semi-psuedo variants for non-programmers

[takkaria]

HURT_FIRE (hurt extra by fire)
HURT_COLD (hurt extra by cold)

I'll see what I can do about these in the next version. (No promises, though.)

[andrewdoull]

Ey and NPP have elemental vulnerabilities for monsters (HURT flags). It's quite nice that you can damage ice elemental more with fire wands...

I don't necessarily agree with HURT flags for monsters. It makes it harder to balance the overall monster power. I know that's why they were not implemented in Angband for so long...

Andrew

[will_asher]

I don't necessarily agree with HURT flags for monsters. It makes it harder to balance the overall monster power. I know that's why they were not implemented in Angband for so long...

I wouldn't think these flags would make much balance difference unless you're a mage or ranger with the bolt spells, because people don't usually carry around wands or rods of fire and cold. Occationally I do, but never more than one stack, so I'd either only have fire or cold (or elec or acid) but never more than one of those.

With some monsters it would just make good sense that they be damaged extra by certain elements, like ice elementals and zombies (but definetly not all undead) by fire, fire elemenals by cold, iron golems by acid, and the killer trees that I'm adding should be damaged extra by fire and lightning.

Will

[Big Al]

I wouldn't think these flags would make much balance difference unless you're a mage or ranger with the bolt spells, because people don't usually carry around wands or rods of fire and cold. Occationally I do, but never more than one stack, so I'd either only have fire or cold (or elec or acid) but never more than one of those.

I think that this would encourage people to carry around more of these types of items - reducing the amount of 'junk' items in the game. If 10-25% of the monsters were vulnerable to certain attacks, it would make it (more) worthwhile to figure out and exploit monster weaknesses - resulting in more varied strategy.

[andrewdoull]

With some monsters it would just make good sense that they be damaged extra by certain elements, like ice elementals and zombies (but definetly not all undead) by fire, fire elemenals by cold, iron golems by acid, and the killer trees that I'm adding should be damaged extra by fire and lightning.

But no undead are immune to fire anyway at the moment... so fire will always be effective against them.

Andrew

[will_asher]

one more question about the edit .txt files

I'm putting in a few new races, but I can't figure out how to correctly edit the p_hist file. Can someone tell me how?

[aeneas]

I wouldn't think these flags would make much balance difference unless you're a mage or ranger with the bolt spells, because people don't usually carry around wands or rods of fire and cold. Occationally I do, but never more than one stack, so I'd either only have fire or cold (or elec or acid) but never more than one of those.

With some monsters it would just make good sense that they be damaged extra by certain elements, like ice elementals and zombies (but definetly not all undead) by fire, fire elemenals by cold, iron golems by acid, and the killer trees that I'm adding should be damaged extra by fire and lightning.

Will

An awful lot of things about Angband don't make sense. It's really a very abstract game, and if you made it make sense I'm not sure you'd still have a *band (it seems a bit odd that a sleeping orc can block a passage that is wide enough fo a Wyrm to pass). When good sense and game balance come into conflict, game balance should win out, IMHO.

It wouldn't make much difference to the balance of V if you made the monsters you list vulnerable to certain elements (your trees I don't know about) as none of them are very significant adversaries. But you have to be careful with things like this. Elemental Wyrms seem like a good candidate for vulnerabilities, or at least a sensible one, but they are actually already way too easy to kill (even more so in NPP with attenuation and easily available branded ammo) given the quality of their drop. One very effective algorithm for winning V reasonably quickly is to drop to Wyrm territory as fast as you dare and just hunt Wyrms. The main danger is the _other_ nasty stuff at those depths- the Wyrms themselves are pushovers even if you're quite far out of depth, as long as you have a few requisites.

It's also worth considering that branded ammo is already one of the most unbalanced things in V (the ridiculousness of high level rangers is just a side effect of this- as an aside, I don't think that rangers are nearly as nerfed in NPP as was intended, at least not with store services on). Any creature that is extra vulnerable to branded ammo is going to go down very quickly to anyone with a decent shooter and a good supply of that ammo.

[Big Al]

I'm putting in a few new races, but I can't figure out how to correctly edit the p_hist file. Can someone tell me how?

As far as I can figure out, here are the steps to add a new race:

1. Edit limits.txt, and change the "M:P:xx" line to increase the number of races.

2. Edit p_race.txt and add the new race info. (I'm assuming you know how to do this).

3. Edit p_hist.txt file: Each line is of this form:

N:1:2:10:25
D:You are the illegitimate and unacknowledged child

The space in order are: the entry index: the entry index to go to next: the relative rarity of the entry: the bonus to social class.


When angband is writing the player histories:
a. It looks at the first entry of the "I:" line in p_race.txt to find which entry in p_hist.txt to start at. (eg. for humans, it starts at entry 1, elves at entry 5, etc.)

b. It finds the appropriate entry in p_hist.txt and randomly picks one of the choices (eg. for humans it picks one of "You are the illegitimate and unacknowledged child", "You are one of several children" etc.). It then looks at the second space in the "N:" line and goes to that entry, picks one of the choices there, goes to the next entry, etc, until it tries to go to entry zero, which indicates for it to stop.

The way it picks with message to display is: roll a random number between 1 and 100, then compare it to the third space in each of the "N:" line for that entry. Eg. for the first entry, the third spaces are 10, 20, 95 and 100. So, if the rolled number is between 1 and 10, you get "illegitimate and unacknowledged child", 11 and 20 you get "illegitimate but acknowledged child", 21 and 95, you get "You are one of several children", or from 96 to 100 you get "You are the first child".

c. It adds the fourth space in the entry you picked to your social class, then subtracts fifty. (eg. for entry 1, you either add -25, -15, -5 or 0 to your social class (for "illegitimate and unacknowledged", "illegitimate but acknowledged", "one of several children" or "first child of" respectively.) It does this for all the parts of the sentence to come up with your final social class, which affects your starting gold. The social class is also randomly varied by up to 3 points and capped between 1 and 100.

4. edit cost_adj.txt for the new races.

(5. possibly edit shop_own.txt to include the new races as shopkeepers.)

p_hist.txt appears to be just about the only edit file that doesn't have an explanation line in the header comments explaining what all the number mean. Hope that helps.

[will_asher]

Thanks, that helps

p_hist.txt appears to be just about the only edit file that doesn't have an explanation line in the header comments explaining what all the numbers mean.

..that's why I couldn't figure it out