I'm considering making a new Sil branch

[t4nk]

What about improving Sil's UI? (e.g., tiles)
Also, any interest in C++ rewrite?
Also, please do something about monsters that constantly run away! This is so annoying. Maybe Poschengband style solution ("the monster is paralized by fear" - that could happen to player, too, so it wouldn't be an overall buff...)

[Quirk]

My impressions. Sorry in advance if they seem overly negative, it's easier to see things you don't like and say why rather than put forth one's own changes as you have done!

I don't want to come back in a negative way, because I do understand where you're coming from. I think though that you have a very different perspective than most other people, particularly when you say things like:

Warhammers: Are outstanding, and I use them often for high-str one-handers. Buffing them to 4d2 base would allow for 4d3 ones to spawn, which is... huge.

Nobody else says this. And with good reason, because mathematically... it's wrong.

At 4 strength - pretty high - a one-handed warhammer is 4d5. A one-handed bastard sword at 4 lb is 3d7. Both average 12 damage, the bastard sword peaks at 21 to the warhammer's 20 - and hits that peak more often. From there, everything gets worse.

- The bastard sword can be lighter, and make use of Momentum.
- The bastard sword has better criticals (and if lighter, more of them).
- The bastard sword is better with Slay.
- The bastard sword grants evasion.
- There are more artifact bastard swords.

At 5 strength, or 4 with Power, the balance tilts slightly. 14 average damage for the warhammer, 13.5 for the bastard sword, warhammer maximum possible damage is 24, same as the bastard sword (4d6 vs 3d8). This still does not seem to offset the other factors.

I think you need 5 strength and Power to even begin to talk about one-handed warhammers being advantaged vs bastard swords, and this doesn't happen often.

And I get this feel from your whole post. You don't want to see flavour lost, but you don't seem to be on the same page as other people with regard to effectiveness.

Take Knock Back for example.

It's not the most widely used skill by winners - in the first run of the stats here (http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8157) it was used less than the widely derided Channeling. Why?

It doesn't add damage by itself, it's actually bad in the throne room, and it's at the top of the Power tree.

I do, for what it's worth, find it flavourful. And I've kept it and not Blind Fighting, but it's in the old Throwing Mastery slot. It might be a newbie trap there, it might need more buffing, but it's a start.

If you look at my release, rather than my first notes, I don't think you'll be too upset. Momentum is gone - which I think you'd consider a nickel and diming skill - for Smashing Blow, which gives some reason to use the formerly strictly worse greatswords over bastard swords; Throwing Mastery is gone for Impale, which I hope meets your standards for flavour.

Follow-through vs Feint: Feint is dull. Missing happens naturally for everyone, and the way to best use this ability... is to keep doing whatever you where doing, ie hitting random people.

No. The place you get to take most advantage of this is in using weapons where you miss a lot - e.g. axes.

But "Feint" and "axes" feels like a minor flavour crime, so I haven't implemented it so far.

Follow-through may have lost most of it's thunder with the removal of worms, but it's not bad. Its crime is more that whirlwind isn't good enough to beeline for over other things. (Even if they are both fun)

Whirlwind is better now. Might be too much better. Might not. Please give it a try.

Opportunist: Needs a prereq, as it's one of the strongest skills in the game (for non-Morgoth fights). Unless you bump it up to need 8 Stealth, otherwise the xp investment for brawlers is trivial.

Have kept the prereq for now.

Find Weakness: Another MMO skill, with nickels and dimes in boring boring areas. 10% armour reduction , even if it stacks, is dull and doesn't change anything that the player would be doing anyways, ie hitting the same guy over and over since he bought concentration.

On hold until Concentration is fixed, and I find out whether it's too good to add bonuses to once fixed. But it does change what the player was doing anyway, the same way concentration does. It makes it more worth keeping focus on the same opponent even if a unique has hauled in to attack you on the other side.

Sharpness: Ah, so I can kinda see what you're trying to do here? Get rid of Sharpness as a song, and spread it to other skills?

Sharpness and Slaying. The Song tree will be healthier if it doesn't have a bunch of skills effectively reserved for the throne room.

There have been a number of changes to the original plan over the course of the thread, I'd encourage you to take a look at them and play the new release.

But, more than this: you like flavour. You like interesting gameplay. I dig that. I'd encourage you to come up with skill ideas, particularly in Will and Perception, because I'd rather have an interesting skill which needs a lot of tweaking to balance than a perfectly balanced dull skill. A skill that makes greatswords viable, or axes, or polearms is from my point of view worth having even if it's a little on the dull side, because it breaks us away from the inevitable progress toward finding the best sword and keeping it until the end of the game.

