Angband Philosophy II: Magic

[Timo Pietilä]

Gravity hounds are just as rare as drolems! Drolems will also be awake by the time you stumble on them with a normal priest with crappy stealth. They're equal problems.

Drolem rarity is 3, gravity hound rarity is 4. AFAIK bigger number means more rare. So actually drolem is less rare than gravity hounds. It's just that gravity hounds are a pack and appear a lot earlier, while drolem is single monster and appears pretty late (native at dlvl 44 or 2200).

Also it is really rare to get blasted by that poison breath before you see it. 1 in 5 from five different spells means 1/25 chance that it breathes and doesn't do something else.

[fizzix]

I've never understood the fear of time hounds. The HP damage from time breaths isn't very significant. Sure, they can drain you pretty badly, if you get caught out without any escapes -- in which case, what the hell are you doing? Even if you're at normal speed and you spend a turn in full view of an entire pack, you're extremely unlikely to eat more than, say, 3 breath attacks before getting another turn. So that's 3 substantial drains of your stats/experience, which sucks, but isn't going to be remotely fatal.

Gravity and plasma hounds have more mayhem potential, no question. I don't know that gravity hounds need to be moved deeper, though. Just carry proper escapes for your depth, and play carefully.

The problem is that they move faster than the other hounds at the same depth, and breathe for 50 unresistable damage. If you're not at +20 speed, you're likely to eat a lot more than 3 breaths if you are unfortunate enough to teleport into a room of them. Granted, the reduction of monster group size has helped a lot with both time, plasma and gravity not being fatal.

IMO time hounds should either be made the same speed as the other nearby hounds, or the damage should be reduced further, so it's mainly the status effect you fear.

[Derakon]

Personally, I would like gravity hounds to be moved to the same tier as plasma hounds, and time hounds to be moved to the same tier as chaos hounds. I'd also like to see the divisor for time and gravity increased so the damage isn't as high (it's mainly the side effects that should scare you.)

I've never understood the fear of time hounds. The HP damage from time breaths isn't very significant. Sure, they can drain you pretty badly, if you get caught out without any escapes -- in which case, what the hell are you doing? Even if you're at normal speed and you spend a turn in full view of an entire pack, you're extremely unlikely to eat more than, say, 3 breath attacks before getting another turn. So that's 3 substantial drains of your stats/experience, which sucks, but isn't going to be remotely fatal.

Gravity and plasma hounds have more mayhem potential, no question. I don't know that gravity hounds need to be moved deeper, though. Just carry proper escapes for your depth, and play carefully.

[fizzix]

Rods of Detection a bit more common and earlier?

It's not the drolem what I'm afraid when playing priests (they are so rare, and don't wake up easily), but hounds. You don't have any means of detecting gravity hounds without detection or ESP. Group of gravity hounds can kill you by slowing you (no haste) stunning (making spells harder) and by phasing you to bad spot where you definitely didn't want to end up.

But I'm OK with that. It brings a bit excitement into game, not knowing all of time that you are safe. It also teaches you the importance of HP.

Gravity hounds are just as rare as drolems! Drolems will also be awake by the time you stumble on them with a normal priest with crappy stealth. They're equal problems.

Personally, I would like gravity hounds to be moved to the same tier as plasma hounds, and time hounds to be moved to the same tier as chaos hounds. I'd also like to see the divisor for time and gravity increased so the damage isn't as high (it's mainly the side effects that should scare you.)

[Timo Pietilä]

by drolem depth (level 45) a player should have access to at least one of the following.

Method of detection of neutral/visible monsters (detect monsters/reveal monsters/detection)
200+ HP and resist poison (whatever the drolem breath value is) + a mechanism of escape (teleport/teleport other/teleport level/destruction)

This is really close to being satisfied, but it does require more "grinding" than I prefer for priests. Maybe it's just my preference.

Rods of Detection a bit more common and earlier?

It's not the drolem what I'm afraid when playing priests (they are so rare, and don't wake up easily), but hounds. You don't have any means of detecting gravity hounds without detection or ESP. Group of gravity hounds can kill you by slowing you (no haste) stunning (making spells harder) and by phasing you to bad spot where you definitely didn't want to end up.

