New pit types

[Magnate]

And you're probably right that angels are too shallow, but every time I posted the early revisions of this list people were complaining that I was making stuff too deep, so it's a bit of a pendulum swing. Easy enough to adjust, and the main reason I'd like to get these into the nightlies to get some feedback on depths from a decent number of playtesters instead of just me taking wild stabs at what seems about right.

I'll do this at the weekend if nobody's done it by then. Many thanks for the ongoing contributions.

(I am pretty certain Timo is right about pits of angels being trouble, but we'll test and see.)

[fizzix]

Timo is definitely right about angels. One thing to remember is that all normal angels have alertness of 255 which is as hard to wake as you can get. You generally don't want to wake them up, and most characters can avoid them. Pits always start awake, so you lose that advantage. A pit of angels would be complete avoidance, and I'd rather leave that one out altogether.

I also would never get close to an eye pit unless it had twice as much floor treasure as a graveyard. The later eyes are annoyance monsters par excellance.

He's also right about demons. Demons should be dlevel 80, dragons dlevel 70. They're the correct depth now. Don't deepen them. If you really want an angel pit, make it dlevel 90.

[Nomad]

I also would never get close to an eye pit unless it had twice as much floor treasure as a graveyard. The later eyes are annoyance monsters par excellance..

Nastier monsters are excluded from many of the pit designs: eye pits don't include undead beholders or hive mothers, and golem pits never have drolems. The full specs for all of them are buried earlier in this thread; I should probably compile a detailed list when I've got time.

He's also right about demons. Demons should be dlevel 80, dragons dlevel 70. They're the correct depth now. Don't deepen them. If you really want an angel pit, make it dlevel 90.

I haven't actually altered the depths for any of the existing pits; dragons and demons have been averaged around 85 and 105 since the new pit code was implemented. As I say, they typically seem to start popping up around 10-15 levels before the chosen average.

And since it seems to be a general consensus, here's new edit files with the angel pits pushed back to an average depth of 90:

[fizzix]

Nastier monsters are excluded from many of the pit designs: eye pits don't include undead beholders or hive mothers, and golem pits never have drolems. The full specs for all of them are buried earlier in this thread; I should probably compile a detailed list when I've got time.

Ok, I should have remembered this. Sorry for belaboring the point.

[CunningGabe]

I haven't actually altered the depths for any of the existing pits; dragons and demons have been averaged around 85 and 105 since the new pit code was implemented. As I say, they typically seem to start popping up around 10-15 levels before the chosen average.

Just to elucidate this further: ignoring Nomad's pit additions, the pits at level 75 are about half giants and half dragons, and the pits at level 95 are about half dragons and half demons. It used to be that at level 100, the 5 pit types (orc, troll, giant, dragon, and demon) were equally likely.

Even with the additions, the pits at level 95 ought to be about half dragons and half demons.

[Timo Pietilä]

Well, I think the goal with adding more pit types is to see more variety from game to game, rather than necessarily seeing them all in the same game

I'm not saying that variety isn't a good thing, I'm just saying that boring ones should not be included no matter how many you create. This same thing is visible in current vault designs, even that there are plenty of vaults you do not enter in the boring ones no matter how much "variety" they offer unless you are going in there for a challenge. Pits are equal to them as dungeon features.

Also too many things tend to make things gray mass if there is too little variety between them. Like trees. There are plenty of different ways to tree to grow, but they still make forest where one tree is no different to others in any significant way. Put a single or just few trees in a courtyard and they no longer look the same.

Giant pit is close to Troll pit is close to Ogre-pit is close to kobold pit is close to orc-pit. Gray mass.

Remove Ogre pit and continuity breaks.

[Derakon]

Regarding golem pits: what about bone golems and bronze golems? They're nastier than drolems IMO.

[Nomad]

Regarding golem pits: what about bone golems and bronze golems? They're nastier than drolems IMO.

Hmm, yeah, you're probably right those should be blocked too. Looking at the monster memory, they've got some much nastier spell/breath attacks than I realised. All right, here's a third revision with those removed.

And these are the more detailed specs for what's currently included and excluded.

