[Announce] Poschengband 2.0.0 Released

[chris]

A suggested change!:

Magic Eaters are a fun class. There's always the next rod/staff/wand to absorb so the quest to grab stuff off the floor is never ending. What they lack is what makes the Mauler and similar classes even more fun: class powers!

I'm not asking for anything that would upset their balance, at least I don't think so. I'd like to see powers that let you do more damage at the cost of (many) charges or a LOT more damage at the cost of all of a spell's charges. It'd be interesting if you could force a bolt spell to become a beam or cone, maybe at the cost of 5 or 10 charges instead of the usual 1. Or force a bolt to become a ball for 10 charges or a larger ball for 20. Utility staves could have their area of affect increased or used even when your character is scared. Heh, I'd be happy to have a staff of starlight actually aim at nearby creatures for extra cost.

You could drain the ALL of the charges for ALL wand powers if you really want a good level 50 "nova" ability. Or you could permanently drain charges (99 out of 99? Nah, more like 74 out of 74 now!) for the most powerful abilities.

My thought was that you would activate a power, "Wand Beam" for example, and you would be given your offensive wand powers. Choose Frost Bolt and you would automatically get a beam effect while 5 charges get drained.

Powers that don't drain charges would cost hit points. Rapid Rod Recharge could cost you 5 HP and cut the recharge time for any rod power by half. Instant Rod Recharge could cost 10 or 15 HP and not drain a charge from the rod power that you select.

Cool powers, the ability to feel strong for a turn or two, but at a cost that just might get you killed on turn three

I'll certainly consider your ideas ... You might consider trying the Devicemaster class. Though more focused than the Magiceater, they have a few cool abilities, including a desperation talent that grants extra power at the expense of using extra charges or possibly destroying the device in question. They can also shuffle charges around from one device to another which is quite useful. In addition, they have powers of preservation so that usage of specialty devices do not always consume charges, and this grows more powerful with experience.

[clouded]

I'm not a fan of the change a few versions back to make the wilderness encounter rate higher. It makes traveling to the towns much more of a chore than it needs to be, especially if you are going through a string of early deaths. The ambushes aren't even dangerous unless you try to shortcut through water or something.

[Arjen]

I'm not a fan of the change a few versions back to make the wilderness encounter rate higher. It makes traveling to the towns much more of a chore than it needs to be, especially if you are going through a string of early deaths. The ambushes aren't even dangerous unless you try to shortcut through water or something.

I second this, maybe reduce the amount of ambushes on the roads and keep them in the forests/swaps/water/mountains where actual ambushes are more likely to happen.

[HugoVirtuoso]

I second this, maybe reduce the amount of ambushes on the roads and keep them in the forests/swaps/water/mountains where actual ambushes are more likely to happen.

Ditto. Chris increased the number of ambushes to prevent players from start-scumming 'Acquirement' at Mt Olympus for artifacts.

[chris]

I'm not a fan of the change a few versions back to make the wilderness encounter rate higher. It makes traveling to the towns much more of a chore than it needs to be, especially if you are going through a string of early deaths. The ambushes aren't even dangerous unless you try to shortcut through water or something.

At what experience level are you heading out into the wilderness?

Like everyone above, I too found Hengband's ambush system annoying and nerfed it for Chengband. But in so doing, I made it far too easy to run over to R'lyeh (and now Mount Olympus) with scrolls of acquirement and artifact creation. *Way* too easy ... Back in Hengband, that was always risky, and I've even lost CL50 characters to deep water ambushes. Taking the risk with the Arena acquirement scroll, for example, required some boldness, and sometimes the return trip after an amazing acquisition would prove fatal: Grrrrrr.

So I reverted the ambush odds for the time being when I learned that even a CL1 character can swim to Mount Olympus with barely any risk.

Here is advice on playing with the current system:

[1] Don't travel with early characters. You can level up quickly by doing the Thieves' Hideout followed by the Warg quest. This should net at least CL10. Another 10 minutes of play in Camelot is recommended to hit CL16. At this point, you are immune to ambush if you stay on the grassland roads ('*' characters in w_info.txt, if you are curious). There are more dangerous roads up near Angwil and between the mountains too.

