Revamping the monster list

[Nomad]

Something evocative of how Morgoth made them by twisting the creations of the other Valar, maybe? A catch-all orc/troll/giant slayer could potentially be useful...not that giants are canonical but oh well.

You could maybe ditch ogres as a separate class of monster and make 'ogre' the collective slay category.

[bio_hazard]

I don't mind groups of trolls. I think giants could be tougher and moved deeper. Not sure about ogres.

Some of the animals could be differentiated by where they are placed. Examples: rattlesnakes and pythons are ambush predators, so place them next to doors or in rubble.

[Nomad]

Some of the animals could be differentiated by where they are placed. Examples: rattlesnakes and pythons are ambush predators, so place them next to doors or in rubble.

Actually an 'ambush' behaviour would be a great flag to add for certain types of monsters. Make them stay stationary and invisible (except to magical detection) until the player steps into an adjacent square, whereupon they become visible and wake up. There are quite a few monsters that would work for, like scorpions, solitary spiders, thieves, bats, maybe birds and harpies?

(Also, on an unrelated note, it just occurred to me that thematically, harpies should probably shriek and/or have the "wail:terrify" attack, which would give them more of a unique niche. Wikipedia says they steal food as well, so they could have eat_food too.)

There are actually a bunch of existing behaviours/attacks that are fairly underutilised and could be spread around the monster list a bit. There are currently only four monsters with the eat_food flag and two with eat_light, and only four with hallucination attacks. There's room for a weak early wall-eater, as well - maybe a type of worm that eats through walls but is easier to kill than an Umber Hulk.

It would be nice to have a weaker version of item-stealing as well, where the monster takes your stuff but doesn't teleport away with it. Birds could steal items, and some of the jellies/oozes (good motivation to make you stick around to battle gelatinous cubes and the like).

[Pete Mack]

Well, there are 'roosts' in Sil, which aren't quite as bad as webs, but still pretty dangerous. Being blinded by a monster with erratic motion and high evasion is a problem.

[bio_hazard]

Actually an 'ambush' behaviour would be a great flag to add for certain types of monsters. Make them stay stationary and invisible (except to magical detection) until the player steps into an adjacent square, whereupon they become visible and wake up. There are quite a few monsters that would work for, like scorpions, solitary spiders, thieves, bats, maybe birds and harpies?

(Also, on an unrelated note, it just occurred to me that thematically, harpies should probably shriek and/or have the "wail:terrify" attack, which would give them more of a unique niche. Wikipedia says they steal food as well, so they could have eat_food too.)

There are actually a bunch of existing behaviours/attacks that are fairly underutilised and could be spread around the monster list a bit. There are currently only four monsters with the eat_food flag and two with eat_light, and only four with hallucination attacks. There's room for a weak early wall-eater, as well - maybe a type of worm that eats through walls but is easier to kill than an Umber Hulk.

It would be nice to have a weaker version of item-stealing as well, where the monster takes your stuff but doesn't teleport away with it. Birds could steal items, and some of the jellies/oozes (good motivation to make you stick around to battle gelatinous cubes and the like).

The monkeys in Brogue raise my blood pressure every time (item stealers). Doesn't seem too weird to have Smeagol and Wormtongue steal items as well.

A few other ideas-
*An early fast but weak stunner (nighthawk or falcon or something)
*Monsters who increase speed if they've moved in the same direction more than X moves in a row (quadrupeds, maybe knights). This would make running away down a long corridor a lot more exciting!
*A monster that always runs away (maybe something with a good drop)

[Derakon]

*A monster that always runs away (maybe something with a good drop)

Just so long as we don't bring back the bats from ToME 2, which have "AI_ANNOY". They constantly hover around just outside melee range, not attacking you, just annoying you (hence the name) and keeping you from running, sleeping, etc. Especially problematic in ToME 2 where many characters are completely hopeless at ranged combat in the early game.

Having a flag that just reverses a monster's movement from normal (which AIUI is all that frightening a monster does) might be a reasonable thing to attach to caster monsters, though.

