For anyone interested in object pricing issues

[bebo]

while playing with dev r1359 i noticed that at the black market a rod of teleport other costs half the amount of a rod of acid bolts - which is pretty strange, considering that i would value the first around 4 times more than the second, as a rough estimate. Is the new object pricing algorithm only related to weapons and armour or does it affect also rings,wands,rods,etc ?

[Pete Mack]

@Eddie --
it means 1 in 5, because Gondolin also has LITE.
Lesser benefits, of 1 in 7, hold for *Slay Evil* and Lothlorien.

[Nick]

Well it will really discomode players who like to take it slow and buy needed stuff from the shops forcing them to dive fast/faster. I don't know if that will turn them off or not. I know I usually accumulate cash by selling stuff to get neater stuff because I play way too slow.

It could be combined with more starting cash and/or better gold drops, as Eddie has done in his patch.

[PowerDiver]

@Eddie: Gondolin weapons and Lothlorien bows can get ESP??? I never knew that - I've never seen either.

I see a gondolin with ESP pretty frequently. It helps in my code that I fixed the random abilities not to duplicate, so since gondolin starts with FA and SI, that means 1 in 6 of ESP instead of 1 in 8 [IIRC and there are 8 abilities].

[Pete Mack]

Do you mean delete it? I can't parse "truncate" in this context.

@Eddie: Gondolin weapons and Lothlorien bows can get ESP??? I never knew that - I've never seen either.

From unix man section 2 open:

$ man 2 open
....
Flags:
O_CREAT create file if it does not exist
O_TRUNC truncate size to 0
O_APPEND append on each write

These are the flags you would use for open. For fopen, it's a little different.



And yes, a Gondolin weapon or Bow of Lothlorien with ESP is pretty uber. Unfortunately, they are quite rare.

[Magnate]

BTW: If you want to do this, the usual way is to truncate the file during initialization, not as a side-effect way down in the program.

Do you mean delete it? I can't parse "truncate" in this context.

@Eddie: Gondolin weapons and Lothlorien bows can get ESP??? I never knew that - I've never seen either.

[Pete Mack]

BTW: If you want to do this, the usual way is to truncate the file during initialization, not as a side-effect way down in the program.

[PaulBlay]

I think the following change (or a better written one ) to object_value_real should stop the pricing.log file from growing to monstrous size. (It's in the user directory, if you want to check how large yours is).

#ifdef POWER_PRICING 
	s32b power; 
	int a = 2; 
	int b = 1; 
	[COLOR="Lime"]static bool useappend; /* Is false when program first runs */[/COLOR]
	
	if (wearable_p(o_ptr)) 
	{ 
		char buf[1024]; 
		int verbose = 1; 
		ang_file *log_file = NULL; 
	
		if (verbose) 
		{                 
			path_build(buf, sizeof(buf), ANGBAND_DIR_USER, "pricing.log"); 
			[COLOR="Lime"]if (useappend)
				log_file = file_open(buf, MODE_APPEND, FTYPE_TEXT); 
			else
				log_file = file_open(buf, MODE_WRITE, FTYPE_TEXT); 
			useappend = TRUE;[/COLOR]

[Pete Mack]

@Eddie
You beat me to it. I've only seen the Cloak of Magi {ESP} in NPP, where they occasionally show up in the general store or fall out of a chest.

In any case, ego items usually end up with one of the undesirable abilities, so you aren't likely to see more than a very few of any sort with ESP in a game.

[Rizwan]

Off the top of my head, here's a halfway house to no selling - drop all the selling price caps in the stores to, say 1000AU or less. Early game selling still works, ID-by-selling still works.

Shoot me down

Well it will really discomode players who like to take it slow and buy needed stuff from the shops forcing them to dive fast/faster. I don't know if that will turn them off or not. I know I usually accumulate cash by selling stuff to get neater stuff because I play way too slow. Although in the new version I did try to be daring and dove like six or seven levels before recalling

[PowerDiver]

i guess *slay evil* counts as blessed from one viewpoint.

You have forgotten weapons of Gondolin and launchers of Lothlorien.

And maybe cloaks of the magi, but I hardly ever see those.

[Magnate]

And amulets of ESP.

Doh! [slaps forehead and eats doughnut]

[Nick]

Interestingly, there are only two sources of ESP - hats and blessed weapons

And amulets of ESP.

[Magnate]

P.S. There is one whole area which isn't covered yet and remains on my to-do list, which is weight. At the moment a 40lb suit of plate has the same value as a 4lb shield of the same AC, and this is clearly wrong. I do plan to adjust power for AC by weight, and hope to get this in for 3.1.1 (though it is non-trivial in integer arithmetic!).

Well, I had a go at this, and I'm sorry to report that it's a total washout. Heavy armours are already cheaper than they were under the old pricing system (because the value of AC is linear), and adjusting the value of AC to reflect weight just made them cheaper still, without really noticeably affecting anything else (except Large Metal Shields). For it to be worth doing this, things like Adamantite Plate would need a base AC of 60 rather than 40, and similar boosts given to Full Plate, Ribbed Plate etc. etc.

I'm still a bit bothered by the fact that there is no real difference in power between a 1lb cloak and a 20lb suit of armour with the same properties, but trying to adjust for this creates more problems than it solves. So unless anybody both really cares and has some suggestions, I'll just leave it as it is.

[Magnate]

Speed in the boot slot is great because there's basically nothing else to put there,

I don't buy this at all. Thror (+3 CON), Dal-i-thalion (rnether), Stealth, Elvenkind, Stability and even Free Action are all useful for the vast majority of the game. We don't balance things (drops, prices, whatever) on the basis of the final fight.

but if you have a roS +10 handy to swap in many artifact and ego launchers are worth more than your second elven ring. Speed in the weapon slot is only good because the weapon it's on is already so good. A randart with +10 speed, 3d3 dice, and slay_orc would be garbage to anyone who expected to use melee just as Cubragol is garbage to anyone who intends to use archery.

Yes, this I agree with.

The interesting thing about speed is the nonlinearity of its value. +1-3 speed is really not worth very much at all - I'd much rather have +1-3 stealth or FA. +10 speed is more than twice as useful as +5 speed, yet +15 speed is not really 50% better still. I've found it really difficult to judge the usefulness of different speed boosts properly - there certainly doesn't seem to be a mathematical relationship, hence the lookup table in the power calc.

But I still don't think that speed boots should cost more than speed rings. I'm convinced that the rarity issue needs to address the rarity of the property *as a whole*, not relative to a particular slot. Leaving aside artifacts, there are only three sources of permanent speed: boots, rings and amulets of Trickery. (Interestingly, there are only two sources of ESP - hats and blessed weapons - so I think Pete was right to argue that it was undervalued.)

One thing I think needs to change is that speed is currently excluded from the "extra pval power" calculation. I think if you've got +5 STR as well as +5 speed on the same item, that's more valuable than just adding the two together. So I think I'll try including it and see what happens to randarts.