Angband 4.2.1

[lea2501]

Originally Posted by Sphara

Is this known or been fixed already?

Fighting Beorn with an axe Beorn dropped.

How are you playing with those mini windows embebbed in the main window with no borders?

[Sphara]

I don't know. I'm playing on angband.live and with my subwindow settings, this is how it looks like. No borderlines

Settings:
right cols 40
right split 10
top rows 0
bottom rows 10

term1 - monsters
term2 - items
term3 - messages

[DavidMedley]

I think a good point has been made here... What we're calling moves +1 should be moves +10 to stay consistent. This also opens up more gradations of movement speed, which I think is very good also.

On topic but a much bigger project: really fast moving stuff like birds should use +moves instead of +speed. Slow stuff like Colossi -moves. Their attacks would have to be adjusted. Then AC could have a built in bonus or penalty to ranged combat only based on moves. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[Pete Mack]

@David:
No! And again no! Fast movement and the like are NOT equivalent to +10 speed, and it is misleading to show them as such. The issue is that the archery description is broken. What is shown as +1 shot should be +0.1 shot, though its raw pval display can remain as +1.

[Pete Mack]

Here is an alternative, if you don't like the +1 display. Show fast action as a multiplier, so +1 movement and fast cast (and + 10 shot) are shown as x2. But whatever you do, don't follow the existing +shots model, which shows an misleading number that appears commensurate with speed but means something completely different

[fph]

What about making them *really* speed bonuses? So if you have +10 speed and +10 movement speed, when you spend an action moving you regain energy as if your speed was +20. And similarly for shooting and attack speed.

Advantages:
* simpler and more natural for the player.
* attack/shoot speed have diminishing returns exactly like "flat" speed, because they use the same mechanic. This reduces the amount of cheese (e.g., machine-gun rangers).
* reduces the importance of flat speed bonuses in the game. Currently speed bonuses trump basically everything else.

Disadvantages:
* more complicated to code
* will require some rebalancing for items that grant +attack / shots.

[Voovus]

Originally Posted by fph

What about making them *really* speed bonuses?

Or maybe completely removing the usual "speed" and replacing it all by movement speed? No more worrying about M getting two moves against you, no more pillar dancing, and a huge amount of rebalancing.

[DavidMedley]

Originally Posted by Pete Mack

@David:
No! And again no!

Well this is more passion than I was expecting! Aren't +1 speed, +1 shots, +1 blows all essentially +10% from starting values? Should these all be properly named +0.1?

[DavidMedley]

Originally Posted by fph

What about making them *really* speed bonuses? So if you have +10 speed and +10 movement speed, when you spend an action moving you regain energy as if your speed was +20. And similarly for shooting and attack speed.

I agree this is better. I think I saw Wobbly championing this a while back, too. Thing is, the diminishing returns are very punishing. With those in place, specific speed bonuses will do very little when you have high general speed bonus. I don't love the artificial diminishing returns; they feel forced... a way to cover up for broader mistakes (perhaps RoS +10 is too high, for example). But now we're talking about a major overhaul that I can't even give a confident opinion upon.

For example, if you have +30 speed and put on +1 movement boots, you'd only go from 3.8x to 4.2x -- about +10% moves against your enemy instead of the current +100%! And that's setting aside the fact that general speed help gain energy and specific speeds affect spending energy.

[Pete Mack]

But speed increase is not commensurate with shots (or or movement or spellcasting.) the former gives you more energy per player turn. The latter all cut energy use by some amount. The effects are very different, except in the special case of starting from normal speed.

Originally Posted by DavidMedley

Well this is more passion than I was expecting! Aren't +1 speed, +1 shots, +1 blows all essentially +10% from starting values? Should these all be properly named +0.1?