Making the game harder, take three

[Timo Pietilä]

I couldnt agree less. For some reason, the first impulse when it comes to making the game harder seems to be to cut off the power spikes of joy. People look at some rare occurence for <player> and go "oh, thats obviously overpowered, disable that".

I say dont. If thats the place you want to add an increase in difficulty, then by all means reduce the probability for it to occur, but leave the deviation high.

Imagine a thread about a character dump in the future: "...oh nice, dlvl 20 and you already have your +3 speed boots..." <later> "...oh, youre below 40 now, look out for at least +5 boots those start dropping here...." <later> "...yeah your good to take on P, I see you have your +10 boots and ...."


For what its worth, I think the best place to make the game substantially harder without ruining the fun is to be found in the monster offense. I might mow down rows of fire giants, but if theres a cyclops, I start treading carefully. Later in the game, a couple cyclopses dont bother me but if a titan makes an appearance, I have to watch out. Now imagine fire giants with the melee damage of cyclopses and cyclopse with that of titans.

Disclaimer: Yes, I do know that monster damage, especially melee one, can be avoided. Yes, I know that this affects some classes more than others. Yes, I know that this might shift the way the game gets played.
Despite all that, I _think_ it would make the game harder without making it less enjoyable. To be sure of that, it takes testing.

Making sure that noone goes over the speed limit of level 30, otoh, sounds awful.

Final discalimer: All opinions voiced by me are free to be considered by the actual dev people or not; by no means do I wish to push anyone in a direction they dont want to take.

Tweaking monsters is no solution, it's too easy to avoid confrontation altogether if monster is too powerful. Ultimately you just need to slow down your descent until you are ready if you just make monsters more powerful.

What needs to be done is increase variation, make artifacts rare, but powerful, OoD monsters appear less predictable and so on. This requires removal of weaker items. Maybe forced diving for something important like speed (remove or weaken small speed bonuses, or make all small speed bonus items also very deep like RoS).

[Magnate]

What needs to be done is increase variation, make artifacts rare, but powerful, OoD monsters appear less predictable and so on. This requires removal of weaker items. Maybe forced diving for something important like speed (remove or weaken small speed bonuses, or make all small speed bonus items also very deep like RoS).

I think I agree with both of you: there's definitely no problem with "power spikes of joy" (nice phrase), providing they are sufficiently rare.

Not sure what Timo means by "OoD monsters appear less predictable" - I think d_m changed OoD generation a while back, so that monsters can appear more OoD than they could before (and therefore less predictably, I think).

[Timo Pietilä]

I think I agree with both of you: there's definitely no problem with "power spikes of joy" (nice phrase), providing they are sufficiently rare.

Not sure what Timo means by "OoD monsters appear less predictable" - I think d_m changed OoD generation a while back, so that monsters can appear more OoD than they could before (and therefore less predictably, I think).

How much "a while back"? At least 3.2.0 has been pretty much predictable. I did encounter one way OoD AMHD in pit-like moat room, but even that was not extremely OoD, just more than usual max five levels.

[Magnate]

How much "a while back"? At least 3.2.0 has been pretty much predictable. I did encounter one way OoD AMHD in pit-like moat room, but even that was not extremely OoD, just more than usual max five levels.

It was definitely before 3.2.0 - which means that we didn't go far enough. I think we already suspected that, if I recall IRC debates correctly. Definitely something to revisit. No reason power spikes of joy shouldn't be offset by the occasional doomspike of terror ...

[Taha]

I just found a dread on level 27 (15 levels OOD) and a Xaren at 29 (11 levels OOD), and that was just in the last hour of playing. At least for a low HP mage, that is enough "doomspike of terror" to keep me happy for a little while. Especially given the total lack of any sort of decent gear to be found, Dread could have instakilled without rnether.
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Mature Webcam

[Timo Pietilä]

It was definitely before 3.2.0 - which means that we didn't go far enough. I think we already suspected that, if I recall IRC debates correctly. Definitely something to revisit. No reason power spikes of joy shouldn't be offset by the occasional doomspike of terror ...

Those doomspikes of terror can be fun in a long run. They make game feel more dangerous (because it would be more dangerous), and danger brings excitement which reduces boredom. Just don't make them too common.

I still remember that NPP GCV with Vecna in about beginning of stat-gain area. In NPP Vecna has teleport to player spell and it used it. Vecna at that point was instant death twice over (single move instant death spells, twice as fast as I was), but I survived. Even if I hadn't it would have still been thing to remember. We need something like that in vanilla angband.

