Gradual monster genocide

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Hm, my guess is that none of these would count, as they all act by "removing the monster from the level", not by killing them. I guess the short answer would be, if you get experience for it, then it counts.

This feels intuitively wrong. Genocide and destruction should certainly count - the very names imply death, not banishment. Banishment itself could be construed as banished elsewhere in the ecosystem, or outside it - so could count or not. For consistency I'd say it ought to count.

This is, I accept, a case where the 'right' answer is more hassle to implement. But it's not impossible - we can adjust populations and fecundities so that monster races aren't too badly hit by the occasional genocide or banishment. But if a mage wants to take the trouble to banish Zs at the start of every level, his/her reward will be the absence of Zs. I don't think we should spike that.

This is a good example of where one proposed change relies on or is affected by another. We've talked a lot about making changes to the banishment effect to make it less abusable. If we were to introduce this change to monster populations, the repeatable versions of these effects (spell, device, activation but not necessarily scroll) would need to be reined in a bit.

[CliffStamp]

Originally Posted by Magnate

We've talked a lot about making changes to the banishment effect to make it less abusable. If we were to introduce this change to monster populations, the repeatable versions of these effects (spell, device, activation but not necessarily scroll) would need to be reined in a bit.

Genocide was intended to be a utility, never really a pruning effect. The simplest solution is just to make the use of it much more harsh. This would have no effect on the utility aspect, but would prevent it from being an item/scum tool. As just one example, if use of genocide had a chance of permanently draining stats and experience based on the number of monsters genocided. Or consider any genocide attempt on a non-LOS monster can be resisted based on the monster type/cl and if they pass it they are aggravated or make it distance based where it gets less effective (and more draining) if the monsters are far away.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by CliffStamp

Genocide was intended to be a utility, never really a pruning effect. The simplest solution is just to make the use of it much more harsh. This would have no effect on the utility aspect, but would prevent it from being an item/scum tool. As just one example, if use of genocide had a chance of permanently draining stats and experience based on the number of monsters genocided. Or consider any genocide attempt on a non-LOS monster can be resisted based on the monster type/cl and if they pass it they are aggravated or make it distance based where it gets less effective (and more draining) if the monsters are far away.

I'm not so sure I like punishing a player because there was a demon pit on the other side of the level and they just wanted to banish the two pit fiends that Pazuzu summoned.

In general though, I'm ok with a weakening of banishment/genocide but I also think that it needs to come with some corresponding weakening of monster summoning. This does happen if you can eliminate the summonses as previously suggested. Summons are too strong and they always have been. But that's why destruction and banishment are too strong as well.

A long time back I suggested an idea where banished monsters went into (limbo) and these would be given priority to be resummoned when they were called. It wasn't a very popular suggestion, but I thought I'd throw it out here again in this discussion.

[CliffStamp]

Originally Posted by fizzix

I'm not so sure I like punishing a player because there was a demon pit on the other side of the level and they just wanted to banish the two pit fiends that Pazuzu summoned.

But this happens in Angband anyway if you play and ignore the level and just focus where you are right now. It is for example one of the most common causes of death, especially for the inexperienced where they take on a high level unique which is going to require multiple wear downs and teleport out right next to something while weakened -> Tombstone.

[emulord]

Heres a way to balance genocide/destruction. Make monsters removed be considered a kill, but worth negative exp. That way you cannot spam genocide without first getting some way to grind your exp up. This prevents the whole "divers are invulnerable" problem and makes it a tradeoff.

Obviously uniques are teleported out still.

I don't agree with "increase power of uniques as they get deeper." It would be counter-intuitive because no regular monster has that effect. Also it would be very hard to balance. Gothmog isn't so bad with double resist fire but if he gets cold breath too for example? I don't like it.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by emulord

Heres a way to balance genocide/destruction. Make monsters removed be considered a kill, but worth negative exp. That way you cannot spam genocide without first getting some way to grind your exp up. This prevents the whole "divers are invulnerable" problem and makes it a tradeoff.

That's...actually really clever! I like it.

[myshkin]

Originally Posted by Derakon

That's...actually really clever! I like it.

