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Comparison: FAangband v1.4.x vs v2.0.x
Comparison because Nick asked for one after my recent Priest win in FA nightly. This won't really be a 1:1 comparison, as I've still not won FA v1.4.x although I have a Beorning Rogue that's currently sitting at Tol-In-Gaurhoth DL84 (which I haven't touched for some time, so the state of things in FA1 isn't as fresh in my mind).
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Getting it out of the way first: FA2 is easier than FA1. Much easier. Largely this boils down to differences in monster spellcasting AI; as I understand it FA2 monsters cast randomly from their spell/breath set (with eventual biases if you have birth_ai_learn on?), while FA1 monsters are "intelligent" and deliberately choose "smart" choices for their spells/breaths . . . this mostly boils down to things that can blind or confuse casting those first and spamming them if you don't have the relevant protection, summoners being extremely prone to open up with them during the first few rounds of an engagement, healers spamming self-heals when they get to low health, and things with distance attacks never closing the full distance (for example, nrulings have a lash attack with range 3 or so, so they'll tend to get that close and then spam it). FA1 has monster SP to mitigate this, although unlike players monsters can just choose to "cast" Recover SP when they get low with no limit on the number of times they can do so total as far as I'm aware. Monster SP was removed for FA2; IIRC Nick said the reasoning was that he felt that it was essentially acting as a second healthbar you had to whittle down before you could work on the actual healthbar in many situations, just making things tedious (personally I thought it was interesting enough to make up for those situations when they happened).
On loot:
Something I noticed with the Priest was that towards the end rings and amulets became pretty hard to find, which definitely isn't the case in FA1; thinking on it I feel like FA2 just has less loot in general because monsters drop less comparatively. The actual variance seems to be worse too, both in jewellery and in other loot. The jewellery I would blame on differences in the generation code (a specific case I have noted is that Combat rings in FA2 seem to very easily acquire aggravation-type curses or flags, so it's very difficult to find a decent one that doesn't come with drawbacks, especially on top of the general jewellery rarity—while on my FA1 Rogue I found a +0,+28 one fairly early on that I've never replaced); the other loot I would blame on a lot of the egos from FA1 being altered in some fashion . . . all the out-and-out "bad" egos got removed or had their "badness" nerfed, while other egos had their native depths altered so you're not finding like daggers of Shocking on DL98 (I would say like a good 85% of endgame weapon egos in FA2 are either Gondolin or Holy Avenger, to give an example).
On monsters:
FA1 monsters on the whole have less health and AC than their FA2 counterparts (dracolisks and dracoliches for example went from average 1700 HP and 48 AC to 3080 HP and 144 AC, with the FA2 iteration actually showing up *earlier* than the FA1 one), but are more dangerous offensively (because of the spellcaster AI thing) to compensate. Some notable monsters/spells are missing from FA2—two big examples off the top of my head are giant marksman ants (earlyish enemy with a short-range acid spit, they tended to get summoned en masse by early ranger/druid types), and while short-range-but-not-adjacent monster attacks still exist in FA2 (my monster memory says balrogs have them) nrulings don't appear to have theirs anymore (or at least I never saw it on my Priest). Summon spells in FA2 result in a lot less monsters summoned per cast than they did in FA1. There are a few changes in mechanics that have changed combat balance in some fashion in FA2—for example demons are considered "living" now and thus are susceptible to things like Drain Life wands. Everything seems to be susceptible to fear now in some fashion; pretty much everything gets scared at low health for instance, even mindless things like golems (which feels wrong to me, some things should *never* be scared). Wilderness at night in FA2 is a much safer prospect than in FA1 on account of *everything* generating asleep at night in the wilderness, even hounds and vortexes, noted hated-for-being-always-awake-and-tracking-the-player-from-afar monsters. Stealth on the whole feels more effective, or monsters on the whole less wake-able in FA2.
On other combat things:
AC formulas have been reworked I believe, so AC has a much bigger effect on hitrate and damage mitigation. As an example, I've previously won a Green-Elf Ranger in FA2, and something I noted was that even though the combo had the best shooting skill out of all the possible race/class combinations, I still had to have Heroism and Bless active to reach over 50% hitrate on winged dragons (all of which had 200+ AC, with the biggest ones having 255). Shooting damage feels different between FA1 and FA2 in ways that I can't quite describe, despite multipliers and dice being relatively the same—my best guess is that in FA2 it feels like I'm doing less damage comparatively because FA2 monsters have more HP. Ditto with throwing damage—in FA1 it's not unusual to see 500+ damage displays on thrown weapons in appropriate slay/brand/monster circumstances (my Rogue has The Spear of Boldog saying it deals an average of 658 with poison or against animals and 383 versus others when thrown), but in FA2 it feels like it's difficult to get to numbers even half that, and in this case I'm not sure where the difference is coming from because I'm comparing damage estimations from the weapons themselves. Quiver slots are limited to 40 ammo per instead of the 99 per that FA1 had; this probably evens out for ordinary ammo since with summons being nerfed there's less monsters to fight on the whole, but I suspect with a dedicated thrower being limited to 40 (keeping in mind that throwing weapons take up more space in the quiver and weigh more than regular ammo) in combination with throwing dealing less makes the avenue a lot harder in FA2 than in FA1.
