making angband harder

[Timo Pietilä]

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?

Less easy access to "have it all" -combos, which means getting rid of three basic resists from Amrod and Amras (you can give them some high resist instead), reduction of small speed bonuses (quantity, not quality). No ESP amulets. No Weaponmastery or resistance amulets (including acid and lightning). Remove speed or rPoison from Trickery. Remove Devotion. Remove speed from elven cloaks. Make Elessar quite a bit more rare.

It has to be removal, otherwise people scum for those abilities/items. Items themselves can stay, but getting that "perfect" combo should be a lot harder no matter how many items you find (until you have Bladeturner, Ringil, Feanor, The One Ring, etc. extremely rare items)

Restricted knowledge and unexpected encounters of OoD monsters. Remove ability to know all items at the floor just by looking at item list after clairvoyance. Weaken clairvoyance to just map the entire level maybe. Remove ability to look at the monster/item that isn't at your LoS (item list should show only object symbol for unknowns, full info if known, same for monsters). Distinguishing Great Wyrm from Ancient Dragon for example should not be matter of just have ESP/cast detection, make monster symbol indistinguishable until you actually see the monster.

More randomness in monster creation depths. Allow deeper OoD monsters to appear easier. Remove some of the more boring vaults, make others more common to insert temptation to try them out (in this the not knowing what items inside are is crucial, otherwise you might not have temptation at all). I would remove especially the very large vertical height -low reward vaults, those are just annoying and take so much space from level that level becomes more boring with vault than without.

Generally higher rarity for all top artifacts. You can win this game without artifacts at all, so all artifacts should be quite a bit rarer than they are now.

Weaken ability to "push this button to avoid fight". Teleport other, mass banish, banish, destruction, teleport level, door creation, teleport and portal should all have higher manacost. Scrolls, staves, rods and wands of those abilities should be rarer, and maybe have less charges/stack size.

Quiver: make that fixed equipment slot without connection to inventory slot, remove one letter from general inventory to compensate. Reduce number of slots in quiver to five. Allow max 20 arrows / slot. (IMO quiver should be removed completely, but that probably never get accepted by devs).

[Magnate]

Hey Timo - just wanted to say thanks for this. I know you've said it all before, but it really helps to have a pithy summary all in one place. I agree with the paragraphs about restricted knowledge and more OoD monsters, rarer artifacts and weakened escapes. And we've already reduced the quiver by 75% so we're on the way ...

[d_m]

More randomness in monster creation depths. Allow deeper OoD monsters to appear easier. Remove some of the more boring vaults, make others more common to insert temptation to try them out (in this the not knowing what items inside are is crucial, otherwise you might not have temptation at all). I would remove especially the very large vertical height -low reward vaults, those are just annoying and take so much space from level that level becomes more boring with vault than without.

In V monsters can sometimes randomly have a bit more (or less) speed than normal. I've been thinking of extending this to other things as well.

TOME used to have monsters of different levels (e.g. level 10 orc, level 30 orc, etc). I'm not sure I'd go that far, but having less certainty about exactly how hard a given monster is might add a bit of spice/danger.

What do you think?

Generally higher rarity for all top artifacts. You can win this game without artifacts at all, so all artifacts should be quite a bit rarer than they are now.

This sounds good to me. To try things incrementally I will probably try "a bit rarer" first (e.g. 1/2 as common) and then try "quite a bit rarer" later.

[Derakon]

Overall, the player should never be satisfied with their equipment. Not unless they got very lucky. There should always be several things they're missing -- not quite enough CON, not covering several resists, not dealing as much damage as they'd like, not quite enough speed, etc. Currently you can cover everything important and still have some slack left over, which typically gets used to overcharge CON and speed. That makes the "equipment minigame" less interesting.

[Timo Pietilä]

This sounds good to me. To try things incrementally I will probably try "a bit rarer" first (e.g. 1/2 as common) and then try "quite a bit rarer" later.

[artifact rarity]

There is a problem with that currently. Unless the way the rarity is determined is changed you can't actually do that properly, all the top artifacts are already as rare as they can be, and they are still too common.

Magnate told me in another thread that current rarity 1 equals old rarity 100, but there were items in old angband that had rarities over 100, Ringil for example had rarity 140 if my memory serves me properly. The One Ring was almost never found, now it is as common as Vilya, only deeper dlvl 100 item, so it needs to pass OoD roll unless you are in a vault deep in dungeon.

[Magnate]

[artifact rarity]

There is a problem with that currently. Unless the way the rarity is determined is changed you can't actually do that properly, all the top artifacts are already as rare as they can be, and they are still too common.

