NPP thoughts

[nppangband]

It's already a combination of annoying and lifesaving how they go dormant until you get close. If all 95 monsters in a treasure pit mobbed you at once there'd be no way to take one down at the depths you get quests for 'em.

They will behave, wake up and/or attack the same way. They will just be much harder to distinguish from normal objects until they attack, or you attack them. But when casting detect treasure, a rectangle room with 95 treasures in it is pretty much a dead giveaway that they are all mimics. Maybe I should occasionally make a room full of actual treasure to keep the player guessing.

I don't think I've ever seen recharging scrolls available for sale, which means the only sources of recharging are spells (effectively mage-only) or the magic shop service (grossly overpriced; only useful if the staff in question can't be bought).

They are standard inventory in the alchemy shop. They should be there most of the time.

The thing that bugs me about this is that monsters which I cannot see can see me just fine and are able to shoot at me. Yes, if I detect them, I can shoot at them, but unless I have telepathy the situation is grossly asymmetrical.

That has always been a quirk of the Angband AI. The monsters always know exactly where the player is.

That seems like a good priority. It might be worth trying to add a minimum-distance-to-other-stairs caveat, but it's not a huge deal, or at least it hasn't been so far. Just means exploring the entire dungeon until I find the room that has all the staircases.

I might work with it a little bit soon. Right after I typed that previous message saying safety was the top priority, I went into 2 consecutive levels where I went down a staircase and was right by a large group of monsters.

* If you aren't going to give strong pseudo-ID to everyone, could you at least let the weak pseudoers detect average items?

Fair enough. I will add this.

* Is it intended that ball spells can hit around corners that you couldn't shoot? E.g.

...X.
##.##
 #*#
 #@#

@ targets the *, and X is hit. If you were standing on *, then you wouldn't be able to shoot X.

I use the Sangband/4gai projection functions. They are, IMHO, much better than the ones that Angband has used for years, but they aren't perfect.

* I find the addition of light-based attack spells to the priest interesting. Definitely makes them play more mage-like early on; once you get Shock Bolt there's little point in melee or missile weapons as a first resort.

Agreed. Diego and Anssi Ramela did a great job with those.

* I'm guessing that carrying capacity has been tweaked. My priest with 18 STR gets overloaded woefully quickly...

I checked, and it is the exact same.

* Chests might also be a bit overpowered sometimes. A large wooden chests at 1050' netted me Ethereal Openings, Radagast's Protections, a scroll of Teleport (?), and two scrolls of Acquirement...of course, the resulting items were Gorlim's useless helm and hard studded leather of resist acid. Oh, well, the spellbook is much appreciated.

They are supposed to be overpowered, but sufficiently rare enough to justify it. I am at 1300' with a mage and I haven't found a single chest yet.

* Have I mentioned lately how I like the message compaction? "4 Cave orcs shrivel away in the light!" indeed.

That is one of my favorite features (full credit goes to Diego for that one). I am actually amazed nobody has asked that this be put in Vanilla. For those of you who haven't seen it, in Angband, take a troll priest to a troll pit and cast dispel evil. You will get hundreds of messages, one or two per affected monster. Do the same in NPP, and the damage messages get tallied and displayed as a count: "8 half trolls are destroyed. 7 Troll Priests scream in agony. 13 cave trolls flee in terror!". So much better.

* Nativity boots seem to be overpriced. 13k for boots that grant nativity to acicd; I'm not going to find any acid-based terrain until well after I've found better boots. Even if they were for earlier terrains, terrain itself is rare enough that it's not worth losing, say, +1 stealth to get that nativity.

That is on my to-do list. 1) determine how much monetary value nativity should add to an item. And 2) Determine how much power, for randart purposes, should be assessed when adding nativity to an item.

* I cast Probing, moved the cursor over a boil-covered wretch, and instead of probing the monster, I probed the floor...

