[CF-Devel] Re: Sorry

[Mark Wedel]

Peter Mardahl wrote:
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      Please.  Your email on the topic is dated Dec. 1.
     
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      Andreas's reply was dated Dec. 5.  Mine was Dec 6.  I do not think
     
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      we left you hanging for an unreasonable time after you put the
     
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      idea up.
     
     
 Just to sort of state this to everyone - you must give at least fair
oppurtunity for everyone to at least pipe up with suggestions.  I would
generally allow at least a 1 week time between suggesting a major change and
starting work on it.

 I know there is temptation when in that high energy coding mood to just start. 
But people may be out of town, or just too busy to thoughtfully reply within 2
or 3 days.


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      So, you say, let's make that shield possible, so everyone doesn't
     
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      immediately forget about shields. Well, don't you see that
     
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      either way, this adds a great deal to the power of the player?
     
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      He can get more goodies.  The balance of the game is...  off....
     
     
 I do think this can be countered with some by the suggestion to reduce bonus on
boots, gloves, and cloaks.  That unfortunately just takes us back to where
things were a few years ago - I still think it is way to easy to get a very good
AC.

 But removing those items will help - if the only items you can get AC out of is
your helm, shield, and armour, that is 3 less items you can enchant (or find
magical varieties of) to get AC from, so the effect may end up making AC's
worse.

 Of course, this would be a fairly easy expirement to try out right now to see
how it works out.


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      And I say to Mark, in those games, were weapons as sexy as they
     
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      are in crossfire, compared to shields?
     
     
 Probably not.  And as alluded two, one problem in crossfire is that weapons are
so much better than anything else - this is one thing that makes classes and
followers of gods who can't use weapons so much weaker.

 I don't have a really good solution to that however - making other items so
much better is probably not the way to go.


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      Let me explain.  Removing caps on stats might lead a player to pick some
     
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      stat to specialize in, increasing character diversity and fun.  Allowing
     
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      two weapons would lead everyone to using two weapons.  Removing caps
     
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      on levels and hp allows the game to be open ended, but leaves things
     
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      in balance at low levels.  Removing the cap on the number of weapons
     
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      changes the relative balance of chars/monsters at every level.
     
     
 Just to note, I'm not convinced that removing caps on levels or stats is
necessarily a good value.  More so levels than stats - it seems we really need
to effectively cut the game off at some point - we can't really expect maps for
levels 1 to 1,000,000 to be made.  But that is a different discussion.


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      Mark's come up with some better solutions, such as setting a flag
     
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      so that abusive combinations are not possible.  However, any
     
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      mapmaker can neglect to set a flag:  I am not completely satisfied
     
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      with this solution either.
     
     
 Any mapmaker can do stuff to totally screw up balance (armor or shield with
incredible protections for example).  In fact, some maps like that have been
found and fixed.  I think we really need to trust that mapmakers will do the
right things (or if the map is part of the standard distribution, it will be
fixed).  My personal preferance is to have the object to try and contain as much
information as possible - this allows for much greater flexibility, and in many
places reduces the code (as the code does not have to try and examine objects to
see what they can do).

 One unrelated thought I had would be to add ego to weapons (ala AD&D's idea). 
If the weapons ego is higher than yours, it basically takes you over (force you
to attack or the like - maybe the beserk flag could be extended to effect
players also).

 But simpler might be to assign ego to all artifact class items, and you total
up the ego the character has equipped, and this is limited to some value (level
or the like).  So using two artifact type weapons would add a lot of ego points,
meaning you need to be very high level.  IF you don't have the ego to equip that
second weapon, it doesn't do you any good.

 Even for simple weapons, ego could be magic bonus + adjustement based on
special abilities (so for example a sword +4 would have 4 ego just for being
+4).  This at least allows the setting of the artifacts egos more accurately
than can probably be done in the code.