What else should not be allowed in vaults?

[Estie]

Changing the rules for vaults is imo not a good idea. If it was me Id just remove the "cant teleport into vault square" part.

What are you trying to accomplish with this ? The way I see it, either the rules applying to a vault are better than the normal ones, then they should apply everywhere, or they are not, then they shouldnt be introduced in the first place.

[d_m]

Changing the rules for vaults is imo not a good idea. If it was me Id just remove the "cant teleport into vault square" part.

What are you trying to accomplish with this ? The way I see it, either the rules applying to a vault are better than the normal ones, then they should apply everywhere, or they are not, then they shouldnt be introduced in the first place.

The whole point of vaults is that they break the rules. They have permanent walls that can't be tunneled (which only show up there and in the dungeon border) they have great items and out-of-depth monsters that the game couldn't generate together (or at least, that the game will never generate when you play it--maybe there is a tiny chance), and they are unconnected in a way that violates the way the rest of the dungeon works.

Currently there are a whole range of abusive strategies that people have documented which work especially well in vaults--some of these are because of special vault behaviors (phase automatically teleports @ out of a vault) and others are a combination of normal play styles (destruction, (mass) banishment, teleport other) with the properties vaults have (walls which monsters can't tunnel through, artifacts and great items lying on the ground).

My goal is to keep vaults fun and exciting while removing some of the most lame tactics. Fighting hard monsters in a crazy vault to get tons of items is great. Teleporting away or mass banishing everything in a vault and picking up the free stuff lying on the ground is lame. Obviously there is a place for tactics/strategy/cleverness, and the trick is balancing those things.

In fact, I think teleport other is currently way overpowered in general (I agree with fizzix that it should be a bolt not a beam) but that is a story for another time.

[Derakon]

Maybe I don't play enough mages, but I don't see banishment getting used to deal with vaults. Destruction, yes. Teleport other, yes. Note that priests and paladins get Banish Evil, but only very late; it's in Wrath of God. And it only works in LOS, and only affects evil, and teleports them away instead of removing them from the level. We could do the same thing to Mass Banish (and remove the hitpoint reduction), and remove standard Banish entirely. Then Mass Banish has the advantage of working on all monsters in LOS instead of only evil ones, but the disadvantage of not working on uniques. And we get the added benefit of having two spells with similar names actually behave similarly.

The standard Banish spell strikes me as abusive pretty much no matter how you plan to use it. It's a "I don't want to deal with this type of monster" spell, a "get rid of that escort" spell, a "cancel that summon" spell. Once you get it you can tailor every dungeon level to only feature uniques and monsters with the best risk/reward ratios. Now again, I haven't played mages much (and my last one didn't get the spellbook with banish in it), so if my analysis is wrong, please correct me.

[ewert]

Maybe I don't play enough mages, but I don't see banishment getting used to deal with vaults. Destruction, yes. Teleport other, yes. Note that priests and paladins get Banish Evil, but only very late; it's in Wrath of God. And it only works in LOS, and only affects evil, and teleports them away instead of removing them from the level. We could do the same thing to Mass Banish (and remove the hitpoint reduction), and remove standard Banish entirely. Then Mass Banish has the advantage of working on all monsters in LOS instead of only evil ones, but the disadvantage of not working on uniques. And we get the added benefit of having two spells with similar names actually behave similarly.

The standard Banish spell strikes me as abusive pretty much no matter how you plan to use it. It's a "I don't want to deal with this type of monster" spell, a "get rid of that escort" spell, a "cancel that summon" spell. Once you get it you can tailor every dungeon level to only feature uniques and monsters with the best risk/reward ratios. Now again, I haven't played mages much (and my last one didn't get the spellbook with banish in it), so if my analysis is wrong, please correct me.

I play a lot of mages for some reason, so I'll answer my views. As long as it is a spell, banish vs mass banish is mostly just a classlevel / inconvenience choice versus vaults. Either way, mages can clear it. Due to that reason, with current banishment spell workings, vault preventing banishes sounds better.

Changing mass banish to LoS teleO makes it suck big time. Making it a teleO "destructarea" spell, now we are talking. Banish Evil could be changed similarly into "nearby teleO" instead of "LoS teleO". I think the base banishment spell could remain as a "kick out of level" spell.

[Derakon]

If changing mass banish to LOS teleport other makes it suck, then why is the priest spell Banish Evil one of the best spells in their lexicon? It would be less powerful than it is currently, certainly, but I'm having trouble figuring out why it would suck.

