't happen and in general they seem pretty low powered.

Another known problem I'm afraid - archery hasn't been converted to the new combat system (launchers still have multipliers instead of balance and heft), so it is very weak. It will be the very next thing I fix, when I get back to v4.

-+blows doesn't do anything, it would be broken on the mega dice weapon anyway if they actually increased finesse to that extent. You could end up with something doing 2-4 k a round easily. +blows needs to be +finess but restricted to lighter weapons and just scaled to give +blows.

Actually +blows will turn into +balance, with a corresponding affix for +heft. And yes, weapons in general are too powerful in the late game, because too many of the affixes increase damage output. We need a greater variety of weapon affixes - which is where my procs come in after the effects rewrite ...

-Some of the artifacts have odd finess, the thanc daggers (one of them anyway) has 0% finess.

Oooh, that's a bug - thank you. Not sure how this happened, as the balance/heft are taken from the base item (Dagger).

-The weapon system seams just as lop sided as before. Previously you would get max blows, now you get max power.

What do you mean by max power?

-The item generation is a bit wonky. I found BoS +18 and BoE +14 to speed. You can also get weapons generated which are too heavy to wield even with max strength.

Yes, these are known too - the preponderance of speed on boots and heavy big-dice weapons are both because there aren't enough affixes to choose from. This is on the to-do list. Feel free to suggest some new ones!

-The insanely high plusses just look silly, Dagger of Slay Evil (+75,+115), etc. . There is no way the difference between +74 and +84 is going to make a decision difference these can all be displayed as before +8, +12. Just a cosmetic thing. Of course you get used to it very quickly, still the first time you see +50,+75 it is a bit exciting.

I disagree. This is a fairly simple paradigm shift: 10x more granularity in plusses. With two decades of roguelike experience you are naturally used to thinking in the old system, but it doesn't take long to get used to, and the extra granularity is important.

(Yes we could simply /10 for the display if people want - hey, I know, we'll make it an option!)

-There are still a lot of useless items. Staves of Evil/Power for example are too rare/deep. It would be nice if they were more common/lower but used CL+magic skill as the damage output, similar with healing, etc.

I'm glad you used consumables as examples. More feedback very welcome - we can certainly move these lower and more common.

-Exp penalties need to be much higher, I would like to have you reach CL 50 at DL 100, but you have to move extremely fast to prevent that from not happening. If you attempt to clear at all then you level very fast. For the upper classes paladin/ranger (duna/h-elf) the exp gains should be much lower as they are way more powerful than the base classes/races.

This hasn't changed since V - the xp from monsters is the same, and the xp required to level is the same. People frequently win V without hitting 50. But FWIW I'd be happy to see more differentiation in xp gain between races and classes.

-Dragon scale armors have very low AC now, look at them compared to normal armor it seems off.

They're now a material from which armour items can be made, not items in their own right. Again it takes a bit of getting used to, if you're used to seeing all DSM as AC 20, but not much. There is much more variety now: you can get gloves or hats or boots made of dragon scale - they'd naturally have lower AC than DSM body armour.

-There are WAY too many buffs now. For example quaff potions of brawn, nimbleness + toughness and get the extra damage + health (and for mages the temp int/con boost), for a unique. But if you try to carry these, + mushrooms + bless/heroism (superheroism/speed, PfE, etc.), etc. you have your inventory gone. It also isn't possible to store them at home and use them for awhile and then switch to another buffer as you build up a pile of them as the home inventory is so small.

Again this is unchanged from V, but interesting feedback nonetheless. Too many useful items == TMJ, to paraphrase Eddie.

-Along that line, since there are no enchant in the stores, you end up also piling them at home which decreases inventory again. Basically it ends up feeling very much like Ironman where you are using vs storing and can not developing for later.

Any examples other than enchants? That was a very deliberate decision, because they were too abusable in stores.

-Regen seems to be very rare as one of the ego flags, I never had it with any character and it is annoying if you don't want to rest. One of the chars was a paladin who was always in the red on mana.

Interesting - thanks for the observation. I'll have a look at the stats.

-Rings of the dog are now pretty useless, it would be nice it they activated for heroism (and then aggravate without the haste, just wake everything up) basically you just yelled out "Leroy Jenkins!!!" at the top of your lungs.

Nice idea - I've always thought =dog were pretty rubbish, and a short heroism activation (or even just bless) would be nice.

-There are a glut of low level wands, staves, etc. . I ended up junking (when not selling) and just keeping the highest damage. It would be nice if they were combined i.e., wand of elemental bolts which would fire all bolts but each one did reduced damage so you would end up with similar damage overall on average, same for staves of slow, confuse, sleep -> staff of bewilderment which would attempt slow, confuse, sleep, but each at a modified chance. Similar drain life would turn into annihilation as cl and magic device increased, no two wands (rods?).