But I'm OK with that. It brings a bit excitement into game, not knowing all of time that you are safe. It also teaches you the importance of HP.

[AnonymousHero]

I'll dust off the disks then!
Problem is, my PC has major scvhost memory leak issues (something to do with windows update, even though I've disabled it - supposedly). The upshot is that I have to restart my PC several times a day, so maybe no-reload is off the cards for now.

And no worries - no need to apologise!

Use a virtual machine! Btw, it's not necessarily *literally* no-reload. If you hit a random bug which just ends your game, it's usually deemed OK to continue from there. (Etc.)

The idea is just that choices that you make during the game should matter.

EDIT: You'll want something like SCS/SCSII to make it an actual challenge...

[MattB]

You should play BG no-reload more. It's just incredible. Not sure about PS3/Wii/Whatever, but BG2 no-reload is crazy hard and interesting.

I'll dust off the disks then!
Problem is, my PC has major scvhost memory leak issues (something to do with windows update, even though I've disabled it - supposedly). The upshot is that I have to restart my PC several times a day, so maybe no-reload is off the cards for now.

And no worries - no need to apologise!

[AnonymousHero]

No you didn't. Nick did. See post #94.
That was the post I was replying to.
Apologies for any confusion caused.

My bad. Apologies.

[AnonymousHero]

I have many games on PC (including Baldur's Gate), PS3, Wii-U and iPad, but I spend literally ten times more time playing Angband than all the others put together. Yes, literally.

You should play BG no-reload more. It's just incredible. Not sure about PS3/Wii/Whatever, but BG2 no-reload is crazy hard and interesting. It was never intentended to played that way, but it works. OMG, it works!

[MattB]

TBF I don't think that was actually something I said, so...

No you didn't. Nick did. See post #94.
That was the post I was replying to.
Apologies for any confusion caused.

[MattB]

Yes, quite right. I guess I was thinking about people who are looking for a game to play, and how long they'd be prepared to try Angband for before moving on to one of the many other choices

Fair enough - a good point.

Good! Scratch number 5 then

See! We're making progress. Soon you'll have nothing to do at all!

On a serious note, maybe there is a debate here about how much we should change Angband to attract new players, compared with how much we should concentrate on making Angband even greater for the people who already play it.

(Of course, by 'we', I mean 'you'.)

Maybe the answer is that once someone has made a decent iTunes version (Anyone?...Bueller?...Anyone?...Anyone?...), there could be an Angband Lite which is touchscreen and all Shockbolt-y (insert favourite tile artist here) so that it is not to much of a shock to the system. Where you have to survive to level 20 and kill, I don't know, Shagrat, and be told on winning that there is a whole new world of lost eveinings out there on PC/Mac/Linux that is also free!

[AnonymousHero]

It was just the phrase 'so people are less likely to...' that struck me as a massive generalisation.

TBF I don't think that was actually something I said, so...

[AnonymousHero]

Yes, quite right. I guess I was thinking about people who are looking for a game to play, and how long they'd be prepared to try Angband for before moving on to one of the many other choices - but it's probably pretty marginal. Good! Scratch number 5 then

I'm already sold on the whole Angband/Roguelike idea, but I *would* be wary of entirely mehcanical-doesn't-take-into-account-me mechanic.

BTW: There's *NOTHING* like winning BG without ever having your PC die. It's just spectacular. Yeah, it's better than beating Angband and/or whatever...

[Nick]

It was just the phrase 'so people are less likely to...' that struck me as a massive generalisation.

Yes, quite right. I guess I was thinking about people who are looking for a game to play, and how long they'd be prepared to try Angband for before moving on to one of the many other choices - but it's probably pretty marginal. Good! Scratch number 5 then

[MattB]

Truth. I've played a single character in (no-reload) Baldur's Gate Trology for about 1-2 years at this point. (I acknowledge that I'm an edge case simply because I actually do this kind of thing... but we do exist!)

Oh, I'm sure you do!

It was just the phrase 'so people are less likely to...' that struck me as a massive generalisation.

I have many games on PC (including Baldur's Gate), PS3, Wii-U and iPad, but I spend literally ten times more time playing Angband than all the others put together. Yes, literally.

EDIT: (Of course, maybe I'm just an edge case...)