Experience penalties have traditionally not been that big of a deal, although with a sufficiently large one, they might give a player pause (e.g. each monster banished generates a 0.1% chance of losing a level and an 0.2% chance of losing half a level -- measure these penalties to the lowest XP requirement for the previous level so as not to neuter them for clvl 50, and make them not recoverable by !RestoreLifeLevels). I might suggest some effect akin to GF_TIME as well; if you like, it can be the wrath of Eru.

[Derakon]

The important thing with banishment is that it should be useful occasionally, but not abusable. Experience penalties become significant only when you're abusing the spell, so there you go, problem solved.

[fizzix]

Been thinking about this a bit. Basically the idea of having a finite supply of slowly breeding monsters is to give both a positive incentive and a negative incentive to killing monsters that you might normally avoid. After all this is one of the reasons we kill many uniques. For there to be a positive incentive, it means that a normal play through will allow the opportunity to see a marked decrease in monsters provided you kill them off. A negative incentive implies that you are likely to encounter more of the monsters later if you don't kill them off. Just like Adunaphel keeps on hounding you until you silence her.

The way I see it, we need four variables. The current number of monsters, the breeding rate, an allocation weight, and a max population.

In the extreme case of a heavy breeder like lice you'd have a high max population, a high breeding rate, and a low allocation probability. In essence the number of monsters always remains constant regardless of how many you kill, and there is no change in allocation probability. I see most grouped monsters fitting this pattern besides Zephyr hounds. (because if you can't eliminate zephyr hounds, I've stopped caring.)

At the other end of the spectrum you have unique monsters which have a low max population (1), a 0 breeding rate, and a high allocation probability. You'll have something like 65536 lice and only one unique (ok 2^16 is overkill, but still it's going to be more than 1k), so if you want them to have the same allocation, the difference in allocation probs needs to have that same ratio.

For the positive incentive to be worthwhile you need a way for a player to make headway on the maximum population. That means extremely annoying monsters (think beholder hive mother) fall close to uniques on the spectrum. Low max pop, low or even 0 breeding rate, high allocation. If there were 5 beholder hive mothers total then killing one might be worth it, but probably not. Lucrative monsters could fit this pattern as well. Dragons and Wyrms could have a finite supply.

Now there's a bit of a problem because this doesn't quite work with the negative incentive. The negative incentive implies that you should have a reasonably high breeding rate so you kill off the hive mothers so they don't swamp the level. I'm not sure how to get both incentives to work. Maybe it's impossible?

I tend to favor the positive incentives over negative ones in this case anyway. If you were to tell me that if I kill 10 undead beholders I'd never see another one again, I probably still wouldn't bother, but some player might! If you were to tell me that if I didn't kill an undead beholder per level, level 99 would be full of them, I'd probably not want to play anymore. That goes double for time hounds, except I might actually kill the time hounds to prevent them from showing up later. Basically if I could eliminate all the possible dangerous monsters for Morgoth to summon, I just might, if only because then I can do something silly like punch him to death.

Breeding rates are tricky, because you don't want to unduly affect divers vs clearers. I'd recommend some bastard approach that breeds monsters based on number of killed. You can cause breeding to occur after you've killed 100 monsters or so. I think this is better than breeding after a set number of turns because that means if you didn't economize turncount (which really shouldn't be standard gameplay) you get hit with more annoying monsters deep to eliminate.

Ok, that's probably long enough for now.

[CliffStamp]

Originally Posted by fizzix

The current number of monsters, the breeding rate, an allocation weight, and a max population.

It can be fairly complicated, but at a first pass it can also be fairly trivial. Monsters already have a rarity used for generation this can just be modified. A basic algorithm would be that when monsters are generated it decreases this rarity, as they are killed it increases it. Pick a balance point say that if you kill 50% of monsters the rarity would be unchanged.

There would always be some small chance that monsters would be generated even if you always killed everything (they wander in from outside) so a min limit would be set, similar a max limit if you ignored everything as you would assume that other things would kill the lice if they got completely out of hand.

But this while not a huge difference would be seen in you played in either extreme. If you killed every Z that you saw you would start to see less of them. If you ignored every graveyard then undead would start popping up more and more.