I'm not sure how this fits with your earlier observation about some devices being too deep/rare - making them more common would exacerbate this problem. I think we'd get criticised for making inventory management too easy if we implemented your amalgamation idea, but I think the same effect can be achieved with a more careful spread of depths and rarities for drops.

-Weapon damage is also off, as a weapon can have a slay and it doesn't show up in the description, some do, some don't.

I don't think I'm aware of this bug - please could you post a save. I know the item descriptions are broken at the moment w.r.t. damage output, but I didn't realise that known item properties were ever not displayed.

-It would be nice if you could just "buy out" the store to reset it. You can do this manually, it just is annoying to buy and then junk (or drop and resell if you are still trying to conserve money).

There have been hundreds of threads on this, and we don't want a buyout button. I'm afraid the devteam consensus is to discourage shopping, not encourage it. If we ever do implement more interesting store stocking, it'll be via investment rather than buyout.

This is obviously pre-alpha, but a lot of work has gone into producing some pretty interesting features and there is some very imaginative and clean coding (the way HA is generated as a themed ego).

A few places for development :

-Random abilities for monsters, create some of the feel for when you were new to Angband

-Gradual genocide (re-populate based on amount killed), makes the game more immersive

-Store item generation influenced by items bought/sold, similar

-Uniques grow in strength if they are ignored/skipped (makes power diving much more dangerous)

-Some inventory adjustment to be able to utilize all the new items

With the exception of the last, these are all things we're at least considering. I'm not sure we'll mess with inventory, but you never know.

Many thanks for such detailed feedback - really helpful.

[Derakon]

I disagree. This is a fairly simple paradigm shift: 10x more granularity in plusses. With two decades of roguelike experience you are naturally used to thinking in the old system, but it doesn't take long to get used to, and the extra granularity is important.

I disagree with your disagreeing; CliffStamp is right. The issue is not just with our prior experience with Angband and other roguelikes, but also with every other game with pluses in existence. +100 is a huge number and should mean the item is incredibly powerful, but in v4 it's just middling. And we really don't need that extra granularity in the values.

Take a 3d16 weapon with .8 heft (i.e. massively powerful prowess weapon). If you rolled max damage on this weapon (again an extreme case), then the difference between +100 to prowess and +110 is 4 points of damage. If you rolled average dice (with this incredibly powerful weapon) of 25, then the difference between +100 and +110 is only 2 points.

In other words, at the very late game when numbers are huge, we're only gaining 1-3 points of extra damage granularity by having the extra order of magnitude on our pluses. At all other points in the game, the extra granularity is completely pointless. You could do a similar calculation for blows/round for finesse fighters if you wanted to, but since the mechanics are identical (the multiplier is applied differently, but against monsters with 0 absorption, damage values should be identical) you'd get the same results.

I chose 100 as the divisor when I implemented the combat system, so I take responsibility for this. I should've just used a factor of 10 instead.

(And this was much easier to quote. Thanks. )

[CliffStamp]

This is a well-known problem with v4. It's actually much much more difficult to solve than it looks

Remove the names (aside from uniques, themes) and just auto-inscribe?

I don't understand the problem here - once you know a rune you can go and squelch its affix - so once you know the rune for Feather Fall, you go and squelch Of Feather Falling.

In the menu? It just comes up same as before, squelch good, excellent, etc. ? Is this in a sub-menu somewhere?

What do you mean by max power?

Sloppy wording, raw dice usually. Nothing can touch something past even a moderate dice boost no matter what it has unless it gets some large speed boost. Unless of course the weight is off and you can't use it, basically you end up junking anything which doesn't have enhanced dice (assuming you are not magic rpg'ing).

They're now a material from which armour items can be made, not items in their own right.

Yes but consider it is dragon scale, it should be a bit higher naturally unless you have some wimpy dragons. Not that I have fought dragons, but it seems to me, especially the higher power ones (Chaos, etc.) should have some pretty hard to cut scales.

I don't think I'm aware of this bug - please could you post a save.

Poor wording, they are displayed but the damage is the same it will be like :

456 normal, 1750 undead, 456 fire, 456 evil

with fire and evil brands, even with a light slay of 1.35 it should I am assuming make at least 1 hp of difference.

There have been hundreds of threads on this, and we don't want a buyout button. I'm afraid the devteam consensus is to discourage shopping, not encourage it.

Again, if it the devteams consensus then it isn't Angband proper - create a variant.

[Narvius]

Again, if it the devteams consensus then it isn't Angband proper - create a variant.

I fail to understand this sentence. First of all, v4 IS a variant, second... what the devteam decides IS Angband proper?

