Something between 2000' and 5000'

[Timo Pietilä]

We do at least agree that it is a tough thing to balance, and I hope Timo will accept that it is not, and never has been, a conspiracy.

I never claimed that there were a conspiracy, but I had (and have) a feeling that many of the developers have a bit narrow vision of the game, and when someone suggested that game should be made shorter by reducing levels and wasn't joking about it it was a bit too much for me to endure. To me that was a heresy. Like someone would suggest that in chess you should get rid half of the pawns, game would be much faster and less boring that way. Yes, but that wouldn't be chess anymore.

I miss Takkaria. He seemed to have good overall picture of the game.

[Nick]

I miss Takkaria. He seemed to have good overall picture of the game.

That bastard? He just writes up all the controversial ideas as tickets, and then lets the other poor saps take the heat for implementing them.

Disagreement is healthy.

I agree.

I really will shut up this time.

Liar.

[Pete Mack]

Another post in favor of keeping levels after 2000'.
Not so long ago, there was a change to reduce the frequency of hounds. While this makes the game more "smooth", it also reduces the obstacles between where you are now, and wherever you want to be. In the end, I changed the hounds frequency back to close to what it was (except for hounds around 1000'-1500' which were just silly.)

I suspect that I will want to make the same change for removing levels. (In NPP, there are shafst; they make the game significantly easier, especially with connected stairs.)

[Hariolor]

Funny the perspective that one gets reading a whole thread start-to-finish. (yes, I had that much time on my hands tonight, sue me)

Ideas:

1) Compressing the game is dangerous mostly because items must be given away more liberally, while consumables become less useful. I love the idea of making all the "boring" levels go away, but shortening the overall depth by 80% is probably not advisable for a non-variant.

2) Terrain features, while a divisive issue, are a reliable way many variants have found to make diving more dangerous and more interesting. I reiterate my +1 for adding terrain.

3) I think making each batch of 10-20 levels into a mini-game is not a bad thing. Not only is the younger generation of gamers (of which I am on the cusp) raised to expect clearer goals - but I feel having goals other than "I must get these eight items" adds to the impression of diversity in the experience, even if actual gameplay changes very little. I have proposed before and will again that rebalancing the Ringwraiths to be scaled in difficulty and more intimidating, then making them hard-stop bosses like Sauron at 9-level intervals throughout the dungeon would not be unreasonable (one appearing at DL's 19, 28, 37, 46, 55, 64, 73, 82, 91). For those who feel crazy stealth should be a viable strategy, perhaps have the Ringwraiths be *highly desirable* to kill in terms of drops, but not staircase-guardians like Sauron. Just an idea. Their undead flag may be exploitable, but I'm just throwing things out there.

4) diving, in my own experience, is an evolved gameplay style that happens less out of choice, than as a response to the game's reward structure. Players are penalized for spending a long time on levels, and any remotely interesting level could become a RNG-fueled deathtrap at any given time. So might as well dive.

5) level-clearing, in my experience, is a conscious choice for those with time on their hands and/or an ability to get out of the meta-game and enjoy the roleplaying (thin as it might be). It is also the preferred strategy of very new players who are learning, and necessarily go slower because of more frequent deaths (restarts) and the newness of everything.

6) I don't think guaranteeing vaults encourages level-clearing...it encourages vault clearing. The best way, IMO, to make the game interesting is to have certain goals that are clearly defined beyond "Kill Morgoth". Whether this is done with breakpoint monsters, or artifacts hard-coded to certain narrow level ranges, whatever - the point is that the reward of clearing a level must outweigh the risk. In a permadeath game, one either has to really really enjoy level clearing, or there has to be a tangible reward.

7) As has been mentioned many times, and implemented in many many variants, making stats exclusively or almost exclusively tied to character-level, and perhaps tweaking the CL power gradient, would also encourage level-clearing. if the majority of monsters on a level provide a decent exp-to-risk ratio, I think a lot of players would spend more time monster-hunting. Combine this with an even-more-aggressive XP penalty for killing underpowered monsters, and this might be a solution.

