Something between 2000' and 5000'

[PowerDiver]

I'm actually contemplating downloading the source and trying out a compressed-to-20-levels hackjob patch, just to see how it plays. I'm on vacation, so theoretically I have the time for silly little projects. And I did bring my extended keyboard with me...

I think the easiest way to do that is to hack the staircases, trapdoors, and teleport level effects. There are too many places that access monster and object and even room types levels to actually compress the dungeon easily.

You could just hack the staircases and scrolls of deep descent. I don't think the other stuff matters much for a test.

[Derakon]

Right, that was what I suggested -- find the code that handles climbing staircases, and change it so that it determines how many levels to go down based on your current dlvl.

[Pete Mack]

Or you could play some Quickband, for the flavor of the thing. I still am fond of that variant.

[PowerDiver]

And to answer PowerDiver (partially): E.g. ToME has basically unlimited potential for items; If you clear enough levels you can find quad-immunity armor(*).

That doesn't matter does it? Once you find the quad [or quintuple] immunity armor, isn't any further armor likely to be redundant?. Playing TOME, have you ever had 25 ego+ armors each significantly better in some way than all previous? If not, you can say #interesting armors < 25 even for TOME.

In my current V game with randarts, I'm down to DL94, and I have used only 4 body armors. Two of those are different dwarven(+2) armors differentiated by weight, so maybe that is only 3 interesting. I've kept another 4 or 5 at home unused. There have been more elvenkind armors I did not take home, but if they are not worth saving at home I don't see how you could call them interesting. The highest I could see the count of interesting body armors in my game so far is 10. That could reach 15 by the end, but probably not much more than that. This is pretty typical. If you upgrade each slot at most 20 times, you simply cannot see more than 200 interesting wieldables in a game. That's less than 2/DL, and if you find 10 in a greater vault, that's 8 you don't get on the other DLs.

[buzzkill]

My 2 admittedly uninformed cents, since I seldom crack 50. The problem is that once the basic threats are basically overcome, it's just a matter of maxing stats and class level. There are no new attack types that manifest themselves between 50 and 100 with the exception of manastorm, which can't be minimized anyhow. At least that's my take on it, having never experienced a manastorm.

It's a rudimentary problem nestled deep within Angband itself. Maybe there are just too many levels for the material we have to work with. I don't think that there's a quick fix. Maybe a whole 'nother slew of elements to overcome once you reach 50 would help, but I feel that not giving the player 'first move' on every new level would force player to be more explorers than divers, since entering a new level would be something you would want to minimize, thus reduced scumming, thus more meaningful (to the character) levels. I don't know ?

[Magnate]

(Opening a can of wyrms, I know, but...)

One thing that causes tedium for me is the fact that the artifacts are limited; you know when you've found all the findable artifacts. If my current game is anything to judge by, you're basically going to have found most artifacts by dlvl 75. (Rings of Power and a few other high-end/high-rarity artifacts notwithstanding). That means that every single non-artifact armor is useless, all known flavors of rings (modulo Speed) are useless, etc. etc.

I think this contributes to the perceived scarcity of interesting items on levels.

As Eddie said, the number of items which can be interesting is finite. If you find most artifacts by dl75, you will indeed find almost nothing interesting short of PDSM for the rest of the game. In the game I just finished, I found 14 artifacts by dl75, leaving 90% to find on the deeper levels. By the time I finished, I'd found 37, which is less than a third of them. Of those 37, about 15 were left on the floor without ever being used - I only actually used 20-22 of them all game.

There is a big philosophical difference here between people who hate junk, and want to minimise the game to drop fewer items so a higher proportion are useful, and people who like wading through junk in order to find the quad-immunity uber items which stand out. Neither changes the fact that there are a limited number of useful items.

[Timo Pietilä]

You don't have a clue what is exploration and what makes the journey more important than goal if that is your point of view. In fact I'm not sure you got what "the journey" is in this case. Your way of playing skips practically half of the journey, and I don't mean dlvls.

