Things I don't like about current V (long-ish)

[debo]

Has anyone here played poscheng? I'm pretty sure dying of starvation is a real danger against the final boss, as he hits to make you mega hungry while summoning and doing a billion other things. I've seen clouded fight him several times, and I thought it was sort of neat. Maybe not a good fit for V, though.

[fizzix]

I agree. The solution isn't to remove food, or 'change' it into something else. Here's what I'd try...

Go play DCSS which does these things and more. Food is still an annoyance, and hardly interesting in any way. There are only two reasons to have food in the game that I can see. Or if you're short on time, just listen to this.

1) Make it a true clock. You are forced to descend in the dungeon because you can no longer find food on your current level. Nick has expressly forbidden this sort of mechanic in vanilla play and I can't say I disagree.

2) Make it a consumable management situation. Food gives positive effects but fills you up. Here food is used as a limitation management. You can't eat too many "healing packets" before you are full. We sort of had this with the gorged status previously, but that was universally hated. I don't think this is a good idea either. It's far better served by having a contamination counter from too many potions being quaffed.

Furthermore in both cases, food requires tight balance from the maintainers for very little extra fun for the players.

In any other cases, food is dumb. (This includes Sil. You only need one hunger clock, and Sil has the min-depth clock.)

I also think light should always be everburning. Yeah it's unrealistic. But light resource management is also boring and gives very limited fun for the players.

[buzzkill]

Regarding changes to food...

I like the general idea, but it does kind of mean food becomes potions in a different form. Possible solutions would be to make all food perishable, or to make food have a slight slowing effect (so it's not really a battle item).

I agree. The solution isn't to remove food, or 'change' it into something else. Here's what I'd try.

Eliminate the spells (mostly): Maybe leave a high level, high cost hunger spell for specific class(s) in the late game. Make scrolls exceedingly rare and never sold or eliminate them outright. At the very least, change satisfy hunger to a potion. That just makes more sense.

Eliminate food from the stores (mostly): Bye bye buying a stack of rations. Sell single quantity, varied food items (meats, breads, veggies). "That was a tasty carrot. You are still hungry."

Make food more plentiful and varied in the dungeon (and no food floor generated on revisited levels): Starvation shouldn't be a concern as long as the player keeps moving (preferably down). Varying the food means it will be less likely to stack, so if one wants to stockpile food, it's going take some space in the pack.

Make food provide less nutrition (maybe lessen the size of @'s stomach also): IMO it just makes sense that @ should eat a large meal (eat many different food items at the same time requiring many turns) every once in a while, or snack continuously.

Make deeper food, better food: Ease off of the 'hunger game' in the second half of the dungeon. New food types (just like everything else) will begin to appear in the deep. These deep food items will function better (just like everything else) leaving the player to focus on staying alive.

Re perishable food: I like the concept, but wouldn't want it in V, as goes for most of the fine suggestions made in this thread, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody.

[half]

Out of curiosity, in what ways were archers made dumber?

They currently fight in melee when pinned against a wall, and only flee from that position if afraid. They used to do better by always trying to flee from that situation to get back to archery. This is commented in the source as 'artificial stupidity'.

[Scatha]

Fibonacci would make some sense, too.

I think it would be quite unintuitive if your first source of resistance didn't do anything.

[fph]

"N levels of resistance will reduce breath damage by 1/(Nth prime number)"

Fibonacci would make some sense, too.

[dos350]

things i dont like:

treasure dtect doesnt show treasure like it used 2

neuter gender

new lvl feelings worse than old 1s

besides this its great game!

[donalde]

I actually really dislike percentile resists, although I like it for display purposes. The reasoning is that 15% resistance is very marginal and not something useful in any way. 50% is. Furthermore, I think it makes sense for resistances to not be a linear addition. Two pieces of resist material should not add up linearly, rather each one should have some diminishing returns. It becomes very difficult to both make single resisting items somewhat worthwhile, while ensuring that multiple of those items don't make it trivial.

How about nonlinear percentage resist? 1st gives say 48%, next item adds 24% on it, then 12% and final adds 6%, you end up 4 resistance pieces giving immunity to basic element, and 90% reduction to damage?

[Patashu]

I agree that Sil's archers are on the edge. There used to be more of them and it was a bit too frustrating. They used to be a bit cleverer and that was also too frustrating, so they are basically pushing things as far as they can reasonably go.

Out of curiosity, in what ways were archers made dumber?

[MattB]

Current Vanilla equipment optimization is an interesting problem: you want to cover as many "slots" as possible, as efficiently as possible -- i.e. with minimal redundancy, because redundant equipment could be better-spent on stat boosts or covering other slots.

If you introduce stacking resists, then it becomes basically impossible to "solve" the equipment optimization. On the one hand, this does mean that basically every item could potentially be useful (if you just want to eke out a little more resistance). On the other hand, "solved" characters are very satisfying, in part because they happen so rarely, and it seems a shame to take that potential away from the game.

I'm completely with Derakon here.
I was just trying to work out how to formulate my argument when I saw someone had already done it perfectly.