Like that Tarrasque-surprise someone encountered here a while a back playing paladin.

[Timo Pietilä]

I just found a dread on level 27 (15 levels OOD) and a Xaren at 29 (11 levels OOD), and that was just in the last hour of playing. At least for a low HP mage, that is enough "doomspike of terror" to keep me happy for a little while. Especially given the total lack of any sort of decent gear to be found, Dread could have instakilled without rnether.

Those both have pass-wall. Was there a vault nearby?

[d_m]

In NPP Vecna has teleport to player spell and it used it. Vecna at that point was instant death twice over (single move instant death spells, twice as fast as I was), but I survived. Even if I hadn't it would have still been thing to remember. We need something like that in vanilla angband.

I might look into how NPP does teleport-to and see how well it'd work in V.

We're hoping to pull monster mana from NPP (on the way to trying to pull as much 4GAI as we can I think) so maybe we could pull this also if it seems like it'd work.

[Timo Pietilä]

I might look into how NPP does teleport-to and see how well it'd work in V.

We're hoping to pull monster mana from NPP (on the way to trying to pull as much 4GAI as we can I think) so maybe we could pull this also if it seems like it'd work.

NPP teleport to player is monster non-LoS spell which brings the monster to player, not the other way around. AFAIK monsters in vanilla can't use spells unless they see the player. That would make the spell much weaker.

[Derakon]

NPP teleport-to is a very, very nasty device. If a monster on the level has teleport-to and you can't kill them, then pretty much your only solutions are either to destruct them or to leave the level. If you teleport them away they'll just be right back 10-15 turns later.

[Magnate]

NPP teleport-to is a very, very nasty device. If a monster on the level has teleport-to and you can't kill them, then pretty much your only solutions are either to destruct them or to leave the level. If you teleport them away they'll just be right back 10-15 turns later.

This simply means that NPP hasn't cracked http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1113 yet either. It should be possible to be far enough away from an awake monster on the same level that they do not move towards you no matter how noisy you are. You should be able to clear the half of the level the nasty isn't on, lure it over to your cleared half, tSelf and clear the other half. But it does require monsters not to have excessive detection ranges.

[buzzkill]

Here's a radically untested and not very well thought out, well.. let's call it an idea for the sake of argument.

Make resting non-free. Institute XP drain or (highly unrealistic) increased noise production for resting, attribute it to snoring if you must. People will obviously side-step this by walking in circles, so the RNG will need a bit of logic to detect such, and I've always felt that natural regen (non-magical) should halt altogether while engaged in combat.

[Derakon]

Er, "regen halts when in combat" and "resting should have a cost" seem to be orthogonal, since resting doesn't happen when you're in combat. What exactly are you going for here?

[buzzkill]

Er, "regen halts when in combat" and "resting should have a cost" seem to be orthogonal, since resting doesn't happen when you're in combat. What exactly are you going for here?

I was probably using the terms resting and regeneration interchangeably, and at the same time trying to make a distinction natural regen, and magically aided regen (in a hastily written post). My bad.

I suppose, don't know for sure, that most players rest to recover HP after combat (I don't in most circumstances, cause being wounded DOES make the game harder/more interesting). That's like free healing. Sure, monsters become more awake the more you rest, but that's not all that high of a price to pay for full HP/mana restoration.

When I said resting during combat, I was trying to say that natural regeneration during combat, combat being a strenuous activity, should halt. Combat being defined as any turn in which you attack, are attacked, or engage in some other combat-type activity (spell casting, device use).

I hope that clears things up. It wouldn't be a monumental change, if taken by itself (but there's a lot more that could be done along these lines), but it would make things only slightly, but definitively harder (something is being taken away without giving the character anything in return).

It was a throw away idea that I that was floating in my head so I spit it out. I didn't for a moment think it garner any serious consideration.

[Derakon]

Ahh. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The major / more visible impacts I see are twofold. First, mages won't be able to cast Magic Missile or other cheap spells as long, which will make taking out weak packs harder. Second, taking down weak pits in melee will still incur a noticeable drain on your HP.

I'm not certain how much of an impact natural regeneration has on pitched fights. And magical regeneration boosts things by so much that natural regeneration becomes practically inconsequential by comparison. Magical regen really needs to be moved to a pval-based system IMO, with the current amount that the REGEN flag gives requiring at least a +3 modifier. And regen in general could be more easily implemented in code; currently it uses a powers-of-2 system like stealth does which makes it hard to understand.