Making the game harder

[Timo Pietilä]

TO teleporting items is better than the alternative; at the very least it means that after you've "cleared" the vault you then have to go explore the level to find all the gear you teleported out of it, while dodging all of the (now awake) monsters you TO'd out while teleporting gear.

OTOH it can make dangerous ordinary room with item too easy. You just TO item out of there and go hunt it from other place. Repeat until it is safe to get it.

TO in GV:s isn't that easy. At least in larger GV:s TO usually means that you are in LoS of the monster as well.

Of course we could make monsters in vaults resistant to TO. You can't banish them, destroy them or teleport them. Vault could be "magical place protected against all kinds of robbery", which means no method of magically move things other than yourself.

Then again that could make GV:s just very annoying instead of exhilarating and exciting. Some things in the game should be easy. Just not too common. Extraordinary unexpected finds can make game fun, be it monster or item. Not everything needs to be hard to get to keep game interesting.

[nppangband]

Or, just have the monsters holding the vault items, so you have to kill them to get the loot.

[TJS]

When I started playing I couldn't really get my head around the idea of some of the spells such as teleport other, but especially banishment, mass banishment and destruction. They all seem a bit like cheating and I still don't like using the last three because they just seem odd to me. Banishment seems to be the player answer to the broken monster summons. If monster summons were sensible in terms of numbers and also used up monster SP then you could get rid of the banishment spells.

While I like the idea of picking and choosing your fights and avoiding others, Angband really does take this to extremes. Maybe a few other methods of stopping monster instant-kills would be preferable to just avoiding them over and over again until you find the appropriate resists. Something like a silence spell that stops monsters casting, or breathing for a limited time would be interesting. Also making breaths do less damage over distance could mean that you could use these spells from a distance that then allow you to get closer to melee etc.

With these changes then you could stop the current tactic of teleport away/banish/destruct difficult monsters and collect equipment.

[fizzix]

Timo: You say vaults and loot are fun, and that's true, but it's only true because they are so rare. If you increase the vault frequency significantly, you wind up getting great gear too easily (tried it, no fun). If you increase the vault frequency but lower the average quality of gear inside, vaults are boring. Sadly, the only way to keep greater vaults interesting is to keep them at frequencies around 1-4 per 100 levels. From my experience, that's roughly where they are now.

Yes, in every game I enjoy the vaults when they show up. But I know that increasing the frequency won't work all that well in the long run. Still, I recommend you try upping the vault frequency and seeing how you like the game. Maybe your experience will be different than mine!

[Timo Pietilä]

Timo: You say vaults and loot are fun, and that's true, but it's only true because they are so rare. If you increase the vault frequency significantly, you wind up getting great gear too easily (tried it, no fun). If you increase the vault frequency but lower the average quality of gear inside, vaults are boring. Sadly, the only way to keep greater vaults interesting is to keep them at frequencies around 1-4 per 100 levels. From my experience, that's roughly where they are now.

I know that when there was a bug in vaults.txt and Crown GV was accidentally marked as lesser vault I was having fun. 40 dlvl OoD monsters in open vault with potentially great loot made them very interesting.

It works well for some of them, but not all. Some of them are just plain boring strange-looking rooms with very little interesting things inside. Actually most of GV:s are just boring strange-looking rooms. I think we could remove quite a few of them and actually increase game quality. Increase LV frequency and decrease pit frequency.

[Susramanian]

How to make Vanilla more difficult:

1) Throw out boring levels. We're in the Pits of Angband. There's no boring here. At least one vault and unique per level, please.

2) This is related to the above. Have only one down staircase per level, and force it to appear in a mild vault. Maybe create a few dozen special new stairwell vaults for this purpose. This would be awkward with connected stairs; going upstairs would land you in the middle of a guarded vault.

3) Symmetric line of sight.

4) Bring back great wyrms of power and other denizens of 4000'+.

5) Make artifacts much, much rarer. Finding an artifact should make you say holy shit, not right on schedule.

6) Rework the whole AC system to emphasize base AC. If you're wearing a robe and a titan punts you, you die. Mages shouldn't take blows well.

7) Rework the combat system so that magic users suck at it. The fact that, by the end of the game, mages turn into warriors with nine books of magic is moronic. If you want to beat something to death, roll a warrior or paladin.

8) Rework the stat system so that maxing anything is hard. With the current system, we're in a weird situation. A late game character's primary stat is so high that maxing it through gear is simple. Most of the time you're not even paying attention to your primary stat in the end. It's maxed no matter what you do.

