V4: Gameplay notes

[Pete Mack]

Kudos
• Potion/scroll "piles" and special rooms are good. No more cloning death quasits/clearing immune dragon pits for stat gain! Increased probability of !Augmentation is also nice.
• Game is much better than 3.3 for balance

Spell balance
• Word of Recall isn't escape; it is convenience spell: all it does is save backpack space. Make it lower level/fail/mana. For mage casters only genuine escape spells are Create Doors, Create Stairs and Teleport level (full caster only)
• Current detect object behavior is totally unfair to non-Rogues. It's ridiculous that CL 15 rogues have better detection than a cl 20 mage wearing Holhenneth.
• In cavern levels, magic mapping no longer (even a little) optional. Should it be a Mage spell, perhaps in Mordy's? (If I don't have MM, I just use Create Stairs, which sort of defeats the purpose of Cavern.)
• I am not quite clear on why important utility spells aren't universally available. Except in Ironman, these just use up a slot that could otherwise be spent on something fun like Dragon's Frost.

Object balance
• Multiple pvals causes best and worst pval rolls to regress towards the mean. The most notable effect is that non-artifact deep amulets are weaker. Was this intentional?
• Black market power level seems to mean that utility objects like ?Teleport Level and --TO are no longer available when you are deep.
• Except for restore life exploit, recover stats objects are very rare. (Have seen zero mushrooms of Vigor.)
• TO is crazy scarce. Is this intentional? It makes game somewhat harder (good), but also makes it much less likely that player will crack vaults (bad) . At the least, make Rod of TO electricity resistant.
• Remove --Clone Monster. This is just a horrible hack for forcing easy drops.
• Too easy to reach 18/100. Bring back some amount of incremental stat gain above ~18/80.
• Too much insanely heavy body armor. Once upon a time, Armor of Elvenkind only applied to chainmail and light armor. Elves don't wear plate!

Poison and cuts
• Poison needs to do more damage per turn depending on poison counter (behave like cuts.)
• Cuts need to do more damage per turn. (Sil model, but maybe at 10% rather than 20%)
• You should be completely aware of cuts and poison counters.

Monster balance
• Not enough confusion distance attacks. Without Bronze Dragons rConf is no longer nearly so important
• Really like the new behavior of Deep Descent. Sayonara, Air and Water hounds!
• Melee is too quiet in LOS. Killed Great Swamp Wyrm in melee, and nearby monsters in LOS did not wake up.

Manual pages
• What do the various protection flags do? (What is pStun?)
• How does Squelch work?

Miscellaneous
• {unseen} Flask of Whisky shows up as "Black" unknown object in food list.
• Sometimes Squelch turns off, but recovers on Save/Restore game.
• Diggers of Earthquake really should cause earthquakes. Because the higher level diggers were removed forever in the past, there is zero chance of earthquakes now.
• Monsters should be able to push past their sleeping companions of same level.
• Quiver behavior is mysterious. Why don't all arrows(+0,+0) stack up to some limit? When does quiver increase object count?
Preferred fix: bring back original quiver stacking behavior, but put a finite limit on total number of ammo in quiver (say, 100). Everything else goes in backpack.
• Some default colors are just too dark. On all devices I need to lighten b6,u7,D8,v17. If there is any glare at all (i.e. the lights are on or the sun is shining), these colors are invisible.
Teal and Cyan (Lt Blue) are(nearly) indistinguishable. I didn't realize they were different until I looked at color menu.
• Essentially all dragon-scale armor is Ego "Of Craftmanship". This is annoying.
• Stuff in your home should charge too. There's no gameplay benefit for stuff at home to remain uncharged, and it's just silly to wait for it to get charged when you get back to town.
• Mouse-click in stores/home behaves strangely.
First click selects item
Second click brings up menu (Examine vs. Take)
Menu doesn't do anything for X-amine, but works for P-Take. (Select or click X and you return to contents of house.)

[Pete Mack]

Also: Iron shot (and possibly Mithril ammo in general) should have a very low breakage rate. This is valid both from gameplay and reality: iron shot don't get damaged when they hit a wall!

[Mondkalb]

Mushrooms of Vigor are very common on dlevel 1. If you are in need, scum around a bit.

[Pete Mack]

Originally Posted by Mondkalb

Mushrooms of Vigor are very common on dlevel 1. If you are in need, scum around a bit.

I did eventually find some at ~3000'.
Also: If scumming dl 1 is recommended behavior, there is something wrong with gameplay. The exploit of using !rLife is better than scumming dl 1.

[Mondkalb]

Well, at 3000' you are also likely to find !Augmentation.

If you play a bit slower, like newbies do, or careful players with fragile mages or such ^^, you will probably find one or two vigors right at the beginning, I have a few in my house most of the time.

Also, dev-version 3.5 has these nice addition of mushroom rooms, which makes it more likely to find them anywhere.

[Antoine]

Dumb question, is this all about v4 (as the header says) or in fact a recent version of v3.x?

A.

[debo]

I think this must be a Vanilla build -- I saw the character sheet and I thought V4 was supposed to use words like 'heft' and 'finesse' and have crazy-huge modifiers for those??

[Pete Mack]

Originally Posted by Antoine

Dumb question, is this all about v4 (as the header says) or in fact a recent version of v3.x?

A.

It is the angband master branch. Is v4 something different?

[Derakon]

Yes. v4 is basically a dev variant where a bunch of moderately radical ideas got tried out. Don't think "3.4", think "4.0". Most of them haven't made it into Vanilla proper. The two biggest changes:

* Magical and ego items are now generated using an "affix" system, which works more or less like items in your average Diabloid do. When an item is generated, it rolls to see which affixes it gets from the eligible pool for its type and level, and the affixes in turn apply modifiers to the item.

* Combat has been completely reworked, so now there's normal Angband combat, O-style combat, and v4-style combat. v4 characters have finesse and prowess instead of to-hit and to-dam; finesse determines how many blows you get, and prowess determines how hard those blows hit (by multiply the dice damage). However, different weapons have different balance and heft, which also act as multipliers, so you simply can't deliver heavy blows with a rapier, or rapid blows with a maul.

For what it's worth, Pyrel is using v4 as its base instead of Vanilla. Mostly, the affix system is far more flexible than the old magical->ego->artifact system (but the affix system can be made to emulate that system if you want). Ideally the combat logic will be readily separated from everything else so you can try out different combat rules without too much effort, too.

[Pete Mack]

Thanks Derakon. So those are Angband 3.4 notes.

For v4, first notes (Windows/MINGW):
* It doesn't compile. Fix: copy z-file.c from vanilla.
* ASCI mode has a lousy (variable-width) font.