Derakon's combat revamp

[fizzix]

If finesse has a noticable impact on to hit chance, a difference in a factor of 3 is going to mess up the paladin. If you apply a nonlinear function to those numbers to calculate to hit chance which mitigates the effect, what have you gained for gameplay by coupling to hit and finesse ?

A first run through of the monster list with new evasion scores is up github

https://github.com/fizzix/v4/tree/evasion

armor (absorption will come later). Basically, paladins will have issues with a small class of monsters and shouldn't notice much difference for other monsters. The standard evasion value in the early game is 0 and the standard value in the late game is 10, meaning paladins will have a 75% chance to hit these monsters and the higher finesse characters will almost never miss.

All highly evasive monsters (except the special case of the will o the wisp) are vulnerable to devices. Paladins may want to carry some.

[Estie]

Sounds good then. The paladins traditional secondary attack is orb, at least late in the game its fairly effective.

[Magnate]

With many thanks to Derakon for his blazing fast development, the first iteration of this new system is now in v4, available from the usual place. Please be aware that this is brand new work which has had no testing in actual games - it's hot off the keyboards (well, Derakon's keyboard). So, for optimum development, please split your feedback into

1. Bugs - things which aren't working at all - e.g. you can't hit anything, you do no damage, the numbers shown are wrong compared with wizmode, you never get crits, or something else has broken, or you can crash the game.

2. Balance - not actual bugs, but you think that your character's combination of race/class/stats/equipment has things too easy or too hard, either against certain monsters or in general.

Please don't worry unduly about balance at this stage, because fizzix's work on EvAbs will be going in pretty shortly, so we won't be doing fine balancing until after that. At the moment we're primarily looking for actual bugs in or caused by the new code. But overwhelming balance problems are of course worth catching sooner rather than later.

[fizzix]

Whenever you're ready I have evasion working and rebased off of Derakon's commits. (hopefully I did this correctly!) Pull request sent.

I made a separate function to calculate monster hitting player probability and put it in melee2.c This is exactly the same as the old test_hit function since both players and monsters used it in the past. Now the calculations are completely different until we want to use player evasion.

right now the naming nomenclature is a bit funky. The evasion value is still referred to as m_ptr->ac. That'll be fixed when I implement the armor (absorption) half.

[Derakon]

Excellent, thanks Magnate (and everyone on IRC) for all your help with this project.

For everyone else, I want to make clear how much balance testing I've done on this, which is: very little. I've tossed level-50 kobold paladins (the default race/class combination for some reason) around the dungeon a bit, and took a level-1 half-troll warrior to the weapons store for some window shopping, but that's about it. Balance is almost guaranteed to be bad. I would have done more playtesting, but a) I'm on vacation, and have precious little time to spend with my family before everyone has to scatter to separate parts of the country, and b) I'm on a laptop and I don't know the roguelike controls.

At the moment I suspect that damage will tend to be too low rather than too high, but we'll see.

Here's the change log summary since my last summation on the 18th:

* Multiplied all finesse and prowess bonuses on equipment by 10 (including the combat rings, penalties on heavy armor, the random (+5,+5) on mithril shots, etc.). Well, the combat rings (=Finesse, =Prowess, =Slaying) aren't exactly comparable to their old values; they range from 20 to 120 now.

* Changed crits as I described earlier in the thread.

* Improved paladin combat skills (level 50: 140 finesse, 300 prowess).

* A bunch of bug fixes.

Magnate: sorry about breaking the unit tests! Unfortunately, if I do "make -C src" I get the error "../mk/buildsys.mk: no such file or directory". Indeed, buildsys.mk is nowhere to be found. Whoops?

[myshkin]

Magnate: sorry about breaking the unit tests! Unfortunately, if I do "make -C src" I get the error "../mk/buildsys.mk: no such file or directory". Indeed, buildsys.mk is nowhere to be found. Whoops?

This is an unfortunate artifact of having somewhat separate build paths for different operating systems. For you, make -f Makefile.cocoa tests from the src directory should work. If you want to have make -C src work from the top level, you'll need to run sh autogen.sh && ./configure with appropriate arguments, to create mk/buildsys.mk.

[Magnate]

This is an unfortunate artifact of having somewhat separate build paths for different operating systems. For you, make -f Makefile.cocoa tests from the src directory should work. If you want to have make -C src work from the top level, you'll need to run sh autogen.sh && ./configure with appropriate arguments, to create mk/buildsys.mk.

Just for general info, noz (he of utf-8 fame) expressed some frustration with this recently (after spending fruitless hours trying to help someone build in Eclipse on Windows), and threatened to rewrite the whole system in a more coherent way. Now that really would be a Christmas bonus for Angband development.