Note that the last few suggestions would push classes deeper into their intended roles by the end of the game. Different classes would be looking for very different gear, unlike now where every character pretty much wants the same stuff. Mages should get excited about finding Gandalf's staff. Priests should get excited about finding Fundin's whatever.

9) Throw out banishment. What the hell, waving your hand and wiping out any non-unique you want? I've been playing for twenty years and it still feels like cheating. If you want to make the game harder, this should be one of the first things to go.

10) Throw out destruction or change it. Maybe it blasts you right through the ceiling to the next level and stuns you for ten turns or something.

11) Make immunities rarer or make elemental wyrms tougher. Preferably both.


I'm sure I'll think of a bunch more. I'll post again with my monster-related suggestions.

[Susramanian]

Monster buffing.

It seems to me that since I started playing, monsters have had almost no upgrades while version after version presented the players with new artifacts, egos, spells, etc. Probably everybody's first thought when reading the following proposals is going to be that belongs in a variant.

Let's stop thinking like that. We're trying to make Vanilla harder. What's so sacred about the current lame set of monster abilities? I want to see some new tricks out of the existing monsters.

1) Better pathing. This is one of the few boosts that monsters have gotten in the last twenty years. Let's do it again.

2) Better AI. Monsters learning from mistakes shouldn't be a mere option. High level monsters shouldn't mess with trying to cast slow and confuse and such. They're in a fight for their lives, just like us. They're going to use the big guns.
Caster monsters should keep out of melee range. Melee monsters should tear apart any caster stupid enough to not get out of the way. Caster monsters should cast spells even when out of line of sight of the player. Monsters need mana for this to work properly.


3) Monsters should work together. Cast heals and buffs and such on each other. An ancient dragon should be a challenge. An ancient dragon with a priest companion should be a nightmare. This change alone would triple the complexity (and therefore enjoyability) of Angband's tactical situations.

4) Monsters should get new abilities. Nasty, horrible, player-killing abilities that we can spend countless hours developing new strategies to counter. Some examples:

-Teleport to the player. Particularly fun when combined with the ability to cast while out of line of sight, like in some variants.
-Stone to mud beam. Having a monster suddenly cast this at you through fifteen squares of solid, safe granite could ruin your whole day.
-Stone to mud point-blank AoE. Powerful casters do this when they figure out that they're in an ASC.
-Ceiling cave in or wall-crushing. A player who hides in the back of an ASC had better watch out for this one.
-Force breath and force bolts that send the player flying. I think the breath is in there already. If the player is standing next to a wall, they should take massive crushing damage.
-Anti-teleportation measures: runes inscribed on the ground, auras around monsters, traps, etc. A monster that chases you down might lay an anti-teleportation rune at their feet which prevents teleportation in radius X. If you want to teleport yourself or him, you need to get away from the rune or disarm it. Neither is an easy option in an ASC.
-Anti-healing measures like above. Runes, auras, traps, etc. Players have too many get out of jail free cards in the form of mass genocide, destruction, *healing* and life potions, and teleports. Let's give monsters some counters.
-Fields that reflect a single type of damage. Smart monster casters put up a fire shield when you nail them with a fire bolt. If you don't notice and bounce one back in your face, tough luck.
-Shapeshifting. Example: Sauron is doing his caster AI thing and it just isn't getting the job done, so he shapeshifts into a Great Wyrm of Power. Ouch. Make the AI smart enough so that monsters don't just shapeshift for the hell of it. They do it when they're losing a fight to change things up.
-Position swapping. Devastating to the player if a monster does it right.
-Anti-telepathy. Maybe something that hides the casting monster's mind from the player's telepathy or displays it as a harmless orc or something. Maybe even a more powerful version that simply switches off the player's telepathy for X turns.
-Rooting. Not paralysis, and not covered completely by FA. You can take turns as usual, you just can't move.
-Resistance. Monsters cast temporary resistance spells if they're taking a lot of a particular kind of damage.

I could come up with these all day. Hell, you could get a long list of things just from the various player spellbooks. If a player can cast it, let monsters cast it. Just get rid of banishment and destruction first

[Derakon]

It sounds like a lot of your new monster abilities are geared towards forcing the player to fight monsters out in the open, with basic unresistable attacks from a bow. Can't use melee because the monster will dodge out of it, can't use elemental attacks because they'll cast a resistance spell, can't hide behind walls because they'll make the walls go away (or use them as an attack), can't even avoid the fight because the monster will just tunnel/teleport to you, and you don't have any banishment/destruction/TO capability.

