Post your top feature/option wish for Vanilla

[ewert]

Currently I am hard pressed to come up with anything other than:

Unlimited home space.

Yep, that's it. Randart games are so troublesome with limited home, for myself it detracts from the fun of kill-and-gather to have to junk so many maybe useful artifacts.

I'd love an option for it. Hell, put it in "cheat" options I don't care. I play with know full monster info anyways, as I start new savefiles so often the "noncheating" method of gathering a full monster knowledge doesn't work for me...

[Derakon]

A rewrite into Python with a good object-oriented design. *ducks*

(But it'd be so awesome! Trivial extensibility! No mucking about with makefiles and minimal cross-platform compatibility issues! Heck, you could probably compress the actual code down by a factor of four while gaining ease-of-reading!)

More seriously, any other ideas I have are sufficiently oddball that they'd be variant-territory. For example, I'd like to see experimentation with slowing down the rate at which the player expects to take damage, with the counter effect that the player also can't recover as quickly and is much less able to avoid getting into big fights. So e.g. being surrounded by dragons wouldn't be an instant death sentence, but on the flipside you'd be more likely to find yourself surrounded by dragons. My thinking is that this would start with the following changes:

* Remove digging
* Remove natural regeneration
* Remove healing potions from the town (but heal the player fully when they return to town)
* Gaining experience heals the player
* Scatter healing fountains about the dungeon
* An individual monster's per-turn damage output is capped at, say, 10% of the player's max HP (by manipulating damage calculations, capping breath damage based on monster level, nerfing melee, etc.)
* Most monsters are generated as part of a "posse" of similar monsters (not the same type necessarily, but e.g. encountering a group of a Priest, an Enchantress, a Necromancer, and two Rangers)

The general thinking here is that most mid- to late-game fights in Angband are optimally-fought by the player manipulating terrain so that it's just him and the monster, and then they stand in each others' faces and try to deal damage faster than they take it. This isn't very interesting, in my opinion. What's more interesting is when the player has to handle a group of monsters, figure out what the best target to take down is, try to take out that target while dealing with other incoming attacks, and so on. Unfortunately this often isn't feasible in Angband because an individual monster is often capable of taking out more than 50% of the player's hitpoints in one action even if the player is otherwise well-equipped.

Another random thought I had was to make the stronger monster attacks two-turn things. So e.g. on turn 1 you'd get the message "The Great Storm Wyrm inhales...", and you'd know that if you don't move on that turn, next turn you'll be hit by the wyrm.

For Vanilla itself, though, mostly I'd like to see the game made harder again. And we have a great big meandering thread with ideas for that.

[PowerDiver]

No selling.

[nullfame]

Player ghosts
Player artifacts
Random monsters option (say 5% of the set)
Reformat monster memory to be more usable

[Derakon]

Oh, I just thought of one.

Non-indexed monster.txt, object.txt, etc. I want to be able to insert records into the middle of the list without having to renumber everything. This would probably require a shift to using the monster's name as its unique key instead, which in turn would mean futzing with the identically-named novice adventurer solo/group monsters...no big loss.

[AnonymousHero]

Oh, I just thought of one.

Non-indexed monster.txt, object.txt, etc. I want to be able to insert records into the middle of the list without having to renumber everything. This would probably require a shift to using the monster's name as its unique key instead, which in turn would mean futzing with the identically-named novice adventurer solo/group monsters...no big loss.

Actually, you could just use a UUIDv4-type identifier. It's a (mostly) opaque hex string, but it's preferable to renumbering everything.

[ekolis]

Monster 0xDEADBEEF4269 not found! Critical error! :P

[miyazaki]

Nerfed detection:

Baby red dragon, mature green dragon, ethereal drake, Kavlax all show as a simple, white "d" with no species details.

[Hariolor]

incremental (stacking) esp

various types of esp (treasure, monster, walls)

nerfed detection spells

smarter monster behavior (reverse pack behavior from current standard, combat makes noise, intelligent creatures run/call for help if outmatched)

eliminate selling completely - food should be a non-issue in a highly-developed dungeon ecology, tweak other consumable drops to make them more useful

more rational system for balancing # blows/weapon weight/damage/criticals

wide hallways/more interesting rooms

terrain and/or thematic level elements

greater class/race distinction (many threads on this lately)

[bron]

My "would most like to see" feature is to generalize the DROP_CHOSEN attribute to be able to apply it to any monster, not just Morgoth. See http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=1180 for a discussion.