[ekolis]

For the enchant scrolls, how about adding a weaker form of enchant scroll that is available in the shops, which has some disadvantage compared to the standard dungeon enchant scroll - say, a greater chance to fail, or something?

For the ridiculously high pluses on weapons, how about displaying them as multipliers or percentages instead? So a (+100, +75) weapon could be displayed as (1x, 0.75x), or as (100%, 75%) - just a minor cosmetic change to make the numbers seem more reasonable since we've got this ingrained idea of what "pluses" mean from years of Angband and D&D!

[Derakon]

I fail to understand this sentence. First of all, v4 IS a variant, second... what the devteam decides IS Angband proper?

The devteam doesn't have a mandate on how the game should work. After all, if they decide to go off into loonyville, then people will just stop playing "their" game and decide that some previous version is Angband.

The buyout button decision wasn't solely made by devteam members. There was a lot of back and forth about it and IIRC there were people both on the devteam and in the community that thought that both approaches (buyout button vs. no buyout button) were reasonable ideas. And I don't think that the current shop system is ideal either. I believe the eventual goal is to reach a setup where you would never want a buyout button because there'd be no point.

[CliffStamp]

There was a lot of back and forth about it and IIRC there were people both on the devteam and in the community that thought that both approaches (buyout button vs. no buyout button) were reasonable ideas.

Is there a thread, I would be curious as to the argument. I recently popped back into town to sell a bunch of things, store some items which could be useful later and there were no WoR scrolls. Now what are the options then, walk back down to DL 65, that is a bit silly, wait/scum to reset the store? Obviously I just bought out all the items and reset and also picked up some other consumables. You can just macro of course buy all item a's, etc. repeat. It just seems silly when you have 1000X the money for all the items and you have this very absurd discussion with the shop keeper, ok, I will buy all all of a, ok, I will buy all of a, ok I will buy all of a ... And then you casually destroy each item, then you say ok, now give me the 8 WoR scrolls, thanks.

[Magnate]

Is there a thread, I would be curious as to the argument.

It came up many times, but IIRC nobody ever started a thread dedicated to it. If you use the forum search for "buyout button", it lists over 20 threads - cross-reference that with search for posts rather than threads, and you can see which threads are the ones that actually went into detail on the topic.

As Derakon says, it wasn't a decision made lightly - there was a lot of debate. It's also remembering that the decision was made by Takkaria as maintainer, and people accepted that. One of the disadvantages of operating by consensus in the post-maintainer world is that people want to know if the devteam are 100% in agreement on an issue, but that shouldn't matter. It's like cabinet government: we may not agree with the decision individually, but once it's made we all support it ;-)

[Magnate]

I disagree with your disagreeing; CliffStamp is right. The issue is not just with our prior experience with Angband and other roguelikes, but also with every other game with pluses in existence. +100 is a huge number and should mean the item is incredibly powerful, but in v4 it's just middling. And we really don't need that extra granularity in the values.

You make a good case for it not being necessary for damage, but I think it is necessary for blows. More compellingly, it's also necessary for per-level increments: there's a big difference between +10 per clev and +20 (+500 by cl50).

That said, I'd be happy for the display to change back to 1/10th of the values, as long as we continue to use the higher granularity internally. In fact I'd prefer the % display as suggested by ekolis (which was used in Z, Ey and others).

[Magnate]

Remove the names (aside from uniques, themes) and just auto-inscribe?

Ugh! That seems a real shame. For a start, auto-inscriptions would run out of room, and/or require a brutally unintuitive set of abbreviations. I personally would really miss the flavour. Nomad came up with an interesting idea of using matrices, where related affixes (stats, resists, slays etc.) are matched to boil down the number of names into higher-level name groups which should result in names which are both intuitive and flavourful.

In the menu? It just comes up same as before, squelch good, excellent, etc. ? Is this in a sub-menu somewhere?

Oh, sorry - you use the knowledge menu (~) to do this - go to the affix you want to squelch and press s.

Sloppy wording, raw dice usually. Nothing can touch something past even a moderate dice boost no matter what it has unless it gets some large speed boost. Unless of course the weight is off and you can't use it, basically you end up junking anything which doesn't have enhanced dice (assuming you are not magic rpg'ing).

Hmmm. This is perhaps a balancing issue rather than a fundamental problem. There are a handful of affixes that add a side or two, a very few that add a whole die (and those dramatically increase weight), and the three very rare specials that apply only to specific items (Chaos, Slicing, Destruction). With some dilution from other weapon affixes the problem might fix itself - I'm going to run some stats to see how many times each affix is generated and go from there. Certainly the weight/dice affixes could use some fine-tuning.

Yes but consider it is dragon scale, it should be a bit higher naturally unless you have some wimpy dragons. Not that I have fought dragons, but it seems to me, especially the higher power ones (Chaos, etc.) should have some pretty hard to cut scales.

