Making the game harder, take five: stealth

[jens]

1. Sometimes the discussions here in the forum remind me of math-talk. People who know everything talk about fine-tuning numbers. I would like to remind everyone that a game is more than just numbers. I believe this game has a very nice gameplay - which enforces the player to decide constantly. Do i keep this? Do i wear this or that? Don't forget that please.

Thats exactly what fine tuning numbers is about, I'm not talking about stealth in particular, but any numbers. If they are not fine tuned then you will have less interesting decisions, since some choice might be clearly better. Using math talk is just a means to an end, in this case to the end you ask us not to forget about.

Sometimes i want to play a sneaky thief, sometimes a spell-hurling mage, sometimes a brute force warrior. I think the freedom of choice is something very good in this game. If people want to play a sneaking half-troll warrior, why not? If they require much sneak-gear they will make a tradeoff for it in other powers.

When I made my first post I had not tried things excessively yet, so I made some general statements. It turns out that the races/classes are pretty well balanced relative to each other. The problem is that all of them are too good. (and even if I could agree with Half-Trolls being quite bad at stealth, I feel it would be more flavorful for them to have a bit lower stealth)

When it comes to freedom of choice people tend to choose what they percieve to be the optimal choice (with some variation to test new strategies). If a given strategy is optimal, then choice is lessened. That is what this thread is about, I want to give players more gameplay strategies and interesting decissions. It should be possible to play a race/class were choosing stealth eq is sub-optimal.

2. If you talk about making the game harder => from my point of view, after countless hours of playing and not hitting clvl 40 once, it is hard enough

The general drive is for making the game harder for the veterans. This does not have to mean it gets harder for newbies. In some cases it might even mean the game gets easier for newbies (as pointed out in another thread were adding a few 'warning' monster would prepare newbies for coming dangers). As for stealth: veterans will know how much stealth eq they need for their character to start being really good at stealth, newbies will not know this. This will affect the choice of eq, so the veteran will gain a big advantage from correct choices, while the newbie might not really get any use out of it (a difference of a few points in stealth from eq does mean a lot for your ability to sneak through a whole level). Reducing the availability of stealth by a few points will penalize veterans a lot more than newbies.

3. The first post stated that sneaking up to a group of monsters and killing them one by one would be unrealistic. I think this aspect does not realy matter. The whole setup is fantastic and therefore by default unrealistic. I think the important point is - the game should be fun playing. And for me that means i must be able to identify myself with the character i am playing and that the game is intellectual demanding.

I agree that realism does not really matter. My main point is that I want the game to fight back. Just walking up to all monsters becomes too easy. The character I'm playing at the moment is not devoted to stealth in any way, it just so happens that he has one +5 stealth item (an Elven cloak of the Magi that he would have used in any case), and being a race/class that does not penalise stealth he achieves good enough stealth to make the game boring.

4. In my imagination sneak is a (if not the) main attribute of thieves.

Precisely! But at the moment it's the main attribute of all classes...

[Tibarius]

a Game is more than just numbers

Greetings to everyone!

As a new member to this forum, i give a big cheer on all the active people here and the dev-team that keeps a game alive and interesting for years i always liked. I played Moria some years ago and was attracted lately again. Looking for the 'most actual' version of Moria i found Angband to be a well maintained and alive game wich developed even further. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this game. I consider myself still newbie in this game. I have tried 30-40 chars, nowadays usually hitting clvl around 25 before i get killed. So i have still to discover a lot of the game. But i thought i give a couple of thoughts to this thread:

1. Sometimes the discussions here in the forum remind me of math-talk. People who know everything talk about fine-tuning numbers. I would like to remind everyone that a game is more than just numbers. I believe this game has a very nice gameplay - which enforces the player to decide constantly. Do i keep this? Do i wear this or that? Don't forget that please. Sometimes i want to play a sneaky thief, sometimes a spell-hurling mage, sometimes a brute force warrior. I think the freedom of choice is something very good in this game. If people want to play a sneaking half-troll warrior, why not? If they require much sneak-gear they will make a tradeoff for it in other powers.

2. If you talk about making the game harder => from my point of view, after countless hours of playing and not hitting clvl 40 once, it is hard enough

3. The first post stated that sneaking up to a group of monsters and killing them one by one would be unrealistic. I think this aspect does not realy matter. The whole setup is fantastic and therefore by default unrealistic. I think the important point is - the game should be fun playing. And for me that means i must be able to identify myself with the character i am playing and that the game is intellectual demanding.