Pits:

DL 15: kobolds
DL 20: spellcasters (apprentices and kobold/orc/dark elf mages)
DL 20: minor demons (excludes summoners)
DL 25: archers (scouts/rangers/kobold archers/black orcs)
DL 25: naga
DL 25: thieves
DL 25: warriors (soldier/swordsman/hardened warrior/berserker/ninja/dagashi)
DL 30: dark elves
DL 30: eyes (excludes undead beholders and beholder hive mothers)
DL 30: ogres
DL 35: believers (novice/priest/patriarch/paladin/knight templar)
DL 40: wizards (apprentice/illusionist/mage/sorcerer)
DL 55: vampires (vampire bats, vampires)
DL 65: golems (excludes drolems, bone golems, bronze golems)
DL 85: gold dragons
DL 90: angels

Nests:

DL 15: ants (excludes types capable of trampling)
DL 20: creepy crawlies (centipedes, killer beetles, spiders excluding spellcasters)
DL 40: serpents (snakes, naga, hydra up to 4-headed)
DL 45: lesser undead (skeletons, zombies, wraiths without nether attacks)
DL 55: hydra

[Philip]

The forum swallowed up my long, rambling post about the pits and nests, this one should be briefer.
Spellcasters, darkelf mage seems dangerous.
Minor demons, Tengus annoying, early.
Archers, dangerous ranger and orc.
Believers, missing first stage of paladin.
Gold pits seems like an unnecessary exception, would prefer Law pit with crystal, gold and law dragons, a deeper chaos pit with chaos dragons, a deeper balance pit with balance, chaos and law dragons and an ethereal dragon pit.
Angels, should have loot on floor similar to graveyard.
Serpents, exclude all spellcasters, move to dlevel 30 or shallower.
Hydra pits, rework hydras to NPP system, turn into pit, treasure on every piece of floor, dlevel 95. To prevent banishment scumming, make pit monsters immune to banish.

Add Quylthulg pit, remove Quylthulg from animal pit. Add vortex pit. Add elemental pit. Steal pits from NPP(ironband, quickband inclusive) and O(FA). Steal special levels like orc mines, There be dragons here level from O.

[Nomad]

Believers, missing first stage of paladin.

Yeah, that's down to a quirk of the pit code I'm using: I made the pit to include humans that cast the HEAL spell, and Gallants don't have it. Now that the pit code's more sophisticated I could probably rig a more complex version that would include the Gallants too, but I was kind of disinclined to bother unless it really bugs anybody.

Gold pits seems like an unnecessary exception, would prefer Law pit with crystal, gold and law dragons, a deeper chaos pit with chaos dragons, a deeper balance pit with balance, chaos and law dragons and an ethereal dragon pit.

The problem with creating other types of dragon pits is that most of them only have a drake and an ancient or wyrm variety, not the full baby/young/mature/ancient/wyrm set to fill out the pit. I did consider combined pits like the crystal/gold/law type you suggest, but I assumed people would be much more likely to skip them if they required multiple higher resistances to tackle.

And I did attempt a chaos pit with other chaos monsters in there to fill it out in addition to the dragons, but it turned out to be pretty much instant death, so I gave up on that one.

Angels, should have loot on floor similar to graveyard.

It could be done, but they'd then be pretty vulnerable to banishment abuse, since unlike graveyards angels all have the same letter. That's definitely the problem with having Quylthulg pits, since Qs don't leave drops so it would have to be all floor items. And I did also consider vortex and elemental pits, but they'd just be nuisances to avoid since the monsters would destroy the floor items.

Special levels would be definitely be awesome, but sadly I don't know enough about the code to be able to do that kind of thing. Though if someone wants to code up a way of loading special rooms from edit files like the vault layouts, I would happily go to town designing tons of them.

(Actually, I'd quite like to try my hand at creating some new vault types too, since it seems like there's a bit of a dearth of lesser and medium designs compared to the greater vaults, but the array sizes aren't in limits.txt so I assume they're hard-coded somewhere. Is that at all feasible to change?)

[d_m]

Special levels would be definitely be awesome, but sadly I don't know enough about the code to be able to do that kind of thing. Though if someone wants to code up a way of loading special rooms from edit files like the vault layouts, I would happily go to town designing tons of them.

(Actually, I'd quite like to try my hand at creating some new vault types too, since it seems like there's a bit of a dearth of lesser and medium designs compared to the greater vaults, but the array sizes aren't in limits.txt so I assume they're hard-coded somewhere. Is that at all feasible to change?)