8) The other way to make monsters more interesting is to improve their behavior in terms of pack behavior, use of scouts, smarter/better "pits", etc. This is another popular topic, so I won't rehash everything here, but if Angband is meant to be more than just a game of yahtzee (read: a game of chance with some limited tactical choices; which I think is how most aggressive divers really see it) then there needs to be a more constant gradient to the risk presented by monsters. There should, ideally, be no monster that is so bad nobody ever wants to fight it (drolems, dracolisks, druj, etc). I am not saying it's an easy thing, but the fun of the first 2000-3000' is that there are so many tactical opportunities for every class in terms of different monster abilities. Once a character is well-kitted, it becomes a matter of avoiding the really scary stuff and mowing through mobs of underpowered/high-reward baddies.

9) last idea, continuing the progressive rant - dramatically reworking the artifact list so it's virtually impossible to cover all resists AND have good speed AND have max stats, etc might be a good solution. Much of the fun of Angband is inventory management, and as such I suspect someone somewhere probably has a matrix of all items with all their abilities that could be put into a pivot table to determine optimal kits. Ideally, one would like to see even the *best* kits have a couple critical weaknesses. Or, if that would only give rise to more avoidance (which it likely would) - readdressing the damage and variety of breath weapons would help. Because let's be honest, breath attacks are the #1 biggest issue for survivability - just look at the hundreds of threads in which the breath damage calculation appears and that becomes clear. A more elegant handling of breathers might fix *everything*...

and that's all I have to say on that.

[fizzix]

Well, yes. Because so much of the risk has been taken away, there is really nothing to do but dive. It used to be an interesting risk/reward decision, now it is all reward and no risk. I arrticulated it a little better in a post a couple pages back, but it used to be that the resist/safety mechanism that countered the threat the monsters posed could be easily found about 10-40 levels after the monsters started appearing. Poison breath was extremely dangerous after 2000, but resistance was hard to find until much deeper. Extremely fast monsters with big damage started showing up at around 2750 feet, and speed was hard to find until 3750'. The phrase "powerdiving" only came about when everything was smoothed out so the equipment that protected against the dangerous monsters became common about the same depth as the dangerous monsters appeared, or a little sooner. This eliminated the big waits, but also eliminated many of the tough decisions. But overall, it was a good thing. The "Powerdiving" rose in popularity about the same time, because the game is smooth and safe, and the only way a player who has won the game once or twice can find real challenging/strategic situation is to create it yourself by diving straight to the bottom.

I'm not sure I agree with this. What enables diving is not that the resistances are available earlier. I've often gotten to dlevel 90 before finding poison resist. I certainly very rarely get poison resist before I reach drolem/AMHD depth, and those monsters can one-shot kill me, and have before, at that depth.

What enables diving is that detection and evasion is much easier. And a lot of this ease comes from improvements to the UI that I don't think we want to change. Even things like having the dtrap boundary makes life a lot easier, since you are much less likely to run into a summoning trap. I don't think anyone is proposing changing that back. The other thing that enables diving is knowledge of the monsters, specifically what can kill you and what cannot. If you don't have this knowledge, you're toast. Now this knowledge is readily available from the monster memory, where before you were unlikely to have much of a monster memory since amnesia kept wiping it, and you had to solely rely on memory and spoilers. I don't think people are proposing that be changed either.

Making the harder monsters appear earlier, or poison resist appear later won't change a thing for veterangs but it will make the game more frustrating for new players.

[Derakon]

I don't think amnesia ever wiped monster memory. Its old effect was to wipe your map and un-ID any items you had not *ID*'d. To my knowledge there has never been an effect that caused you to forget monster attributes in Vanilla (or, for that matter, in any variant).