Magnate told me in another thread that current rarity 1 equals old rarity 100, but there were items in old angband that had rarities over 100, Ringil for example had rarity 140 if my memory serves me properly. The One Ring was almost never found, now it is as common as Vilya, only deeper dlvl 100 item, so it needs to pass OoD roll unless you are in a vault deep in dungeon.

Yes - I have noted on ticket #720 (the general "fix item generation" ticket) that we need more granularity here. It's quite a difficult piece of work - I would have started on it already, but I messed up 3.3.1 so now I have to get 3.3.2 out first ...

[PowerDiver]

I personally think 25 is the golden number.

Note that the player can always keep stacks of arrows >25 (or whatever number) in their inventory rather than quiver if they only want them to take up one inventory slot.

I think that is harsh on warriors. My warriors like to carry more than 25 ?phase in the final battle, for example. Also, I think that the vast majority of ammo drops should fit into a single slot. I think 40 is a better number, at least for the first experiments.

[Derakon]

I'd rather overcompensate than undercompensate. At least with 25 we know that the quiver isn't making the game easier!

(Except through its original stated goal of not penalizing the use of small ammo stacks)

[fizzix]

I think that is harsh on warriors. My warriors like to carry more than 25 ?phase in the final battle, for example. Also, I think that the vast majority of ammo drops should fit into a single slot. I think 40 is a better number, at least for the first experiments.

yeah, in the current nightlies you don't get ammo drops more than 25. I'm thinking that 25 is a little harsh too, and would propose bumping it up a little to 35 or 40. That being said, it's not too punitive. I wind up just not lugging around a bunch of ammo that I probably won't use anyway.

You can carry more than 25 ?phase, they just take up more than one slot (right?).

[nppangband]

I have been thinking that removing the "recall depth" and having recall depth return you to max_depth might be a good thing to consider.

recall_depth came about before the JLE patch (before 2.8.3) when there was a big jump in monster danger right after stat gain (1800 to 2000). Falling through a trap door meant a huge increase in danger that the player wasn't ready for. Now that things are smoothed out, allowing the player to re-set their recall depth serves little purpose.

Other than that, I think speed is probably a little too easy to find at this point. Maybe there should be rings of speed (plus 1-3) with a native depth of 2000, and rings of *speed* starting at +5 at 4000', and take it away from some of the artifacts.

Edit: I think I like 30-35 for quiver size. 25 seems a little light. But overall a fantastic idea.

[d_m]

I think that is harsh on warriors. My warriors like to carry more than 25 ?phase in the final battle, for example. Also, I think that the vast majority of ammo drops should fit into a single slot. I think 40 is a better number, at least for the first experiments.

We may very well relax it back to 40... we're trying 25 in master right now. I'm just interested to see if people find the current master still too boring/easy, or if the pendulum has swung the other way.

[Timo Pietilä]

I have been thinking that removing the "recall depth" and having recall depth return you to max_depth might be a good thing to consider.

recall_depth came about before the JLE patch (before 2.8.3) when there was a big jump in monster danger right after stat gain (1800 to 2000).

Really? I thought that was much later addition.

(quick test...) 2.8.3h doesn't allow setting recall, it takes you to deepest level you have been.

(reading changes.txt -files) Changes.txt mentions resetting recall only after 3.0.

I think there was a period of time when recall did bring you to level you last used it, not the deepest, but without asking player if he wants to reset recall. I might remember that wrong though. Maybe that was discussed in newsgroup, but never implemented.

[Nomad]

Object-specific stack sizes?

So, I really like the new restricted stack sizes - 25 seems about right for ammo, and I definitely think it makes inventory management more of a challenge. But I actually think stack sizes for objects in the pack could potentially go even lower.

In my current game I managed to come across enough food to go over the maximum (have I mentioned that I think food is way too plentiful?) and that made me realise that really, it's kind of weird that you should be able to carry a stack of 25 meals in one pack slot in the first place. What about dividing the types of objects into "small", "medium", and "large" in terms of bulk, and allowing different maximums accordingly? So, say, ammo or scrolls might fit 25 to a pack slot, but you could only get 15 potions or 5 staves in the same space.

[Jungle_Boy]

You could perhaps do this by weight too. Anything less than three a certain minimum weight will stack to 25, progressively heavier items would only have smaller stacks. This might be easier than creating another flag or whatever for bulk.

[UglySquirrell]

Played a bit of FK for a while, sadly my savefile crashed but the biggest difficulty change I noticed was the lack of monsters acting smarter in groups, this made even a group of cave spiders really dangerous. They all keep attacking and are fast enough that you don't even get a chance to close the door. I can imagine this makes high level hounds brutal. I like the new pack A.I a lot, but maybe have them chase you until you're a higher level than them ,then switch to pack intelligence. I remember breeders used to be a lot more deadly too. And I miss being instakilled by traps at low levels X)