Making the game harder, take two

[TJS]

It doesn't seem right to me that end-game mages can carry as much weight as warriors. Part of the early fun of mages is in having to keep your weight down and use the lightest armour/weapons you can find, but by the end you can use pretty much what you like.

Instead of capping carrying capacity at 18/50 you could cap it at 18/220 instead so only warriors can normally get to the full amount at the end.

[Nick]

I've tried a few variants... most recently, I've tried DAJ and FA... but to be honest, I didn't care for either of them.

I'd be interested in feedback about FA. Different people have different likes and dislikes - but I always like to hear opinions.

[Derakon]

A normal dagger is better than a longsword as long as your strength and dexterity are in the right range. Too weak/clumsy, and you don't get multiple blows, so you opt for a big weapon instead -- my priests often end up with flails or morningstars early on, for example. Too strong and you can get multiple blows even with the heavier weapons, so daggers again lose their shine. It's only in the very early game, for non-caster classes, that daggers are remotely automatically better.

[Lord Fell]

Putting aside "real" realism, where I'd be pulling out copies of Jane's Medieval Arms, or citing historical warfare, let's instead talk "Fantasy Realism." if you read your Tolkien, virtually everyone used a sword... a few exceptions of course; Gimli's Axe, Gil-Galad's spear... even the Dwarves in The Hobbit used swords instead of Hafted weapons. I think the sole instance of a dagger being used was the Lich King stabbing Frodo with a Morgul Knife -but the Ring Wraiths still used swords.

Talking about "martial" vs. non-martial weapons... I guess I'm thinking in terms of the Modern D&D books. Anyone can use a Mace... it's a glorified club, and any peasant can beat a rat to death with a heavy stick. Special training is required to use weapons such as the sword or longbow -what D&D calls Martial weapons.

...and I don't think you can ignore the balance aspect. On paper, a non-magic dagger is always better (more attacks, more damage out-put, less weight) than any other melee weapon, and that just doesn't make sense to me. Players will only trade to heavier weapons when they gain ego weapons who's powers are better than that of the best dagger they have available.

[d_m]

The weapon weights/blows per round in Vanilla is definitely unbalanced and unrealistic. A proper Martial weapon should, without a doubt, be superior to anything else. I pointed this out in another thread, and again the suggestion was to "try a variant." I don't understand why this bias would be deliberate... and I really don't care that it's tradition. A heavier weapon is penalized by slower blows per round, and doubly penalized by (especially at earlier levels) creating an Encumbrance problem... in my (not even slightly humble) opinion, it should still be worth it to carry heavier weaponry.

Given that the whole idea of HP is an insane abstraction to begin with, that the amount of time a round takes is completely indeterminate, and that we're talking about a single person exploring an unlit underground cave, I don't think arguments abou realism carry much weight. I certainly don't think most traditional "martial weapons" are intended to be used by one person in those circumstances.

This is not to say that the V combat system doesn't need to be changed. But I don't think most of the devs are worried about making things more realistic (I am not). Rather, I'm interested in creating interesting trade-offs and trying to make sure most weapons have at least one case in which they'd be somewhat useful (which is specifically not realistic).

For what it's worth, I think multiple blows have made heavier weapons much more feasible in the early/middle game. My recent warrior (who killed Sauron and almost won) used heavy axes for the second half of the game (300k turns), and never used a dagger or anything smaller than a cutlass (except for the starting short sword). I'm interested if others have noticed this as well.

[Timo Pietilä]

The weapon weights/blows per round in Vanilla is definitely unbalanced and unrealistic. A proper Martial weapon should, without a doubt, be superior to anything else.

All of those weapons are "proper martial weapons". Just the art changes. Katana is no different to longsword in capable hands. Only weapon which is a bit "out of place" is a whip, which can be interpreted as chain whip in which case that too becomes proper martial weapon.

[Lord Fell]

As Magnate said, I based my restocking schedule on the idea that you can be 3rd level in less than 15 minutes. If anything, having the store restock too quickly at the early levels is almost a punishment; you see that shiny +2,+4 Sling at a good price, you want to save up and snag it before the shop restocks.

@Lord Fell: have you tried any of the "O-combat" variants? O, FA, S and others all have much better balancing of light/heavy weapons. V is deliberately and famously biased in favour of light weapons (until the very endgame, at least).

I've tried a few variants... most recently, I've tried DAJ and FA... but to be honest, I didn't care for either of them.

The weapon weights/blows per round in Vanilla is definitely unbalanced and unrealistic. A proper Martial weapon should, without a doubt, be superior to anything else. I pointed this out in another thread, and again the suggestion was to "try a variant." I don't understand why this bias would be deliberate... and I really don't care that it's tradition. A heavier weapon is penalized by slower blows per round, and doubly penalized by (especially at earlier levels) creating an Encumbrance problem... in my (not even slightly humble) opinion, it should still be worth it to carry heavier weaponry.

