A minimal band

[Antoine]

DL 1 isn't too scary, which is fine with me (I still died a couple of times). But as soon as you start descending you have to start thinking about what you are doing, on DL 2 or 3 groups of goblins appeared, Shelob chased me at DL7 etc. I should say that I've been testing with stealthy characters without much offensive power, I suppose a standard warrior would have it a bit easier the first levels which is also fine with me. If it would be bad for warriors already on dlvl 1 the weaker guys would not have any way to level up.

Note that shelob is not like in v or npp- she is much weaker here- no breath attack for one thing. I just wanted another early game unique that was token canon and not an orc.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

You need somewhere for newbies to learn the ropes without being punished too badly for screwing up. If the game requires minimal mistakes right out the bat then newbies' experience will look something like "Die...die...die...die...die...ragequit."

Heh. I used to get bored in early levels of Fay until I hit DL 15 or so. I decided to cut the easy levels altogether in the next version. I guess Fay is aimed at people who enjoy being really careful right from the start.

Of course Fay is special in that you cannot just keep diving until you hit comfortable difficulty. You are actually supposed to clear every level. Angband is much easier to balance for both newbies and experienced players.

But I think newbies will do just fine in Fay if they choose to play warriors.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Minimal is really nice.

It would actually be a good base for a new variant, set in a completely different world. (Less things to rename.)

I recently cut the bottom 50 levels from Fay dev version. It was a really painless procedure -- I only needed to cut about 5% of monsters, for example, because there are very few deep monsters in Angband. (Bottom levels are populated by uniques.)

Do you think I could do the same thing with Minimal, cutting it to only 25 dungeon levels? Or are there more deep (DL 26-50) monsters in Minimal than in Angband?

[ghengiz]

Do you think I could do the same thing with Minimal, cutting it to only 25 dungeon levels? Or are there more deep (DL 26-50) monsters in Minimal than in Angband?

Yes and no. Yes, there are some monsters whose native depth is below that, but no, there aren't more than in Angband.
Instead, the whole idea of the variant is to have less monsters and objects than in vanilla. In a few cases, there were a "fusion" of more monsters in one.
I know because I helped Antoine in the editing of the monsters/objects list files.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I was afraid that part of your process was to move many of the monsters deeper so that a bigger percentage of them would inhabit levels 26-50. That would have made cutting the bottom half a bit more difficult.

But it seems that you mostly just divided monster levels by two. Good.

I'm probably not starting anything in a couple of years. But updating my base from the aged Ey to modern NPP-minimal does have serious benefits. I would probably bring both Eytan's and my own best ideas to the new variant.

[Antoine]

Id really like to see some balance reports from the mid game

[thapper]

Id really like to see some balance reports from the mid game

What would you consider being the midgame? I'm a bit unsure now that there is only 50 DLs... I don't have any report yet anyway since I'm still at DL10ish but just so I know when to start reporting

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I believe you can just divide the Angband levels by half. 50 in Angband is 25 in Minimal.

[thapper]

Report from DL10-17, still playing first alphaversion, I'll update tonight. Still playing hobbit rogue

Many DLs are small, so small that one detection of monsters/traps/objects show me half the level. (The detection of monsters usually make me leave the level as fast as possible also). My problem with so small levels is that any wall eater or wall walker that I can't handle in principle blocks most of the level. I now have teleport other (a few charges) so this might change. Teleporting on these mini levels is of course also highly dangerous.

Confusion (and to a lesser extent poison) is a real danger when CCW doesn't cure. Potions of curing have not been plentiful.

Stat draining is annoying. I've only seen two pots of restoration in the black market and none in the dungeon (at least none that I could get to). Maybe they'll show up deeper? The stats starts getting drained already on DL1 by traps (and by then I had no means of detecting traps) so it's been a long wait for my CON to get restored.

A list of monsters, DJabanete style. I've removed the once where we had the same opinion.

(*) Poltergeist: were OK in their original form, you need a form of attacking that you can do when afraid and some patience, that's all.
(*) Crebain: Annoying but balanced.
(*) White, Black, Blue Dragons: Balanced. I don't mind them being this shallow.
(*) War trolls: Tough but balanced
(*) Mage and illusionist: Balanced
(*) Ghouls: OK when you have FA, scary otherwise (so balanced I guess)
(*) Rogues: If you bumped up thieves I guess they're something like the "original" rogues, in that case you could bump up rogues as well.
(*) Wight: A bit weak when I dared to attack them but then I had already seen them a few levels earlier
(*) Vampires: Hard, I avoid or teleport away.
(*) Homunculus: Weak, but I had FA when I took them on the first time.
(*) Ghost: I avoid because of stat drain
(*) Iron golem: weak, but maybe because he never managed to slow me
(*) Ochre jellies: Balanced
(*) Fire giant: Balanced, perhaps a bit weak

Seen but not attacked
(*) Dragons other colours (at least bronze, red, green, chromatic)
(*) Cave trolls
(*) Rangers and chaos adepts
(*) Colbran
(*) Frost giant
(*) Probably more


Bugs:

My rods of detect monsters act as rods of recall, or my rods of recall are named rods of Detect monsters, you choose.

Cave trolls (and the cave troll of Moria) are "O"'s, bug or feature?

[Antoine]

Excellent thanks! Sorry about the rod bug

A.

[thapper]

Don't worry about the rod bug. I found two rods of recall, who cares if they are called "detect monster"

[ghengiz]

Don't worry about the rod bug. I found two rods of recall, who cares if they are called "detect monster"

@Antoine
Interesting...the rod of recall isn't in object.txt, so it shouldn't even be in the game, whereas the rod of detect monster is.
Probably there is a typo in the object management code, so that the IDs have been switched.

[thapper]

@Antoine

In your comment on my dump it sounded as if you expected shops to have !curing. During my games they have never had any (except perhaps BM). I've found them sometimes on early DLs but not very often deeper.

From my first long game I'd say that:

Stat drain is annoying, it is hard to find any restoration. This is not necessarily bad and in my next games I'll do even more to avoid stat drainers. Currently I'm worrying about ghosts since I haven't found any SI.

I wouldn't mind levels being a bit bigger.

The reduced variety of scrolls, potions etc has the good effect that almost everything I find in the dungeon I keep, at least early on.

Finding resists to the base 4 was hard but until DL20 there was not (m)any heavy breathers so avoiding stuff was good enough, at least with good stealth.

Until I found a bronze DSM I worried a lot about confusion since curing was so rare and staffs of teleportation can't be bought. I did not find any other source of rConf and I suppose I can't expect to find bronze DSMs all the time.


Just out of curiosity, when does stat potions start to appear?

[Antoine]

Noted all your comments - thanks.

Stat potions are native to DL 20 (which is equivalent to DL 40 in V).

!Curing was supposed to be in unlimited supply in the shops. That alone is worth a bugfix release, I've just done one and forwarded to Pav - will post a link here when available. While it doesn't address all your comments, it covers the most important ones and the rest are filed on my to-do list.

Not quite sure whether the bugfix will apply to your in-progress game...

A.

[Antoine]

Posted as http://angband.oook.cz/quickband/minimal-20120407.zip - thanks pav