Gradual monster genocide

[Derakon]

Heres a way to balance genocide/destruction. Make monsters removed be considered a kill, but worth negative exp. That way you cannot spam genocide without first getting some way to grind your exp up. This prevents the whole "divers are invulnerable" problem and makes it a tradeoff.

That's...actually really clever! I like it.

[myshkin]

That's...actually really clever! I like it.

Experience penalties have traditionally not been that big of a deal, although with a sufficiently large one, they might give a player pause (e.g. each monster banished generates a 0.1% chance of losing a level and an 0.2% chance of losing half a level -- measure these penalties to the lowest XP requirement for the previous level so as not to neuter them for clvl 50, and make them not recoverable by !RestoreLifeLevels). I might suggest some effect akin to GF_TIME as well; if you like, it can be the wrath of Eru.

[Derakon]

The important thing with banishment is that it should be useful occasionally, but not abusable. Experience penalties become significant only when you're abusing the spell, so there you go, problem solved.

[fizzix]

Been thinking about this a bit. Basically the idea of having a finite supply of slowly breeding monsters is to give both a positive incentive and a negative incentive to killing monsters that you might normally avoid. After all this is one of the reasons we kill many uniques. For there to be a positive incentive, it means that a normal play through will allow the opportunity to see a marked decrease in monsters provided you kill them off. A negative incentive implies that you are likely to encounter more of the monsters later if you don't kill them off. Just like Adunaphel keeps on hounding you until you silence her.

The way I see it, we need four variables. The current number of monsters, the breeding rate, an allocation weight, and a max population.

In the extreme case of a heavy breeder like lice you'd have a high max population, a high breeding rate, and a low allocation probability. In essence the number of monsters always remains constant regardless of how many you kill, and there is no change in allocation probability. I see most grouped monsters fitting this pattern besides Zephyr hounds. (because if you can't eliminate zephyr hounds, I've stopped caring.)

At the other end of the spectrum you have unique monsters which have a low max population (1), a 0 breeding rate, and a high allocation probability. You'll have something like 65536 lice and only one unique (ok 2^16 is overkill, but still it's going to be more than 1k), so if you want them to have the same allocation, the difference in allocation probs needs to have that same ratio.

For the positive incentive to be worthwhile you need a way for a player to make headway on the maximum population. That means extremely annoying monsters (think beholder hive mother) fall close to uniques on the spectrum. Low max pop, low or even 0 breeding rate, high allocation. If there were 5 beholder hive mothers total then killing one might be worth it, but probably not. Lucrative monsters could fit this pattern as well. Dragons and Wyrms could have a finite supply.

Now there's a bit of a problem because this doesn't quite work with the negative incentive. The negative incentive implies that you should have a reasonably high breeding rate so you kill off the hive mothers so they don't swamp the level. I'm not sure how to get both incentives to work. Maybe it's impossible?

I tend to favor the positive incentives over negative ones in this case anyway. If you were to tell me that if I kill 10 undead beholders I'd never see another one again, I probably still wouldn't bother, but some player might! If you were to tell me that if I didn't kill an undead beholder per level, level 99 would be full of them, I'd probably not want to play anymore. That goes double for time hounds, except I might actually kill the time hounds to prevent them from showing up later. Basically if I could eliminate all the possible dangerous monsters for Morgoth to summon, I just might, if only because then I can do something silly like punch him to death.

Breeding rates are tricky, because you don't want to unduly affect divers vs clearers. I'd recommend some bastard approach that breeds monsters based on number of killed. You can cause breeding to occur after you've killed 100 monsters or so. I think this is better than breeding after a set number of turns because that means if you didn't economize turncount (which really shouldn't be standard gameplay) you get hit with more annoying monsters deep to eliminate.

Ok, that's probably long enough for now.

[CliffStamp]

The current number of monsters, the breeding rate, an allocation weight, and a max population.

It can be fairly complicated, but at a first pass it can also be fairly trivial. Monsters already have a rarity used for generation this can just be modified. A basic algorithm would be that when monsters are generated it decreases this rarity, as they are killed it increases it. Pick a balance point say that if you kill 50% of monsters the rarity would be unchanged.

There would always be some small chance that monsters would be generated even if you always killed everything (they wander in from outside) so a min limit would be set, similar a max limit if you ignored everything as you would assume that other things would kill the lice if they got completely out of hand.

But this while not a huge difference would be seen in you played in either extreme. If you killed every Z that you saw you would start to see less of them. If you ignored every graveyard then undead would start popping up more and more.

[saarn]

How about a totally brain-dead approach:
Have an optional attribute for "nuisance monsters" that has a count and a second rarity. When your kill count for that monster type hits the value, the rarity drops to the second level.

For an RP kind of story behind this mechanic, some monsters aren't very common but there is a rogue pack loose in the dungeon and they are tracking @ down. When he kills the rogue pack, the frequency of encounters is reduced.

It doesn't sound as cool as the population dynamics discussed above, but it might be as good for game mechanics.

[Rydel]

I'm not sure how to get both incentives to work. Maybe it's impossible?

This may be something that's best to work on a case-by-case basis for the monster. Some monsters, a single one can ruin your day, so you would design them for positive incentive so that taking the time to kill them on your terms means you are less likely to be surprised by them. Same for monsters that are fine when your healthy bun especially dangerous if you are wounded and trying to get away.

Other monsters aren't too bad on their own, but can be trouble in groups. These would work best with negative incentive, so its best to kill them when you see them alone or in small groups to keep those large groups from spawning.

This would require changes in the monster edit file since you would definitely have to have the breeding count, allocation weight, and max population in there instead of calculating them off the existing rarity value, but I suspect that's what you were thinking anyway.