[Estie]

The whole point of vaults is that they break the rules. They have permanent walls that can't be tunneled (which only show up there and in the dungeon border) they have great items and out-of-depth monsters that the game couldn't generate together (or at least, that the game will never generate when you play it--maybe there is a tiny chance), and they are unconnected in a way that violates the way the rest of the dungeon works.

Currently there are a whole range of abusive strategies that people have documented which work especially well in vaults--some of these are because of special vault behaviors (phase automatically teleports @ out of a vault) and others are a combination of normal play styles (destruction, (mass) banishment, teleport other) with the properties vaults have (walls which monsters can't tunnel through, artifacts and great items lying on the ground).

My goal is to keep vaults fun and exciting while removing some of the most lame tactics. Fighting hard monsters in a crazy vault to get tons of items is great. Teleporting away or mass banishing everything in a vault and picking up the free stuff lying on the ground is lame. Obviously there is a place for tactics/strategy/cleverness, and the trick is balancing those things.

In fact, I think teleport other is currently way overpowered in general (I agree with fizzix that it should be a bolt not a beam) but that is a story for another time.

The vault rule of not allowing phasing into vault area illustrates my point perfectly. Originally introduced to disbale "cheesy" ways of getting in, it has the sideeffect of making phase door a failsafe escape inside vaults where it isnt so otherwise. Same with perma walls: can be used to thin out tunnelers.

I am saying that whatever special rules you introduce will have similar unforseen effects. It will change the way people approach vaults and play the game in generally. Thats ok of course, but if its a good change, why restrict it to vaults ?

If mass genociding a vault is "lame", then why is mass genociding anything else not.

The question is, are you unhappy with how vaults get treated currently. Speaking only for myself, the cases where I massbanish a vault are rare unless I play a highlevel mage (and I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing it). The reason is that the scrolls are rare and require an inventory slot to carry, so a) I must have found scrolls and at least one must have survived in my inventory, b) I do not consider anything else more important to carry atm and c) there must be a vault present. If massbanish didnt work in vaults, I wouldnt even consider carrying the scroll prior to the M battle.

Destructing vaults almost never happens, usually I want (and can get) the destructable goodies.

With my playstyle unrestricted by "morale" I would guess that about 60% of vault monsters get teleported out, 20% fought and 20% destructed/genocided/ignored. That takes into account that I sometimes play mages. I am curious what other players´s numbers are.

What exactly do you want me to do with vaults ? Certainly only increasing the "ignored" percentage couldnt be called interesting.

Edit: the 20% of fighting is done almost exclusively outside the vault itself. Fighting inside an open vault with dangerous ood monsters is just not going to happen period.

[Timo Pietilä]

Sounds to me that you think the current trap detection/searching system is broken. By the time you're cracking GVs you are probably around clevel 25-30. I'm guessing a normal player with +3 - +4 searching at this level *should* be able to detect traps at something like 95% effectiveness every turn. (not that they do now, just that this should be the ability we aim for) If this *still* isn't good enough for reasonable trap avoidance without too much tedium, perhap's ewert's LoS trap detection should be poached.

Just so we're on the same page, I think searching through vault.txt is a poor solution and should never be encouraged.

95% is not good enough, not in angband. Do you trust that spell with 5% failure works every time? I want to be 99.995% sure that there is no trap there before stepping on the next grid. That with current system where trap placing is completely irrational.

IMO our entire trap system is broken. Both trap placement and detection.

1) trap placing is entirely random which makes no sense. They should be placed on some intelligent way.
2) how can magic detect traps that are not magical? That should be not so easily detectable.
3) Person with trained eye should be able to spot traps from distance.

1) leads to searching only when needed.
2) would remove magical trap detection.
3) trap detection becomes automatic on LoS, or not at all, unless searched when needed.

[d_m]

IMO our entire trap system is broken. Both trap placement and detection.

Agreed completely. The "trap detection game" as currently played with spells/scrolls/rods is boring and doesn't add a lot of value to Angband.

I like the idea of automatically trying to find traps in LOS. I also like the idea of removing trap detection spells/effects. If traps are worth having in the game (and honestly I would be fine removing them, and trying to make the game harder in other ways) then they are worth stumbling into sometimes.

If there is a play style that guarantees you will never hit a single trap ever, and traps are dangerous enough that you want to avoid them, then I don't think traps are even worth having, because it will force everyone to adopt that particular play style (which might be repetitive, boring, etc).

[Timo Pietilä]

I fully support making vaults immune to destruction and mass banishment. I am not sure whether standard banishment gets abused with regard to vaults... certainly warriors are not in a great position to do so but priests might be.

