melee hit probability

[mushroom patch]

As it stands now, vanilla angband is, imo, largely a memory game. Do you know the monster list or at least the dangerous part of it? The core game mechanics don't support a guessing game about what monsters can throw at you. No saving throw melee effects like paralyze and confuse, breath weapons that one shot you without a resistance that appears infrequently before the depth at which such breath weapons appear, etc. make for a game no sensible person would want to play without at least having the possibility of determining whether these things can or can't happen in a given encounter.

You hit the yammering icky thing. The yammering icky thing wakes up.
The yammering icky thing touches you. You are paralyzed! --more--

There are a ton of rough edges to smooth over before even thinking about introducing monsters with randomized abilities. Frankly, vanilla is what it is. Randomized monsters is too much of a departure, even for something that would appear five years from now. And it would most likely make the game worse, not better.

[Nick]

As it stands now, vanilla angband is, imo, largely a memory game. Do you know the monster list or at least the dangerous part of it? The core game mechanics don't support a guessing game about what monsters can throw at you. No saving throw melee effects like paralyze and confuse, breath weapons that one shot you without a resistance that appears infrequently before the depth at which such breath weapons appear, etc. make for a game no sensible person would want to play without at least having the possibility of determining whether these things can or can't happen in a given encounter.

Good points, well made. I think that the history of the game is fairly illuminating here, with the following factors being big contributors:

1. When Angband (and more so Moria) came out there were far fewer games around and still less close to filling the niche that Angband did. So people were prepared to spend a lot more time on learning the minute details, and less likely to get confused by similar mechanics in other games.
2. In a similar vein, less games meant that people would give Angband more of a go; today a player put off in the first hour or so would just move on to a different game, but back then there were fewer options to do that.
3. The alternative was Nethack. I'm not kidding. If Angband has "unfair" death mechanics, then Nethack has ten (or maybe a hundred) times as many.

So do we need to change anything, and if so what? I think this thread has veered enough from the original topic already, but I'm planning to write another philosophy post about game balance. Real soon now

[mushroom patch]

From ##crawl learndb:

nethack
[...]
5. a fantasy household accident simulator

When it comes to core mechanics, angband has a lot going for it. It has a pretty well tuned combat system, which counts for a lot. I think the suggestion of filling in missing links in the monster progression is good. In particular, dragon tiers between wyrm and ancient and ancient and mature would help. Perhaps better would be to increase the native depth of baby dragons and increase their stats accordingly, shifting those between baby and wyrm up to space them more evenly, with mature being much closer to the current "ancient" tier and ancient getting somewhat closer to the current wyrm tier. It might be worth looking at the hydras too. It seems to me there's a jump in there somewhere, but I'm not quite sure where it is. Smoothing that out would also be worthwhile.

If you want to do something that adds a lot of value to vanilla, it would be incorporating new AI and monster behavior in variants like Sil (fourth generation AI or whatever they call it) to create monsters that are smarter about finding you/harder to manipulate pathing-wise and wandering monsters that move around before they notice you, so that your encounters will sometimes be joined by potentially unexpected monsters. Stealth is much too good in current angband, but the answer isn't a straightforward nerf, imo.

[Nick]

If you want to do something that adds a lot of value to vanilla, it would be incorporating new AI and monster behavior in variants like Sil (fourth generation AI or whatever they call it) to create monsters that are smarter about finding you/harder to manipulate pathing-wise and wandering monsters that move around before they notice you, so that your encounters will sometimes be joined by potentially unexpected monsters. Stealth is much too good in current angband, but the answer isn't a straightforward nerf, imo.

Smarter monster pathing will be happening, and soon - both takkaria and I found an incredibly dumb part of the current AI, and had to really struggle not to fix it

There are lots of possibilities in monster awareness, too - Sil's wandering monsters, DaJAngband's awake but not aware, and NPP's wariness (only applied to monster trap detection, I think) are all things I want to explore.

[Timo Pietilä]

As it stands now, vanilla angband is, imo, largely a memory game. Do you know the monster list or at least the dangerous part of it? The core game mechanics don't support a guessing game about what monsters can throw at you.

Not guessing game, but point is that you don't need to guess if you know the rules of the game.

If you let monster one-shot you, then you are doing something wrong, and that is not the fact that you didn't know that it can one-shot you.

No saving throw melee effects like paralyze and confuse, breath weapons that one shot you without a resistance that appears infrequently before the depth at which such breath weapons appear, etc.

You do get saving throw against paralyze. Also AC helps. AC above +8 renders floating eye harmless. Confuse you can survive. etc.

[Estie]

Smarter monster pathing will be happening, and soon - both takkaria and I found an incredibly dumb part of the current AI, and had to really struggle not to fix it

There are lots of possibilities in monster awareness, too - Sil's wandering monsters, DaJAngband's awake but not aware, and NPP's wariness (only applied to monster trap detection, I think) are all things I want to explore.