EDIT:
On miscellaneous things I forgot at first:
Dice variance seems like it's a lot less common an occurrence in FA2; it's pretty common to go into the weapon store or general store and see like both 2d3 and 2d4 lead shots in stock in FA1, but seeing nonstandard dice outside of artifacts is something of a rarity in FA2.
---
Getting it out of the way first: FA2 is easier than FA1. Much easier. Largely this boils down to differences in monster spellcasting AI; as I understand it FA2 monsters cast randomly from their spell/breath set (with eventual biases if you have birth_ai_learn on?), while FA1 monsters are "intelligent" and deliberately choose "smart" choices for their spells/breaths . . . this mostly boils down to things that can blind or confuse casting those first and spamming them if you don't have the relevant protection, summoners being extremely prone to open up with them during the first few rounds of an engagement, healers spamming self-heals when they get to low health, and things with distance attacks never closing the full distance (for example, nrulings have a lash attack with range 3 or so, so they'll tend to get that close and then spam it). FA1 has monster SP to mitigate this, although unlike players monsters can just choose to "cast" Recover SP when they get low with no limit on the number of times they can do so total as far as I'm aware. Monster SP was removed for FA2; IIRC Nick said the reasoning was that he felt that it was essentially acting as a second healthbar you had to whittle down before you could work on the actual healthbar in many situations, just making things tedious (personally I thought it was interesting enough to make up for those situations when they happened).
On loot:
Something I noticed with the Priest was that towards the end rings and amulets became pretty hard to find, which definitely isn't the case in FA1; thinking on it I feel like FA2 just has less loot in general because monsters drop less comparatively. The actual variance seems to be worse too, both in jewellery and in other loot. The jewellery I would blame on differences in the generation code (a specific case I have noted is that Combat rings in FA2 seem to very easily acquire aggravation-type curses or flags, so it's very difficult to find a decent one that doesn't come with drawbacks, especially on top of the general jewellery rarity—while on my FA1 Rogue I found a +0,+28 one fairly early on that I've never replaced); the other loot I would blame on a lot of the egos from FA1 being altered in some fashion . . . all the out-and-out "bad" egos got removed or had their "badness" nerfed, while other egos had their native depths altered so you're not finding like daggers of Shocking on DL98 (I would say like a good 85% of endgame weapon egos in FA2 are either Gondolin or Holy Avenger, to give an example).
On monsters:
FA1 monsters on the whole have less health and AC than their FA2 counterparts (dracolisks and dracoliches for example went from average 1700 HP and 48 AC to 3080 HP and 144 AC, with the FA2 iteration actually showing up *earlier* than the FA1 one), but are more dangerous offensively (because of the spellcaster AI thing) to compensate. Some notable monsters/spells are missing from FA2—two big examples off the top of my head are giant marksman ants (earlyish enemy with a short-range acid spit, they tended to get summoned en masse by early ranger/druid types), and while short-range-but-not-adjacent monster attacks still exist in FA2 (my monster memory says balrogs have them) nrulings don't appear to have theirs anymore (or at least I never saw it on my Priest). Summon spells in FA2 result in a lot less monsters summoned per cast than they did in FA1. There are a few changes in mechanics that have changed combat balance in some fashion in FA2—for example demons are considered "living" now and thus are susceptible to things like Drain Life wands. Everything seems to be susceptible to fear now in some fashion; pretty much everything gets scared at low health for instance, even mindless things like golems (which feels wrong to me, some things should *never* be scared). Wilderness at night in FA2 is a much safer prospect than in FA1 on account of *everything* generating asleep at night in the wilderness, even hounds and vortexes, noted hated-for-being-always-awake-and-tracking-the-player-from-afar monsters. Stealth on the whole feels more effective, or monsters on the whole less wake-able in FA2.
On other combat things:
AC formulas have been reworked I believe, so AC has a much bigger effect on hitrate and damage mitigation. As an example, I've previously won a Green-Elf Ranger in FA2, and something I noted was that even though the combo had the best shooting skill out of all the possible race/class combinations, I still had to have Heroism and Bless active to reach over 50% hitrate on winged dragons (all of which had 200+ AC, with the biggest ones having 255). Shooting damage feels different between FA1 and FA2 in ways that I can't quite describe, despite multipliers and dice being relatively the same—my best guess is that in FA2 it feels like I'm doing less damage comparatively because FA2 monsters have more HP. Ditto with throwing damage—in FA1 it's not unusual to see 500+ damage displays on thrown weapons in appropriate slay/brand/monster circumstances (my Rogue has The Spear of Boldog saying it deals an average of 658 with poison or against animals and 383 versus others when thrown), but in FA2 it feels like it's difficult to get to numbers even half that, and in this case I'm not sure where the difference is coming from because I'm comparing damage estimations from the weapons themselves. Quiver slots are limited to 40 ammo per instead of the 99 per that FA1 had; this probably evens out for ordinary ammo since with summons being nerfed there's less monsters to fight on the whole, but I suspect with a dedicated thrower being limited to 40 (keeping in mind that throwing weapons take up more space in the quiver and weigh more than regular ammo) in combination with throwing dealing less makes the avenue a lot harder in FA2 than in FA1.
EDIT:
On miscellaneous things I forgot at first:
Dice variance seems like it's a lot less common an occurrence in FA2; it's pretty common to go into the weapon store or general store and see like both 2d3 and 2d4 lead shots in stock in FA1, but seeing nonstandard dice outside of artifacts is something of a rarity in FA2.
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