[Crossfire-wiki] [Crossfire DokuWiki] page changed: user:saru:balance

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Date        : 2014/10/08 10:07
User        : saru
Edit Summary: 

@@ -181,15 +181,12 @@
  |<del>Chaos</del> | Chaos  | Randomized attack | This is really an administrative/effect - it is supposed to randomize for one of the other attacktypes, so characters should never be facing chaos itself. |
  |<del>Counterspell</del> | Counterspell  | Stops a spell effect | Once again, this is an effect, can get removed. |
  
  Internal: This continues to exist, but should never be visible to players - this is really just used when a convenient way to do damage to the character is done (eg, ceiling collapsing, crushing you, character is dead) - it probably should be used sparingly.
- 
  
  
  ===== Equipment=====
  Equipment refers to items players use such as weapons and armour. Balance should occur around two main fields, how easy items are to find (method of finding equipment) and how powerful items are (based on the properties of the item).
- 
- 
  
  ====Method of finding equipment====
  This section unpacks the current ways in which players can gain access to equipment and proposes an additional step to better identify which methodology a developer intends an item be associated with.
  
@@ -207,14 +204,8 @@
  ==Map specific==
  Map specific items are items that have been modified inside a map to grant new features (both positive and negative) to greatly enhance the speed and diversity of map making. These items present the biggest challenge in balance as they are more difficult to track. Some of these items should probably be 'god granted'. These items only vary by how map makers design them (no random variation)
    - specific map based items
    - specific monster drop
- 
- ===Potential Problems===
- One important aspect of crossfire is the diversity in equipment value. Items can appear quite similar but provide vastly different levels of power. Each of the mechanics for giving players access to equipment needs to provide useful items whilst not making highly powerful items too easy to find. Players should be forced to make decisions about equipment based on strengths and weaknesses as they perceive them. For example the use of negative resistances on items is a fantastic way to make that uber item still have situations where an alternate item is a better choice. The down side to this is that analyzing item value is extremely difficult for anything other than basic or simple items (e.g. a weapon with 10 damage is better than a weapon with 5 damage, when damage is the only attribute). Therefore knowing which method to give an item is imperative in making sure that items are awarded for the right reasons. Currently this is well implemented in crossfire but has been created on an ad-hoc basis which limits ongoing development. It also has the effect a lot of items are 'map specific' and may be under utilised.
- 
- ===Suggestion===
- Items should flag what the means of access is intended to avoid including items in random treasure when it is only intended to be offered upon completion of a specific challenge. It is probably simply whether the item is 'generic' and can be included in standard systems or is considered an 'artifact' and should only be used for specific applications such as completing a map or completing a complex crafted item. Artifacts should probably generally be 'god-given' and could be donated with a different background colour (like blessed items).
  
  ====Generic monster & random treasure loot====
  Currently the game offers a specific set of items with various likelihoods for each to drop based on the treasurelist of that monster (or chest etc). This approach does allow for interesting diversity in what items players may encounter for some examples but also means that:
    - collecting particular items can be very simple, bonecrushers off Titans for example. 
@@ -223,9 +214,9 @@
  To add to this, the requirement to list every possible item that a particular treasurelist may drop is very time consuming and would be extremely difficult to update. Secondly it doesn't work at all for modified creatures so map makers must instead either create whole new archetypes (and the associated even longer treasurelist)
  
  While each of these problems could be addressed individually, I want to propose a more general approach to fixing this effect that should be more tune-able, more easily.
  
- I propose that generic treasurelists for classes/groups/types of items should probably be maintained (such as what currently exists in treasurelist for chests). If we factor in a 'is_artifact' flag to avoid handing over specific items, then the most obvious generic treasure list would probably be each item type. With generic treasurelists, instead of listing each possible item, we can now simply list axes, maces, shields, body armour, food, body parts and money. We can set each generic treasurelist for the orc to have different probabilities (e.g. 5% chance to drop (95% chance not to drop) each type of equipment, a 10% chance to drop food, and a 50% chance to drop body parts). This makes it far easier for developers to add new generic items to the game without requiring extensive time adding them to each monster treasurelists.
+ I propose that generic treasurelists for classes/groups/types of items should probably be maintained (such as what currently exists in treasurelist for chests). Items that are not generic should be flagged to avoid being accidently included in these treasure lists via something like an 'is_artifact' flag. Then the most basic generic treasure list would probably be each item type. With a generic treasurelists, instead of listing each possible item for a monster treasure list, we can now simply list axes, maces, shields, body armour, food, body parts and money. We can set each generic treasurelist for the orc to have different probabilities (e.g. 5% chance to drop (95% chance not to drop) each type of equipment, a 10% chance to drop food, and a 50% chance to drop body parts). This should make it far easier for developers to add new generic items to the game without requiring extensive time additional to creating generic items in adding these items into each monster's treasurelists.
  
