Missile weapons overpowered or not

[Antoine]

Using nukes against individual persons would be rather wasteful I would say.

It depends on the person.

A.

[Zyphyr]

Is it "overpowered" to use missile weapons *exactly for that reason*? You are saying that one of the main non-cheating tactical methods of killing monsters without risking death is wrong. That's just bullshit. Using hockey stick is wrong, using shoot and scoot is not.

You are clearly misunderstanding his point. His didn't say there is anything wrong with using missile weapons.

What is 'wrong' with the current system is that there is is very little *cost* to you in using a missile weapon. This is a game of tradeoffs. Prior to the addition of the quiver, one could argue that the inventory spaces used up by your ammunition was the price you payed for the safety of being at range.

With the quiver, the only real cost remaining is the weight of the ammo. That is relatively minor. Not nearly enough to counterbalance the advantage of being immune to melee-only opponents.

If the quiver stays in, ranged damage needs to come down to reflect the lower cost.

[Timo Pietilä]

You are clearly misunderstanding his point. His didn't say there is anything wrong with using missile weapons.

What is 'wrong' with the current system is that there is is very little *cost* to you in using a missile weapon.

There is the cost that missile weapons are much weaker than melee as long as few pretty minor tweaks are made in ammunition. Even with nearly perfect weapon you have at best 30% of melee-weapon power if you don't have also suitable ego ammunition. With effective ego ammunition it is closer to 90% of melee-weapon.

It is not the launcher that we should pay attention to, it is the ammo. Ego ammunition other than slay evil triple the damage and that is too much, unless ammunition with those bonuses are rare which is not the case currently (branding spell, abundance of ego-items in deep levels). For very early game I suggest we remove enchanting scrolls from stores. That never felt right to me, and *that* is the reason missile launchers are so overpowered very early in game.

As I said in my initial post missile weapons are OK *IF* we make these changes:

a) remove overpowered slings of buckland (or make it an artifact)
b) remove many ego-ammunition types (ego-ammunition is what makes bow really powerful, this is what "old days" used to be, not many ego-types there, so no issue in overpowered missiles either)

edit in this: also base ammunition types included only two / launcher types. Now there are three, which makes ammunition 1/3 more likely to appear.

c) remove ammo branding in spells.
d) new one: either make shooting at point blank very very difficult or disallow it completely.

d is something that really should be done. No more point blank shooting. In reality you would not be able to hit anything if there is someone right next to you trying to hit you. This hinders shooter capability nicely.

Also one other post mentioned that enchanting of ammunition should be prevented entirely. That could pretty much solve entire problem with shooters. You could still have very good ammunition, but less of those. Also what I have read here Takkaria will tweak ego-items distribution so that there will be much less ego-items so I really don't see any real reason weakening shooters any further.

[PowerDiver]

d) new one: either make shooting at point blank very very difficult or disallow it completely.

d is something that really should be done. No more point blank shooting. In reality you would not be able to hit anything if there is someone right next to you trying to hit you. This hinders shooter capability nicely.

I strongly disagree with this change.

IMO the thing that makes missiles overpowered is not facing side effects of melee attacks. If you are in melee range, that doesn't matter any more!

The @ can parry incoming blows with the shield on his third arm, or with the sword held by his fourth arm. Those items remain wielded when you fire ammo after all.

In any case, if you go this route due to some worry about realism, for consistency the penalties to mages casting spells should be astronomical when engaged in melee. It just screws things up, and is not needed. The gameplay penalty for point-blank shooting compared to shooting from a distance is already very large.

[Magnate]

If the quiver stays in, ranged damage needs to come down to reflect the lower cost.

It will, Oscar, it will. The thing about nightlies is that they get whatever people feel like working on at the time. It just so happens that d_m felt like adding the quiver before anyone felt like tweaking missile weapons, that's all.

There's also the fact that although lots of things on the to-do list can be done by anyone who cares to make a patch, there are a specific few that Takkaria has indicated he's personally keen to do. Balancing missile damage is one of these, which is why nobody else is doing it. (FWIW, overhauling curses is another.)

[shawnosullivan]

With the quiver, the only real cost remaining is the weight of the ammo. That is relatively minor. Not nearly enough to counterbalance the advantage of being immune to melee-only opponents.

If the quiver stays in, ranged damage needs to come down to reflect the lower cost.

i haven't played much with the quiver yet, but it seems like it may be pretty seriously unbalancing - maybe it would be ok in another variant, but vanilla is a very carefully balanced game. you would never offer mages a quiver (err, a bookbinder i guess) for their spellbooks (or even magic devices), or warriors a portable armory, and for a very good reason. and even if ammo is seriously nerfed, 10 slots holding 99 each just seems ridiculously overboard. that's 10 free slots!! maybe 2 or 3 slots, or maybe just 99 arrows total (i thnk i saw that suggested somewhere)...
(that said, the quiver does seem to be very well designed and easy to use compared to similar features in variants i've seen)

[Derakon]

Well, the tricky bit is getting the mechanics coded; now that they're done, it's a comparatively simple coding job to change how much they can store. I don't think you should consider the current 10x99 limit to be set in stone.