You mean mages here? Priests do not get any banishment spells. "Banish evil" is just mass teleport other against evil in LoS, and it is into deepest priest book, which is rare.

Or do you mean priests have recharge-spell? Priest recharge is weaker than scrolls of recharge, they blow up stuff very often trying to recharge. Considering that you have so few charges in staves of banishment you can't use it many times before it blows up.

[d_m]

Err, yeah I mean mages. I thought priests did get banishment and greater recharge, but it just shows that I have played more mages than priests.

For what it's worth I think Estie may be right--certainly I think teleport-other is really over-powered in general and vaults are just the place where that comes through the most. I need to think about it more I guess.

[Timo Pietilä]

The vault rule of not allowing phasing into vault area illustrates my point perfectly. Originally introduced to disbale "cheesy" ways of getting in, it has the sideeffect of making phase door a failsafe escape inside vaults where it isnt so otherwise. Same with perma walls: can be used to thin out tunnelers.

I am saying that whatever special rules you introduce will have similar unforseen effects. It will change the way people approach vaults and play the game in generally. Thats ok of course, but if its a good change, why restrict it to vaults ?

If mass genociding a vault is "lame", then why is mass genociding anything else not.

The whole point of "vault" is to protect what's inside. That is pretty much dictionary definition of vault. So items and monsters should be protected from outside influences and also require "cracking the vault" in order to get in. However once inside getting out should not be that hard (it is not prison cell, it is a vault)

That means that items as well as monsters should be safe from spells that usually get rid of them, but like player are easy to teleport away.

For game balance mass geno and destruct are too easy ways to get rid of monsters protecting the loot. A big GV can have 10-20 artifacts in it, so *destrcution* -spell turns to *easy way to get artifacts* -spell. Same applies to mass geno.

[Magnate]

Agreed completely. The "trap detection game" as currently played with spells/scrolls/rods is boring and doesn't add a lot of value to Angband.

I like the idea of automatically trying to find traps in LOS. I also like the idea of removing trap detection spells/effects. If traps are worth having in the game (and honestly I would be fine removing them, and trying to make the game harder in other ways) then they are worth stumbling into sometimes.

If there is a play style that guarantees you will never hit a single trap ever, and traps are dangerous enough that you want to avoid them, then I don't think traps are even worth having, because it will force everyone to adopt that particular play style (which might be repetitive, boring, etc).

I think this is a perfect analogy with curses. When we only have the sticky curse, everyone plays to avoid it with ID, and it's not worth having. When we have a range of interesting and mixed curses, play styles will vary as some will still avoid them and others will embrace them.

I think it should be possible to do the same with an interesting variety of trap - create a game where avoiding them at all costs is not the only viable play style.

[Estie]

For game balance mass geno and destruct are too easy ways to get rid of monsters protecting the loot. A big GV can have 10-20 artifacts in it, so *destrcution* -spell turns to *easy way to get artifacts* -spell. Same applies to mass geno.

I dont know how others play this game, but for me changing that would have very little effect. It isnt any harder to win when vaults cant be destructed. So how is game balance affected ? I dont think I destruct 1 vault in 10 winning games if that. And thats not because I find anything wrong with it. Im going to bet though that some (not yet foreseen) consequences will bear heavier on the game than what little effect removing destructed vaults has.

[Timo Pietilä]

Err, yeah I mean mages. I thought priests did get banishment and greater recharge, but it just shows that I have played more mages than priests.

For what it's worth I think Estie may be right--certainly I think teleport-other is really over-powered in general and vaults are just the place where that comes through the most. I need to think about it more I guess.

Without TO many GV:s become inaccessible. It could take only one 40dlvl OoD monster to block your entire access to vault. You need a way to get rid of the monster and it needs to be rather fail-proof method, otherwise CGV turns to inaccessible useless section of the dungeon.

Of course if you allow phase door work as it works now, you can crack open the block containing that said too-hard-to-handle monster, phase, lure it outside and TO/destruct/banish it after it is outside. For some vaults that is difficult because of monster pathfinding restrictions. They just don't know how to get to you. Especially pass-wall and kill-wall monsters don't have a clue how to react to permanent walls.

I would be very careful before I tweak TO weaker. It is one monster handling method that affects game balance a lot. Change it and whole game changes. Way more situations change to "avoid at all costs" situations without semi-guaranteed TO. Especially summoners change to much much much more dangerous, and that would lead to everybody using ASC to kill them.

[Timo Pietilä]

I dont know how others play this game, but for me changing that would have very little effect. It isnt any harder to win when vaults cant be destructed.

It isn't very hard to win, period. That doesn't make clearing vaults with mass monster removal spells any less cheesy.