[Serephina]

My impressions. Sorry in advance if they seem overly negative, it's easier to see things you don't like and say why rather than put forth one's own changes as you have done!

Blind fighting: Is dull. And as mentioned, listen already does that.

Follow-through vs Feint: Feint is dull. Missing happens naturally for everyone, and the way to best use this ability... is to keep doing whatever you where doing, ie hitting random people. Follow-through may have lost most of it's thunder with the removal of worms, but it's not bad. Its crime is more that whirlwind isn't good enough to beeline for over other things. (Even if they are both fun)

Knockback is one of the most fun skills in the game, opening up all sorts of cool gameplay. Removing it is a crime and really makes me wonder how much you've played with various builds.

Smashing blow is just a complicated way of adding more damage, especially as the formula's not stated. Note that there's already many ways to get through armour in the game, from crits to axes to the many sources of sharpness for the mid-weight weapons. From the description it sounds as if more weight would help more, which is backwards as heavy weapons are fine v armoured foes.

Warhammers: Are outstanding, and I use them often for high-str one-handers. Buffing them to 4d2 base would allow for 4d3 ones to spawn, which is... huge.

Opportunist: Needs a prereq, as it's one of the strongest skills in the game (for non-Morgoth fights). Unless you bump it up to need 8 Stealth, otherwise the xp investment for brawlers is trivial.

Find Weakness: Another MMO skill, with nickels and dimes in boring boring areas. 10% armour reduction , even if it stacks, is dull and doesn't change anything that the player would be doing anyways, ie hitting the same guy over and over since he bought concentration.

Smithing: Good luck fixing it! Imo it needs a grounds-up reconsideration.

Sharpness: Ah, so I can kinda see what you're trying to do here? Get rid of Sharpness as a song, and spread it to other skills?


Honestly, it's a lot of changes spread over a large area and I don't see the overall vision other than a few of them favoring heavy weapons. It's good that people are still brainstorming over Sil tho, and I'm hoping for some time to free up for the devs so they can revisit Sil with some of the ideas that have been thrown about.

Edit; this was very negative and I apologize, thank you for sparking discussion

[Quirk]

Just a minor thing but is it easy to swap around starting stats for the different races? Edain being physically stronger than Sindar Elves irks me, as does Edain being naturally better fighters than Dwarfes. Changing Sindar to 0111 and Naugrim to 0021 (with an extra stealth malus) would make more sense imo.

Altering stats should be doable. Docking a point of Con might feel harsh though. I'm a little tempted to just bump the -1s up to 0 - 0121 and 0031 respectively. It would make Sindar and Naugrim a little easier, but they'd still be much worse than Noldor.

On buffing Warhammers; remember that they already compare favourably to greataxes when wielded 2-handed (-2,4d3)5lb vs (-4,4d4)10lb.

This is a fair point. How much do either Warhammers or Great Axes get used at present though?

[Infinitum]

Just a minor thing but is it easy to swap around starting stats for the different races? Edain being physically stronger than Sindar Elves irks me, as does Edain being naturally better fighters than Dwarfes. Changing Sindar to 0111 and Naugrim to 0021 (with an extra stealth malus) would make more sense imo.

On buffing Warhammers; remember that they already compare favourably to greataxes when wielded 2-handed (-2,4d3)5lb vs (-4,4d4)10lb.

[Derakon]

The impression I get is that Slaying is a requirement if you want to kill Morgoth, and people want to kill Morgoth because it's perceived as being "more of a win" than simply escaping with the Silmarils. So you can make Slaying no longer be a requirement if Morgoth is unkillable. That would also presumably help keep the escape sequence interesting, since you'd be guaranteed to be chased by him.

[Quirk]

All of this sounds great, except removing knockback. Knockback is a potential interesting ability and should be kept IMO.

Yeah, I've come round on that. I should update with my latest thoughts.

I began by thinking: "Some abilities are practically useless, others are too powerful; by balancing them there will be more viable ways to play the game. Also there should be more support to encourage using weapons other than swords".

Infinitum's comment "Abilities not changing up playstyles are boring" put a fresh slant on this for me. It's not just having multiple reasonable choices, it's about having the decisions you make change the way combat plays out.

In this context, Knockback leads to very different combat to other options, and should be kept (though it feels too weak to be at the top of the Power tree, so moving it where Throwing Mastery is now feels better to me).

I still like the idea of Impale (also attack the monster behind your opponent if using polearm or greatsword) as a way of encouraging polearms and greatswords, and I think Feint (+3 after a miss) may make using low-accuracy weapons more viable. Smashing Blow generally should help heavier weapons, like great-axes. We can try things, see if they work, and if they don't revise them.

I think the biggest fix needed in the Song tree is getting rid of the "need" to use Slaying to finish the game.