Sure, but if you're only cutting a scale or two for a pair of gloves/bracers ;-) In general it does add to AC, but here we enter a % rounding issue - if the item's base AC is only 4 (which is not high for things like hats/gloves/boots), a 20% AC boost will not increase it ... but if we make all dragon scales give higher boosts, you'll end up with some truly impenetrable body armours.

This could be solved by lengthening the AC scale again, but I'm not sure if that would start to spoil people's flavour of roguelikes (which generally have AC up to a couple of hundred, rather than thousands).

One could also divide the DSM affixes into blue-scales-for-body-armour and blue-scales-for-boots-and-gloves, and so on. But that seems like a lot of added complexity for minimal gain.

Poor wording, they are displayed but the damage is the same it will be like :

456 normal, 1750 undead, 456 fire, 456 evil

with fire and evil brands, even with a light slay of 1.35 it should I am assuming make at least 1 hp of difference.

Yes it will - this is a known bug. The actual damage is applied correctly (you can confirm in wizard mode), it's just the display that's wrong.

Again, if it the devteams consensus then it isn't Angband proper - create a variant.

Sadly there's a word missing in that sentence which could crucially alter the meaning. I said "the devteam consensus is to discourage shopping", and it's not clear what you consider "isn't Angband proper". Do you mean that you feel so strongly about shopping that even if the entire devteam is in agreement about it you still feel it's not Angband proper? Or that it's not proper if we don't have 100% consensus? Or ...?

[Derakon]

You make a good case for it not being necessary for damage, but I think it is necessary for blows. More compellingly, it's also necessary for per-level increments: there's a big difference between +10 per clev and +20 (+500 by cl50).

Aren't the per-level increments in p_class.txt actually given as "bonus per 10 levels"? So they already have that much granularity.

That said, I'd be happy for the display to change back to 1/10th of the values, as long as we continue to use the higher granularity internally. In fact I'd prefer the % display as suggested by ekolis (which was used in Z, Ey and others).

Percentage isn't a terrible idea either. The main issue is that we have the heft multiplier to take into account; +100 prowess is nowhere near as good on a dagger as it is on a warhammer.

[ekolis]

Nomad came up with an interesting idea of using matrices, where related affixes (stats, resists, slays etc.) are matched to boil down the number of names into higher-level name groups which should result in names which are both intuitive and flavourful.

Would this involve restricting the sets of affixes on a particular item to particular groups - e.g. fire branded weapons could also get resist fire or resist cold, but not resist electricity or resist acid?

Or would it be more along the lines of ToME4 where there are several types of affixes - prefixes and suffixes - and certain affixes can be one or the other (or maybe both, just with different words), with each item allowed up to one prefix and one suffix? For instance fire brand could be "flaming" as a prefix, or "of burning" as a suffix...

[saarn]

Hmmm. This is perhaps a balancing issue rather than a fundamental problem. There are a handful of affixes that add a side or two, a very few that add a whole die (and those dramatically increase weight), and the three very rare specials that apply only to specific items (Chaos, Slicing, Destruction).

Seems like this logic may be at least part of the problem-- adding a die isn't necessarily more powerful than adding a side (consider say a 6d2 weapon becoming 7d2 (10.5avg) vs 6d3 (12avg)). What about having a single ego that boosts base damage by some amount or some fraction of base damage and then using some logic to figure out how that increase should be mapped to dice based on base item balance/heft (I'd be happy to share the same logic I used for redistributing weapon dice).

[CliffStamp]

I personally would really miss the flavour.

No doubt, but there are a LOT of combinations, it can be done but someone is going to have to get very creative.

Oh, sorry - you use the knowledge menu (~) to do this - go to the affix you want to squelch and press s.

I have to check that, it would significantly remove brute force destroying.

In general it does add to AC, but here we enter a % rounding issue - if the item's base AC is only 4 (which is not high for things like hats/gloves/boots), a 20% AC boost will not increase it ... but if we make all dragon scales give higher boosts, you'll end up with some truly impenetrable body armours.

I am just looking at it from a material perspective, basically what normal material should Dragon scale be similar to. I never did a very detailed comparison, but it seemed to me it wasn't high enough compared to what I would expect for the hide of a dragon compared to the hide of a cow for example.

Do you mean that you feel so strongly about shopping that even if the entire devteam is in agreement about it you still feel it's not Angband proper? Or that it's not proper if we don't have 100% consensus? Or ...?

My opinion would not decide anything aside from a Variant I would decide to create. There simply has to be some kind of consensus, it never is going to be uniform, people will always fall on the boundaries of both sides. It is just a discussion and then some kind of majority opinion which the devteam then respects, just like the user base respects the devteam isn't a bottle of genies that can do anything regardless of complexity / effort or personal desire/enjoyment.