  The potential downside to this is that without knowing which items within a generic treasurelist are more or less valuable, generic treasure would be far more consistent in what dropped (boring) and players would be exposed to a wider quality of items from smaller variety of monsters making powerful items less valuable. To overcome this, I propose that we start using the level attribute of equipment to denote what the target audience (player level) should be. If we use the item archetypes to provide a target level, crossfire can then use the ratio between the item level and the level of the drop mechanism (monster, chest etc) to determine a sensible probability for the player to receive that item. This probability can be based off of a distribution (normal or poisson) with the standard deviation used to set how much variation from the monster level there is (And +luck could influence the standard deviation). We might consider adding an upper bound value such that items higher than monster level + upperbound are disregarded to avoid players getting too lucky.
  
  ===Example===
@@ -243,13 +234,31 @@
  | axe | 8 | 98.6% |
  | battle axe | 15 | 0.0003% |
  
  A similar process can then be applied to determine if it is a magical item (+1, +2, of mostrai etc.) and which magic property it gets (levels are added to magical properties along with the existing probability rates (Really good items are very rare)).
+ 
+ ====Map specific items and skill based items====
+ Non-generic items can be added to crossfire by directly modifying the stats of an archetypal (generic) item. In part perhaps due to the complexity in adding new archetypes to crossfire a large array of unique equipment exists embedded within maps. This variety is one of the strengths of crossfire but it does make changing balance within the game by adding new items or simplifying existing systems very difficult. This is because 
+ 
+   * changing generic items directly affects non-generic items due to the way in which map-specific items are based on an existing archetype. (e.g. removing the fire resistance from the dragonshield would then affect the non-generic dragonshield +4).
+   * changing generic items also indirectly affects non-generic items because any changes to the balance of generic items will devalue or increase the value un-linked non-generic items. This effect has a much more significant impact on balance projects as changes can have severe, unforeseen or unintended balance ramifications.
+   * map embed non-generic items can simply be really hard to find and so players can hit the wall in progression just because they didn't know of a certain map that has a really sweet reward at the end. This is arguably a map design issue. Skill-based items suffer from similar problems, however, they are usually based on archetypal items so they are slightly easier to find and consider.
+ 
+ I don't have a specific solution for map based items except to continue review these items as crossfire continues to evolve. This highlights that these problems are all important considerations for why map specific items should be treated with caution and only be used for the right reasons. These items should definitely have a target level attribute so that items can be re-evaluated long after the original author has stopped contributing to the game.
  
  ====Adding and Re-balancing Generic Equipment====
- The following is thoughts on ways to identify items that are significant out of balance without solely relying on 'gut feel' and also be able to add more generic armour without disrupting existing balance too much.
+ Players should be forced to make decisions about equipment based on strengths and weaknesses as they perceive them. This is created by adding a variety of attributes to various equipment to force the player to choose between a light weight robe or a protective platemail. For example the use of negative resistances on items is a fantastic way to make that uber item still have situations where an alternate item is a better choice. The down side to this is that analyzing item value is extremely difficult for anything other than basic or simple items (e.g. a weapon with 10 damage is better than a weapon with 5 damage, when damage is the only attribute). Non-generic equipment is a great way to add unique and complicated items to the game but can become to 'hodge-podge' if there isn't enough 'generic' equipment to base its value off.
  
- ===body armour===
+ One problem is that some generic equipment really shouldn't be generic at all (chaos sword). Items should flag what the means of access is intended to avoid including items in random treasure when it is only intended to be offered upon completion of a specific challenge. It is probably simply whether the item is 'generic' and can be included in standard systems or is considered an 'artifact' and should only be used for specific applications such as completing a map or completing a complex crafted item. Artifacts should probably generally be 'god-given' and could be donated with a different background colour (like blessed items).
+ 
+ ===Potential Problems===
+ One important aspect of crossfire is the diversity in equipment value. Items can appear quite similar but provide vastly different levels of power. Generic equipment currently feels very 'samey' with 45 different varients of 'sword' and 'shield' but little to distinguish them except that, for example, sickles are currently the best generic one handed weapon and mithril chainmail one of the best generic armours.
+ 
+ ===Suggestion===
+ Different 'tiers' of equipment could be adopted to provide more variety within generic items whilst still providing many points of difference. By factoring in item level, items that are poorier quality items can be readily available at low levels whilst much more powerful types of items only available at higher levels.  
+ 
+ ====Body Armour====
+ The following is thoughts on ways to identify items that are significant out of balance without solely relying on 'gut feel' and also be able to add more generic armour without disrupting existing balance too much.
  Currently:
    * generic body armour sits around +1 - +5 AC - (chainmail, platemail, leather armour etc)
    * magical armour can get up to +9 AC - platemail +4 etc
    * artifact armour is generally around +5 AC - (dragonmail, mithril chainmail etc)
@@ -262,43 +271,45 @@
  |weight 	|10000	|20000	|60000	|40000	|50000	|20000	|20000	|100000	|100000|
  |value 	|30	|40	|75	|85	|60	|8	|30	|100	|25|
  |gen_sp_armour 	|0	|8	|15	|15	|15	|10	|10	|30	|30|
  