4. In my imagination sneak is a (if not the) main attribute of thieves.

Cheers,
Tibarius

[Quendus]

After trying some games as a diver, using lots of stealth, one thing that really stands out is how quiet the levels are. It feels both boring, unrealistic, and like I'm sort of cheating.

The reason levels seem so quiet (at least in versions up to 3.1.2; I haven't played 3.2.0 because it doesn't work on MacOS) is a deficiency in monsters' pathfinding skills rather than a lack of supply. If you walk around a level with ESP, you'll have difficulty finding an area with no visible monsters.

However, even monsters which are awake and aware of the player can't find and confront the player because they don't know how to plot paths around things like U-shaped corridors. Things like ethereal dragons and reavers that can pass through walls don't have this problem, so levels that contain them tend to seem more lively. If monster AI was fixed so that they can get past obstacles, this would go a long way towards fixing the OP's problem (provided changes to stealth are made so that enough monsters will be awake).

It also doesn't help that as soon as the player reaches a certain level of power/slaughters enough of a certain monster type, they start to pathfind *away* from the player as default :P

[Derakon]

Buzzkill: ehh, that's realistic but IMO not fun. Especially since you could make a reasonable argument for magical gear not having the malus, which makes it more or less pointless anyway...

Kobolds are probably too stealthy right now. Same with rangers.

[Philip]

Personally I dislike kobolds and would reduce their stealth by one too, simply because they already have quite a few advantages.

[buzzkill]

@ Timo : DaJ has awake but unaware, I'm not quite sure how it's accomplished.

@ Derakon : How about normal equipment types carrying stealth penalties (regardless of other enchantments). Stuff like iron shod boots and plate mail come to mind as items that should carry large penalties.

[jens]

I've compiled some stats on stealth, using the information Derakon supplied.

vigil	#	sleep	0 stl	6 stl	12 stl	18 stl
100+	22	700	140	560	2240	8960
80-99	72	560	112	448	1792	7168
60-79	51	420	84	336	1344	5376
40-59	76	280	56	224	896	3584
20-39	118	140	28	112	448	1792
10-19	160	70	14	56	224	896
0-9	108	0	0	0	0	0

vigil	: The value in monster.txt
#	: The number of monsters that have vigilance in the given range.
sleep	: The average size of the sleep value (= vigil*2 + 1d(vigil*10)) (using the lowest value in the range for vigil).
0-18stl	: Nr of monster turns you can spend on a level before a given monster wakes up.

In this table I'm using the model that you are walking at a distance of 20 steps from any given monster. This means that each time a monster is disturbed (100/20 =) 5 is subtracted from that monsters sleep value. At 0 stl (stealth), and at equal speed, it would then take 140 turns before a monster with 700 sleep would wake up. Using the stats from Derakon's table a character with 6 stl would disturb a monster on average 25% of it's turns, i.e. on average he could stay 4 times as long on the level. At 12 stl that would be 16 times, and at 18 stl 64 times as long (well actually it's a bit less, closer to 60 at 18 stl, but clean multiples of 2 are nice). The stealth number I'm talking about here is the combined value of 1 + race + class + eq. The range of stealth excluding eq is 0-10.

For ease of conversation I'm designating values close to 0 stealth as bad, 6 stealth as average, 12 stealth as good, and 18 stealth as insane.

Some ways of achieveing these values:

Bad stealth	Naked Half-Troll/Warrior

Average stealth	Half-Troll/Warrior with 2 good stealth items
		Naked Elf/Ranger

Good stealth	Naked Hobbit/Rogue
		Elf/Mage with 1 really good stealth item

Insane stealth	Hobbit/Rogue with 3 stealth items
		Half-Troll/Warrior with 4 really good stealth items

10 vigilance seems to be a breaking point. There are 152 monsters with 10 vigilance, there are none with 6-9 vigilance. So, if you can sneak around a dungeon without waking up monsters with 10 vigilance you are set. If you have good stealth you'll probably have more than 200 monster turns (adjust according to your relative speeds to get player turns) before too many of these wake up. And these are monsters that most would consider very vigilant, and probably not much effort put into stealth.

For eq I consider 4+ stealth to be a really good stealth item; e.g. an elven cloak of stealth, which quite often gets +5 stealth. A good stealth item would have 3 stealth.