For my part, I think that the limit should probably be something like 50 arrows or bolts, or 100 shots, or some appropriate combination of the two.

[will_asher]

Don't mistake what the quiver does. NPP-style quiver (I haven't played with the quiver in V, but I guess it's pretty much the same) doesn't give you 10 extra backpack slots. Each 99 arrows or other ammo in the quiver still take an inventory slot. The difference is that you can have 10 arrows (+3 +5), 23 arrows (+9 +7), and 65 arrows (+0 +0) and have them take up one inventory slot all together as if they were in a stack of 98. It solves problems with ammo stacking, but it doesn't actually give extra inventory slots.

[PowerDiver]

I think a single quiver is fine having 10 slots of 99 ammo, since other variants offer multiple quivers. It's just that the number of available backpack slots should decrease by some function of the ammo carried, be it something like (#ammo + 49)/50 or (ammo weight + 9)/10 or whatever.

[edit] maybe other variants do not have multiple quivers, but just use the (#ammo+99)/100 thing and display it as multiple quivers on inventory screen.

[d_m]

If there's a consensus on how many backpack and/or quiver slots should be removed it will be trivial to do so. I would rather not do anything more complicated (e.g. having the quiver use up mulitple pack slots) because I think the resulting code would be really buggy. (it is already still buggy, although I'm working on it!)

Magnate hit the nail on the head: I was working on targeting and firing-related commands and got pointed in the direction of the quiver ticket so I implemented it. I haven't touched missile damage because Takkaria is planning on doing some work and I don't want to preempt him on it.

[Derakon]

I don't really like the idea of an item taking up multiple inventory slots, especially when the item is a semi-rigid container like a quiver. Granted that Angband doesn't track volume at all, but it doesn't make intuitive sense to me that the fuller a container is, the more volume it takes up. If we're worried about people being able to carry too much ammo, make the quiver be an equipment slot instead of an actual container; any ammo not in the quiver is treated as a normal inventory item. Unangband does this, for example.

[Magnate]

If there's a consensus on how many backpack and/or quiver slots should be removed it will be trivial to do so. I would rather not do anything more complicated (e.g. having the quiver use up mulitple pack slots) because I think the resulting code would be really buggy. (it is already still buggy, although I'm working on it!)

I haven't got far since it was introduced: does it not occupy one slot per 99 items, like the NPP one? IMO that's the best implementation - as Will said, it doesn't add inv space, it simply facilitates a kind of stacking of non-identical ammo.

[d_m]

I haven't got far since it was introduced: does it not occupy one slot per 99 items, like the NPP one? IMO that's the best implementation - as Will said, it doesn't add inv space, it simply facilitates a kind of stacking of non-identical ammo.

Clearly I missed that aspect of implementing a quiver!

Currently it works more as a facility for "free" slots. Like I said, I'd like to avoid the complexity of using "placeholder quiver items" in inventory slots and keeping them in sync with the quiver. That said, if it is decided that it must work that way then I guess I'll get cracking...

I do think that reducing the number of quiver slots can make the feature more balanced than it currently is, if that is a concern.

[Magnate]

Clearly I missed that aspect of implementing a quiver!

Currently it works more as a facility for "free" slots. Like I said, I'd like to avoid the complexity of using "placeholder quiver items" in inventory slots and keeping them in sync with the quiver. That said, if it is decided that it must work that way then I guess I'll get cracking...

I do think that reducing the number of quiver slots can make the feature more balanced than it currently is, if that is a concern.

No worries - I see now why people are describing it as unbalancing, if it gives free slots for ammo. I don't think it's worth worrying about until we see what Takk wants to do with missile damage though. By the time he's finished the free slots might be necessary!

[fizzix]

No worries - I see now why people are describing it as unbalancing, if it gives free slots for ammo. I don't think it's worth worrying about until we see what Takk wants to do with missile damage though. By the time he's finished the free slots might be necessary!

While I generally like the idea of a quiver, one thing that makes Angband fun is the difficult choices that are made on what to take and what to leave behind. Since the quiver alleviates some of this, I hope there's some correspondingly difficult addition.

Also, I have a slight fear of 'quiver creep.' There is no intuitive reason why 20 frost arrows and 20 acid arrows should be treated differently than 1 rod of frost bolts and 1 rod of acid bolts. So while I like the quiver it definitely leaves some dissonance in my mind.