- If we create an arbitrary formula to model how 'good' each item is it might look something like this:
+ we can see that the items appear to progress fairly linearly with the exception of one of the types of platemail which is clearly a lot worse. This item is the bronze variant of platemail listed last on the above table. One approach might be to move it back into line, however, items will all start to feel the same.
+ 
+ If we create an arbitrary formula to model how 'good' each type of armour currently is it we can end up with a scatter plot like this:
  
  {{user:saru:image.png|}}
  
- we can see that the items appear to progress fairly linearly with the exception of one of the types of platemail which is clearly a lot worse. This item is the bronze variant of platemail listed last on the above table. One approach might be to move it back into line, however, items will all start to feel the same. Instead I intend on creating different 'tiers' of armour balanced on the level of the user. This would result in poorier quality items being readily available at low levels whilst much more powerful types of armour only available at higher levels. A formula for generating items out of treasure classes should be created. This would result in a table of general armour more like this:
+ If we instead add item tiers for armour the table might now look something like this:
  
  ^Armour group^	light - casters^	scales - thief^	Composite - barbarian^	full plate - warriors^
- ^leveling range 0-10^^^^^				
+ ^Item level range 5^^^^^				
  |Name	|robe	|leather scale mail	|leather segmented armour	|leather cuirass|
  |last_sp 	|20	|18	|17	|16|
  |materialname	|cloth	|leather	|leather	|leather|
  |ac 	|1	|2	|3	|4|
  |resist_physical 	|0	|10	|15	|20|
  |weight 	|1000	|2000	|3000	|3500|
  |value 	|10	|15	|20	|25|
  |gen_sp_armour 	|0	|5	|10	|15|
- ^level range: 10 - 20^^^^^			
+ ^Item level range 15^^^^^			
  |Name	|lorica segmentata	|ring mail	|splint mail	|plate mail|
  |last_sp 	|17	|16	|15	|14|
  |materialname	|leather	|iron	|steel	|steel|
  |ac 	|3	|4	|5	|6|
  |resist_physical 	|10	|20	|30	|30|
  |weight 	|8000	|15000	|15000	|18000|
  |value 	|30	|35	|40	|45|
  |gen_sp_armour 	|0	|10	|20	|30|			
- ^level range: 20 - 40^^^^^			
+ ^Item level range 35^^^^^			
  |Name	|breastplate	|hauberk	|brigandine	|fluted mail|
  |last_sp 	|12	|10	|8	|6|
  |materialname	|steel	|steel	|steel	|steel|
  |ac 	|5	|6	|8	|10|
  |resist_physical 	|20	|25	|30	|50|
  |weight 	|10000	|14000	|15000	|25000|
  |value 	|50	|55	|60	|65|
  |gen_sp_armour 	|0	|15	|25	|40|
- ^level range: 40 - max	^^^^^			
+ ^Item level range 75^^^^^			
  |name	|mithril splint|mithril chainmail	|mithril coat of plates	|mithril harness	|
  |materialname	|mithril		|mithril		|mithril	|mithril	|
  |ac	|8	|10	|14	|18|
  |resist_physical	|30	|40	|50	|60|
@@ -306,8 +317,10 @@
  |weight	|5000	|8000	|9000	|12000|
  |value	|7000	|8000	|10000	|15000|
  |gen_sp_armour	|0	|10	|20	|30|
  |item_power	|1	|2	|3	|4|
+ 
+ This now means that as players level and develop, new armour will continue to become available to them through killing monsters and opening chests without needing to heavily depend on customized non-generic items for variety.
  
  === Weapons ===
  
  Table comparing DPS of various common items in crossfire


IP-Address  : 59.167.121.117
Old Revision: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:saru:balance?rev=1412778672
New Revision: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:saru:balance

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