Remember, Angband is a deliberately asymmetrical game. The player is smart and can hit somewhat hard, but can't take hits worth a damn, even when playing as a warrior. In contrast, the monsters are brick-stupid, have gobs of hitpoints, make use of a few massively powerful attacks (even resisted dealing over 50% of the player's health in one shot), and come in huge quantities.

You could take the basic Angband engine and turn it into a series of fights between more-or-less equals, where monsters and the player have roughly equivalent abilities, but it wouldn't be Angband any more.

I'm not saying that monsters don't deserve to be buffed. I've always felt that ancient dragons were a bit scrawny, for example. But buffing monsters should not consist of identifying "abusive" player tactics and coming up with monster abilities geared towards rendering those tactics unusable. That said, improving pathing, limited improvement of monster spell selection (or a mana system, at least), the occasional monster with wall-disintegrating breath attacks (ToME has 'em, they're a nice change-up), giving more monsters phase door and teleport-to -- I can get behind these.

[nullfame]

I don't think ASC makes the game too easy. Why? Because I haven't dug one in years. There are a lot of things like that. Hack and back. Pillar dance.

Symmetric line of sight is a mixed bag. Player can abuse it with long diagonal but, again, exercise some personal restraint. OTOH monsters do not hesitate to abuse it. I'm looking at you, skull druj that almost killed me last week. I snuck past him as he slept but then he woke up with me in RLOS. That gave me a good fright. I'm not saying asymmetric LOS is a feature, but IMO eliminating it doesn't automatically make the game harder.

Removing some of the stupid spells from high-level monsters (confuse, blind, slow) when you resist sounds okay. Slippery slope here. Removing every spell but mana storm from Morgoth's arsenal would make that fight harder.

[fizzix]

I pretty much agree with all of Derakon's post. Specifically, DJA allows monsters to phase when they are near a player even without LoS. It's a very nice addition, and I think should be in V.

Better path finding algorithms would also be welcomed, but these are hard to code. I think the biggest problem is dealing with special rooms, (moated rooms and vaults) Monsters tend to consider them as just one open space, and thus have a really hard time navigating them. This is extremely exploitable, as anyone clearing out a pit one row of monsters at a time knows.

and as far as removing spells, I think we should remove all attack spells from monster arsenal that will do significantly less damage than melee (assume single resist). There's no reason that Sauron should be casting fire bolts at you, he's already wasting enough turns advancing towards you while you pelt him with acid arrows. On the other hand, like Derakon says, you can't have him manastorming every other turn either. Personally I think Sauron, Gothmog, Lungorthin and Cantoras could use some beefing while Morgoth, Vecna, Huan, Carcharoth and Ancalagon are suitably challenging for their level. Tarrasque is probably too hard for its level, it should be 90s. Ancalagon is also extremely difficult without slay dragon ammo (i.e. much harder when bard is off the table). Cantoras gets the low marks mostly because he always starts out alone.

Also, instead of eliminating confuse/blind/slow/paralyze from high uniques have them all combine into one spell. Vecna, Feagwath, Cantoras and Saruman would be good targets for this new spell. I think I mentioned this before, but I can't recall if it was in this thread

[Derakon]

Brain smashing would be a suitable replacement for the blind/confuse/paralyze/slow trio. It does all of those plus some damage. Replacing most/all instances of those four spells with brain smashing would be entirely reasonable, though its flavor text (which mentions "psionic energy") might need to be changed.

It'd be nice if we could bias which spells monsters are likely to pick in their spell lists. Right now every spell has equal probability, but e.g. dragons should be more likely to breathe than to summon, even if they only have one breath weapon and multiple summoning spells. Ancalagon actually has both "summon ancient dragons" and "summon kin", which, as far as I can tell, should be identical as his "kin" are ancient dragons -- but it tweaks his spellcasting frequencies (granted, he also has multiple breath weapons; Ancalagon definitely doesn't breathe too little right now!). Non-hackish ways of accomplishing that would be nice. Other possible tweaks:

* Reduce the frequency with which monsters cast the "cause darkness" spell, especially when you have a group of spellcasters (c.f. troll priests in troll pits)
* Make monsters favor their stronger-hitting spells without removing the weaker ones altogether (c.f. Gorlim's mana bolts vs. his water bolts or critical-wounds spells)
* Make Nexus Quylthulgs more likely to cast teleport-to or teleport-away than teleport-level
* Bias Aether Hounds/Vortices towards their more exotic elements (which are more likely to deal serious damage)

One simple way to do it from an edit-file perspective would be to allow multiple entries of the same spell to "stack" probability-wise. I don't know how hard this would be to implement, though.

[buzzkill]

4) Monsters should get new abilities. Nasty, horrible, player-killing abilities that we can spend countless hours developing new strategies to counter.

