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One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. -
I think you can bystep those issues if you extend the concept to every item type and also introduce backpacks or belts that can be equipped and changed to customize @'s item carrying profile... A warrior will want a pack with plenty of potion and weapon slots and largely disregard book or wand storage, while a priest will need space for books and staves more than for weapons or potions. A smaller number of generic any-item slots would still have to be present.
You can also make it less opaque with UI tricks by including a shaded text in empty slots to indicate what item type and the max number carriable there.
Having said that, a change THAT drastic is probably not V territory... but I'd be interested to see what it looks like in a variant.Comment
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As far as the final fight goes, I think a higher priority is teaching M not to fall for simple LOS tricks. It cheapens the battle.
A.Ironband - http://angband.oook.cz/ironband/Comment
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Uhh, Angband is about to be revived, nice.
I like many ideas, while forced descend is not so bad, other possible "anti grinding" measures can potentially ruin gameplay, and make it like Sil.
So IMHO unavoidably increasing danger is good, while limiting resources/time in any way is horrible. Probably simple idea to make danger level equal to
MAX (dlvl, clvl*2), while keeping rewards only dlvl dependent might work.Comment
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There's tons of potential "abuses" for fighting Morgoth that really amount to being willing to use all the supplies you've gathered throughout the game. We can make the final fight harder by simply making those supplies not work (e.g. letting monsters resist Teleport Other / Destruction), but I think really we ought to reward creative problem-solving against Morgoth. The real problem with the final fight is that the community has shared their approaches to dealing with him, so they're "common knowledge" for us now. Someone who isn't on the forums won't have anywhere near such a huge advantage against him.
That said, the specific issue of LOS abuse is not limited to Morgoth, and can be relatively easily fixed by tweaking the LOS rules. My preferred approach is to allow sight of monsters in hockeystick situations, but only allow targeting if the monster can target you back. In other words, for vision you project from the player to the monster; for projectiles you project from the monster to the player.Comment
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I think that should be reversed. Currently you don't have sight in hockey stick situation until the very last knight move, but can target, and that's wrong. You should be able to target only places you actually see.
Keep the asymmetry, it works both ways and is quite important feature in battles, but allow only targeting places you see. That would help a lot against that abuse. It would also makes sense: how do you accurately target some place you can't even see?Comment
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Okay, I spoke a bit blithely. Consider this situation:Currently, @ can see and target p, and p cannot see nor target @. What I meant to suggest is that @ should be able to see but not target p, while p cannot see nor target @. You're correct in that my original suggestion would have resulted in p being able to target but not see @, which is bizarre.Code:###p# .@..# #####
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Does the "cannot see" distinction matter in monster->player interactions? I thought monsters had perfect awareness (in terms of positioning) of the player at all times as long as they are inside the awareness radius?
Anyway, it seems that your suggestion is trivially worked around by any character with some degree of splash damage.
The only real solution ISTM is to make LoS symmetrical and to give monsters an awareness of the splash damage of their own spells. (That is, to target the squares adjacent to where the player is.)
Of course that may require further rejigging of spell damage, but...
EDIT: Actually, I thing Heng, Entro and Cheng sort of have this right: Randomize energy slightly so that speed doesn't become such a (dependable) dominating factor in the LoS game.Comment
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While this is true, in practice splash-damage spells are pretty inefficient against single targets, especially if the target is not in the center of the impact (since damage falls off with distance from the center). At that point I kind of feel like if the player wants to punish themselves with a very boring and tedious fight, then that's their decision.
I think Heng et al have monsters who can hit the player with splash damage even when they can't see the player. If you ported that straight to Vanilla then you'd wreck the game balance of course, since Vanilla is heavily reliant on very narrow LOS manipulation (you're often 1 tile from being in sight of a lot of monsters).The only real solution ISTM is to make LoS symmetrical and to give monsters an awareness of the splash damage of their own spells. (That is, to target the squares adjacent to where the player is.)
I'm really not a fan of this; it feels like it introduces too many opportunities for random "screw-you" events where the RNG just up and decides to kill you. I think the problems we're talking about are solvable without resorting to such inelegant hacks.EDIT: Actually, I thing Heng, Entro and Cheng sort of have this right: Randomize energy slightly so that speed doesn't become such a (dependable) dominating factor in the LoS game.Comment
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Yeah, I was totally getting Castle of the Winds vibes from the 'specific-item-type inventory slots' idea, too. (In particular, in Castle of the Winds, you have a big backpack - which can store items until its weight/bulk limit is hit, but you can't use anything in it) - two hands (anything in your hands can be used immediately, but usually one hand is taken up by your weapon) and a belt (the slots of a belt acted like your hand slots in that anything in them could be used immediately - there were belts of 2, 3 and 4 slots then a wand quiver belt with a bunch of wand slots and two free slots, then a utility belt with a bunch of potion slots and scroll slots and two free slots, or something like that anyway). And it played a bit with this idea by having staves that were typically too bulky to fit on a belt, so you'd have to have them in your hands, the aforementioned item-specific-type belt slots and so on.
(I also remember being able to do some funny things, like place shoes in your belt slot if you needed to carry back just one more thing to sell and didn't use your belt yet...)My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashuComment
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Asymmetric line of sight and ability to hit is an anachronism probably due to an oversight in the original code.
If you can see someone then it makes sense that they can see you too and if you can fire an arrow to hit them then they can fire back along the same line without hitting a wall.
It is one of those things that people have got used to and built some tactics around so would be sad to see it go, but really it needs to be fixed.Comment
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