I don't "impose level clearing" because that is not what I do. You just don't have a clue why I play this game, your point of view is so different.

[LostTemplar]

Monsters are too easy to avoid in vanilla, and too many free item sources, including vaults, that can be destructed and banished, orc packs at dlvl 98, etc.
But all developers are divers, so this will never change. Nobody wants to fight for something here.
Originally it was intended, that risk/reward ratio of deep levels is very high for weak characters, but at some point that was removed. Compressing levels will only make things worse (better for divers).

[ewert]

No, compressing levels will only remove annoyances from some people (divers), and not affect some people much (clearers). IMHO. Why? Because most divers have the knowhow to skip the levels anyways pretty much safely. Hence the difference with stairs taking many lvls and taking many stairs is not that much. Easier with some classes, but detect doors/stairs scrolls are for sale ...

For clearers, they can keep on clearing, and doing either recall or stairs to "change" the level.

PS. I'm all about the char going from 1-50 and gear from weaksauce to powerful destroy-the-walls-around-them style. I don't play for turns, nor actually to win. I just want to create powerful chars. I'd say I am of the "journey" guys. But I still dive. And stairscum insanely because most levels are freaking boring. My priest just got 35 and clairvoyance, laalaa, fun times. Vaults or good pits etc. only from this point on! FUN!

[Nick]

Just a few points - only slightly ranty:

1. Angband has been around for 20 years, and is still attracting new players. Clearly it has something going for it.
2. Dividing players into "divers" vs "clearers" is a misleading over-simplification. People play the game for all sorts of reasons. Some have never won; some don't even really want to.
3. As a developer, you are forced into a different viewpoint from the average player.
4. There are no average players.

I posted about running a survey a little while ago. There were a few replies about what form of survey would be most useful.

To me this kind of missed the point, which was to encourage as many people as possible to talk about *their* experience with *bands.

Ask yourself - what is the point of a turtle?

[ewert]

One uses the "absolute" names of divers and clearers, since even though realistically everyone is a mixture you need to make a difference to be able to compare. And then try to see what the difference would be for compressed levels for either group. If it does not impede either but unannoys the other, then one must think if it is a good change. Compression to 20 would be a huge compression factor though. I'd be way cool with even just a 1:2, straight up halving of levels.

(though honestly, I'd rather have nonlinear compression than straight ...)

I don't really see your point Nick aside rambling. I'm fine with ramblings though.

[Nightmarjoo]

If there's one down staircase per level, and I'm having trouble finding it, I'm going to respond by scumming the bm for a stack of deep descent scrolls, and/or pick a magical character and create staircase my way down.

When I play, I tend to go down to 1000' pretty quickly, and then go pretty slowly to 1500'. Once I feel like I can detect/escape pretty well (fa, si, phase, teleport, to, etc) I drop like a rock to 4900'. For me, it's not that those levels are boring and thus I skip them, it's skipping quickly through them that's fun. Very quickly I get to a point where I feel like I can't win a single fight, and it becomes a tricky game of sneaking around the ring wraiths, not waking up the amhd, etc. At 4900' it's a new game: vault raider. Suddenly I start to become much stronger, my stats increase, I find cool new artifacts (always randomized, so I never know what'll be an artifact, or how good it'll be). Through this process I can suddenly start challenging the monsters around me, which speeds up my strengthening. As I keep getting stronger I get to take on the uniques around me. Whenever I kill something I can just barely kill without risk of death, I'm almost guaranteed a good reward since I'm at 4900'.

Everything between 1500' and 4900' is boring for me. A fight I can barely win drops nothing at 1500', but the same fight is just as difficult (with the addition of even stronger monsters around I have to avoid bothering during the fight) at 4900', but the reward is likely to be much greater. Epic battles are fun, but epic battles with epic rewards are better. I can't fathom not diving hard.


