The Hardest part of Angband

[Timo Pietilä]

Simple monster knowledge, such as Red Dragons are resistant to fire, Black to acid, White to cold, etc, and that they breath that element for great damage should be pre-populated. Uniques are legends of the land, much like artifacts. There should be some knowledge imparted to the adventurer. Gorlim is a dangerous spell caster, Kavlax's heads breath different elements and have killed many adventurers, etc. Clues to let people have some idea of what they're facing, but not enough to allow them to target a weakness (unless it is common knowledge), or to work out exactly if they're safe.

I have sometimes thought of systems like what I saw in one of the pen & paper roleplaying game which gave monsters "scales" like size XXXL for enormous dragon and XXXS for annoying insects.

It could be useful for give some vague description of different physical attributes of monster in their monster memory entry before you actually know what it can do. For example Drolem, if you see it first time and read the description

"A constructed dragon, the drolem has massive strength. Powerful spells weaved during its creation make it a fearsome adversary. Its eyes show little intelligence, but it has been instructed to destroy all it meets."

you are not much smarter about it's capabilities. A balance drake (not dragon, drake) description sounds just as bad:

"A mighty dragon, the balance drake seeks to maintain the Cosmic Balance, and despises your feeble efforts to destroy evil."

even that it is far less dangerous.

Neither of those really tell you anything about the exact nature of the creature. Only clues you get from drolem is that its symbol green, and it is dragon, so you might be able to expect poison breath. How bad that could be isn't even hinted anywhere.

[Mondkalb]

What about color coding monsters in the monster list; FAangband uses colors to indicate the danger of the current dungeon level.
Something similar could be applied to monsters; there is already the red coding for OOD and purple for uniques, maybe some colors could be added for indication of how powerful a monster is or if it is of higher level than the player char?
Or perhaps some icons could be added to the monster name to indicate breathers, elemental attacks, spellcasters, and so on.

[Timo Pietilä]

What about color coding monsters in the monster list; FAangband uses colors to indicate the danger of the current dungeon level.
Something similar could be applied to monsters; there is already the red coding for OOD and purple for uniques, maybe some colors could be added for indication of how powerful a monster is or if it is of higher level than the player char?

Not too much info though. We don't want to remove those precious "it hit for *HOW MANY* points??" -situations.

[fizzix]

Not too much info though. We don't want to remove those precious "it hit for *HOW MANY* points??" -situations.

Eh, I disagree with you on this. At least, I think we should get rid of the out of the blue ones, and leave the "you were careless and forgot to wear cold resist around Huan" ones (yeah...i did that...) Even knowing everything you can still get surprised by a big attack.

In other words, the player should know the drolem breathes for roughly 600 damage in some way. Hiding this feels unfair.

[Timo Pietilä]

In other words, the player should know the drolem breathes for roughly 600 damage in some way. Hiding this feels unfair.

800. Or has this been changed....hm, it is. 2200 listed in monster.txt HP attribute. That's just 733. Boo. AMHD is even less, just 1848?? That's odd.

What about dracolich, does that still do max damage with nether... no, it doesn't.

hmmm.....looks like this is quite old change (done at the time with new HP calc system it seems). Weird.

[dhegler]

Eh, I disagree with you on this. At least, I think we should get rid of the out of the blue ones, and leave the "you were careless and forgot to wear cold resist around Huan" ones (yeah...i did that...) Even knowing everything you can still get surprised by a big attack.

In other words, the player should know the drolem breathes for roughly 600 damage in some way. Hiding this feels unfair.

I am with Fizzix on his suggestions... And maybe I did not realize the first placement of positions was different from:

#######p#
#@
#########

When you can target several squares beyond the "p" and get your arrow/bolt/magic to turn the corner at the right spot to hit a monster that can't hit you back.

Resistances are a serious part of the game and trying to get double resist in some and at least one in others is key to staying alive. However, not knowing that a monster has an unresistable attack (mana bolt, water, etc) does seem unfair. It is basic knowledge to have FA and probably rConfuse by lev 20 or so, along with most/all basic resists. However, nothing prepares you for finding out about non-resistables.

Anyone ever think of making a resist for the "unresistables"? It may make it much more strategic once you have so many resists that you can't choose them all, or it could get more tedious for those who resist-swap (which I typically do not, except for maybe poison early).

