stochastic energy and fractional blows

[tigen]

Just throwing this out for discussion. What do you guys think about these two ideas? They've been around a long while but I never really saw the reasons not to use them in more bands, or even vanilla.

I. Stochastic energy: implemented in hengband, this gives player and monsters randomized energy each turn instead of fixed values. I assume you would assign energy in a random distribution centered on base amounts. It seems to me that reducing predictability is a good thing, and it would mitigate the overwhelming tactical advantage of speed. It could make play feel less mechanical. Problems?


II. Fractional blows. For example 1.4 blows means you get 1 + (40% chance of 1 more) blow. Would create finer points of distinction between different weapons. Why not? One argument I saw somewhere was talking about how large "breakpoints" in power are better for gameplay. But I think that aspect would better not be hardcoded into core mechanics, but rather designed into character and item progression. It's not intuitive how just a slightly lighter weapon can cross a threshold and be hugely more powerful than the other.

[will_asher]

I'm pretty sure they're already planning to put fractional blows into V.
As for the first, idea, I like it but I think I lot of people rely on mechanics too heavily to want to make them less predictable.

[PowerDiver]

Just throwing this out for discussion. What do you guys think about these two ideas? They've been around a long while but I never really saw the reasons not to use them in more bands, or even vanilla.

I. assign energy in a random distribution centered on base amounts.

II. For example 1.4 blows means you get 1 + (40% chance of 1 more) blow.

I. The biggest deal in the game is the double move. If you make energy stochastic, then people have to figure out how much faster they have to be to avoid the double move. A lot of headache for little gain.

If you want to avoid pillardancing and hackandback, there are other methods that would not increase double moves.

II. An alternative method would be that you get 1 blow, but it uses 72 energy instead of 100 energy.

[takkaria]

Just throwing this out for discussion. What do you guys think about these two ideas? They've been around a long while but I never really saw the reasons not to use them in more bands, or even vanilla.

I. Stochastic energy: implemented in hengband, this gives player and monsters randomized energy each turn instead of fixed values. I assume you would assign energy in a random distribution centered on base amounts. It seems to me that reducing predictability is a good thing, and it would mitigate the overwhelming tactical advantage of speed. It could make play feel less mechanical. Problems?

I've never played a variant where this is done, so I can't really comment.

II. Fractional blows. For example 1.4 blows means you get 1 + (40% chance of 1 more) blow. Would create finer points of distinction between different weapons. Why not? One argument I saw somewhere was talking about how large "breakpoints" in power are better for gameplay. But I think that aspect would better not be hardcoded into core mechanics, but rather designed into character and item progression. It's not intuitive how just a slightly lighter weapon can cross a threshold and be hugely more powerful than the other.

Fractional blows are something I'm looking at putting in V.

[tigen]

I. The biggest deal in the game is the double move. If you make energy stochastic, then people have to figure out how much faster they have to be to avoid the double move. A lot of headache for little gain.

Well, arguably that is the gain. Tougher choices. Depending on how you limit the distribution you could have the same "breakpoint" as now (i.e. 1x speed gets 50 to 150, 2x gets 150 to 250; correct me if I'm wrong but the 2x speed character wouldn't get double moved by the 1x speed one.) But it would make 1x vs. 1x trickier and "mix up" the turn-to-turn distributions, making combat just a bit less predictable.

II. An alternative method would be that you get 1 blow, but it uses 72 energy instead of 100 energy.

Interesting... seems clean, but that would have different gameplay effects compared to now. Quick attacks versus more blows per attack. I'm not sure what the best approach is, but this seems a separate question from fractional blows. Fractional melee attacks? I mean, you could implement this using the current integral blows. My first inclination would be not to go that route, because fine-grained melee makes players more powerful, and is inconsistent with how monsters attack.

[Matthias]

I. The biggest deal in the game is the double move. If you make energy stochastic, then people have to figure out how much faster they have to be to avoid the double move. A lot of headache for little gain.