Am I the only one who doesnt like the "smarter" run away behaviour ? The only effect is that it enforces a long and boring waiting routine for each of the 1000000 monsters that have to die before the endfight. It is NOT smart in the slightest, since they invariably return to get killed.

I am not suggesting to completely remove any "run away" routines. But I would avoid makining such changes globally. *Some* efficient runners can be fun, all of them trying to be isnt.

[mushroom patch]

Agreed. Monsters would be smarter to stay away permanently once they've gotten their asses kicked once. If you had to chase them to get the kill, there'd be some tactical significance, since you generally don't want to move around a level any more than necessary.

[quarague]

Monster smartness is a huge and complicated subject. I agree that making all monster just run away when they see they are losing the fight would make horrible game play, although it would be the smart thing to do from the monsters perspective. I think for good gameplay most monsters should be fairly stupid (mostly that means being predictable and refrain from annoying behaviour). Some individual thoughts:
Currently hounds try to engage the player in big open rooms instead of in corridors. I think this is a good example of AI behaviour and some but not all monsters should do that. I never quite understood why hounds ie animals are smart enough for that but orcs/trolls ie humanoids are not but that is more a flavour/lore topic.
Some monsters try to run away when hurt, ideally I would restrict this behaviour to some (cowardly?) humanoids but make it appear fairly consistently.
Some intelligent spell casters should deliberatly exploit player weaknesses instead of choosing their spells at random, the 'intelligent' flag would be good way to do that, although I don't think that's what it currently does.
Maybe dragon families could show mother protects young behaviour, but I not sure how to implement that.
Undead would be good candidates for stupid behaviour.

[Bogatyr]

Monster smartness is a huge and complicated subject. I agree that making all monster just run away when they see they are losing the fight would make horrible game play, although it would be the smart thing to do from the monsters perspective. I think for good gameplay most monsters should be fairly stupid (mostly that means being predictable and refrain from annoying behaviour). Some individual thoughts:
Currently hounds try to engage the player in big open rooms instead of in corridors. I think this is a good example of AI behaviour and some but not all monsters should do that. I never quite understood why hounds ie animals are smart enough for that but orcs/trolls ie humanoids are not but that is more a flavour/lore topic.
Some monsters try to run away when hurt, ideally I would restrict this behaviour to some (cowardly?) humanoids but make it appear fairly consistently.
Some intelligent spell casters should deliberatly exploit player weaknesses instead of choosing their spells at random, the 'intelligent' flag would be good way to do that, although I don't think that's what it currently does.
Maybe dragon families could show mother protects young behaviour, but I not sure how to implement that.
Undead would be good candidates for stupid behaviour.

You could reasonably argue that orcs are trained since (hatching?) to attack attack attack and are mercilessly conditioned against retreat. You could also reasonably argue that all monsters in Angband are under the influence of Morgoth to do the same.

[Carnivean]

I never quite understood why hounds ie animals are smart enough for that but orcs/trolls ie humanoids are not but that is more a flavour/lore topic.

The assumption is that Zephyr Hounds are dogs, and dogs are pack animals. Pack animals try to lure stronger prey into a position where they can all attack at the same time, hence out of corridors and into rooms. Lesser dogs show the same behaviour in game.

Orcs travel in packs, but don't think like dogs.

[Monkey Face]

Undead would be good candidates for stupid behaviour.

Not so sure about that. I'm pretty sure some of my best friends are undead (at least first thing in the morning) but I don't go so far as to call them stupid!

[debo]

The assumption is that Zephyr Hounds are dogs, and dogs are pack animals. Pack animals try to lure stronger prey into a position where they can all attack at the same time, hence out of corridors and into rooms. Lesser dogs show the same behaviour in game.

Orcs travel in packs, but don't think like dogs.

It is a little known fact that the glyph Z is used for hounds because their inventor realized that it was more fun to go to sleep IRL than it was to play through any floor that spawned packs of them.

[Timo Pietilä]

I never quite understood why hounds ie animals are smart enough for that but orcs/trolls ie humanoids are not but that is more a flavour/lore topic.

That's simple, dogs and other canines are smarter than most humanoids in the game .

Seriously speaking, smart instinct can be smarter than stupid thinking. Also if you have ever followed pack of African wild dogs hunting they show thinking and co-ordination that rivals most humans (read:untrained humans) in capturing the preys. Many animals are far smarter than we give them credit.

aaand back to game, I wouldn't mind if group humanoids would try to surround player by dividing the group, but that would probably require a lot smarter AI than game currently has.

[mushroom patch]

I'm having a hard time following the turn this thread has taken. None of the monsters in angband are smart. Are we still talking about the same game?

[debo]

I'm having a hard time following the turn this thread has taken. None of the monsters in angband are smart. Are we still talking about the same game?

The umpteenth theorycrafting post hits you.
You are confused!