Poll: Vanilla room frequencies (vote in this one)

[fizzix]

Trying to get feedback on room frequencies in 3.5 Voting for more than one option is allowed

[getter77]

I was too captivated by the notion in the FA thread on the recent gain of "interesting mode" whereby the likes of pits and such are far more common. Seems to me that's a great way to amp up the game so long as the denizens are level appropriate---far better/more worthwhile to run into a large pack of something in a spiffy vault versus just randomly clogging up a hallway like a tetris piece jumble with nothing special to show for it.

Might also sort of channel a bit of Quick and/or Tiny into it in terms of helping pace in a different way than just diving and hoping since the usual floor clear becomes more janitorial than adventurous. Besides, how amusing would it be for most level feelings to be of the exciting/dire sort? Heh

[Derakon]

Regarding pits: big dangerous pits later on are great (c.f. zoos, graveyards, demon pits, ainu pits). Orc and troll pits are a bit scary when they first show up, but they'd be about equally scary at a quarter the size without requiring quite so much holding down of movement keys to clear out. Dragon pits I feel a bit similarly about -- they're mostly dangerous for the really big dragons they can have, not for the 40 baby dragons that "guard" the perimeter. So I'd say the problem isn't so much the pit frequency as it is the size -- the only pits that should stay big are the ones that never really get completely trivialized.

[fizzix]

the only pits that should stay big are the ones that never really get completely trivialized.

But even then, it's usually just avoid unless you can banish everything inside in which case do that.

If you had to choose between all pits being small or all pits being large which would you choose?

[Malak Darkhunter]

I might be a little different, but I find vaults very exciting, and interesting to look at, so I support the idea of seeing vaults earlier, if the smaller ones appear early. I have never much cared for large monster pits, I feel like they slow down the game, I think small sized monster pits are okay though. If they were generated pretty rarely it could be an exciting moment for the game instead of how they are now pretty common, and lackluster.

an interesting idea would be to make vaults more like pits, you could have undead vaults, dragon vaults, zoo vaults, etc.

[Derakon]

But even then, it's usually just avoid unless you can banish everything inside in which case do that.

But avoiding is much harder when the pit is big than when it's small. Ignore banishing everything since that's a mage-only shtick; their reward for putting up with being a mage for the last 40-odd levels.

I guess in my ideal world pit size would ramp up as some function of the pit's native depth, and then the pit would stop being generated a few levels after it hits max size.

[Therem Harth]

Hmm. Keep in mind the following is somewhat uninformed, as I rarely make it to high levels outside of savescumming and debug mode.

My first thought was "vaults are okay, pits should be more common early." That's what I voted for... But there are some serious problems with those ideas, namely that

- Vaults make things easy because monsters are stuck in them

- Pits often make things hard because monsters can easily escape from them

So having more vaults and fewer pits later on would probably result in the late game being too easy.

My reconsidered thoughts are as follows...

Vaults should be rare. They should also be awesome finds, with reward proportionate to risk. I'm not sure how much has changed since Angband 3.2.0, but last I checked most vaults (other than nests, GCVs, and maybe bubble vaults) weren't really worth raiding. Ideally I think that all vaults should be worth raiding - if you're willing to take a definite risk.

Pits should be common, but not too common. Common enough to make the game more dangerous, but not enough to make it tedious. Not sure exactly what a good frequency would be.

There should be more monsters and more floor items stuffed into each level. Particularly at low levels. But you already know I think this.

[buzzkill]

How about making the pit slightly smaller... so that the moat can be double wide... and no doors, instead 4 open passages, one in each side. Why would a "pit" (cave, lair) have a door anyhow?

[TJS]

How about making the pit slightly smaller... so that the moat can be double wide... and no doors, instead 4 open passages, one in each side. Why would a "pit" (cave, lair) have a door anyhow?

Yes I'd like to see them in a cave-like room not a perfectly rectangular room which just feels odd. Looks like they're lining up for assembly at school.

Regarding size I think they could be a lot more frequent, but much smaller with just 10-12 monsters in them. With pits you can either handle them which makes them massively tedious to go through (and equally tedious to go through all the loot) or you have to avoid them completely if they're too dangerous. With a smaller pit you might be tempted to take them on even with monsters very dangerous to your level if there's quite a few items in them. You'll never take on a pit with 50 monsters that can kill you in line of sight, but if there's just 1-2 dangerous monsters then you might chance using teleport other to get to the treasure.

[fizzix]

So I'm going to play around with smaller pit sizes on my personal version and see how it goes.

Making nests variably sized is trivial (and I've done so.) Making pits variably sized is much harder. I've settled to making them 4x11 instead of 4x23 and allowing two per level.

I also changed the frequencies of pits to be flatter and rarer and vaults to be flatter and commoner.

buzzkills idea of removing the door and making 4 open passages is interesting. I may try that. I'm not keen on the double width moat though.

As far as 3.5 (the purpose of this thread), changing pit size is not out of the question especially since a *lot* of people here seem to want it, but it might need something more clever than my hackish approach. Frequency can definitely change even if size remains the same.

[Magnate]

Have you looked at the generation code in Sangband? There's a specific type of monster lair that's a whole set of interconnecting rooms (e.g. like an orc or giant stronghold). So there's roughly as many monsters as a pit, but they're more spread out and the whole thing feels much more believable and interesting.

[fizzix]

Have you looked at the generation code in Sangband? There's a specific type of monster lair that's a whole set of interconnecting rooms (e.g. like an orc or giant stronghold). So there's roughly as many monsters as a pit, but they're more spread out and the whole thing feels much more believable and interesting.

There are lots of things like this that i'd like to make. But I dread fitting them into the current angband generation scheme. (the larger something is the less likely it will get built) Luckily, they'll trivially fit into a better designed top-down generation algorithm like in pyrel.

I think for V we're going to be stuck with a single room pit/nest format. If someone wants to design a procedural algorithm for filling a random sized pit with monsters, then I'll try to implement it.

[Derakon]

I'm not keen on the double width moat though.

Are you kidding? That's a brilliant way to make the pits harder by getting rid of convenient nearby corners to fight in.

[fizzix]

Are you kidding? That's a brilliant way to make the pits harder by getting rid of convenient nearby corners to fight in.

No I'm not kidding, and it has nothing to do with the goodness of the idea and everything to do with the asinine dungeon blocking system in the V codebase that I'm not going to muck with. If the moats were double wide, then the monster living area could at most be 3 high. There is a hard limit of 11 on the total height of the room including walls. Relaxing this could happen but it would make pits harder to place. Really the dungeon generation algorithm in V is so frustrating that I'm really looking forward to relieving myself of its limitations.

With respect to the idea itself, wouldn't it just move the fighting to the corridors outside the moat? That's where I usually fight anyway because I can't get to the moat before the monsters come after me.

[TJS]

Are you kidding? That's a brilliant way to make the pits harder by getting rid of convenient nearby corners to fight in.

Actually I'm not sure it's a good idea as it stands. Double width moats will mean that people will only take them on if they are easily powerful enough to deal with the monsters in the pits. So more people will avoid them unless they are trivial to deal with making them even more boring.

Pits should be a risk/reward temptation for the player rather than something to avoid at all costs.

Now the routine is:

1) See dangerous pit
2) Move to the other side of the map or if not just leave the level entirely

I would suggest making pits only appear at levels where they will generally be challenging for the player, reduce them in size and then give them at least 1-2 exceptional drops to be make them tempting to tackle.