making angband harder

[fizzix]

I don't think "too cheap" prices is only BM problem, it is in fact every shop problem. I don't know how and when this has happened and has it been result of several different changes, but in Frog-Knows prices of things are much higher, and it isn't really any problem. It just makes gaming more dungeon-intensive when you can't buy things from town just because they cost too much.

I pretty much agree with this assessment. I do think that teleport level and deep descent are more egregious than other items though. We're doing a halfway decent job of generating enough needed items in the dungeon, so making shops more costly is good (and scaling starting gold appropriately).

[Nomad]

Personally, I think it would help just to have scrolls of Tel Other, Teleportation and Deep Descent appear in the Black Market singly, rather than in potentially large stacks.

[Malak Darkhunter]

There is a monster.txt patch that replaces the standard Angband monsters with Moria monsters, but that is not enough. Object.txt would have to be edited to remove artifacts additionally.

I don't remember where I found it, but if anyone is interested the patch is attached to this post, (hope it works)

Very interested, could you perhaps use the monster.txt patch and then turn artifacts off in game, to be better balanced? With that patch is morgoth still the bad guy or the Balrog? And also could you not turn maximize off for race stat bonus in birth options thereby inc
Helping the balance?

[Magnate]

This thread with this title has appeared many times over the past year.

Malak - you have read all five of these threads, right?

1) Hordes of novices drop tons of stuff. After clevel 10 these are pushovers, and they are the most lucrative kills for money, especially in a no-selling game.

We really need drop profiles. Currently all novices have DROP_60, and the best we can do at the moment is tone that down to DROP_40, which would reduce the drops by 1/3. But once we have drop profiles we can limit what they drop much more carefully.

3) DSM mail is too common early in the dungeon. It is a very powerful find at dlevel 20 or even 30. I seem to find several in every game I've played between dlevels 20 and 30. And I'm generally moving as fast as possible through those levels to get to stat-gain depth.

Looks like this is another case of me overcompensating. For years DSMs never appeared early enough to be useful, and now they are appearing too often.

4) BM sells too powerful items for too cheap. Specifically ?tl, ?dd, _destruction, _speed, -TO, =resist poison, =FA. The combination of these items and the gold mines that are novices, make for a very powerful @. The only things that seem well priced in the BM are weapons, armor and stat-gain potions.

That's deeply satisfying - though I agree with Timo's and your later position that in fact everything could be made more expensive. For wearables this is a single line, but for consumables it's tedious. Perhaps takk will let me sort out inflation properly ...

5) Overall the dungeon is extremely safe but is dotted with areas of extreme danger. This allows a player to get by with a small stack of ?TL (readily available in the BM) to bypass the areas that are dangerous and get a new level which is more likely to be safe than not. Monsters with power close to the current level need to be more common than they currently are. I already tried a variation on this, but was not successful (it changed the game, but it made it much more tedious).

I think there will be some more serious monster rebalancing eventually, but for now we could just try making TL and DD not come in stacks.

7) Quiver is too powerful, encumberance penalty is too weak (late in the game).

I agree with the proposed stack size cap of 25 - for every slot, not just the quiver.

8) Melee characters do way too much damage early in the game. A warrior or paladin will start with over 20 damage per round with a dagger. That's way too much.

This one I'm going to leave for another day. It's all to do with light weapons and +dam. Every time I try to come up with an improved system, I end up with O combat. One day I will come up with something else ... or takkaria will agree to move to O combat.

9) Poison is too easy to just walk off. I know Derakon and others had a lot of suggestions for things to do with poison, maybe we should revisit them.

I'd welcome a pull request with some of this stuff in. That reminds me, Derakon's about the only person with seriously enthusiasm and good ideas who hasn't ever sent us a pull request. Derakon - are you allergic to git?

[Derakon]

That reminds me, Derakon's about the only person with seriously enthusiasm and good ideas who hasn't ever sent us a pull request. Derakon - are you allergic to git?

No, not really, though I do have to admit to preferring Mercurial (from familiarity, not any citable superiority). Mostly I'm just lazy -- it's easier for me to code my mini-patches against the latest version and then post the patch here, than it is to keep my own branch that's successfully merged all of the changes from other devs.

(Granted this may well reduce the odds of any given patch I make getting accepted...)

[Malak Darkhunter]

Magnate-no I didn't know these threads existed already, this battle has been going on for s while it seems, I only realized it after I had done posted it and saw the threads, realized I just opened up a can of worms.

[Derakon]

The can was already open. You just removed some papers that had been set on it temporarily.

[Magnate]

Well anyway, I went from talking about it to doing and made a bunch of changes to the latest nightly. Providing you start a brand new character, it should be fine, but if you're in the middle of a character you're enjoying, don't upgrade yet.