[fizzix]

Anyone ever think of making a resist for the "unresistables"? It may make it much more strategic once you have so many resists that you can't choose them all, or it could get more tedious for those who resist-swap (which I typically do not, except for maybe poison early).

I think every game uses resist swapping to some extent, Carrying swap gear is pretty common across roguelikes, and I generally view it as a positive, especially in games where inventory slots are limited. However, if it's not *easy* to swap, and it needs to be done often, then it can really detract from gameplay. (ring swapping right now is the biggest problem in V because of the extra keystroke) Tome gets around the swapping tedium problem by generally allowing the player to kit gear for areas rather than individual monsters. Sil play seems to involve a lot of swapping, and it can be pretty tedious (although I suck at Sil...).

Right now V has probably the right number of resists based on what can usually show up on gear. You very rarely achieve full resist, but you can typically ignore some slots (confusion by level 20 is super optimistic by the way.) I think we might do better by giving partial resists rather than full resists.

I've always really disliked the permanent and static resist situation. I hope we can change that to something more transparent at some point.

[Timo Pietilä]

Resistances are a serious part of the game and trying to get double resist in some and at least one in others is key to staying alive.

Resists for high elements are not reliable. It's the side-effect of the thing why you might want it, not damage reduction. They definitely are not the key to stay alive. If you feel that you need all resist you are doing something wrong, or at least you could do something better. We could well remove all damage reductions from high element resists and game would be nearly as easy as it is now.

[Derakon]

I wouldn't go that far. Just because you can't count on a resist for anything better than ~15% damage reduction doesn't mean it won't often reduce damage a lot more -- you could get 85% reduction instead, for example. Your argument is kind of like saying that because a spell does 1d100 damage, it's useless because you can't count on it to deal more than 1 damage. Overly reductionist, in other words.

[Timo Pietilä]

I wouldn't go that far. Just because you can't count on a resist for anything better than ~15% damage reduction doesn't mean it won't often reduce damage a lot more -- you could get 85% reduction instead, for example.

I didn't say resistances are useless. I said that without them, if you have protection to side-effect, game would be nearly as easy as it is now. There are far more effective ways to prevent damage than resists.

[Philip]

I wouldn't go that far. Just because you can't count on a resist for anything better than ~15% damage reduction doesn't mean it won't often reduce damage a lot more -- you could get 85% reduction instead, for example. Your argument is kind of like saying that because a spell does 1d100 damage, it's useless because you can't count on it to deal more than 1 damage. Overly reductionist, in other words.

That's not quite the same thing. Player characters have low hitpoints and are threatened by burst damage. Monsters have massive hitpoint pools and not much healing, so we wear down monsters through avoiding damage, healing and having good average damage. Resists are good for a couple things, but mostly reducing maximum damage to a survivable level, avoiding side-effects and for nether, conserving healing supplies.

[OOD Town drunk]

Perhaps monster knowledge could be acquired via esp. At least for intelligent monsters. That would likely help newer players without breaking the game.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Since full knowledge would mark @ as a cheat, I shamelessly savescummed through the new version a few times, Probing everything. Now, with a full-knowledge Savefile I play without savescuming. It was a pain, but if I win the character won't be marked as a cheat. Seems to me that the competition characters should always have full monster knowledge to level the playing field.

[debo]

We should just have full monster knowledge all the time so you don't have to do these ridiculous things

[Timo Pietilä]

Since full knowledge would mark @ as a cheat, I shamelessly savescummed through the new version a few times, Probing everything. Now, with a full-knowledge Savefile I play without savescuming. It was a pain, but if I win the character won't be marked as a cheat. Seems to me that the competition characters should always have full monster knowledge to level the playing field.

You can get full monster memory using debug-mode. There is a command to acquire full monster memory: ^ar which writes monster memory to your savefile. If you then quit and start fresh using that same file you have full monster memory. You can do reverse with ^aW (wipe recall).

I was thinking reverse for competition. No monster memory whatsoever. It is people that compete each others, no need to level the playing field. Unless whoever comes up with competition char wants to. It's pretty arbitrary, and I feel that monster memory is not necessity in any way.