[taptap]

"N levels of resistance will reduce breath damage by 1/(Nth prime number)"

yup, it continues with 1/9 though

[Monkey Face]

My thought is that if resistances were to stack, there be a maximum short of immunity and that immunity be separately available from specific artifacts (at least for the basic resistances).

Unless it has changed in 3.5, I don't think teleport other is overpowered as long as it is not a beam and has no chance to become a beam. If I'm clearing a vault and there are only one or two monsters I can't handle, it's nice to send them to another part of the level and not have them come back after me right away.

[debo]

"N levels of resistance will reduce breath damage by 1/(Nth prime number)"

[Nick]

Longer answer.

Problem: Food is useless

Possible solution: Remove the hunger bar. Some current food items (rations of bread) disappear. Other food items (waybread, wine) can have buffing or healing effects. If desired, certain powerful food items can be "perishable", meaning that they cannot be carried between floors. This allows potentially powerful food items to be generated with the assumption that they'll be used on that floor and not hoarded.

I like the general idea, but it does kind of mean food becomes potions in a different form. Possible solutions would be to make all food perishable, or to make food have a slight slowing effect (so it's not really a battle item).

Problem: Resistances are unintuitive

Proposed solution: Each basic resistance class (fire, cold, elec, acid, poison) has 5 resistance levels. The damage reduction for each level is something like 1/2, 1/3, 1/5, 1/9, immunity. so 2 levels is the current "single resist" and 4 levels is the current "double resist." I'm not sure whether 5 levels = immunity is a good idea, or if we should cap it at four. I'm sort of thinking that immunity should just be immunity to pack damage + 1/9 damage reduction. Gear can have multiple levels of resist. For example, a shield of resist fire could have 2 levels, but a shield of resistance could have 1 level of each of the 4 base elements. Resistance spells can add one level of resistance. For the higher level "elements" (nether, chaos, nexus etc.) I propose that we drop the stupid variable resistance crap and make it a straight damage reduction + immunity to side effects. How much to reduce is undecided, and partially depends on whether we change the next problem.

This is pretty much exactly the Oangband resistance system, apart from numerical details. It is essentially an approximation to percentage resistances which stack by fractions of damage taken multiply. This is actually how the V base + poison temporary + permanent resistances stack.

Problem: Monster breaths are too powerful

Proposed solution: Breath damage reduces with distance to the player. It is no longer a ball effect, rather it's a ray with some max distance. Furthermore, monsters do not breathe if there's another monster in between themselves and the player that is not immune to the effect. Lastly, monsters that breathe something are no longer guaranteed immunity. Rather they get 2 resistance levels (1/3 damage), or 1 resistance level for higher elements. Monsters can also get the IM_XXXX flag which does guarantee immunity. This changes a lot of late game combat. It'll take some experimentation to decide whether it's an improvement or not. It might be worth considering nerfing some player ranged abilities to make sure a player can't just kite an enemy.

Again, this is close to the O, FA, NPP model (without the changes to monster immunity and fellow feeling for intervening monsters). I like it, not least because it means that ball spells and breaths are actually different things.

Problem: Player utility spells are too powerful

Proposed solution: If multiple sources of damage are fixed, then it seems a late level player can survive multiple high level monsters at once. Then we can impose stuff like monsters that resist teleport, or areas where teleport is not available. Destruction is more of a problem. I had a patch once which instead of removing monsters from the level, it pushed them outside the destruction zone. So it bought the player a few turns. I propose we bring something like this in the game and also give players negative status effects like heavy stun, confusion (ignore resist) which makes destruction also require consumable consumption. If this path is taken, you will no longer be able to remove monsters from the level short of banishment, so we will also need to limit/weaken undefeatable annoyance monsters (some uniques come to mind).

I like the direction of these ideas a lot. Note that O/FA make vaults immune to destruction, which is a pretty big nerf. The general idea of making zones where the rules change is one I've been playing with too, and it does open up many possibilities.

Problem: monsters behave boringly

Why is this a problem: Monsters with ranged attacks don't try to use them. There's no way to anticipate powerful attacks like breath spells. An optimized use of spells is out of the question, so some randomness is needed. Nevertheless we can improve on some things.

Proposed solution: Monsters prefer ranged attacks if available. Monsters that are given the RANGED flag do not advance towards @, if they choose not to attack a turn they retreat. If retreating puts them out of range, they stay still. We can steal more advanced monster behavior, like in Sil, but I don't think it's necessary. Let's just make the archer standing in a corridor to be a dangerous enemy that needs to be dealt with.

I don't necessarily agree that optimised use of spells is bad - there just needs to be a downside for the monster so they can't just spam their best spell. Most of the 4GAI variants (yes, yes, O, FA, S, NPP) do this with monster mana, which runs the risk of being just another monster health bar you need to exhaust if it's not handled carefully. Archers in these variants tend to be brutal, but in a balanced kind of way

[taptap]

Whatever you do to resists, 1/2 1/3 1/5 is a really odd sequence.