Want to send me an email at $NICK @plastic-idolatry.com? Or if you're ever on the Freenode IRC network you should stop by #angband-dev and chat with us about your ideas...

[bulian]

Currently nests (graveyards, animals, and jellies) have floor loot - considering these are difficult to clear, I think the additional loot is justified. Do the new nests have loot on the floor? The new nests seem slightly easier/less annoying.

DL 15: ants (excludes types capable of trampling)
DL 20: creepy crawlies (centipedes, killer beetles, spiders excluding spellcasters)
DL 40: serpents (snakes, naga, hydra up to 4-headed)
DL 45: lesser undead (skeletons, zombies, wraiths without nether attacks)
DL 55: hydra

Also, the presence of dracoliches/dracolisks in white and red pits definitely increase the difficulty and make them almost unclearable. I ran into a white pit (~DL80) that had 8-12 dracoliches, which was too many IMO, and was very disappointed since I had turmil but no rnether. I didn't bother trying to clear it. Blue and black can still be _dispel evil with the appropriate immunity.

[Philip]

The problem with creating other types of dragon pits is that most of them only have a drake and an ancient or wyrm variety, not the full baby/young/mature/ancient/wyrm set to fill out the pit. I did consider combined pits like the crystal/gold/law type you suggest, but I assumed people would be much more likely to skip them if they required multiple higher resistances to tackle.

I didn't actually think this through. It probably isn't feasible to do so. d nests a la(probably) NPP and Quick and maybe D nests as well could work though.

And I did attempt a chaos pit with other chaos monsters in there to fill it out in addition to the dragons, but it turned out to be pretty much instant death, so I gave up on that one.

Yeah, I suppose it could be a problem.

It could be done, but they'd then be pretty vulnerable to banishment abuse, since unlike graveyards angels all have the same letter. That's definitely the problem with having Quylthulg pits, since Qs don't leave drops so it would have to be all floor items.

That's why I suggested all pit and nest monsters be resistant to banishment.

And I did also consider vortex and elemental pits, but they'd just be nuisances to avoid since the monsters would destroy the floor items.

I wasn't planning for them to be useful for the character ...

Special levels would be definitely be awesome, but sadly I don't know enough about the code to be able to do that kind of thing. Though if someone wants to code up a way of loading special rooms from edit files like the vault layouts, I would happily go to town designing tons of them.

Special levels could be stolen from O, although the code would probably have to be different. Special rooms figure in O as well, so you can probably get inspiration from that while someone else figures out how to load the rooms.

(Actually, I'd quite like to try my hand at creating some new vault types too, since it seems like there's a bit of a dearth of lesser and medium designs compared to the greater vaults, but the array sizes aren't in limits.txt so I assume they're hard-coded somewhere. Is that at all feasible to change?)

I have no idea.

[Nomad]

Want to send me an email at $NICK @plastic-idolatry.com? Or if you're ever on the Freenode IRC network you should stop by #angband-dev and chat with us about your ideas...

I'm not on IRC, but look for a rambling email in your inbox shortly.

Currently nests (graveyards, animals, and jellies) have floor loot - considering these are difficult to clear, I think the additional loot is justified. Do the new nests have loot on the floor? The new nests seem slightly easier/less annoying.

Yep; anything where the monsters don't have drops or don't have sufficiently interesting drops will have some floor loot too. The percentage chance of treasure is adjustable, so hopefully the reward should be roughly in line with the danger level - if it seems like there's too much or too little I can tweak the numbers accordingly.

[Derakon]

I continue to maintain that banishment abuse is not a problem -- or if it is a problem, the solution is to remove staffs of banishment or make them next-to-impossible to recharge. If deep mages want to troll for pit loot, then fine; they've had a hard enough problem getting that far. Everyone else, if they want to burn a difficult-to-acquire banishment charge, then that's their decision.

Is anyone actually currently running around using banishment for the purpose of easily acquiring loot? I mean, sure, if there's a pit I don't want to deal with as a high-level mage, then I'll banish the monsters in it; it's preferable to having to dodge around them. And if there's loot on the floor that's unguarded after said banishment, then I'll head on over and pick it up. But it's not like I set out to do this as a routine thing -- nor that I'll be getting a noticeable amount of useful stuff from doing this, either.