[relic]

With that patch is morgoth still the bad guy or the Balrog? And also could you not turn maximize off for race stat bonus in birth options thereby inc
Helping the balance?

I haven't tried this patch but the Balrog is the Quest monster (Morgoth is not defined), but as the Readme file says: "defeating the Balrog does not seem to terminate the game as it should."

Turning off maximize mode would mean using earlier Angband versions (3.2 or earlier?) when that option was still there.

If you should try this patch, a tip: beware of the Black Dragon Bats and also the Disenchanter Bats. They were horrible in Moria.

[nppangband]

I haven't tried this patch but the Balrog is the Quest monster (Morgoth is not defined), but as the Readme file says: "defeating the Balrog does not seem to terminate the game as it should."

True. You would also have to also edit quest.txt to make the Balrog the final quest (and delete the Sauron quest). But the way it worked was that, after 2500', either the Balrog or Evil Iggy was generated on each level, with a 50% chance for each. The Angband code base would have to be altered to support that.

[Nomad]

Well anyway, I went from talking about it to doing and made a bunch of changes to the latest nightly. Providing you start a brand new character, it should be fine, but if you're in the middle of a character you're enjoying, don't upgrade yet.

Man, really feeling the sting of those 25-max ammo stacks already. Didn't occur to me until actually playing that even the early game habit of picking up every type of ammo until you find a launcher is now going to eat up your inventory slots. Definitely going to have a big effect on gameplay.

Like the boosted weapon and armour prices too; it makes it more of a decision what to buy instead of being able to kit your warrior out with a piece of armour for every slot. Seems like leather shields are still pretty underpriced for the AC, though.

Also, would it be practical to rebalance weapon pricing to take weight into account as well as damage? I guess there's a bit of a conflict between what's best for the different classes, but maybe work out some sort of curve where light and powerful weapons are both expensive and mid-range ones are the cheapest? (I suppose it might end up a bit of a wonky pricing structure later in the game, but by the time everybody's got maxed stats, I'm not sure town prices have that much impact.)

[Magnate]

Also, would it be practical to rebalance weapon pricing to take weight into account as well as damage? I guess there's a bit of a conflict between what's best for the different classes, but maybe work out some sort of curve where light and powerful weapons are both expensive and mid-range ones are the cheapest? (I suppose it might end up a bit of a wonky pricing structure later in the game, but by the time everybody's got maxed stats, I'm not sure town prices have that much impact.)

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past three years. The problem is that the effect of weapon weight in combat is all wrong - light weapons get more blows and are much much better than heavy weapons except at the very endgame where the extra criticals become barely noticeable. Pricing for this is almost impossible, so IMO pricing for weapon weight properly needs to wait until we move to O-combat, or some similar combat system where weapon weight is properly considered. Then the pricing will follow naturally.

[Timo Pietilä]

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past three years. The problem is that the effect of weapon weight in combat is all wrong - light weapons get more blows and are much much better than heavy weapons except at the very endgame where the extra criticals become barely noticeable.

Either your endgame starts really early, or you are looking at the wrong data. A good longsword beats dagger quite soon, at the stat-gain latest. With fractional blows this difference turns to favor of heavier weapons quite soon after start of the game.

It's not that bad. Not anymore, especially now that we have removed some of the grossly overpowered off-weapon damage bonuses which were main reason why more blows were better than good weapon.

[Derakon]

Yeah, I'm with Timo here. You use a dagger or whip up until you find something better, which isn't hard. An unenchanted dagger beats an unenchanted longsword, sure, but it often doesn't beat an enchanted beaked axe, which is the kind of comparison the player ends up making pretty quickly.

(Of course, an enchanted dagger is even better, but that's assuming you find one)

[Chud]

I wonder if there's a better way of thinking about making the game harder. This is just me thinking out loud at the moment, so most of my ideas here are not exactly well thought out... sorry.

But still, it's really not that difficult to make the game harder in ways that are not basically very interesting... make this weapon weaker, that monster stronger, some needed thing less common. I'm not sure that doesn't just lead to more grinding. Stock up on escapes, and beating this guy now takes 8 tries where it took 3 before, but is that really harder or just more tedious?

Making escapes less than perfectly reliable takes away the grind element here, but it also allows death-through-no-fault-of-your-own (essentially). Maybe that's okay, maybe not.

Maybe solving this requires some fundamental change in the nature of the game, and maybe we don't want to go there - I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe some added element of problem solving? Relationship building? (Very complex that, but interesting. Mass Effect takes a stab at this in a rudimentary way.) I'm not sure, but somehow simply changing the combat balance seems unsatisfying.

Timo, someone said, finds almost every game winnable; what would make a game challenging and risky for you, and a win especially rewarding, without adding any tedium?