Monster pathing + damaging terrain

[PowerWyrm]

I was toying around with a great hell wyrm which breathed fire and generated a tile of lava. After killing it, a great storm wyrm came along and refused to cross the lava tile, so I was able to kill it from distance without ever having to care about melee damage. Looking at the code, crossing lava does 100+d100 damage... while the great storm wyrm has 4200 hps and could easily afford to lose 5% of its hp to cross one damaging tile.

Maybe such case should be allowed? Shouldn't be too hard to implement "if there's no other path and damage from damaging tile is less than x% of current hp, cross tile".

[Julian]

It's a bit more complex than that, because of the possibility of multiple lava tiles.

Also, with the wizard's controlled teleport, you could bounce from side to side of a lava tile, grinding down the critter's HP, while never exposing yourself to LOS. Eventually, it'd stop trying, but at that point it's a lot less dangerous.

(And what happens if you paralyze a monster on a lava tile?)

Mostly, the AI was written before the existence of squares that block movement but not line of sight, and doesn't handle it well.

Logically, the appropriate response for a monster blocked by lava would be to increase its use of ranged abilities, but that's got its own problems.

[Nick]

Every now and then the player needs to get a win