I like your enthusiasm .

Teleport other is a great weapon, some monsters should have it too. I'm not talking about the teleport-to ability that already exists. I mean teleport (the player) away, randomly. Suddenly boots of stability serve a purpose.

[fizzix]

I like your enthusiasm .

Teleport other is a great weapon, some monsters should have it too. I'm not talking about the teleport-to ability that already exists. I mean teleport (the player) away, randomly. Suddenly boots of stability serve a purpose.

Monsters do this already. Most notably Nexus Q's. Even worse, it's unresistable, rnexus doesn't help.

Other monsters that can do this.

Draebor, Lich, Seraph, Hand druj, saruman, the witch king, gauth, ar-pharazon.

Nexus Qs are notoriously annoying. I'll do anything I can, abusing create doors or earthquakes so I can get a cheap kill shot on them before they can send me halfway across the dungeon.

[Hariolor]

Not to second guess the OP, but I think the real title of this thread could have been "making Angband more tactical". The basic winning strategies are readily accessible to anyone who reads this forum, and can be executed by anyone with adequate patience and a bit of luck. More advanced strategies will always be available for anyone who wants a challenge.

The issue that seems to be coming up over and over is one of tactics. Timo called me a newbie (and he's right!) for wanting things more challenging in terms of combat. I happen to enjoy combat right now more than exploring or storytelling, as I continue to get better that may change.

What I think is always a *good thing* is giving more tactical options. To sort of summarize what I've seen so far, I think the general bent has been to:

1) have monsters rely less on numbers and more on smart tactics

2) have monsters that do appear as large groups behave more rationally

3) make the reward for taking on these new challenges significant enough to make fighting tough battles a reasonable proposition

4) reduce the reliance of @ on luck (specifically in terms of drops) by tweaking the power curve for everything to be more of a normal distribution (damage, item frequency, monster depth, spell failure, spell cost, stat gain, etc)

5) give @ more options that are useful throughout the game for spells and item effects while reducing the usefulness of the most commonly "abused" effects

6) create in-game incentives that provide self-directed "quests" that move @ along toward the ultimate goal of killing M. Ideas such as reducing down stairs (find the stairs), making down stairs always appear in vaults (get to the stairs), making artifacts harder to obtain (clear the vault/kill the unique) - these all accomplish this general goal

Someone asked a few pages back if there were general conceptual "goals" for Vanilla. It sounds like these few items, with a bit of mixing and matching, point at a popular direction for V that doesn't have to require fundamentally changing the nature of the game.

PS - to the extent that I have mutilated, maligned, mangled, or misappropriated anyone's perspectives, I apologize in advance

[Tiburon Silverflame]

TO is certainly a great tactical weapon...too good.

Had a thought this morning that might go a long ways to making archery easier to balance across all classes. Right now, rangers get extra shots. It's going to be brutal to have archery be effective for all classes, without making it seriously overpowered for the ranger.

So, instead of giving extra shots...how about giving them increased shooting power? I'm assuming that we'll implement the additive aspect of the bow multiplier and the brands, as that seems well accepted at this point. Also, shooting power can be improved several times; it scales in a more balanced way than extra shots does.

Also, to make this work, AND to keep it restricted to bows, the bonus is going to have to be fairly sizable.

The effect is obviously HIGHLY variable. For the sake of argument, let's say that the ranger gets +1 power at 12th, 24th, 36th, and 48th level. At 12th, we're probably talking a long bow x3; extra power's not likely. So the ranger gets a 33% improvement to damage over the other classes, OR is getting the advantage of a heavy crossbow without the weight. (And weight's an issue.) By 24th, there's a better chance for branded arrows/bolts. He can have a net x7 or x8 (x3 bow improved to x5, x2 or x3 for the brand); others are likely to be using heavy crossbow for x6 or x7. At 36th, the ranger would probably be around x10 damage (x4 bow improved to x7).

Side effects...

--Rangers become relatively best in a case when @ doesn't have an applicable brand or slay to use. That is, they get a higher degree of improvement in this case, than they do when a brand/slay does apply.

--Not related to this change per se, but as a result of the additive-multiplier change, extra shots rises to, arguably, the single most powerful offensive upgrade in the game. One can assert that's already true in many cases, but not in all cases, and the relative advantage of +1 shot to +1 shooting power, has changed dramatically. And if we accept the suggestion here, it'll be massively true, I think, that rangers will always prefer the extra shot; the shooting power bonus becomes no more than a 50% improvement, and probably less, while the extra shot is a 100% improvement for the first extra shot, and still a 50% improvement for the 2nd, in all situations.