Class penalties/restrictions that make sense

[Sky]

I just hope you are going to keep the 4.1.2 release on the main download page so people can choose to play classic angband instead of new angband. I feel the changes have been too radical a departure from what the game was for all these years.

Realistically, acid bolt is how a mage deals with 90% of his problems.

[grodrigues]

Realistically, acid bolt is how a mage deals with 90% of his problems.

A *real* mage faces Morgoth with only magic missile and relies on regeneration to replenish his mana, not on some pansy wussy restore mana potions.

Kids, these days.

[Derakon]

A *real* mage faces Morgoth with only magic missile and relies on regeneration to replenish his mana, not on some pansy wussy restore mana potions.

Kids, these days.

If you're using only magic missile to deal damage, then you won't have any mana woes, because you'll be naturally recovering more than 1SP/turn.

That said, you may have trouble overcoming Morgoth's innate regeneration...

[Voovus]

I just hope you are going to keep the 4.1.2 release on the main download page so people can choose to play classic angband instead of new angband. I feel the changes have been too radical a departure from what the game was for all these years.

I think this is a serious issue and would also like to know what's planned for the future. I'm all for the introduction of new classes, but I'm concerned that some of the old ones may have been changed too dramatically for this to feel like dear old Vanilla. Some fun and perfectly good playstyles may have got lost.

[Nick]

I think this is a serious issue and would also like to know what's planned for the future. I'm all for the introduction of new classes, but I'm concerned that some of the old ones may have been changed too dramatically for this to feel like dear old Vanilla. Some fun and perfectly good playstyles may have got lost.

OK, a couple of things to say here.

1. The new classes are still developing, and I am listening to feedback. My thrust in developing them so far has been to clarify the magic system so it's a bit more coherent (and so new classes can be more easily added in a sensible way), and to try and reduce the "I have to carry this book just for this one spell" problem. Both of these will mean a bit of a change to the feel of classes, but I'm trying not to change wholesale or eliminate playstyles.
2. When I first started playing the latest version was 3.0.3 (I know, that makes me a n00b for a lot of people). At that time, there were people on the newsgroup complaining about not only how the current version had ruined the game, but how 2.9.1 had, and how 2.8.3 had, and so on. If there is one thing that is traditional about Angband, it is that it is constantly changing; on the other hand, if you go back and play 2.6.1, you'll find it still recognisably Angband.

So, the game will change. Some changes not everyone will like. I'm trying to use my experience plus the massive experience of the community to change in ways that are positive - keep me honest.

[Estie]

Seeing as whenever I make a post about what I would like and what not, there is a polite post by you and the exact thing I despise happens, I have given up on "feedback". You make the game and all the people who play it, have fun.

I have played the competition, just for the hell of it, but I certainly dont enjoy this game anymore. I have posted some of the reasons; there are more, but whats the point.

Good luck, if I ever play it will be an original version. Thanks for making rune-id; that at least is something I find an improvement.

[Nick]

Seeing as whenever I make a post about what I would like and what not, there is a polite post by you and the exact thing I despise happens, I have given up on "feedback".

This is the first post of yours I can recall where you expressed serious dissatisfaction with how the game was evolving. Since then, partly because I wanted the competition to play out and partly from my life being too busy, I have made very few changes. They have mostly been bugfixes in preparation for the competition, but they did include reverting the Banishment in vaults change which you (and others) had disliked. I also intend to make several other changes prompted by that thread - gold on level 1, clarification of artifacts, etc.

If you are dissatisfied with the rate of progress, you could implement some of these changes yourself and submit them - that would probably speed things up. Of course, how you choose to spend your time is completely up to you.

[fizzix]

Just a general point. As far as I can tell, the (classic) roguelike with the healthiest playerbase these days appears to be DCSS. One reason is that they have a very friendly UI (they actually have devs devoted to improving UI), but another reason is that they regularly, at least once a year, push a major update with very significant changes. They add new races, delete others, and alter the way other races work. They do the same major changes with deities, spells, monsters, uniques, etc. They often modify branches significantly. Unsurprisingly, they also have people that constantly complain about how the devs are "ruining the game" and how version XX was the best version. A lot of these players stop playing, but to me it's not clear they would continue playing if the game never changed.

Angband absolutely needs to continually evolve or it will go the way of Nethack. Nick needs the freedom to push the game in whatever direction he chooses, and I'm pretty sure he will accept code from whoever wants to give it. Contribution in the form of feedback is equally valuable, especially with new changes.

I think the biggest mistake we made with Angband development was splitting v4 off as a separate dev branch. It was isolated to satisfy the old school players (Timo, Eddie, people who appear to be gone now anyway). In the process we also alienated some devs (d_m, magnate) who had many great ideas and the ability to contribute code. We should have made v4 the new version and dealt with fixing the imbalances.

Nick's feature branch should be the next major version. Some things are probably broken now, but that's ok. We can iron things out in time. It's ok to have an easy or hard version of the game released. It's ok to have classes that are not balanced. It's ok to have exploitable interactions. It's ok to push an updated release to fix some of these things.

[Pete Mack]

V4 was done before the engineering deficit was eliminated. That was very much the wrong order., i feel. Angband now (except for the hairy object code) has a much cleaner codebase than ever. Doing this in parallel with huge feature changes would have been very difficult.

[Nick]

Nick's feature branch should be the next major version. Some things are probably broken now, but that's ok. We can iron things out in time. It's ok to have an easy or hard version of the game released. It's ok to have classes that are not balanced. It's ok to have exploitable interactions. It's ok to push an updated release to fix some of these things.