So after lots of analysis here are some concrete suggestions:
1) Change the +1 that everyone gets in calcs.c to -2. This would cut in half the time that any current character can spend on a level before waking up monsters. If the +1 is there because it's needed to avoid a negative value in the further stealth calculations a safeguard of (if s < 0; s=0) can be used instead.
A cleaner change would be to simply remove the +1 addition, and instead lower both race and class values with 1 each (but keeping humans at 0). Races/classes could of course be adjusted on an individual basis instead of a blank -1.

2) Make sure that no ego items can go beyond 4 in stealth, and 4 should only be for elven cloaks of stealth.

3) Break up the horde of monsters at 10 vigilance a bit.


These changes would lead to the Hobbit/Rogue having to dedicate to stealth to get insane, but with 1 good and 1 really good stealth item would be sneaking along nicely. On the other hand the stealth dedicated Half-Troll/Warrior would be good at stealth, but never insane. Maybe make it a bit easier for the hobbits/kobolds by letting them keep their stealth, while lowering the other races by 1.

If you feel these changes are too severe, any smaller adjustment would help as well. In my opinion the question is not if we need to nerf stealth, just how much we need to nerf it.

[Derakon]

I thought someone would ask that. In that case it's pointless; the monsters you can kill in one round are the ones you don't care if you can stealth-kill. More insidiously, if you fail to kill one in one round, then suddenly all of the others are awake and you're in a terrible position.

[Chud]

The main difficulty I have with combat noise is that it's freakin' awesome to be able to take out an entire pack of sleeping enemies without waking any of them up prematurely.

What if you were still allowed to do this, but only as long as you could kill the monster in one round? If you fail to do so and it lives long enough to attack you, then it also wakes up everyone else.

[Derakon]

As I noted earlier, there's no need to have a race- or class-based variation on how much benefit you get from +stealth. Just modify the base stealth value for that race or class. Because stealth is exponential, this works just like having a multiplier.

[jens]

Why not? If I'm packing on *that* much additional stealth, then it's likely at the cost of a bunch of other things.

To force different play stiles when playing very different race/class combos.



To help get a better feel for stealth, a few questions:

1) How many turns (at normal speed) do you on average stay on a level? Answering this would help balancing how many turns, on average, it should take for monsters to wake up.
2) What race/class combos do you usually get stealthy with (stealthy -> you can walk right up to about 50% or more of the monsters on a level). The easiest way to display this would be with a number combining the stealth of a given race/class combo, but just writing the race/class works as well :-)
3) How much stealth do your characters get from eq?

[Derakon]

There is no level dependence in the stealth calculations. It is possible to have stealth go up with level, but this isn't done -- and with the current 0-30 range, doing so would probably result in overly stealthy characters. We'd need to change the stealth calculations, either by making the numbers involved 64-bit or floating point, or by using a non-exponential calculation, to increase the resolution enough to make level-based stealth improvement more viable.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

My point is that Hobbit Rogues should be able to do that, with a few mediocre stealth items, but a half troll warrior should not, even with the best stealth eq.

Why not? If I'm packing on *that* much additional stealth, then it's likely at the cost of a bunch of other things.

If the problem is really related to dive strategy, then perhaps the better solution is to make stealth more strongly level-dependent. I assume that every class gets a bonus to stealth every level, with probably rogues and rangers getting the best. How about dropping initial stealth ratings, and increasing the per-level improvement in some manner? And perhaps lower the Dex contribution to stealth.

[camlost]

2) awake but not aware (maybe roaming randomly)

(IMO there is nothing wrong in stealth as it is, it just has potential to be much more).

I agree with awake + roaming.

Sangband has a stealth skill -- have you used it? Do you like it?

[Derakon]

Random aside: I had a character who for awhile had 100% perception, thanks to some ridiculous searching bonus on a randart. Even though I always immediately saw any traps I walked next to, I still used trap detection, because you really want to know if a given tile is safe before you get close to it.

A simple way to have monsters be awake but not aware would be to have each pathfind to a random location in the dungeon, and when it gets there, pick a new target. You'd need some mechanism to keep groups together, though, and right now there is nothing in the game that has the concept of "group" after the monsters are generated (they just stick together because they're generated in the same place and always have the same pathfinding target, i.e. the player).

Adding complexity, you might also want wandering monsters to move more slowly than monsters that are aware of the player -- maybe make it a per-monster type of thing. Fruitflies move at maximum speed all the time, but mystics amble about chatting up the local wildlife and only start running when they have something to kill. You could even tie the variance in speed between combat and non-combat modes to the monster's likelihood of noticing the player when awake.