Announcing TFork

[Therem Harth]

Yeah, starting classes with no melee skill are almost literally hopeless at melee. You could either give everyone a small bonus to-hit, or boost everyone's starting Combat skill level, or something along those lines.

Hmm, I guess I'll try giving default +1 to-hit and to-dam instead of zero and see how that works...

[Therem Harth]

Okay this is crazy. I gave everyone +5 to_h and to_d by default, hard coded. I now have a L1 character with +12 to_h and +10 to_d in melee... Who can't hit anything at all. What the hell!

Edit: Okay +10 (for a total bonus of ~20!) seems to work, with that my L1 paladin can kill a green naga without too much trouble. May need a bit more tweaking but I think something in this area should work. Amazing I should need 20 to_h to hit anything though.

[Therem Harth]

Mucho apologies for the quad post. Lots of tweaking going on here though...

- I've eliminated the silly boomeranges, we now have bolas, which don't rely on archery. They should provide a useful means of ranged attack for melee classes, though less powerful than archery (once I'm done tweaking )

- But... During my messing around with bolas, I discovered that weaponmastery - which was supposed to affect the damage of the bolas - doesn't actually exist as a skill. As with archery skill there's a get_weaponmastery_skill() method, but unlike with archery, the skill itself (SKILL_WEAPONMASTERY or whatever you might call it) isn't there. I may fix this eventually but meanwhile I think I'll have to work around it. Meanwhile though I've learned some things...

- Like that Weaponmastery and Combat skills do not affect melee damage AT ALL. They don't seem to affect hit chance either, though I'm less certain of that. All it seems to do is affect the number of blows. Probably I'll be removing it entirely at some point, and making blows depend purely on STR and DEX again.

*sigh* This is going to take a while.

Edit: Oh wait a minute there is a SKILL_MASTERY, it just doesn't seem to be used very much... :/

[Derakon]

You sure about that? The Killerbunnies skill spoilers say that Combat gives a damage bonus, Weaponmastery affects your displayed "Fighting" ability level (no idea if that actually impacts anything; in Vanilla it's just a reflection of your to-hit, IIRC), and the various masteries give you to-hit and to-damage bonoses.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that what you say goes against what the spoilers say, and I've generally found the spoilers to be accurate.

[Therem Harth]

Hmm. Well, I went into wizmode and used a weapon shop's "Compare Weapons" service on two weapons, once with zero weaponmastery and once with 50... The only difference was the number of blows, there was no difference at all in damage per blow.

[Derakon]

What does your character sheet say about your melee damage bonus, though?

[Therem Harth]

Same with 50 weaponmastery as with 0.

[Atarlost]

+hit is extremely important with the inflated armor classes in ToME. Removing monster leveling may change that.

[Therem Harth]

Okay... I am finding myself generally unhappy with the changes I've made, so for now I'm retiring TFork. I figure for now I'll work on something less silly, like Strawberry or maybe a modification of OAngband. Or maybe I'll see if I can do anything with Z+. Whatever, I'll experiment. But right now TFork is as good as dead.

[Therem Harth]

*sigh* I can't help myself. I need to sharpen my programming skills on *something*. I'm giving it another go. Thus version 0.2, rewritten again based on 2.3.8-ah. Tactics are back, bolas are out, and a bunch of other mods are in. I should have it uploaded later tonight.

[DarkGod]

Or make a TE4 game ?

[Estie]

[QUOTE=Therem Harth;36466]*snip*Antimagic no longer provides trap detection, *snip*

How are Antimagic-users supposed to detect traps ? Searching ?
Sounds like a suicide skill now. Unless you also remove the bad traps, of course.

[Therem Harth]

Yes, Searching. I actually made it useful.

Though the antimagic changes are going to be (again!) canned in the next revision, because I'm nuts and can't decide on any steady direction.

[Derakon]

One of the issues ToME 2 has is that many abilities that grow naturally to quite high levels in other variants require extensive skillpoint investments to become usable instead. The vast majority of ToME characters have absolutely lousy searching and disarming, because it'd cost a crapton of skillpoints to get them to the point they'd be remotely reliable, and rods/spells of detection and disarming make entirely adequate substitutes (you need to pump magic device use a bit anyway to use artifact activations and junkarts, which you'll assuredly want to be able to use).

In other words, before nerfing something, make certain that your compensation actually compensates.

[AnonymousHero]

There's also the fact that Trap Detection/Destruction for Anti-magic users is 100%. With traps that can randomly scatter *ALL* your equipment around the whole level anything less than 100% is useless.

EDIT: All your *equipment* not all your *items*. Still...