New version of v4

[jevansau]

Running the latest version there seems to be something wrong with brands/slays.
I'm not sure if it is just a display problem or not, but using:
Sapphire Great Hammer of Slay Evil (8d1) (+48,+46) <+50..>
+1 strength, tunneling.
Slays animals (x1.48), evil creatures (x1.50).
Branded with frost (x1.48).
Provides protection from blindness.
Can be destroyed by acid, fire.

Combat info:
Receives 10% of your finesse score, 90% of your prowess score.
1.2 blows/round.
2.4x damage multiplier.
Average damage/round: 25.2 vs. normal creatures, 35.4 vs.
creatures made of stone, 40.5 vs. animals, 40.7 vs. evil
creatures, 40.5 vs. creatures not resistant to cold.

I get messages like:
You hit Ufthak of Cirith Ungol
You hit the Hill orc
You hit the green worm mass
You hit the Cave spider
You hit the Zombified human
You freeze the Rock lizard
You freeze the Black mamba
You hit the Giant white mouse
You freeze the Large grey snake
You hit the fruit bat
You hit the Cold hound.

Not absolutely sure, but it looked like freeze was the only applied brand and the slays were never applied.

Still, otherwise it actually seems fairly balanced. Looking forward to the new archery.

Regards,
Jonathan

[Old Coach]

That's fixed in the version Old Coach is playing (the one announced in this thread). The randart generator is arthritic, but it now copes with all of fin/prow, pval slays and multiple pvals. Coach's randart is quite tame for one that has aggravate.Not without critical hits he won't have been. The 53 includes crits, and I think non-critical base damage is quite a lot lower. I am thinking that crits might need to be capped after all.

Aside from some minor tweaking with the crit system, I think that it is balance fairly well. My CL 26 warrior just spent a good amount of time bashing a Mithril Golem at DL 26. It was hard to do damage without a crit. Took lots of swings, but it felt about right. I imagine that a mage would just have to walk away from this battle. Much better flavor wise than before when you could just grind up a golem with your whip or bow and arrow.

Speaking of crits, IMHO crits should be more spectacular and less frequent than they are now. Angband is such a long game that you are swinging tens of thousands of times. Crit hits are pretty normal for high level fighter types.

If you put in a cap for crits, would it be possible to leave it off for the warrior? Maybe it is my DND background coming through, but I always thought that the Warrior class should be afforded a higher level crit than other classes when in melee. I am not sure how hard it would be to code. I guess that the ranger should get the *SUPERB* crit for ranged attacks and the rogue could get *SUPERB* for thrown. Where have I played a game like that before? Ahhh. Wizardry 7 and 8.

Anyway, I think the absorption armor is balance pretty good for warriors up through lvl 26.

[Magnate]

Base types for randarts have nothing to do with the standarts they were built from (with the exception of jewelry, I think). You can find Bladeturner in bow form or Ringil as a pair of boots.

... and in modern versions (3.2.0 onwards IIRC) inspecting a randart will tell you what it's based on.

[Derakon]

If it was an artifact long sword, then it was probably based on Ringil's template, which already has a high power.

Base types for randarts have nothing to do with the standarts they were built from (with the exception of jewelry, I think). You can find Bladeturner in bow form or Ringil as a pair of boots.

[PowerWyrm]

Also, I found this artifact longsword on lvl 10, and it has a TON of flags (+1 to every stat, speed, resistances, light, see invis, free action, a couple slays, and a lot more). How does the RAND_Art generator work? Should I be seeing something this awesome at such a low level?

Also, the sword has "aggravates nearby monsters". I have never used a weapon with this attribute before, but I can't really tell much of a difference with my dwarven warrior of the monster behavior when I am wielding it. How does aggravate actually work?

Thanks!

The response is in your second part. Sometimes the randart generator generates a really powerful randart, and adds aggravation to balance it. If it was an artifact long sword, then it was probably based on Ringil's template, which already has a high power.

[Magnate]

Ok, just posting some known bugs in this current version, to save people reporting them. They'll be fixed when the archery fixes are released.

1. Inspecting ammo damage shows you loads of slays that neither the launcher nor the ammo have. This is because it's erroneously applying all the melee slays from weapon, rings, etc. Your missile attacks do not actually have these slays.

1b. Inspecting ammo says "It brands your melee attacks with..." or "It causes your melee attacks to slay ..." - this is caused by a single missing parenthesis, which somehow slipped past the compiler.

2. Melee attacks sometimes say "you burn" or "you freeze" when you don't actually have those brands. This is because the monster has HURT_FIRE or HURT_COLD, and it's not checking for the brand. (Ooops.)

3. Rings of the dog have <+0> in their description, when their pval is actually -2. The new pval display code displays only the highest pval (and a short ellipsis if there's more than one) - but it assumes that the highest pval isn't negative. Ooops.

1b, 2 and 3 are all fixed in 9feb8de, which will be available from the buildbots soon. #1 is actually very tricky, because of the way that slay pvals either affect archery (launchers and ammo) or melee (everything else). Still working out how to fix this, and it's tied up with the overall archery fixes - whether archery is going to use any different mechanics etc. Sorry for the ongoing delay.

[Magnate]

IIRC randarts are still buggy because the power calculations are keyed towards the old +to-hit/dam system. So they see e.g. Narthanc with (+40, +60) and think it's Godslayer, generating an equivalently powerful randart in its place.

That's fixed in the version Old Coach is playing (the one announced in this thread). The randart generator is arthritic, but it now copes with all of fin/prow, pval slays and multiple pvals. Coach's randart is quite tame for one that has aggravate.

