Item power calculations: consiter crits?

[Domiano]

Hi there,
I'm a big player of multiplayer Angband. Currently, mAngband uses an old pricing algorithm to determine how to value items. Since their is a significant market between players, this does not really cut it anymore. While asking around, I heard about Ang's current pricing system, which is rather impressive and through.
However, I didn't notice any place in the calculation of an item's power which consitered the increased damage output on a weapon through critical hits. What is the reasoning behind excluding them? You could use assumed combat and tohit values akin to what is used with off weapon damage with extra attacks. Without crits considered when calculating power, heavy large-dice weapons will be undervalued.
Or... did I simply miss the crit added value?

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Domiano

Hi there,
I'm a big player of multiplayer Angband. Currently, mAngband uses an old pricing algorithm to determine how to value items. Since their is a significant market between players, this does not really cut it anymore. While asking around, I heard about Ang's current pricing system, which is rather impressive and through.
However, I didn't notice any place in the calculation of an item's power which consitered the increased damage output on a weapon through critical hits. What is the reasoning behind excluding them? You could use assumed combat and tohit values akin to what is used with off weapon damage with extra attacks. Without crits considered when calculating power, heavy large-dice weapons will be undervalued.
Or... did I simply miss the crit added value?

Thanks for the compliment. I thought critical hits were included in the power algorithm, but you've got me wondering now. (Goes off to check.)

Hmmm, ok, it's not. I think I remember now - I did plan to include it after the obj-power rewrite in v4, but it got postponed by the move to pval-slays (i.e. instead of arbitrary slay multipliers, they used a pval so could be anything from +1% to +400%). This flushed out lots of bugs in the object inspection code (the one which works out and shows you your average damage per round). When I'd fixed all that I was going to call the same code from object_power, so that the calculated average damage would be the same for inspection and pricing.

Unfortunately Derakon started pyrel, so I stopped working on v4 because I didn't want to do everything twice. Please rest assured that pyrel's object power code (which is only a mere three or four tasks away for me) will definitely include criticals.

To answer your original question, it wasn't consciously excluded - it just wasn't implemented in the original object power code. I always accepted that heavy big-dice weapons were losing out a bit, but since pricing was quadratic I felt the loss to be tolerable (i.e. these are expensive items anyway). I did always intend to add it, but kept on and on refactoring instead ...

[Domiano]

Good to know, thank you!