[Huqhox]

Just so long as we don't bring back the bats from ToME 2, which have "AI_ANNOY". They constantly hover around just outside melee range, not attacking you, just annoying you (hence the name) and keeping you from running, sleeping, etc. Especially problematic in ToME 2 where many characters are completely hopeless at ranged combat in the early game.

Having a flag that just reverses a monster's movement from normal (which AIUI is all that frightening a monster does) might be a reasonable thing to attach to caster monsters, though.

Maybe something like EASY_AFRAID so it lowers the threshold required to evoke the fear response. So they will aprroach and maybe engage you but as soon as you show you can actually damage them they run away

[t4nk]

OMG monsters that run away are horrible. If you want to annoy the player, make the game crash every five minutes, easier to do and just as fun (maybe some monster with RF_ANNOY should trigger the crashes )
Also, if you guys reduce the size of levels in early game then you won't need so many multi hued centipedes...

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Borrowing from FAAngband, one change to monsters could be to include neutral monsters. Not only most townfolk, but also some of the other "p" that @ meets in the dungeon. Neutral, unless @ attacks them. Also, it could be interesting if Maggot could be negotiated with, rather than wantonly attacked, in order to obtain his drop.

[fizzix]

Borrowing from FAAngband, one change to monsters could be to include neutral monsters. Not only most townfolk, but also some of the other "p" that @ meets in the dungeon. Neutral, unless @ attacks them. Also, it could be interesting if Maggot could be negotiated with, rather than wantonly attacked, in order to obtain his drop.

Regarding farmer maggot, I'd rather have the dogs be removed from the dungeon and give Maggot an attack "call dog" which he can only do, and always will do, if he's at half health or lower. Dogs will also show up if maggot is dead.

[Nick]

Nice ideas everyone, largely tallying with some of my thinking. I haven't had a chance to respond until now, and will be brief now, but there are a couple of things I wanted to mention:

• I'm looking at also some change to frequency where shallow monsters get rarer as you go down the dungeon
• Thraalbee's excellent visual monster spoiler page is a great resource here

I'll say a bit more when I have time.

[fizzix]

• I'm looking at also some change to frequency where shallow monsters get rarer as you go down the dungeon

Ooh, I have some experience with this one. I once set a floor on monsters so that monsters must be above a certain level to spawn in the dungeon. I think it was something like max(1, dun_level - 10, dun_level/2). This worked ok, but it really made stark just how thin the monsters are in the higher levels.

The biggest problem I ran into was that at the higher levels it was just too dangerous to kill anything. The monster difficulty in angband is set up so that the late game monsters (not even considering non-unique) are supposed to be handled 1v1. Only the most powerful of characters (probably with immunity) can handle more than one great wyrm at once, and I'm not sure if any can handle more than one great wyrm of balance/chaos/multi-hue. The weaker monsters mainly serve to isolate the stronger monsters, so that you usually only have to deal with one or at most two at a time.

Also, the weaker monsters do play an important role in providing a lot of the consumable drops (stuff like !CCW and ammo) so if you cut them from the lower levels, you really need to prop those drops up artificially.

There's a lot of ways to fix this. Evening out the monster distribution somewhat along with shortening the number of levels would help make this work.

[Pete Mack]

I was considering some soft model like P = P0*ML/DL when DL >= ML. So there are still plenty of level 50 monsters, but not many level 20 and extremely few level 1 when deep in the dungeon. If you want a steeper decline, use P = P0*1/(DL-MIN(C*ML, DL-1)), where C = a scaling number somewhere between 1 and 2. (2 makes DL 50 monsters likely at CL 100, 1 makes them unlikely, reduced in relative frequency by a factor of 50.)

[PowerWyrm]

I'm looking at also some change to frequency where shallow monsters get rarer as you go down the dungeon

For PWMAngband I just added a second chance at harder monsters to be generated: if the depth of the generated monster is less than half the dungeon level, it gets rerolled and the strongest of the two gets kept.

[PowerWyrm]

Any idea why Time Hounds have speed +20 while the two other hounds (nether/plasma) that are totally identical except their breath have speed +10? This really sounds like a typo to me, and the monster revamp could clearly address that issue.