[Derakon]

One of these days I should try patching the enchantment rules so that a given weapon can only be enchanted up to the same level as its max damage dice roll. So daggers would top out at (+4, +4) while scythes of slicing would hit up to (+32, +32). Unfortunately this would also require significantly reworking how extra blows are rewarded, and probably mean that extra blows on non-weapon slots would have to go away entirely.

[Magnate]

I think your restock schedule is completely backwards. The game should be at its hardest in the late game and at its easiest early on. Requiring the player to level multiple times for the first restock is very harsh and restocking several times per level late game makes restricting it by experience pointless.

But you forget that clevs are not linear. The first few clevs come in a whirlwind, while later in the game you level up only after multiple dlevs.

@Lord Fell: have you tried any of the "O-combat" variants? O, FA, S and others all have much better balancing of light/heavy weapons. V is deliberately and famously biased in favour of light weapons (until the very endgame, at least).

[Atarlost]

I think your restock schedule is completely backwards. The game should be at its hardest in the late game and at its easiest early on. Requiring the player to level multiple times for the first restock is very harsh and restocking several times per level late game makes restricting it by experience pointless.

[Lord Fell]

Thinking about Store Restock:
I don't mind the idea that restock is tied to experience. It does seem artificial, but while it's unrealistic, this is still a game. "I'm sorry, Happy Drunk... I won't get any more Pints of Fine Wine until Umar the Angry hits level 13."

I think though, that rather than tying it to Level Gain, it should probably be tied to Gain against Max-Exp. Starting at around 100xp -so the first shop reset won't hit until 3rd or 4th level. So, at the earliest levels, the dungeon won't reset for every few levels. At the highest levels, the shops will reset every few levels... and can continue to reset once max level has been achieved.

Thinking about Encumbrance:
My first thought, is that increasing encumbrance screws warriors. I actually play Warrior classes more than anything else, and am already noticing that encumbrance is not optimized for the class.

I think my main point of discontent with Encumbrance is the way weapons work. If my warrior has an 18 Strength and an 18 Dex, I can get 3 attacks per round out of a dagger (1d4) and only 1 attack per round out of a longsword (2d5). Assuming I'm laying into a Brown Mold and won't miss, that dagger is doing to do 7.5 damage, and that sword is going to do 6 damage. In my opinion, a longsword should always be a superior weapon choice to a dagger. A heavier weapon doesn't always have to be better than a lighter weapon -a Longsword is probably a superior weapon to a Maul... but the current weight/effectiveness of a weapon is definitely borked.

[Estie]

Are you sure that was my suggestion? I don't remember doing that and I hate getting appreciation from someone else suggestion. If it was mine then it was just a suggestion without much thought. An idea thrown in the pool of other suggestions.

It was mine, but in answer to Derakons idea to increase effect of encumbrance. Simply reducing carrying capacity of strength would mean little for the endgame.

[Magnate]

Not quite. Your change changed gameplay for minor annoyance caused by one single item in the artifact list. That's wrong way of doing things. Luring monsters somewhere got harder or even impossible for some monsters, you introduced one unavoidable insta-death scenario and generally did it the easy way around "fixing" one thing that wasn't broken and changing gameplay in the process. This change made dealing with open vaults with insta-death monsters annoying "avoid" -objects instead of challenging "lure those monsters out of the vault" -objects.

Instead of fixing targeting allowing targeting range 20, you changed every single thing that had MAX_RANGE 18 to be 20. Not a good way of doing things.

Agreed. It was a nasty temporary hack, until LOS/FOV is completely rewritten for 4.x

I'm glad you agree with the rest of my post though. It would have been awful if there'd been nothing in it with which you could disagree.

[Magnate]

And, in my humble opinion, making the game more accessable to new players is great, but I would not want to see many changes that reduce Angband's trademark tension/excitement that is a by product of the harsh and unforgiving environment in the Angband dungeon.

Agreed - I think we as a team have taken on board that we need to swing the pendulum back this way a bit.

What I meant was, witha new release usually comes a *ton* of bug reports. That usually takes up 100% of a developer's time for a couple weeks after a release.

Ah, yes. We're ready for that - it's likely to result in takk releasing a "v2" a month or two later ;-)

[fizzix]

IMO, this would make the end game even more mind boggingly (too) long/boring. You'll level faster, become immune to your DL faster, thus become nearly invincible (end-game strong) faster. More of the dungeon will be simply be skipped. This could result in even more scumming for end game consumables.

Which is why play testing changes like this is important.

It could be good, it could be bad, we won't know until some people try it out and give feedback.