[fizzix]

More specific squelching options

Removal of sticky curses.

Rune based ID along with complete elimination of ID spell.

nerfed summoning combined with nerfed TO

destruction removes artifacts also

[HallucinationMushroom]

Wands of wall building.
No Hunger.
Everything comes identified.
Zephyr hounds come in packs of 2-4.

[bebo]

here goes.....

1) improve or change to something useful sleep/confu/etc spells
2) differentiate more between ranger and rogue (possibly more class specific spells a la detect treasure, other ideas?)
3) artifact dungeon books (the current ones, not new ones)
4) %resistances
5) either always give complete monster memory after first/fixed number of kill/probing/whatever or reset it to zero every new game, making at the same time probing much more accessible for everyone (this could tie in well to requests of small % of monster types being generated with random attributes/resistances every new game)
6) fuse restore stat potions into two, !rMind and !rBody
7) REMOVE CHARISMA
8) artifact robe (why isn't there one?)
9) more varied and better curses (this is already being worked on afaik) + improve rings of dog/cat/mouse/giraffe/hippo/whatever or simply use them as curses
10) improve mage damage spells and at the same time make them less accessible to rangers/rogues; the decreased mana cost is a good step but not enough
11) set time/aether/chaos hound max pack size to 4-5. for others to 9-10
12) low level pits relative to dungeon depth have no impact on level feeling
13) ---warning, controversial--- more vaults! bring back autoscum!
14) no random hp gain every level. even d&d has stopped doing that. just set a specific number.

and, most importantly:

x) no radical changes to gameplay, game is great almost as is, we should probably concentrate more on ui improvements
-----> like better monster recall layout, as seen on a recent thread
-----> like more refined and specific squelch
etc

[d_m]

Here are a bunch of things I like, some of which are appropriate for V and many of which are not.

1. Fractional weapon blows
2. Make rangers have worse (or no) magic
3. Make rogues have more interesting magic
4. More auto-ID depending on item type and/or character class/level
5. Differentiate bows, slings and crossbows more
6. Split AC into evasion and deflection
7. More interesting/different level layouts
8. Make guaranteed escapes harder and/or rarer
9. Make drops more context sensitive on average
10. Make mushrooms a real source of food and more common (or remove them)
11. Remove object detection from clairvoyance
12. Dungeon stores (possibly removing or nerfing recall and/or the town)
13. More monster AI variety
14. Monster SP
15. Improve monster status effects (sleep, confusion, fear, etc)
16. Better FOV/LOS algorithm
17. Remove Elf race or make it more than a nerfed High Elf
18. Make Human race more interesting (at least a little bit)
19. Make game mechanics more obvious (especially to new players)
20. Better official game documentation (in-game and/or out-of-game)
21. Remove Iron Spikes
22. Remove chests or make them better
23. Some form of containers (maybe including backpacks and quivers)
24. Weaken or remove Satisfy Hunger spell
25. Make some monsters more excited about collecting gold/items, and able to get artifacts
26. Player ghosts and/or player graves

This is just a list of things I think are cool. Maybe this is more a list of what d_mband would contain than a list of stuff I want for V. I'm not sure.

P.S. For about four years I've thought about "porting" Angband to another language, e.g. Python. I never really get started though... temptation to make a new game (rather than porting all of Angband's internal logic) is just too strong.

[bebo]

1. Fractional weapon blows
...
5. Differentiate bows, slings and crossbows more
...
7. More interesting/different level layouts
...
13. More monster AI variety
14. Monster SP
15. Improve monster status effects (sleep, confusion, fear, etc)
16. Better FOV/LOS algorithm
17. Remove Elf race or make it more than a nerfed High Elf
18. Make Human race more interesting (at least a little bit)
19. Make game mechanics more obvious (especially to new players)
20. Better official game documentation (in-game and/or out-of-game)
21. Remove Iron Spikes

these I find are great ideas

25. Make some monsters more excited about collecting gold/items, and able to get artifacts

only if the monsters able to get artifacts from the floor don't have teleport or similar