Who is to say you should be able to make 100% sure that you don't get double moved. In Heng you can get a very unlucky roll and get triple moved by a monster of equal speed. Powerfull characters have been killed by that, what might look like turnoff. But this unpredictability, the player's mortality at any point, is one of the things that really make Heng fun. That and the 17 pages of home storage room

[fizzix]

Who is to say you should be able to make 100% sure that you don't get double moved. In Heng you can get a very unlucky roll and get triple moved by a monster of equal speed. Powerfull characters have been killed by that, what might look like turnoff. But this unpredictability, the player's mortality at any point, is one of the things that really make Heng fun. That and the 17 pages of home storage room

I would only consider this option as reasonable if there was a guarantee that the deadliest attacks could not occur twice in a row. In my opinion the game is designed (or at least should be designed) so that you can always survive RNG badness with enough preparation, and no carelessness. Two mana storms from Morgoth is enough to kill pretty much any character, and reaching speed twice Morogoth's is pretty much impossible. So I'm not a fan of stochastic energy at all.

However, I am a huge fan of changing the blows per round formula. Fractional blows work as well as anything else that I came up with, and seem easy enough to implement. I've never liked the idea that a dagger is a better weapon than a broadsword to start, or that a character that gets one blow per round with a 7 pound short sword can just as easily wield a 30 pound lance.

EDIT: I've also found it silly that the tremendous amount of possible Angband actions take the same amount of time. Swapping a weapon out in a turn, sure. Changing your armor, that probably takes much longer. Reading a scroll vs aiming a wand, etc.

[pampl]

I like the idea of stochastic energy in general, but I don't think it's a good fit for V (or Heng, really). Angband already encourages a pretty conservative approach, with its 100 floors and insta-kill attacks and so on. In Quickband or TinyAngband, where games only last a few hours, it could be interesting.

[tigen]

I would only consider this option as reasonable if there was a guarantee that the deadliest attacks could not occur twice in a row. In my opinion the game is designed (or at least should be designed) so that you can always survive RNG badness with enough preparation, and no carelessness. Two mana storms from Morgoth is enough to kill pretty much any character, and reaching speed twice Morogoth's is pretty much impossible. So I'm not a fan of stochastic energy at all.

Haha! Morgoth should be pretty tough though. It does look like you might need to do as you say, preventing 2 breath attacks in a row, or double mana storms. That seems like a reasonable restriction (kind of like the "cooldown" timer on attacks in WoW or RTS games). But then maybe we should consider limiting the player in a similar fashion

I guess I should just go and try to play a game with these changes and see what it feels like, since it doesn't sound too difficult to hack in. I played heng a long time ago but there's so much weirdness there... I want to see how it works in more familiar environs.

[dzhang]

While I fully agree that double- and triple- moves in Hengband do occasionally lead to tragic and frustrating deaths, the fact of the matter is that experienced players regularly do beat Hengband, despite occasional double Mana Storms by the Serpent of Chaos and Morgoth. The probability of a double-move combined with both being Mana Storms is sufficiently low.

(Much more annoying in Hengband is the Ancient Foul Curse that paralyzes you for 1d3 turns even if you have Free Action...)

[Schroeder]

At first, I useing stochastic energy was a bad idea, cus it was breaking away from vanilla, and fealt kind of inconsistant to me. However, I thought of something you could do to it that would keep its 'vanilla feel' (imo).

If how widely the energy you got was distributed was biased on some stats. It would make sense, would cause some fun things to happen, and it would be preventable. Perhaps base it on some ability? So thus, people who aren't as good at something would not do it as consistently.
Clearly it would require balancing, but it would be nice to see jerky characters like half trolls, fighting inconsistently cus they are just bashing at stuff with force.



Concerning partial blows, I believe that an important part of the 'weapon puzzle' in angband has to do with the fact that the number of blows you have is incremental. And, once again, the idea of randomly using the partial blow makes me feel like your going away a bit from that nice vanilla flavor.

