Making the game harder

[Derakon]

The general trend lately has been to streamline gameplay, and as a side-effect, make it easier (barring the current lack of consumables, which we can assume will be fixed in 3.1.3). How do we compensate by making it harder again? Should we compensate?

The way I see it, here are the following types of challenges in the game as it currently stands:

* Immediate tactical challenges. These are what you face when you're in fights in the dungeon. You can make them harder by making monsters stronger or more common, or by making the player weaker. Things like removing extra blows/shots from players, increasing the importance of armor class, making monsters smarter, etc. all fall into this category.

* Short-term exploration challenges. These are for when you're exploring the dungeon but not currently in a fight. You can make them harder by making the dungeon more difficult/dangerous to explore, by limiting the player's movement capabilities, and by limiting access to information. Things like adding dangerous terrain, removing the ability to tunnel, and nerfing detection all fall into this category.

* The long-term character customization challenge. This is deciding what equipment to use, what inventory to carry, what spells to learn, etc. Players are trying to find the optimal equipment loadout that protects them from dangerous attacks while giving them a strong offense of their own. Reducing overlap between equipment (so that, for example, you're exceedingly unlikely to be able to cover every resistance hole), making most items have drawbacks to their use, and reducing inventory size would all fall into this category.

It's my feeling that current tactical situations are good, current dungeon navigation is too easy, and current customization is a bit too easy. Which is to say, the fights that I choose to get into are good tactical challenges, but I can pick my fights so I can easily avoid the ones that are too dangerous or have bad risk/reward ratios. And in general, by the mid-late game I'm finding equipment that does what I want it to do with only minor holes.

Thoughts? How well do you think current Vanilla is balanced?

[Magnate]

The general trend lately has been to streamline gameplay, and as a side-effect, make it easier (barring the current lack of consumables, which we can assume will be fixed in 3.1.3). How do we compensate by making it harder again? Should we compensate?

The way I see it, here are the following types of challenges in the game as it currently stands:

* Immediate tactical challenges. These are what you face when you're in fights in the dungeon. You can make them harder by making monsters stronger or more common, or by making the player weaker. Things like removing extra blows/shots from players, increasing the importance of armor class, making monsters smarter, etc. all fall into this category.

* Short-term exploration challenges. These are for when you're exploring the dungeon but not currently in a fight. You can make them harder by making the dungeon more difficult/dangerous to explore, by limiting the player's movement capabilities, and by limiting access to information. Things like adding dangerous terrain, removing the ability to tunnel, and nerfing detection all fall into this category.

* The long-term character customization challenge. This is deciding what equipment to use, what inventory to carry, what spells to learn, etc. Players are trying to find the optimal equipment loadout that protects them from dangerous attacks while giving them a strong offense of their own. Reducing overlap between equipment (so that, for example, you're exceedingly unlikely to be able to cover every resistance hole), making most items have drawbacks to their use, and reducing inventory size would all fall into this category.

It's my feeling that current tactical situations are good, current dungeon navigation is too easy, and current customization is a bit too easy. Which is to say, the fights that I choose to get into are good tactical challenges, but I can pick my fights so I can easily avoid the ones that are too dangerous or have bad risk/reward ratios. And in general, by the mid-late game I'm finding equipment that does what I want it to do with only minor holes.

Thoughts? How well do you think current Vanilla is balanced?

Interesting - my view is almost the polar opposite of yours. I think the long-term customisation is about right, the detection faff and picking your fights is too hard unless you optimise for stealth, and the tactical challenges are too easy (which is why blows and shots will be rarer on randarts in 3.1.3).

Ho hum.

I am up for making the tactical and strategic elements both harder, but please for God's sake let's not make detection any more of a hassle than it already is.

[LostTemplar]

IMHO more monsters should actively attack player. Add teleport to player or passwall ability to some easy to wake up or allways awake monsters or maybe improve movement ai. I have only limited experience in vanilla but compared to FA it seems that monsters just stay where they are even after waking up and wait for death to come to them. The only monster I have seen actively attacking was one of ringwraiths with passwall.

[d_m]

I think you're just noticing the shallow path-finding algorithm... those monsters that aren't doing anything are pushed up against a wall trying to be close to the player.

[nppangband]

I don't have much to add, since I am still wrapped up in my own variant. But there is a part of me that is glad this thread is being written. From everything I have seen in the latest releases of Angband, it has gotten easier in that obsticles that prevent people from diving deep and battling only select monsters to get the desired equipment.