Absorption is in monster.txt, though it looks like fizzix didn't update the docs at the top of the file. The I: line in each entry has, in order, the following fields: speed, HP, vision range, evasion, absorption, alertness. Giant yellow scorpions have absorption of 15, so you should have been damaging them consistently with 53 average damage/blow.

Not without critical hits he won't have been. The 53 includes crits, and I think non-critical base damage is quite a lot lower. I am thinking that crits might need to be capped after all.

[Derakon]

IIRC randarts are still buggy because the power calculations are keyed towards the old +to-hit/dam system. So they see e.g. Narthanc with (+40, +60) and think it's Godslayer, generating an equivalently powerful randart in its place.

Absorption is in monster.txt, though it looks like fizzix didn't update the docs at the top of the file. The I: line in each entry has, in order, the following fields: speed, HP, vision range, evasion, absorption, alertness. Giant yellow scorpions have absorption of 15, so you should have been damaging them consistently with 53 average damage/blow.

Aggravation, assuming it hasn't been changed recently, simply means that all monsters are always awake. There's also an aggravation spell, which wakes up everything near you and hastes all monsters in line of sight, but that's different.

[Old Coach]

Down at DL 20 with a warrior of lvl 20. Combat seems to be pretty well balanced so far, except for a problem with scorpions. With an artifact longsword, (+100, +120) poison brand an a bunch of other flags, gloves of slaying, and 18/10 str and dex, I average 53 damage per swing and 2 swings per round. However, I can only actually damage a yellow scorpion about 1/3 of the times I connect, and the damage is minimal. Took about 100 swings to take out one of these suckers. Is absorption found in the monster.txt file? I could not track it down.

Also, I found this artifact longsword on lvl 10, and it has a TON of flags (+1 to every stat, speed, resistances, light, see invis, free action, a couple slays, and a lot more). How does the RAND_Art generator work? Should I be seeing something this awesome at such a low level?

Also, the sword has "aggravates nearby monsters". I have never used a weapon with this attribute before, but I can't really tell much of a difference with my dwarven warrior of the monster behavior when I am wielding it. How does aggravate actually work?

Thanks!

[Magnate]

Ok, just posting some known bugs in this current version, to save people reporting them. They'll be fixed when the archery fixes are released.

1. Inspecting ammo damage shows you loads of slays that neither the launcher nor the ammo have. This is because it's erroneously applying all the melee slays from weapon, rings, etc. Your missile attacks do not actually have these slays.

1b. Inspecting ammo says "It brands your melee attacks with..." or "It causes your melee attacks to slay ..." - this is caused by a single missing parenthesis, which somehow slipped past the compiler.

2. Melee attacks sometimes say "you burn" or "you freeze" when you don't actually have those brands. This is because the monster has HURT_FIRE or HURT_COLD, and it's not checking for the brand. (Ooops.)

3. Rings of the dog have <+0> in their description, when their pval is actually -2. The new pval display code displays only the highest pval (and a short ellipsis if there's more than one) - but it assumes that the highest pval isn't negative. Ooops.

[buzzkill]

Thanks. That fixed the issue. I actually had to put the # in front of lines 901 and 902, which are the svals for the scrolls of *Enchant Weapon* and *Enchant Armor*.

It would be my guess that the *enchants* were probably removed from the game.

[Old Coach]

Thanks. That fixed the issue. I actually had to put the # in front of lines 901 and 902, which are the svals for the scrolls of *Enchant Weapon* and *Enchant Armor*. That fixed all the graphics issues. I am not sure what will happen when those scrolls are generated on the floor. I assume I will just see the ? symbol looking very tiny.
Not sure if this is unique to my version or if it is a bug in the latest build that needs to be fixed.

Thanks again!
Fred

[buzzkill]

I am getting a graphics problem with this new build.
Scrolls, potions, rings, and other floor items are only showing up as tiny ascII versions of themselves instead of the 64x64 tile.
Also, when starting a new game (or loading a save) I get the error:

Error in lib/pref/graf-shb.prf line 900 col 5: unrecognized s-val

Quick fix...

graf-shb.prf governs the tiles. Once Angband encounters an error in it, it stops processing it. If you comment out the offending line with a #, then things should go back to normal (except for that one item).

[Old Coach]

I am getting a graphics problem with this new build.
Scrolls, potions, rings, and other floor items are only showing up as tiny ascII versions of themselves instead of the 64x64 tile.
Also, when starting a new game (or loading a save) I get the error:

Error in lib/pref/graf-shb.prf line 900 col 5: unrecognized s-val

And, no matter what race or class I choose, I always get the generic warrior picture for my @.

Thanks,
Fred

[Magnate]

Thanks for this work! Since ranged is still broken, trying a warrior. The difficulty level seems about right at the beginning. 1st level dwarven warrior cannot just wade in and go toe to toe at low levels. Warrior has to be somewhat careful, which is good. Died to Fang, who was right below stairs down to DL1 (iron man game)... as it should be. However, by character level 5, warrior seems to smoke anything from lvls 1-5 without effort. Going to try and get a little deeper and stress out the new combat system a bit more.

Thanks again! Game feels great, and with Shockbolt's new graphics, it has a completely different mood.

Excellent - thanks for the feedback, and glad it feels ok so far. With the changes to melee combat and slays, we're quite a long way from V now, so please don't be surprised if at some point during the game the balance seems to be quite a way off (i.e. you steamroller everything, or you can't kill anything). The item generation will need tweaking to ensure that weapons are appropriately powerful for their depth now. One example that springs to mind is that the slays on HA and Gondolin weapons will now be much weaker, rendering those weapons much less desirable than un-themed random affixes. This will get fixed in the round of tweaks immediately after the archery changes.

(Also, the dice on certain weapons will need changing to be more consistent with the new combat and crit system.)