I do, however, acknowledge that its a bit cheesy to be able to use a super heavy weapon with 1 blow as well as you can wield a light weapon though. I would support making fractional blows between 0 and 1 (or maybe 2) blows per round.
However, I think that it would probably be best to make the partial blow appear consistently. For example, after you used the extra blow, you could not use it again until it 'recharged'. (for .5 blows, you could attack, move while readying your attack, then attack again) This way, it gives a feal of you needing to ready for your next attack.
You could argue that it should only recharge while you are in mele, but then you have the issue of not getting to attack the first time you try to attack! (this could probably be fixed though by having you get the extra blow if you weren't fighting for a little bit.)

[ekolis]

If how widely the energy you got was distributed was biased on some stats. It would make sense, would cause some fun things to happen, and it would be preventable. Perhaps base it on some ability? So thus, people who aren't as good at something would not do it as consistently.
Clearly it would require balancing, but it would be nice to see jerky characters like half trolls, fighting inconsistently cus they are just bashing at stuff with force.

Yeah, I had some thoughts about that this morning... remember how whips in old versions of Angband got TONS of blows, even though they're heavier than daggers? But now they're essentially nerfed? Well, what if weapons had some intrinsic randomness in the number of blows you get with them, just like with the damage? And maybe your str/dex could be factored in, as it is now (IIRC)?

So perhaps a whip that does 1d3 damage might have 1d(dex/5) blows, while a halberd doing 2d8 damage might have 1d(str/12) blows? If you wind up with 1d0 (say, a whip being used by a character with a dex of <5, or a halberd being used by a character with a str of <12) then you get the "you aren't strong/dextrous enough to use this weapon effectively" message and you get 1 blow with reduced accuracy and/or damage (perhaps accuracy for dex-based weapons and damage for str-based weapons).

Of course, this system would probably work best in variants with monsters that resist damage per blow based on their AC... otherwise, what's the real difference between 1d4 blows with 1d3 damage apiece, and a "critical" hit with 3d4 damage in one blow? :P

Another thought is why not make blows like shots? Why do I HAVE to use up one turn's worth of blows to attack an enemy? Why can't I just use one blow's worth, enabling "hit and run" tactics? Or would that be too gamey vs. slow monsters?

[zaimoni]

....

Of course, this system would probably work best in variants with monsters that resist damage per blow based on their AC... otherwise, what's the real difference between 1d4 blows with 1d3 damage apiece, and a "critical" hit with 3d4 damage in one blow? :P

Hmm...while splitting AC into DR (damage reductiion) and EV (evasion) might make sense, it would be a very severe combat change.

.Another thought is why not make blows like shots? Why do I HAVE to use up one turn's worth of blows to attack an enemy? Why can't I just use one blow's worth, enabling "hit and run" tactics? Or would that be too gamey vs. slow monsters?

sCthband implements this.

Ignoring questions of playability, I always thought (once the question came up) that blows were different enough than shots to warrant different time treatment. As a matter of in-game realism, each shot has to be aimed individually (for the in-game weapons, obviously modeling shuriken could violate this). While with melee, it's very likely the game is abstracting away all feints and trained reflex sequences (oriental martial arts "katas") and just resolving attacks that could potentially hit.

Of course, one could unplayably dispose of part the stochastic energy proposal, after per-blow energy, by simultaneously increasing maximum blows while reducing the chance to hit per blow (for both player and monsters). The general effect, besides making the interface worse, is to increase the practical time variability of melee combat while leaving mere movement very predictable.

[PowerDiver]

As a matter of in-game realism, each shot has to be aimed individually

The real problem is that ammo differs. If you only want to use one uber-arrow and then switch to lesser arrows, the UI has problems.

If the system was changed so that all arrows were identical and all brands and plusses came from the bow, then it would make sense to me to have a scheme similar to where you shoot at a target and fire 100 energy worth of arrows with a single firing sequence.

[Hariolor]

Of course, this system would probably work best in variants with monsters that resist damage per blow based on their AC... otherwise, what's the real difference between 1d4 blows with 1d3 damage apiece, and a "critical" hit with 3d4 damage in one blow? :P

3d4 = avg dam of 7.5
1d4x1d3 = avg dam of 5

the critical is far stronger on average

and just in case I misinterpreted

4x1d3 = avg dam of 8 (slightly better than the crit)