Randarts and power

[Pete Mack]

Estie-
Randarts are *on average* weaker than standards' (especially for weapons). But in toto, they grant more power because you can get uber bows, gloves and shields that simply are not possible with standarts, because a high power weapon or armor gets converted to a lesser slot. Then you can make up the weakness in weapons with top 3 attacks/HA and dwarven dragon armor. So you end up with a more powerful character.

[Nivra]

Bug/Feature

I love the idea of being able to tune dungeon difficulty by tuning rand-art power.

[Bug/Feature]:

I just started a game off the latest nightly. I haven't played in over a year now. I started in town, surrounded by lava, unable to move except go down, and of course, I had no beginner's kit on. Ended up getting to level 2, going back up, and stepping into the fire, to see how much damage it would do and dying.

[simon_a_robinson]

Sample size will be nowhere near enough

Perhaps showing my age, but back in the mists of time there was the Borg. I've not seen any reference to it recently so I assume that it's now defunct, but perhaps using some sort of automated player would be a method of generating a sufficiently large dataset. Of course, the risk is that the results simply reflect the playstyle that the automated player has been programmed to follow...

[Carnivean]

This goes pretty much hand in hand with something else I'd like to see now we have rune-based ID, more randomisation of egos.

If we go down this path (and I also think we should), then what differentiates a Randart from an ego?

If you set it up so that you have x% of another power being added, or more dice or damage, then it's possible to reach a point where you can get egos way better than any artifact.

Randarts don't get fancy stories, just a random grab bag of stuff, just like our random egos.

[Nomad]

If we go down this path (and I also think we should), then what differentiates a Randart from an ego?

If you set it up so that you have x% of another power being added, or more dice or damage, then it's possible to reach a point where you can get egos way better than any artifact.

Randarts don't get fancy stories, just a random grab bag of stuff, just like our random egos.

Well, you've already got a situation where you can get a randart with no properties other than Slay Orc or similar, so they're not particularly distinguished on an individual level now. As a group, they have things like activations, immunities, and properties occurring in unusual equipment slots, different combinations or excessive numbers to make them distinct.

Generally, though, I think that rather than having an x% chance of adding properties, which I agree is too much like making them mini randarts, egos should still have a fixed number and type of properties, just be more randomised within those bounds. We're partway there already with things like the random higher resists on Elvenkind and random abilities, I'd just like that to go further so it's pretty much all "randomly picked property of type x" instead of fixed specifics. So ego definitions would basically be recipes for which categories to pick the random traits from, like "armour with two base resists and one higher resist" or "weapon with two slays, one ability and one stat boost". Rune-ID makes that kind of flexibility much more possible, since it's no longer the massive pain in the butt it used to be to manually identify each individual instance of an ego to check its properties.

[Estie]

Estie-
Randarts are *on average* weaker than standards' (especially for weapons). But in toto, they grant more power because you can get uber bows, gloves and shields that simply are not possible with standarts, because a high power weapon or armor gets converted to a lesser slot. Then you can make up the weakness in weapons with top 3 attacks/HA and dwarven dragon armor. So you end up with a more powerful character.

Yes. Randarts have by nature a greater spread. Not sure what you mean by "more power in toto".

You can either make that average more or less equal in power to standarts, then the average game is the same and you can occasionally get a very good or very bad set, making for an ego game or an uber game.

Or you can make sure that the spike never ever gets more powerfull than the standarts. Then the majority of games will end up with mostly egos, while occasionally youll be able to use some artifacts.

As the idea is to find items of unpredictable properties, and egos alone are even more limited than egos + standarts, option 2 is pointless.

[Philip]

Just to weigh in on the "difficulty level" thing, wouldn't you have to individually balance and then upkeep all the difficulty levels? You can't just double hp for all monsters, because that screws with monster power balance, for example. Some classes care less about certain nerfs than others.

Also, I think what Pete means is that a full ego set isn't all that horrible, in current V, and as such, there's a pretty high lower bound for character power. What randarts do is increase the possibility of a bad set, but also the possibility of a good set. Since for each slot you're going to have at least an acceptable way to fill it, the possibility of getting extremely good randarts to fill certain slots while wearing e.g. a Crown of Serenity and Boots of Speed and a Balance DSM makes the overall set of your stuff better than it would be on standarts.

[fizzix]

regarding borg stats: We have stats modules that can presumably get at this information better. The trick is figuring out what we need to track properly.

Regarding level difficulties. At first we only need to balance for the "default" difficulty, since that's what most people are going to play anyway. As people start experimenting, there will be some "recipes" for higher difficulties which we can also add as super coarse grain knobs.