[2] And now for the munchkin option. If you are ambushed by really weak stuff, you can often just press '<' to run away! So often you don't have to fight at all ... but this option is only practical once you are CL12 or higher.

[3] Stealth matters. Time of day does not.

That said, I would love something new for the wilderness and am open to ideas, even if they will probably exceed my coding capabilities ...

[Derakon]

If all players care about is accessing other towns, you could drop the ambush rate to 0 on roads (assuming it isn't already at 0).

[HugoVirtuoso]

New ideas:
I'd recommend generation of outside guardians protecting the entrance to high-level dungeons. IIRC, Z+Angband (maybe the original ZAngband 2.7.4/pre-2.7.5) had groups of monsters protecting high-level dungeon entrances!!

For Mount Olympus, perhaps, change the code so that the player is *required* to kill a very-high-level dragon, for example, a Sky Drake ('D') to *unlock* the Mount Olympus entrance. If you can't kill it, the entrance won't open (of course!), but then your only option is... RUN...OR...TELEPORT!!

As for R'lyeh, maybe the player should be required to kill the nearby Lesser/Greaker krakens to unlock the entrance?

For Dragon's Lair, maybe a Dracolich/Dracolisk should be guarding it!

For the Mine...a Drolem.

For the Arena (near Zul)...a Storm Troll.

Maybe these will guarantee prevention of early scumming of such deep level dungeons!!

And so on...

[Arjen]

I like that

[chris]

Me too. More importantly, I probably could even code that

[HugoVirtuoso]

Me too. More importantly, I probably could even code that

You should.

After this *ever* gets coded, then we'll see a consensus of whether most players like this (or not).

[Brouhaha]

A couple of archer questions:

What does the (x/y) at the end of each ammo stack indicate?

Is there a way to automatically pick up identified ammo? Manually scavenging recent battle sites is a little annoying and picking up ammo while running from something nasty is impossible. If I can effortlessly scoop up 174 pieces of gold while confused, stunned, and hallucinating, I don't think snagging a single bolt or arrow is unrealistic

Would it be trivial to code a quiver so we don't have to select our ammo of choice every time we fire? Common quivers could be sold at the general store while powerfully enchanted ones could be found. The quiver could take up the shield slot and, if you have a couple kinds of ammo that you do cycle between, the quiver could be activated or deactivated as a free action.

[chris]

A couple of archer questions:

What does the (x/y) at the end of each ammo stack indicate?

Average damage per shot/Average damage per round

Is there a way to automatically pick up identified ammo?

See below.

Would it be trivial to code a quiver so we don't have to select our ammo of choice every time we fire? Common quivers could be sold at the general store while powerfully enchanted ones could be found. The quiver could take up the shield slot and, if you have a couple kinds of ammo that you do cycle between, the quiver could be activated or deactivated as a free action.

Adding a quiver would be extremely difficult given the very poor code design and is not something I'm willing to do.

Instead, try inscribing your ammo with, for example: @f1=g

The @f1 part says to use this object by pressing '1' whenever invoking the 'f' command. So press 'f' then '1' to shoot this ammo (or better yet, macro up something like \e*tf1 to auto shoot the first enemy in range). Obviously, if you change the inscription part from @f1 to @f2, then the 2 key would be used.

The =g part says to automatically pick up this object.

For archers, I usually inscribe my primary ammo with @f1=g and my secondary ammo (with slays or whatever) with @f2=g. Then I macro up \e*tf1 to deal with trivial monsters. But I use *t then f2 then n (for repeat) to deal with difficult monsters.

HTH

EDIT: And I set the use_old_target to be true. Without this option, you need to re-target after every fire command which is very annoying!

[HugoVirtuoso]

Minor bug:
Wielding 'Sting' (as opposed to picking it up) does not give the so-called 'you have completed your quest' message. But, when you go the 'main building' the guy correctly marks the quest as 'complete,' so it is NOT a failure.

Suggestion:
ToME does this.... Implement an option that *ASKS* before picking up heavy corpses that slow down the character. My last all-powerful character got killed because I was lugging this *stupid* Greater Hell-beast corpse by mistake... a hugely costly one.