The monster should be given priority. I will double-check this. If you, by chance, see this again, a savefile is extremely helpful. Sometimes these problems are situation-specific and I can't re-create them.

* Why does Perception have to cost 20 mana for a priest? Are you trying to make it very annoying to identify items? Its failure rate is also high -- 20% for a level-27 character (the spell's available at level 20) with 18/162 WIS.

Good point. Seems a big much.

* Are you supposed to be able to get the berries from thornbushes? They're mentioned when I walk on the tile but I can't figure out any way to interact with the terrain.

No. That is for flavor only.

* A wounded Cold Hound breathed frost at me and the potion (of naivety) didn't shatter. Do items on the floor get a saving throw against destruction now?

With 4gai, the damage from cone breaths dissipates with distance. Getting hit by a cold hound breath from across the room won't have much effect on anything. I don't recall doing much to the saving throws, but we have been at this for 7 years, and I s.

* I just had a quest level where 7 of the quest monster (sasquatches) were generated in the same pair of rooms. I'm guessing this is because they're native to icy terrain, which those rooms had. Kinda weird though.

Yes, monsters do prefer to be generated and stay in their native terrains. They get combat and damage bonuses, and they use less energy to move (but not attack) while in native terrain. The player gets the same bonuses if they are native to terrains as well, and I am still trying to decide how valuable it is.

[nppangband]

Obviously Priests should be pure spellcasters, the problem I want to avoid most is making Priests feel too similar to either the Druid or the Mage.

IIRC, The Prime Directive in Star Trek is something like "Don't interfere with the evolution of alien cultures". IMO, in *band player class design The Prime Directive is "Make sure that no player class is just an inferior version of another class". I think we might want to make Priests stand out even more from Druids, to make sure that Priests are not just Druids without "Haste" or that Druids aren't just Priests with worse "Healing".

Agreed with both your and buzzkill's posts. To me, ideally all classes (and to a lessor extent, all races) would have strengths and weaknesses that present a unique challenge in winning the game, and certain monsters should be difficult to kill for some classes, but easy for others. Priests should be the best in the game at destroying evil and undead creatures, but things like Ainur/angels should present a problem for them. I think we have three good spellsets that just need minor revisions at this point. And I think we can do more with spell effects (spells that last more than one turn) and different shape spells other than simply bolt, beam, cone, or ball spells. Maybe the priest should get dispell evil effect spell, that pop up randomly like the lightning spell for mages or the drain life spell for druids.

I only see one unfair thing in the NPP priest spellset right now, and that is the combination of alter reality and clairvoyance is just a bit too much. I would like to see those nerfed a bit.

My other concern with NPP magic is that, between quests, chests, and the bookshop, it is just a little bit too easy to get dungeon spellbooks right now.

[Derakon]

With 4gai, the damage from cone breaths dissipates with distance. Getting hit by a cold hound breath from across the room won't have much effect on anything. I don't recall doing much to the saving throws, but we have been at this for 7 years, and I s.

I didn't write this very clearly, but what I meant was that the potion was on the ground on a space that got hit by the cold breath, but didn't shatter. In my experience objects on the ground are always destroyed by relevant elements, so I was wondering if my experience was faulty here.

[nppangband]

I didn't write this very clearly, but what I meant was that the potion was on the ground on a space that got hit by the cold breath, but didn't shatter. In my experience objects on the ground are always destroyed by relevant elements, so I was wondering if my experience was faulty here.

In both Angband and NPP, the objects get a saving throw against elemental attacks. For example, with cold breaths, if a random # between 0 and 40 is greater than the damage, the object is not destroyed.

[Derakon]

Oh, I did not know that. Interesting.

[Derakon]

After having giant fleas show up out of nowhere and start taking over the section of the dungeon blocking a pit I needed to clear for a quest, I went into monster.txt and sterilized 'em. I killed 300 of them first but there's simply no way to keep an infestation under control once it starts unless you get really lucky with doors, and I didn't (and I note that giant fleas even have BASH_DOOR, not that I ever saw them use it). This is not fun, so I've fixed it, at least for the fleas.