[Estie]

Re: difficulty

In another post Eddie explains how he values inventory management and choices highest. How hard would it be to make a birth option that reduces inventory slots ? And, since quiver is a major part, reduce its capacity too ?

Both children wanting their candy and real men wanting to show off would be happy - right ?

Edit: without having to resort to measures like not letting arrows stack if they arent exactly the same - because, even though it was traditionally done that way, the reason was programming limitations - there is no way around it - non-stacking arrows based on type is an incredibly stupid concept.

[fizzix]

Edit: without having to resort to measures like not letting arrows stack if they arent exactly the same - because, even though it was traditionally done that way, the reason was programming limitations - there is no way around it - non-stacking arrows based on type is an incredibly stupid concept.

Why stop there. Why should arrows stack and not potions, or scrolls. This is going to be way off topic...but still.

One of my long percolating ideas for inventory involved getting containers that possibly can be upgraded later in the game. You'd start with a container that could hold 10 potions (of whatever types you chose, oil included) another container that held 10 scrolls, One that held 3 wands or rods (no more stacking/merging charges). A pack that could hold one of each equipment type, including one swap weapon, and one swap launcher, it would have something like 10 miscellaneous slots (torches and lanterns can take up slots here also). A quiver with 60 (or so) arrow slots. A pouch for 2 rings/amulets. Another pouch for 10 food items (including mushrooms) and the ability to strap 2 staffs on you. Warriors start with extra gear slots, possibly get an overall increase in available space because...

Spellbooks would no longer be carried, rather the spell container is a mental container and it allows you to hold spells in memory. The limit would be lower than the total spells so you'd have to choose (which honestly would force us to rework the spell list, something that's long overdue). Spellbooks would be replaced with individual spell scrolls that you'd buy from merchants or find in the dungeon. Learning one would destroy the scroll. You can free a slot by forgetting a spell at any time, you'd just have to find a new spell scroll to relearn it.

As the game progress you could get packs that held more things, finding them in the dungeon (maybe as guaranteed drops from specific uniques), or possibly even being bought from town. There could also be ego packs that protect gear from elemental damage in exchange for smaller space.

[Pete Mack]

@fizzix:
I've played with Bags of Holding before. It gets old fast, unless the game is really difficult in some other way. If you can be ready for anything, then everything seems pretty much the same

[PowerDiver]

[QUOTE=Estie;114728In another post Eddie explains how he values inventory management and choices highest. How hard would it be to make a birth option that reduces inventory slots ?[/QUOTE]

I implemented both a difficulty option, -3 slots, and an easiness option, +3 slots. That was pretty easy. Going above +3 slots means a bit more UI work since there are only 26 lower case letters.

Ironman with -3 slots gives you multiple decisions on every level.

[Derakon]

@fizzix:
I've played with Bags of Holding before. It gets old fast, unless the game is really difficult in some other way. If you can be ready for anything, then everything seems pretty much the same

I assume the intent was that you should face inventory pressure for all types of items individually. I would however worry about this effectively meaning that there's only inventory tradeoffs within a given item type, so there's no "do I carry this wand or this swap weapon" kind of decision to be made.

Something similar that could be done, though, would be to vary the max stack size based on the item type. Maybe arrows keep a max stack size of 40, but potions have a max stack size of 10, scrolls of 15, wands of 4, and staves, 2. That would set some players howling, I'm sure!

[fizzix]

I assume the intent was that you should face inventory pressure for all types of items individually. I would however worry about this effectively meaning that there's only inventory tradeoffs within a given item type, so there's no "do I carry this wand or this swap weapon" kind of decision to be made.

Something similar that could be done, though, would be to vary the max stack size based on the item type. Maybe arrows keep a max stack size of 40, but potions have a max stack size of 10, scrolls of 15, wands of 4, and staves, 2. That would set some players howling, I'm sure!

Yeah, the downside of not having inventory tradeoffs across types for individual items (but possibly for containers) is the major drawback.

If potions had max stack size of 10, then rods of curing might make a comeback as a useful item.

So maybe the way to have the pack be "modifiable." So weapons don't stack. Arrows stack to 40 across types. Potions stack to 10 across types (so you can have 9 !CCW and 1 healing in one inventory slot, but 11 !CCW take 2 slots.) and so on.

The upside is that marginal items that are never worth a slot now might make it. You might make room for a mushroom slot if you can carry 10 of them. You also might pick up that potion of dragon breath if it can fit in a potion stack, or hold onto a few resist heat or cold potions. Basically the tradeoff is for bulk item stacks (no more 40 stacks of !CCW) in exchange for more variety (5 !CCW, 3 !healing, 1 !*healing and 1 !*life only take up one slot)

[Estie]

The perfect solution would be inventory Tetris ala Diablo. Too much to ask for ASCII, but maybe it could be done with tiles.