Revamping the monster list

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by bio_hazard

*A monster that always runs away (maybe something with a good drop)

Just so long as we don't bring back the bats from ToME 2, which have "AI_ANNOY". They constantly hover around just outside melee range, not attacking you, just annoying you (hence the name) and keeping you from running, sleeping, etc. Especially problematic in ToME 2 where many characters are completely hopeless at ranged combat in the early game.

Having a flag that just reverses a monster's movement from normal (which AIUI is all that frightening a monster does) might be a reasonable thing to attach to caster monsters, though.

[Huqhox]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Just so long as we don't bring back the bats from ToME 2, which have "AI_ANNOY". They constantly hover around just outside melee range, not attacking you, just annoying you (hence the name) and keeping you from running, sleeping, etc. Especially problematic in ToME 2 where many characters are completely hopeless at ranged combat in the early game.

Having a flag that just reverses a monster's movement from normal (which AIUI is all that frightening a monster does) might be a reasonable thing to attach to caster monsters, though.

Maybe something like EASY_AFRAID so it lowers the threshold required to evoke the fear response. So they will aprroach and maybe engage you but as soon as you show you can actually damage them they run away

[t4nk]

OMG monsters that run away are horrible. If you want to annoy the player, make the game crash every five minutes, easier to do and just as fun (maybe some monster with RF_ANNOY should trigger the crashes )
Also, if you guys reduce the size of levels in early game then you won't need so many multi hued centipedes...

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Borrowing from FAAngband, one change to monsters could be to include neutral monsters. Not only most townfolk, but also some of the other "p" that @ meets in the dungeon. Neutral, unless @ attacks them. Also, it could be interesting if Maggot could be negotiated with, rather than wantonly attacked, in order to obtain his drop.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Ingwe Ingweron

Borrowing from FAAngband, one change to monsters could be to include neutral monsters. Not only most townfolk, but also some of the other "p" that @ meets in the dungeon. Neutral, unless @ attacks them. Also, it could be interesting if Maggot could be negotiated with, rather than wantonly attacked, in order to obtain his drop.

Regarding farmer maggot, I'd rather have the dogs be removed from the dungeon and give Maggot an attack "call dog" which he can only do, and always will do, if he's at half health or lower. Dogs will also show up if maggot is dead.

[Nick]

Nice ideas everyone, largely tallying with some of my thinking. I haven't had a chance to respond until now, and will be brief now, but there are a couple of things I wanted to mention:

• I'm looking at also some change to frequency where shallow monsters get rarer as you go down the dungeon
• Thraalbee's excellent visual monster spoiler page is a great resource here

I'll say a bit more when I have time.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Nick

• I'm looking at also some change to frequency where shallow monsters get rarer as you go down the dungeon

Ooh, I have some experience with this one. I once set a floor on monsters so that monsters must be above a certain level to spawn in the dungeon. I think it was something like max(1, dun_level - 10, dun_level/2). This worked ok, but it really made stark just how thin the monsters are in the higher levels.

The biggest problem I ran into was that at the higher levels it was just too dangerous to kill anything. The monster difficulty in angband is set up so that the late game monsters (not even considering non-unique) are supposed to be handled 1v1. Only the most powerful of characters (probably with immunity) can handle more than one great wyrm at once, and I'm not sure if any can handle more than one great wyrm of balance/chaos/multi-hue. The weaker monsters mainly serve to isolate the stronger monsters, so that you usually only have to deal with one or at most two at a time.

Also, the weaker monsters do play an important role in providing a lot of the consumable drops (stuff like !CCW and ammo) so if you cut them from the lower levels, you really need to prop those drops up artificially.

There's a lot of ways to fix this. Evening out the monster distribution somewhat along with shortening the number of levels would help make this work.

[Pete Mack]

I was considering some soft model like P = P0*ML/DL when DL >= ML. So there are still plenty of level 50 monsters, but not many level 20 and extremely few level 1 when deep in the dungeon. If you want a steeper decline, use P = P0*1/(DL-MIN(C*ML, DL-1)), where C = a scaling number somewhere between 1 and 2. (2 makes DL 50 monsters likely at CL 100, 1 makes them unlikely, reduced in relative frequency by a factor of 50.)

[PowerWyrm]

Originally Posted by Nick

I'm looking at also some change to frequency where shallow monsters get rarer as you go down the dungeon

For PWMAngband I just added a second chance at harder monsters to be generated: if the depth of the generated monster is less than half the dungeon level, it gets rerolled and the strongest of the two gets kept.

[PowerWyrm]

Any idea why Time Hounds have speed +20 while the two other hounds (nether/plasma) that are totally identical except their breath have speed +10? This really sounds like a typo to me, and the monster revamp could clearly address that issue.