[CF-Devel] Re: Sorry

[Peter Mardahl]

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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....
     
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       I do think this can be countered with some by the suggestion to reduce bonus
     
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      boots, gloves, and cloaks.  That unfortunately just takes us back to where
     
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      things were a few years ago - I still think it is way to easy to get a very g
     
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      AC.
     
     
I would rather not reduce bonus with boots, gloves, and cloaks.  
Boots and gloves right now traditionally give very moderate benefit.
[AC, levit, speed, stealth], and [protection, stats, armour, but not AC]

... unless "enchant armour" is used on them.

I would not REDUCE the benefit of boots and gloves:
I would just withdraw the ability to use "enchant armour" on them.
This seems to me a more minimal and elegant solution than other
proposals.

Cloaks.  No enchant armour for these either.  When I added in cloaks
I never intended them to be enchanted beyond what was native.
minor +1, intermediate +2, greater +3, end of story.  The rest of them
are simple single-protection affairs for the most part, except 
Underworld and Invisibility:  nothing that great and moderated very
well by PR.

But we should think of some issues before doing reductions:
are we seriously screwing fighter chars by doing these reductions?
Remember, these characters are going up against high-level demons,
undead, and things like Jessies.

On enhancing shields:  well, we can add more AC to them.  Honestly,
though, i'd still be using a +5 enhanced taifu instead of a shield:
doing extra damage is better than 2-3 AC points, and I think putting
more than that would be wrong. 


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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?
     
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       Probably not.  And as alluded two, one problem in crossfire is that weapons 
     
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      so much better than anything else - this is one thing that makes classes and
     
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      followers of gods who can't use weapons so much weaker.
     
     
I don't really see this as a problem, but rather as style.  Swords are
*inherently* sexier than a helmet, for example.  Take a sword and a
helmet and stick 'em in a museum and people will spend more time
looking at the sword.  All the cool stories talk about magic swords,
by and large.  Crossfire just reflects that, and I think it is fine.


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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.
     
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       Just to note, I'm not convinced that removing caps on levels or stats is
     
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      necessarily a good value.  More so levels than stats - it seems we really nee
     
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      to effectively cut the game off at some point - we can't really expect maps f
     
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      levels 1 to 1,000,000 to be made.  But that is a different discussion.
     
     
I understand your point on levels,
 and I don't really have strong arguments against the cap.  However, 
I don't have a problem with a non-existence of maps for players > level 100.
Just because we allow the possibility doesn't mean we have to realize it.
I can't think of anything I would do with a level 200 character, nor
do I have any ideas on maps for such a char.

I don't have strong objections to stat caps either, but I would like
to see them go, because I think it would force players to make choices
and specialize.  Now, we'd leave caps on "natural" stats as they are,
but enhancements could go as high as someone could pile on items to do.
There'd be no more "well, my POW is 30, now I'll work on my Str."

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      > mapmaker can neglect to set a flag:  I am not completely satisfied
     
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      > with this solution either.
     
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       Any mapmaker can do stuff to totally screw up balance (armor or shield with
     
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      incredible protections for example).  In fact, some maps like that have been
     
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      found and fixed.  I think we really need to trust that mapmakers will do the
     
     
That's a reasonable point.

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      information as possible - this allows for much greater flexibility, and in ma
     
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      places reduces the code (as the code does not have to try and examine objects
     
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      see what they can do).
     
     
Well, what would we need to test in this case?
path_attuned compared to 0,
magic compared to 0,
ac compared to 0
resistances compared to 0.
Well, that IS a lot of stuff to check.  

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       One unrelated thought I had would be to add ego to weapons (ala AD&D's idea)
     
     
Yeah, I was once going to make power crystals do unexpected, interesting
things, maybe useful things, using up the mana in them, and based on
their personality.  Hence the file "egoitem.c" where power crystal
code resides.  I never got around it.

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       But simpler might be to assign ego to all artifact class items, and you tota
     
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      up the ego the character has equipped, and this is limited to some value (lev
     
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      or the like).  So using two artifact type weapons would add a lot of ego poin
     
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      meaning you need to be very high level.  IF you don't have the ego to equip t
     
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      second weapon, it doesn't do you any good.
     
     
We could use "level" for this.  Set level to the sum of {magic + resistances/10
+ attunements + 2*stats}, and MULTIPLY the weapons levels together.

But still, on thinking of this, I do not like it.  The rich get richer:
high levelers would get to use two artifact weapons.

I would rather see only one nice weapon and one mundane weapon in use.
Use "level" as your flag.  Whenever we create a + item, or an artifact,
we set a level on it.  Can't use two "leveled" weapons at once.  We
can retrofit most of the artifacts in the game by modifying the archetypes
file to add "level 1", and hunt down the rest in the mapset.

PeterM