Making these fights just as rewarding earlier on has the risk of making the game too easy. Its the difficulty of angband that makes it so great, or atleast it's a big part of it. For me there's fun in sneaking and hopping around the dungeon, so that it's possible to play the way I want to is great. I don't want to be forced to play another way, so obviously I don't want someone who plays differently to be forced to play my way.


If "level clearers" think a greater number of more interesting vaults in the 2000'-4900' range will make those levels more interesting, that'd be fine with me. I love vaults, no matter where they are. Earlier in the game vaults are exciting because I can't guarantee I can get any loot out of it. I get to see the exciting and dangerous out of depth monsters, a taste of things to come. If I manage to pull away any loot, if it's not useful in and of itself it atleast sells well, and I can put that money into consumables or a lucky-spawning resistance-hole-filler.


Something like more stair-guards, quest uniques, etc, I wouldn't like at all. A guard, I'm going to destruct or teleport away, and a quest unique is going to make the game unfun I think. If I have to be a certain level, or have a certain resistance filled, or have a certain damage capacity by some mid-game level, it's just going to distract me from my dungeoning experience. Normally, I never know how strong I'll be or how good my equipment will be at any point in the game. I only know that I won't fight Sauron and Morgoth until a certain point. If say, Saruman is the key the getting to 2550', and come 2500' I don't have some resistance I need, or a good enough weapon to beat him, I'm just going to scum 2450' until I do get to that point. That's no different than what happens at 4900' currently. It won't have made the game more interesting, just I'll be scumming sooner for worse gear/stats at only slightly sooner in the game.


I guess one thing you could do is make resistances more powerful (maybe as strong as immunities), and immunities more common (or even adding non-artifact sources of immunities) earlier in the game. Currently, if I'm lucky enough to find an artifact or elvenkind armour that gives nether resistance, it doesn't really change the game at all. I can't suddenly fight stronger undead things, because nether resistance doesn't do that much, so my low hp makes the resistance negligible. If I got an early fire immunity, all red dragons would be cake, but every other kind of dragon would still be hard, if not impossible to beat, depending on the game. I feel this could make the midgame more interesting, because I have something to look forward to in those levels. Instead of just diving as fast as possible to get stuff to help me kill stuff, I've already got something to kill some stuff, but the majority of stuff will be overpowered against me. It becomes a cat and mouse game where I'm hunting the red dragons (or other fire monsters), and shying away from (running for my life from) the blue dragons, undead, etc etc.

Then you've got something like confusion resistance, which since there's no double resistance for it, I simply can't fight anything that breathes confusion without the resistance, and even with it maybe it only means I'll survive a single breath and be able to escape. Making it stronger against confusion attacks, or making it stackable and/or more common might help me fight more and run/dive less. This won't necessarily give me more great loot. If I'm lucky it will, but if I'm unlucky I just get the fun of being able to fight instead of run/dive and the exp for winning the battle. With luck, maybe I'll get another key part of my endgame costume, or another resistance/immunity to fight more of angband.
Additionally with confusion, it covers such a wide range of things. Not just confusion breaths, but also confusion spells and confusion melee effects. It's both too-strong and too-weak a resistance. Too weak in that having it doesn't necessarily mean I can fight and win against anything meaningful, and too strong in that without it there's a LOT I can't even think about fighting. Confusion spells aren't a big deal usually, just drinking a !ccw often solves that, but confusion melee monsters are unbeatable with melee without the resistance, and more or less cake once I have it. Something like fire is more interesting in that getting the resistance lets me live, getting the double resistance lets me fight, and getting the immunity lets me get free kills.

I'm saying, I think tweaking the way the resistances/immunities currently work could make the midgame more interesting, and thus make those levels less skippable. Something could be interesting or useful without breaking the game. An item/spell/whatever that lets me fight more things when I see them doesn't necessarily make the game easier, and won't necessarily help me in the final fight. Maybe I'll find an armour with a fire immunity that gives me more things to do in the midgame, but it won't have enough AC for the final fight, since I want to melee, or something like that. Or, cool, I've got a fire immunity, but since Carcaroth breathes darkness he's still unbeatable since I lack that resistance (or maybe future immunity!?).