[Pete Mack]

@fizzix, @Jeff:
I agree with fizzix, at least as far as rPois. It is desirable but not necessary. There just aren't that many drolems in the game, and there never were. The original newbie's guide on this topic was misleadingly conservative. And in fact it led me seriously astray. I never won until I was willing to dive, at least a little. (That was in 3.0.6; iin that game I went past 2500' without rConf, IIRC, and had a terrifyingly close shave with a Lesser Titan: command to return, hit to confuse, and speed +10 are a scary, scary combination.)


It looks like I need to play a few rounds of 3.0.6, to see how it stacks up 3 years later.

[ewert]

I agree that it is not resists that enable diving, but detection & attitude. My last priest didn't really divedive, it was more a solid fast descend killing stuff. There was lots of need to plain skip to next level though after clairvoyance came and could see that nothing interesting was anywhere. I don't think I even really looked at what dlvl I was between 60 and 95. I'd still prefer a shorter dungeon (50lvl, 20lvl whatever ...). =P

[Timo Pietilä]

@fizzix, @Jeff:
I agree with fizzix, at least as far as rPois. It is desirable but not necessary. There just aren't that many drolems in the game, and there never were. The original newbie's guide on this topic was misleadingly conservative.

I think that "newbie's guide" was trying to be too specific. My advice even then was.

1) Detect often.
2) Don't get greedy
3) Be prepared to escape
4) If it is faster than you and you don't know what it can do, assume it can kill you.
5) Get high HP and speed ASAP

Now I add:

6) Don't trust high resist damage protection, get them for side-effects.
7) Learn to use swaps. Don't try to get a combination that gives you everything, it takes forever.

There are still players that seem to think resistances are key for survival. They are not. Then that point seven is, I assume, just something relatively new players just don't do.

[ewert]

I wouldn't count myself as relatively new anymore having played Moria etc. too, but I still don't do swaps really. I can't be arsed. =P I play too fast RL time tbh to do swaps ... Only things really are activation for the base 5 resistances, if I get an artifact for that I usually carry it around. =) You can check my latest priest what kind of gear I aim for, lol.

[Jungle_Boy]

Since everyone else seems to have a comment I guess I should add my thoughts.

I agree that the latter half of the dungeon could use some spicing up. I do not think that removing it is the answer though. I look at the second half of the dungeon kinda as the gauntlet you have to go through to get to Morgoth.

I like several of the suggestions for improving gameplay in the latter half of the dungeon. Specifically the idea of more monsters that you have to kill before moving on. One thing I found interesting was the idea of monsters with keys. Or you could make a keymaster in town who needs a certain item from the dungeon in order to create keys for you.

Another idea I like is the idea of increasing the likelyhood of vaults. I would not say guarantee one every level but maybe increase their frequency to one every 3-5 levels or so.

Just my 2 cents

[Magnate]

I never claimed that there were a conspiracy, but I had (and have) a feeling that many of the developers have a bit narrow vision of the game, and when someone suggested that game should be made shorter by reducing levels and wasn't joking about it it was a bit too much for me to endure. To me that was a heresy. Like someone would suggest that in chess you should get rid half of the pawns, game would be much faster and less boring that way. Yes, but that wouldn't be chess anymore.

I miss Takkaria. He seemed to have good overall picture of the game.

That's an interesting view, since to the best of my knowledge he is pretty relaxed about lots of the things you don't like (branding rings, JLE items, moving tough monsters deeper and smoothing out wait points, etc. etc.).

Your reference to "many of the developers" is either disingenuous or out of date. The only people other than Takkaria to have committed anything since 3.1.0 was released are me, d_m and Marble Dice. Neither of the other two describes themself as a diver: I do, though only in the last 2-3 years of ten playing, so I well remember the level-clearing play style. None of the three of us claims to have a "vision" for the game, we're just tinkering with things we think we can improve. That's why Takk is the maintainer and we aren't.