[HallucinationMushroom]

So, I haven't really thought about Morgoth's mortality so far. Fingolfin couldn't kill him. It seems thematically appropriate for him not to be killable, and it would be possible to make him practically unkillable. I feel though that many players regard killing him as the gold standard of victory, and I would want to canvas a wider spectrum of opinion before making that unachievable.

Okay, cool. Just curious, carry on!

[Gwarl]

All of this sounds great, except removing knockback. Knockback is a potential interesting ability and should be kept IMO.

[Quirk]

Not crazy about percentage abilities (including sharpness). The main pull of the combat system as-is is the simplicity of it imo. A simpler way might be straight upp adding 1 extra damage to the final score per enemy defense die to the final roll (with the maximum amount of extra damage depending on weapon weight; the exact formula would need testing but 1 point per lb seems reasonable to begin with).

For an instance, Cat Warriors have [1d4] defense whereas Ancient Serpents have [8d4] iirc ; meaning a character with an 8lb greatsword and 3 strength could deal (3d8 +1) damage to the former and (3d8 + 8) to the latter. A 6lb weapon might only get a +6 bonus max etc.

I began with the "simpler" weapon weight being subtracted from armor, so e.g. a 3 lb sword would deal an extra 3 damage against all armor. However, the way the UI displays protection is currently percentage-based (it shows the defence rolls with e.g. 50% against it), and once I started looking at mixing sharpness percentages and other values it was going to make the display ugly and cluttered. Moving sharpness generally to fixed values rather than percentages would make it possible to provide a fairly clean-looking UI, but any kind of mix is fairly horrid.

debo's solution would also work fairly nicely, but provides much less by the way of immediate impact.

Still interested in what system people are playing on by the way.

So, tl;dr, does Morgoth's mortality figure into your changes?

So far, I've been focusing a bit on rebalancing the skill tree and tightening up items. There are a few things I've noted along the way I might also want to alter (deathblades are not very Tolkienesque), and the throne room may need some revisiting if I get rid of Slaying. So, I haven't really thought about Morgoth's mortality so far.

Fingolfin couldn't kill him. It seems thematically appropriate for him not to be killable, and it would be possible to make him practically unkillable. I feel though that many players regard killing him as the gold standard of victory, and I would want to canvas a wider spectrum of opinion before making that unachievable.

Ungoliant should thematically be similarly hard to defeat, in any case; one on one, she overcame Morgoth and only his balrogs saved him.

On another note, it might be nice to have a number of Morgoth-crafted artifacts in his dungeons, powerful but with horrible drawbacks.

[Derakon]

My current rocket launcher plan is for them to be 50d2 It will look a lot like rocketband when you find one.

And what about the orc archers?

[debo]

I'm looking forward to Rocketsil

There is at least one other person working on a sil variant with rockets, and I'm pretty sure they'll be done long before me...

My current rocket launcher plan is for them to be 50d2 It will look a lot like rocketband when you find one.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I've been lazily working on my own Sil thing for a long time

I'm looking forward to Rocketsil

[Infinitum]

Not crazy about percentage abilities (including sharpness). The main pull of the combat system as-is is the simplicity of it imo. A simpler way might be straight upp adding 1 extra damage to the final score per enemy defense die to the final roll (with the maximum amount of extra damage depending on weapon weight; the exact formula would need testing but 1 point per lb seems reasonable to begin with).

For an instance, Cat Warriors have [1d4] defense whereas Ancient Serpents have [8d4] iirc ; meaning a character with an 8lb greatsword and 3 strength could deal (3d8 +1) damage to the former and (3d8 + 8) to the latter. A 6lb weapon might only get a +6 bonus max etc.

[debo]

It's 2% per point of Song, no? So 50%?

It probably is too high; I'm probably overcompensating for the lack of criticals (and defence) on the larger weapons. I'll start it off at 5% per lb and see how that goes.

I've been lazily working on my own Sil thing for a long time, and I added a similar ability to the melee tree that roughly checks weight x strength against some derivative of monster con (I think) and if it succeeds, it "melts" or "shatters" 1d4 of armor from the target. (Acid brand also does this with a check that is much more advantaged to the attacker, instead of causing permanent armor degradation.) This ability also works against the player, which can be exciting. It works pretty similar in feeling to DCSS' corrosion effect -- you have to rest it off.

The idea is sort of that big-weapon fighters have to wear down high-defense foes (instead of getting an advantage against them right off the bat), whereas light-weapon fighters have to bust through defense using criticals. I also planned to work in some other abilities that make stabbing a bit worse at the high end and a bit better at the low, and to be a bit more dependent on stealth to work well. There is no sharpness effect in this variant, you have to deal with armor directly.