If we're going to keep breeders, personally I recommend not making them fast and/or greatly reducing the chance to breed. Right now, assuming I read the code correctly, monsters will breed if there are at most 3 adjacent monsters and a random number between 0 and the number of adjacent monsters * MON_MULT_ADJ (currently 8) is 0. This seems like it should make breeding pretty rare, but clearly from my own experience it doesn't.

Part of the problem here is that young characters have strictly limited ability to deal with groups. Sure, one orb of draining can kill 10 fleas...but I can only cast 5 orbs (at a 20% failure rate) before I run out of mana and have to rest, and if I leave even one flea behind, it repopulates very quickly thanks to the "always breed if there are no adjacent monsters" logic. Functionally this means that if the fleas have taken over a room and a corridor, then there's too many of them to kill before I run out of mana, which means that it's impossible to clear them out, which means that I have to abandon the level, which means failing a quest through no fault of my own, which means tanking my reputation. All in all not fun.

Mages are a bit better off thanks to cheap stinking cloud; everyone else is even worse off (than the priest I'm playing). Though I suppose playing stealthier races than dwarves mitigates the issue slightly.

Of course, in Vanilla I'd simply abandon the level and not give it a second thought. Quests greatly change the calculus here though.

In other news...
* I continue to be surprised that dark hounds aren't hurt by bright light. They aren't in Vanilla either, though, so oh well.
* Jammed doors seem to be very difficult to take down. You'd think a strength of 17 would eventually be able to take out a wooden door, but I've yet to succeed. Monsters have no such limitation, though; after 7 attempts at taking out a door, a brown yeek kindly opened it from the other side for me.
* Sun Beam (and presumably other "arc" spells) seem to have a display bug with the targeting projection line. If I target a space that is two spaces up and four spaces left of me, for example, then the first time I cast Sun Beam it won't animate properly (though it still seems to hit the appropriate targets). Repeat castings are shown correctly though.
* Incidentally, how will your plans to make mimics actually be objects until detected mesh with squelching? Will I suddenly see mimics springing out of purple dots? I don't really like the sound of that...
* The items from nests definitely are screwy. I'm consistently getting average or cursed ego items. I am getting a few nice items though.
* Amusing randart name: The Large Leather Shield of Rumor. Nothing particularly special, but definitely better than the bog-standard small leather shield I was using before.
* Are you sure you have damage falloff working correctly? It seems like Orb of Draining is consistently killing evil enemies regardless of how far from the epicenter they are. I haven't done any comparisons for enemies that survive getting hit, though.
* Troll priests are notably more durable than anything else in a troll pit at 1250'. Seems a bit odd; I assume it has something to do with their not showing up in groups.

[ramela]

Orb of Draining is supposed to deal equal damage to all affected squares, that is the distinction between an Orb and a Ball.

Also, Druids tend to do well against weak breeders with Poison Cloud.

[Derakon]

Ah, I haven't played any druids yet. Given what I've seen of high-level monsters, I don't want to take a physically frail character after them just yet...

[nppangband]

Druids become extremely strong at the higher levels. One of their spells becomes more powerful the more creatures you are facing. Check out some of the groups of uniques my druid winner simultaneously beat:

My druid did battle 5 ringwraiths, Tselakus and their summons of at least a dozen other greater undead creatures....all while standing in the middle of a room, and crushed them all. He even killed three on one turn.


| 1581748 | 3050 | 50 | Destroyed Adunaphel the Quiet
| 1581748 | 3050 | 50 | Destroyed Akhorahil the Blind
| 1581796 | 3050 | 50 | Quest: Destroyed Tselakus, the Dreadlord
| 1581796 | 3050 | 50 | Destroyed Dwar, Dog Lord of Waw
| 1581796 | 3050 | 50 | Destroyed Ren the Unclean
| 1581806 | 3050 | 50 | Destroyed Hoarmurath of Dir



This one was even harder. At least a dozen black reavers and probably 20 other liches got summoned to this battle.