My intent was that, post-competition, it becomes the first major building block of the next version. Other things I want to go in the next version are:

1. Race revision like for classes - it makes sense to do both these at once;
2. Monster list rework - it makes sense to do this at the same time as player rework, because they get balanced against each other;
3. Work on randarts - because they're currently OP.

So we could break these up a bit and have successive versions, or I could (relatively) quickly throw first attempts at these other things together as 4.2.0 and expect a lot of 4.2.x versions, or keep to the current pace. What do people think?

[mrfy]

My intent was that, post-competition, it becomes the first major building block of the next version. Other things I want to go in the next version are:

1. Race revision like for classes - it makes sense to do both these at once;
2. Monster list rework - it makes sense to do this at the same time as player rework, because they get balanced against each other;
3. Work on randarts - because they're currently OP.

So we could break these up a bit and have successive versions, or I could (relatively) quickly throw first attempts at these other things together as 4.2.0 and expect a lot of 4.2.x versions, or keep to the current pace. What do people think?

Successive versions IMO. I've like playing the class new feature branch now (except for the nerfing of the ranger class ;-) ).

Seems like it makes sense to do a version with your additional class tweaks, then adjust/change the races, monsters, randarts, etc. It might take longer to do in stages, but less major changes all at once.

[fizzix]

Race revision like for classes - it makes sense to do both these at once;

Are you thinking of modifying them significantly or tweaking. I feel Angband game difference is derived mainly by classes and race is a difficulty knob. In that sense there really isn't all that much that needs to be done with races, besides maybe eliminating half-elf, because it's useless.

[Monster list rework - it makes sense to do this at the same time as player rework, because they get balanced against each other;

I know at some point you were planning on implementing different monster AIs. I think that should be the first step. I think monsters can be balanced after the player rework. There's a lot more room for balance here, and it probably should be something that is done over a long term, after lots of feedback.

Work on randarts - because they're currently OP.

I think recent changes to randarts removed many of the restrictions, but that also allowed for super powerful randarts on things like lights or bows, stuff that typically didn't have the option for strong items.

I also think that a lot of the nitty-gritty balance really needs statistics working again. Every time I fire it up I get a crash after some number of iterations, and I haven't been able to figure out why that is.

[Derakon]

Are you thinking of modifying them significantly or tweaking. I feel Angband game difference is derived mainly by classes and race is a difficulty knob. In that sense there really isn't all that much that needs to be done with races, besides maybe eliminating half-elf, because it's useless.

While I agree with you that race is generally a difficulty selection (you choose a race based on how well-suited it is for the class you want to play as), judging from the pushback on food I might suggest you try to think of a way to make half-elf interesting rather than remove it. Since elves and humans aren't that well-differentiated to begin with, a race that is halfway between them isn't very interesting, but maybe we could make half-elves have some kind of hybrid vigor? They could be an explicit "easier race", kind of like High-Elves and Dunedan but in a different way. Maybe leave their stats as-is but give them a nice selection of intrinsics.

[bunnies]

My intent was that, post-competition, it becomes the first major building block of the next version. Other things I want to go in the next version are:

1. Race revision like for classes - it makes sense to do both these at once;
2. Monster list rework - it makes sense to do this at the same time as player rework, because they get balanced against each other;
3. Work on randarts - because they're currently OP.

So we could break these up a bit and have successive versions, or I could (relatively) quickly throw first attempts at these other things together as 4.2.0 and expect a lot of 4.2.x versions, or keep to the current pace. What do people think?

I don't think you can do them individually. As you mentioned, class/race/monsters are balanced against each other and it doesn't make sense to release and balance them in isolation.

That said, I think that you might be biting off more than you can chew. Angband has been around for a long time, and each subsystem is sort of balanced against each other right now. But you're adding new mechanics such as stealing/darkness/shapeshifting, in addition to a massive class rework, and trying to balance races and monsters on top of that... sounds like a monumental task.

I believe the initial intention was to streamline spellbooks. Would it be better to start with the existing classes, rework/remove spells and spellbooks, make sure it works and is balanced, release a version, then progressively add new classes, readding spells that have been removed, and adding new mechanics?

In order words, instead of a massive vertical change i.e. class rework -> race rework -> monster rework, I'm suggesting smaller horizontal changes.

I'm not against the current approach, it just feels like it's too large a step, and I'm concerned that it'll be stuck in development hell while trying to make all the changes balanced at once.

[luneya]

My intent was that, post-competition, it becomes the first major building block of the next version. Other things I want to go in the next version are:

1. Race revision like for classes - it makes sense to do both these at once;
2. Monster list rework - it makes sense to do this at the same time as player rework, because they get balanced against each other;
3. Work on randarts - because they're currently OP.

So we could break these up a bit and have successive versions, or I could (relatively) quickly throw first attempts at these other things together as 4.2.0 and expect a lot of 4.2.x versions, or keep to the current pace. What do people think?

I think that once you've dealt with whatever tweaking and bug-fixing is necessary on the new classes, you should release it immediately as 4.2.0, and only issue further 4.2.x if major bugs or imbalances are found in the release. Then simultaneously handle the race and monster list revision as 4.3.0.

Any major reworking of randarts should probably wait for 4.4 or later, though stopgap tweaks like reducing some of the power level parameters can be implemented sooner if the status quo is thought to game-breakingly OP. I don't have any real opinion on that matter, as I usually play standart.