The main reasons were: missing a key resist (confusion, blindness poison), not enough hp, risk of paralysis, risk of getting knocked out, lack of speed, lack of ID. All of these have been addressed to some extent or another. and people are free to dive much quicker than ever. But it does seem to come at a price in that the risk is being removed as well.

I think the biggest obsticle is that Angband is basically an inventory management game. There is little character development, and by the end of the game most classes just play like a warrior. But in keeping it that simple, it has also been able to remain fairly balanced with high replay value.

[Magnate]

I think you're just noticing the shallow path-finding algorithm... those monsters that aren't doing anything are pushed up against a wall trying to be close to the player.

See, this strikes me as one of the areas that doesn't need to be made harder - the whole picking-your-fights thing. While I'm happy to have better pathfinding on principle, I think we should tone down the number of always-awake monsters, and more importantly I think we should make more of monster aggressiveness (or lack of it). Not every monster should head straight for the player. Some of the aggressive ones, yes, but some should just idly wander around instead. That'd make things more interesting if less tactically challenging.

Happy for the game to be made harder in other ways, but I don't think this is one of them.

[nppangband]

I think you're just noticing the shallow path-finding algorithm... those monsters that aren't doing anything are pushed up against a wall trying to be close to the player.

I have played with this alot in NPP. There are plenty of ways to enlarge the path finding code without hurting game performance (NPP monsters move almost exclusively by path finding, and depending on the terrain there are more than a dozen different moevment flows being tracked at once). In the Vanilla environment practically the entire dungeon can be mapped without any pauses in the game. It makes the dangerous, aggressive low reward monsters like the hounds and hydras much more difficult to avoid.

[PowerDiver]

I would like to see the game harder in lots of ways, but I wonder if you are worrying about the wrong things.

Try playing a warrior without ASCs and tell me if you think the game is too easy. I'd say yes, but would not be surprised to be a minority of 1.

If not, then one could argue the problem is as simple as the overpowered nature of ASCs and current spellbooks.

[Derakon]

I do think that spells confer a ton of power on every class except the warrior. Here's how I see spells currently breaking down in order of importance:

* Detection. Warriors suck at detection. They can pray for early telepathy, which lets them see most monsters, but they're reliant on consumables until they find rods, and once they do find rods they have to wait for them to recharge (and rod recharging is nowhere near as fast as mana regeneration). All spellcasters, in contrast, get reliable detection (a bit later for priestly types, but Godly Insights and its Detection spell typically shows up before -Detection does). This is far and away the most important item.
* Combat boosters (haste, heroism, bless, temporary resistance, etc.). The number of boosts a high-level mage-type can cast before a battle is huge, to the extent that consumables can't adequately compete. Getting an extra +10 to speed and +30 to-hit is a massive advantage. Reliable access to double-resistance goes a long way to mitigate one of the most common sources of damage. Oddly, priests and paladins are limited to Bless et al (edit: and Protection from Evil and Sense Invisible, both of which I don't use too often).
* Healing. This is mostly a convenience, since the Temple healing potions in conjunction with Phase Door make an adequate substitute.
* Escapes. This is mostly a convenience, since with good detection you should generally not get into situations that require you to use escapes in the first place. Thus the rate at which you use up consumables should be less than the rate at which you find them, at least in my experience.
* Attack magic. Mages can rely heavily on this, and priests can use Orb of Draining throughout the game at steadily diminishing effectiveness, but everyone else pretty much sticks to melee and missiles.

Good detection is so important that I think you could make a viable class that only has rogue-level fighting abilities and detection spells. In fact, how about this:

* Mages: Mages get access to the entire spell list for their books. Escape and booster spells are more expensive for them; attack magic is cheaper.
* Rangers: do not get any attack or escape magic; only get resistance spells from the booster set (so no speed, heroism, etc.); don't get any spells that detect objects (so no Detection spell).
* Rogues: do not get any attack or booster spells. Detection magic is cheaper.
* Priests: pretty much as current.
* Paladins: do not get any attack prayers; only get Detect Evil and Detect Monster from the detection set.

[Atarlost]

The real problem is that there are people who have been playing Angband and similar games obsessively for decades. If the game is to remain viable it needs to be accessible to new players which in turn means the curmudgeonly veterans need to fork.

Either that or changes need to be made that only make Ironman harder. Like removing all or nearly all consumables from the dungeon while making the shops stock based on the player's recall depth.

