Ideas from old angband.

Timo Pietilä · August 10, 2011, 12:23

Consensus is that game is now too easy, however ways to make it more difficult are a bit limited, because making monsters more difficult just means that more monsters get avoided completely and/or people scum for better equipment until they can kill those hard monsters. Making things more rare just means that this scumming just takes longer.

So. What made old versions more difficult than current one without doing either of the two above:

1) inventory management. Things with charges didn't stack unless charge amount was identical, and staves didn't stack even with identical charges. We could revert that partially so that at least staves no longer stack.

2) inventory management (still). Ammunition took space from inventory. Now quiver basically adds ten additional letters to inventory making missile combat way more effective than it was. I vote for removal of quiver. If you wanted to have multiple stacks of ammo, you need multiple slots from inventory. This creates IMO necessary problems for what to carry and what not to carry. You are not supposed to be able to carry half the town with you.

3) floor stacking. This is anti-summon corridor prevention. You could create ASC, but you pretty much lost the loot if you did this. How about making things "radiate" from point of origin, but never stack more than three items deep piles? If at all.

4) item detection. No items could be identified beyond what you could look and you couldn't look beyond what you really saw. Item symbol was the only way to distinguish items from each other. Treasure detection didn't detect items, only treasure.

5) monster detection. Pretty much same as above, you couldn't look beyond what you really saw, so distinguishing monsters from each other required seeing them. No extra term windows with monster lists. I vote for partial detection removal so that monsters that are detected by ESP still get identified, but other non-visible ones do not. This creates nice "fog of war" -effect intensifying the mood of the game.

6) monster coloring. This is something I don't know if it is worth changing, but in older versions it was more difficult to distinguish monsters from each other, and I have lately started to think that it was at least partially deliberate decision more than just limitation of colors in old versions. Grip and Fang were indistinguishable from jackals, even that there were plenty of colors free to use for canine uniques for example.

7) More restricted item abilities. Acid and poison -brands didn't exist at all. Elec brand was x5 brand and was really rare, only few items had it. Way less random ability items existed. Whole selection of abilities and items was more compact, stunning was prevented by sound and chaos did prevent confusion. No trickery, weaponmastery, ESP, Devotion, sustenance, magi cloaks, lothlorien bows, Buckland slings etc etc etc. This lead to less variation in items at the endgame, but more variation in gameplay, because you were not guaranteed to find everything you think you needed in one form or another. You actually used Anarion at the endgame more often than not, how many games you now play that you even consider using that one?

8) class/race selections were restricted. Only humans and dunedain could play paladins, and warrior was only class allowed for everybody etc.

7) Town shops were way more random. That created an situation where you were not guaranteed anything, but they also did have occasional discounts which created nice flavor for shopping.

8) games were shorter. Less (and easier) monsters to kill did mean you got to bottom faster if you wanted, but it also did mean that you were less prepared to really tough fights which did mean more deaths. Difference between uniques and tough normal monsters was bigger.

buzzkill · August 10, 2011, 13:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Consensus is that game is now too easy, however ways to make it more difficult are a bit limited, because making monsters more difficult just means that more monsters get avoided completely and/or people scum for better equipment until they can kill those hard monsters. Making things more rare just means that this scumming just takes longer.

I read you whole post and while I agree that the changes mentioned will make the game harder and merit some consideration, most make me cringe (from a UI perspective, I want the game to remember stuff for me). Nightmarish visions of that Fangband competition still haunt me. I'd rather evasion became harder, scumming restricted, obvious exploits nerfed, and AI improved. No surprises here. I mean, what if 0% failure evasion wasn't possible (or was incredibly rare).

Nick · August 10, 2011, 14:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzkill

Nightmarish visions of that Fangband competition still haunt me.

My work here is done

konijn_ · August 10, 2011, 14:27

Some random ideas :

* Allow for the Z monster spell where the monster can teleport the player next to him/her ( if Vanilla has this already, give it to a few more monsters ).

* More vaults ( risk/rewards et all )

* inventory management : make things more vulnerable to acid/fire/cold attacks ( I would hate that of course, but you asked how to make it harder

* traps, make some of the traps odds based to find, even with spells.

* reduce player hitpoints and spell points by 1/3 ( or whatever fraction you feel like )

The problem with fiddling with UI/info is that offscreen monsters can kill you, I dont think any other roguelike allows for that. And because of that auto-travel from stone soup will never work nor fog of war ( you would just need to be lucky from then on instead of skillful).

T.

Derakon · August 10, 2011, 15:23

Regarding the quiver, I've said for awhile now that it's overshot its goal, which was to encourage the player to continue using a stack of ammo even after half its units have been broken through use. The quiver should be using about 30 ammo/inventory slot, instead of the current 99. That makes inventory management harder while still allowing the player to continue using a "marginal" stack, which IMO is a good thing.

dos350 · August 10, 2011, 19:09

please i understand that u might think it is easy but that dnt mean go back 2 oldschool,, here try this from suggest.doc of frog-knows... maybe it has actual legit suggestions:

Code:

	Currently, the Chaos, Gold, Bronze, Shimmering, Law, Balance Dragon
Scale Mails do not work properly - they only do damage of a particular sort to
creatures at the moment. Ideally, Bronze should confuse creatures in its are,
Gold should stun etc.
	Add some more monster pits, particularly Giant pits.
	Have the no. of turns played printed on the character sheet (converted
to days gametime perhaps?) and perhaps have particular monsters appearing at
particular times of the day e.g. undead more at night etc.
	Have more resists for creatures... chaos, disenchantment, sound,
confusion etc. and even spell resist. I mean, you can have em, so why not
them?
	Add Chris Wilde's targetting code - not sure about upsetting the
balance too much with this one, but it's an idea.
	Instead of having to wait until a rod has recharged before being able
to use it, have a chance of getting it to work before being fully charged, and
if it fails, destroy the rod.
	Different types of dungeon level... some with more corridors etc.,
some with more rooms.
	Write the quest plane code again, the old code was somehow lost, and
all I have left are the maps for the elemental and dragon planes. The idea is
that at certain levels there are particular quests to do before you can
proceed... the code will take a fair bit of writing though. I am including the
quest files in the tar.
	A new spell for mages and/or priests... set recall spell.
	New weapon to wield... the rod. Then we can have more Tolkien sceptres
and rods actually in the code and useful.
	Digging/quiver slots.
	The priest spell unbarring ways is in the wrong book really... needs
to be moved as well as adding more mage and priest spells. Priest spell of
cure poison should come at a lower level - currently mages get it earlier.
	Add two new flags for creatures... environment (things like cold,
desert etc.) and a friendly flag... add creatures that don't attack you, maybe
aid you instead.
	Perhaps have injuries to characters to give a more authentic feel...
scars and things to make your character more personal.
	Shouldn't be able to genocide uniques, or polymorph other creatures
into uniques.
	Add efreeti, djinni as high level elementals.
	Add a command to show (or dump to a file) total numbers of particular
creatures killed, as well as the total killed.
	Larger than normal are of effect for powerful ball spells/dragon
breath.
	Perhaps have the caster take some damage from ball spells if they are
cast too close.
	Let monsters carry specific treasure (only Morgoth does this at the
moment, with the Iron Crown and Grond)
	Communication with monsters.
	Monsters can use items too.
	Stores in the dungeon.
	Different kinds of floor.

eeeeee plz no rage

Timo Pietilä · August 10, 2011, 19:41

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