[Timo Pietilä]

That's an interesting view, since to the best of my knowledge he is pretty relaxed about lots of the things you don't like (branding rings, JLE items, moving tough monsters deeper and smoothing out wait points, etc. etc.).

I'm not against most of those things (except maybe branding rings). It was actually me that suggested FA not being cumulative for example. That smooths out FA wait point (if there were such thing).

I do complain about many of the changes JLE did, but not directly because of change itself but because it contained a lot of things that should not be there and should have been removed when it was introduced. That's only thing I didn't like Robert did. JLE-patch was basically not balanced (not unbalanced just not balanced as a whole), and just somewhat playtested when it was added as permanent part of the game. That's now one of the reasons why you have to do tuning to so many items. Most of it is OK, but many things it did just were unnecessary and some were plain broken. As a whole removing some of the items would work much better than trying to fix them. Amulets of Devotion and sustenance for example are not useful or needed so easiest way to "balance" them is to remove them.

I have no problem moving tough monsters deeper. Never had. Only complaint I made was moving titans, but that was because I didn't find them dangerous enough to be worried. Easy to detect by both detect evil and monster, not instant death, easy to avoid.

[Magnate]

I'm not against most of those things (except maybe branding rings). It was actually me that suggested FA not being cumulative for example. That smooths out FA wait point (if there were such thing).

I do complain about many of the changes JLE did, but not directly because of change itself but because it contained a lot of things that should not be there and should have been removed when it was introduced. That's only thing I didn't like Robert did. JLE-patch was basically not balanced (not unbalanced just not balanced as a whole), and just somewhat playtested when it was added as permanent part of the game. That's now one of the reasons why you have to do tuning to so many items. Most of it is OK, but many things it did just were unnecessary and some were plain broken. As a whole removing some of the items would work much better than trying to fix them. Amulets of Devotion and sustenance for example are not useful or needed so easiest way to "balance" them is to remove them.

I have no problem moving tough monsters deeper. Never had. Only complaint I made was moving titans, but that was because I didn't find them dangerous enough to be worried. Easy to detect by both detect evil and monster, not instant death, easy to avoid.

Then if I understand your position correctly, more of your objections than I thought result from changes even older than JLE. Taking just the item-based issues (I know there are others like detection and spells), personally I think the richness that extra items and abilities add to the game is worth the pain of balancing them out. I have only ever found one "Devotion (and never yet found "Trickery or "Weaponmastery), and I do think it's a really interesting ego amulet for a priest, who would otherwise simply wear "Wis until finding an artifact. I'm less sure about "Sustenance, which I've found but never used, though I have seen dumps where it is in use.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of these people who wants to add infinite amounts of chaff - I stopped playing the Dominions series (one of the best TBS games ever made) because they just kept adding stuff and not bothering to check whether it added to or detracted from the game. But I honestly don't think that many of JLE's additions actually detracted from the game. Some (like Evenstar, or "Sustenance) didn't add very much, but that can always be improved.

[miyazaki]

Then if I understand your position correctly, more of your objections than I thought result from changes even older than JLE. Taking just the item-based issues (I know there are others like detection and spells), personally I think the richness that extra items and abilities add to the game is worth the pain of balancing them out. I have only ever found one "Devotion (and never yet found "Trickery or "Weaponmastery), and I do think it's a really interesting ego amulet for a priest, who would otherwise simply wear "Wis until finding an artifact. I'm less sure about "Sustenance, which I've found but never used, though I have seen dumps where it is in use.

I like some of those higher-level amulets/cloaks/staves because they are almost class-specific. I think that in a world inhabited by different classes, we have to be tolerant of items that are designed for a different class. (This is a major reason that I oppose merging the two lines of spellbooks.) It adds some depth to the world. It allows me, anyway, to get into character a little more. I like that I am disgusted when my mage finds an ?EO or my paladin finds a cap of intelligence. And it just seems right when my rogue gets to wear a "trickery!