[Derakon]

Originally it was intended, that risk/reward ratio of deep levels is very high for weak characters, but at some point that was removed. Compressing levels will only make things worse (better for divers).

Calling out the intent of the original Angband developers is a dicey proposition, because we don't have any of them here to talk to, and moreover it's fairly evident that Angband was made as a variant of Moria, so it's more likely to have an evolutionary design than one that was carefully constructed from the ground up. We had a short discussion awhile back about whether or not powerdiving was possible in the early days, and the only thing we could think of that would have really prevented it was the lack of extended 'l'ook (can't examine anything not in LOS, thus can't tell if that's a Black Wraith or a Nightcrawler). In fact, early Angband had a much looser monster/item placement ratio, which resulted in "out of depth" stuff showing up far more frequently. I strongly doubt that 1800' would have been entirely safe from Drolems. In a situation like that where you're likely to encounter "deadly" monsters anyway, diving to improve the odds of better loot is a good idea. It just wasn't one we had until Eddie took a good hard look at things fairly recently.

EDIT: incidentally, PDSM was brought up in another part of this thread. I found a suit of PDSM in my last winning game, and it really couldn't make a strong case for itself. Resistances are only part of what we're looking for in armor, and it so happens that in that (randart) game, I was relying on my body armor for important stats far more than for resistances.

[Magnate]

EDIT: incidentally, PDSM was brought up in another part of this thread. I found a suit of PDSM in my last winning game, and it really couldn't make a strong case for itself. Resistances are only part of what we're looking for in armor, and it so happens that in that (randart) game, I was relying on my body armor for important stats far more than for resistances.

But that's a direct result of the drastic reduction in consumables (in general, and stat pots in particular) in 3.1.x - in the old days nobody went below 2000' without all stats maxed, and thus resists were THE thing you wanted from armour.

But now you can scum for PDSM of Speed (+10) ....

[Timo Pietilä]

Calling out the intent of the original Angband developers is a dicey proposition, because we don't have any of them here to talk to, and moreover it's fairly evident that Angband was made as a variant of Moria, so it's more likely to have an evolutionary design than one that was carefully constructed from the ground up. We had a short discussion awhile back about whether or not powerdiving was possible in the early days, and the only thing we could think of that would have really prevented it was the lack of extended 'l'ook (can't examine anything not in LOS, thus can't tell if that's a Black Wraith or a Nightcrawler).

There are two major other things:

1) lack of small speed boosting items. Only sources of speed were: Ringil, Cubragol, Feanor, BoS, and RoS. (and you couldn't use both Ringil and Cubragol at the same time). That mean that between 2500 - 4000' you were moving one third of the speed of fastest monsters and half of the speed of dangerous most monsters _unless you got speed from vault_. You needed to go slower down and examine levels because of that. You needed to gain enough HP and detection stuff to survive and/or avoid monsters that are faster than you are. That also did mean that you probably needed to use two RoS deep down, which hurts classes/races with low HP. Especially mages.

2) Preserve mode didn't exist. You needed to examine levels or risk losing artifacts. That obviously doesn't stop powerdiving, but players that powerdived would need to cope with the fact that you lose artifacts and are probably permanently much weaker down there than slower player.

Minor things were:
There has been huge change in drops (was (dlvl+mlvl) / 2, items didn't stack), ammunition (now more types, much more common), slays (only one kill slay: dragon and it was very rare) and brands (acid and poison are new ones), shops (especially infinite ammo and enchant scrolls) in addition to fact that almost every single artifact have got a some sort of boost in order to make them "less boring" and ego items got boost to compete with artifacts and artifacts got boots to beat ego items... In old days at the point where you were at stat-gain you were usually much weaker, and after that your char was quite good, but your gear was much weaker than it is now, and that continued to the endgame.