An idea to alleviate Rangers LOS abuse

[Grotug]

Stone to mud line of sight abuse is waaaaaay OP. So my idea is to have deeper "greater" monsters have the intelligence to not play fiddle to this. So if they see a diagonal corridor they'll find another way to go. I'll edit this post with a screenshot or YouTube short of how this could work.

[PowerDiver]

(1) The dev team has doubled down on LOS abuse. E.g. more deep breathing summoning wyrms. A slowing spell that takes multiple applications to take full effect. I don't see anything changing.

(2) Smart monsters are hard.

(3) The simplest solution is to change stone-to-mud to be a ball spell. I.e. it removes the target and all adjacent walls. Then if you want an ASC or hockey-stick, you have to go find one already on the level.

I'd be stunned if you get much support for diminishing LOS abuse. I certainly had no luck.

[Grotug]

I guess one other change that was implemented that I thought was pretty cool is diagonal range is less than orthogonal range when firing.

I suppose another simple option is to make the spell more expensive/difficult, maybe not *quite* as difficult as ammo brand, but along those lines. Wands of stone to mud would also have to be more rare with a blow up rate similar to annihilation wands or something.

I enjoy STM but when it's 5 mana and you have 300 mana it's kind of hard not to abuse it. Being able to just go wherever you like all the time is kind of OP. Fortunately Morgoth is still difficult as it's nigh impossible to do LoS trickery on him.

Ball spell is an interesting idea. Seems making it more expensive in that case would make sense since from a mechanics pov would seem more powerful and energy intensive than just removing a single tile.

[Sky]

LOS problems aren't gonna be solved by changing S2M (mostly because mobs will wait when there is no pathing to you - all you need to do is dig up to the last block, rest for SP, and then dig the last block. Even if you make S2M to cost 30 mana, it will still be not relevant.
LOS is a problem that is built in to the game. I would say that the game depends on LOS abuse, given that 90%+ of conflicts are resolved by hiding behind a corner to teleport away whatever monster you want to get rid of, but can't fight.

*IF* you want to fix this .. "problem" .. what needs to happen is that mobs need to shoot ball effects at the wall and hit you with the splash. You'd still have an advantage, but not as great. Breathers need to get their breath expanded to have a 1-tile area of effect, too.

Note that this doesn't really change much. Unless you want to make area attacks deal the same damage as the center of the ball, which is a really really really really stupid idea.

[Pete Mack]

STM is hardly the problem. If you turn it into a ball spell, people will react by digging, then retreating and using STM at the very end. In any case, rangers are the last of it. Nothing compares to mage with STM/create doors in combination with the directed phase spell.

[Nick]

Symmetric LoS is implemented (in a pretty ugly fashion) in NarSil. One option would be to offer it as a birth option.

[PowerDiver]

STM is hardly the problem. If you turn it into a ball spell, people will react by digging, then retreating and using STM at the very end. In any case, rangers are the last of it. Nothing compares to mage with STM/create doors in combination with the directed phase spell.

Oops, the problem with posting based upon my feeble memory of old experiments. When I tested this stuff, I eliminated digging entirely. Do you have any idea how hard it is to mine a passage through 10 feet of rock? One square should take days or hundreds of thousands of game turns. I know it's stupid to let real life interfere with game design, but sometimes I can't help myself.

[PowerDiver]

I would say that the game depends on LOS abuse, given that 90%+ of conflicts are resolved by hiding behind a corner to teleport away whatever monster you want to get rid of, but can't fight.

Right. This is why e.g. adding the new (since 3.2) wyrms is doubling down on LOS abuse.

I've toyed with changing teleport other to require a touch on the recipient, but my guess is that is not feasible without many significant changes. I haven't thought it through.

OTOH perhaps it's not so bad. If you simply cannot defeat or teleport certain opponents, you could always just avoid that particular vault or area of the dungeon. It might suck to see an arkenstone and be unable to get to it, but that's not the end of the game.

[Sky]

I've toyed with changing teleport other to require a touch on the recipient

if you really want to change Angband, what needs to change is giving the target a saving throw against TO. MAYBE some combination of the caster's level vs the target, but as long as your success rate is only your Spell Fail %, TO will remain the dominant tactic of this game. "i can't kill it, TELEPORT IT IS".

[Grotug]

Should sleeping monsters be able to utilize their saving throw? :hmm:

I'm actually not so bothered by TO lately. For rangers, which is all I play until I can find my über launchers again, it's a limited resource and it feels balanced.

[Estie]

I have been playing an older version for a while now and I like the ray TO better.
You can do things like teleporting away a row of monsters, or cut off that row at any desired point, or target monsters indirectly which are not in the hockey-stick. It is interesting gameplay that was lost with the change to single target only TO.

The old game as a whole is harder to win than the new version, if anyone is wondering. Whatever increase in difficulty has been achieved by nerfing TO is, in my opinion, the "a rock falls on your head - you die" kind of difficulty.

[Grotug]

How are versions harder to win?

[Sky]

How are versions harder to win?

well, i mean .. they are?

In 3.0.6 you could *Destroy and artifacts would be unharmed. Literally just walk around spamming WoD and whatever's left in the rubble is an artifact for you to pick up.

At one point we had Globe Of Invulnerability which just made it impossible for you to die.
I think someone mentioned that at some point Morgoth was a Giant and would be subject to the 5x *Slay.

As late as 4.0 before the randart rework, you would regularly get stuff like "the boots of plus six" +6 Spd + 6 CON +6 STR +6 INT rEverything, or idk, The Amulet of Whoops, +19 Spd, ESP +2 Shots.

[PowerWyrm]

well, i mean .. they are?

In 3.0.6 you could *Destroy and artifacts would be unharmed. Literally just walk around spamming WoD and whatever's left in the rubble is an artifact for you to pick up.

At one point we had Globe Of Invulnerability which just made it impossible for you to die.
I think someone mentioned that at some point Morgoth was a Giant and would be subject to the 5x *Slay.

As late as 4.0 before the randart rework, you would regularly get stuff like "the boots of plus six" +6 Spd + 6 CON +6 STR +6 INT rEverything, or idk, The Amulet of Whoops, +19 Spd, ESP +2 Shots.

Sometimes it was "the boots of +12" with +12 to all stats...
Fortunately, there was no ToME randart bug which generated "the ring of +15" giving +15 speed, blows, shots...

[Estie]

I am playing 3.0.9b, if anyone wants to try. And the randarts are the worst part of it. Would it be possible/easy to replace them with the current generator, without any other changes ?