As long as they don't simultaneously all cast their most powerful spells, fights like this are alot of fun.


| 1653818| 3450 | 50 | Killed Maeglin, the Traitor of Gondolin
| 1653818| 3450 | 50 | Killed The Cat Lord
| 1653941| 3450 | 50 | Destroyed Feagwath, the Undead Sorcerer
| 1653946| 3450 | 50 | Destroyed The Witch-King of Angmar
| 1653984| 3450 | 50 | Destroyed Khamul, the Black Easterling

[Derakon]

As long as they don't simultaneously all cast their most powerful spells, fights like this are alot of fun.

Per my rant when I was fighting Sauron with a previous character, it seems ilke high-level monsters do nothing but cast their most powerful spells every turn...but okay, I'll give a druid a shot when I'm done with the priests.

[Derakon]

Okay, running on beta6 now.

* Something seems to be screwy with targeting. I target a monster in one direction and when I cast Orb of Draining it goes in a different direction, or sometimes it explodes prematurely. The specific context here was trying to target the middle of a troll pit while being attacked from another direction.

* Is it really expected that breath weapons use no mana? That seems overpowered; monsters with breath weapons are fully willing to spam them ceaselessly.

* In my opinion, doors should only burn for a few hundred turns at most.

* Terrain recall should mention which elements have their damage affected by that terrain.

* Squelched items shouldn't be mentioned when hit by areas of effect, e.g. mass identify, breath destruction.

* Incidentally, it took my character until clvl 36 and dlvl 2200' to get the Phial. And I still can't use it, because I need the See Invisible that my lantern gives! And I'm having to wear a Ring of Free Action! No real point here, just equipment's been a bit sparse.

* If Winged Horrors can breathe nether, then they really should be evil.

* The adventurer's guild's probing function doesn't tell you anything about the monster's melee attacks. This is very slightly important information...

* Radagast is a pain. There's no escaping him throughout the dungeon, he hits to disenchant, he summons natural monsters (like, say, gravity hounds), he's durable and immune to damn near everything, he has plenty of annoying other spells (including heal-self), he shows up at a mere 2500' when most characters are only barely scraping by and having to be very careful about what fights they get into...he's even always awake! So shortly after you enter the level, he teleports to you and starts smashing your face in with powerful spells. If you teleport him away, he just comes right back. About the only way I see to deal with him is to keep destructing him away until you're powerful enough to just tank what he throws at you. Usually I assume that uniques are at least meant to be possible to take on at the depth at which they first appear without requiring excessive luck, but I don't buy it for this guy.

[ramela]

Radagast does not resist Fire, so Haste + Fire-Branded weapon / ammo does well against him. Dealing Damage to him quickly forces him to heal himself instead of summoning and attacking, which can be key.

Each of the failed Istar (Radagast, Pallando, Alatar and Saruman) is weak to one of the basic elements or poison. Radagast (and the others) also has an exceptional drop, I've found them worth the trouble.

The others will be challenging as well, the one which has caused me most grief is propably Pallando. The fact that Priests have the most difficulty with Ainur is not a coincidence!

[nppangband]

@Derakon - I found the problem that was causing unnecessary disturbs when shosts were moving through walls at you. It is fixed for the final release.

[Derakon]

Great! Glad to hear it. I haven't been playing NPP much lately; my *band time has been poking at the competition and my current character is stuck on an annoying quest (a bunch of Servants of Yavanna). But I'll pick it up again in a bit, I'm sure.

[slinberg]

Prefs

Would it be possible to make NPP use its own prefs area so it doesn't clobber the Vanilla prefs, and the two can coexist side-by-side? It blew mine away last night and I was irked. I'd like to try it, but manually shuffling prefs around every time I want to switch back or forth is a hassle.

(This is beta 6 on OSX, built from source)