[Derakon]

And how do you think that the current veterans of the game got into it in the first place? I guarantee that 2.4 frog-knows is way harder than modern Vanilla, and yet it's what I cut my teeth on. Just because a game is hard, just because it takes years to get your first win, doesn't mean it's not fun to play.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Tactical: the major fix here is with archery. No, it's not the extra shots, it's the 600+ damage per shot because x5 bow stacks with x3 arrow to give x15. I would also like to see spells that do more damage, especially from those expensive, high-level spells. If endgame-level melee damage is 150 per blow, then endgame-level spells need to be doing about 400 against a single target.

Strategic/customization: I'd love to see casters forced to make tougher choices in their spells. Give MORE spells than one can allocate for slots...especially, perhaps, past a few basics that "everyone knows" that form, say, a core 15 or so. After that, you choose...and the choices have to be meaningful. It would help to have the notion of augmentable spells, to borrow from 3rd Ed D&D. To use healing as an example, CLW is the baseline, 1st or 3rd level spell. Spend 3 mana, get a certain amount of healing. There is no CSW or CCW in an augmentable approach; instead, you just sink in more mana into the CLW. Doing so increases the spell failure rate by a certain amount, but heals more as well. Alternately, you turn a bolt into a beam or into a radius 2 or radius 3 ball, by augmenting. This approach doesn't work for all spells, but it does work for quite a few.

Augmentation would almost certainly be necessary to make choice important. Without augmentation, there's just too many spells, and the spells you don't get, are ones you never really wanted in the first place. OK, it doesn't have to work like that...but in practice it usually does.

I would also dearly love the complete removal of spellbooks.

[Hariolor]

Tactical challenges:

I think the behavior of hounds/spiders and orcs/humanoids should be reversed. It makes sense to me that packs of hounds would actively hunt the player. While mobs of o/O/T/p/h/etc would probably stay in their own room. As it is Z are annoyingly hard to fight (or at least boring to hockey-stick), and o/O/T/etc are waaaaaaay too easy. A room full of uruks pelting you with arrows is much scarier than a corridor full of them rounding the corner into your @'s meat grinder.

Exploration challenges:

I think torchlight and infravision should be more useful, while esp and detection should be nerfed. I like the idea of having the ability to auto-map that was mentioned in another thread (maybe give this to dwarves in place of auto-detect-treasure?). I and a few others have also mentioned making ESP scalable with item/caster level. I'd also add the suggestion that more creatures, especially intelligent undead and higher-level magical creatures, be much harder to detect. Like a sort of anti-scrying buff. Basically have more drolem-esque threats, even if they aren't all potential one-hit-killers.

Customization challenges:

Others have noted that there's still waaay too many weapons and armor dropped relative to consumables. As a result most ego and splendid items are mostly useless for most of the game. I think far fewer drops overall would make what you find seem more valuable. I also think more or less every artifact should have some kind of downside. Cloaks with great abilities might give below-average AC, for example. Many artifacts that buff certain stats might also penalize another stat...you get the idea.

and +1 on the idea of making it much harder to fill every slot. I admit that I get a lot of pleasure out of losing characters to careless play around DL 30-40, but it seems a bit odd that I am usually able to pretty easily cover all but one or two resists with a couple common artifacts and maybe a ring and some boots...It'd be interesting to have to make bigger decisions between covering resists/dealing damage/buffing speed.

[Hariolor]

Strategic/customization: I'd love to see casters forced to make tougher choices in their spells. Give MORE spells than one can allocate for slots...especially, perhaps, past a few basics that "everyone knows" that form, say, a core 15 or so. After that, you choose...and the choices have to be meaningful. It would help to have the notion of augmentable spells, to borrow from 3rd Ed D&D. *snip*

This would be....awesome...

I would also dearly love the complete removal of spellbooks.

even with tougher spell choices, I can't see mages getting away with having all their inventory slots free like that. If V moved away from a spellbook-based spell list, maybe replace the inventory placeholders with arcane/divine focus objects that have to be found to cast spells beyond a certain level. This would free up the structure of spellcasting while preserving the inventory slot requirement for high-level casters.

[PowerDiver]

The real problem is that there are people who have been playing Angband and similar games obsessively for decades. If the game is to remain viable it needs to be accessible to new players which in turn means the curmudgeonly veterans need to fork.

I think a bigger problem is the opposite. Remember Flee? Showed up and won the game in 3 months, presumably got bored and left.