[CF-Devel] Okay here goes... my thoughts
Peter Mardahl
peterm at tesla.EECS.Berkeley.EDU
Sat Oct 7 15:35:48 CDT 2000
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Okay, this might turn out to be alittle long... sorry.
It was interesting.
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Gods
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Firstly, diseases, I have never actually managed to get one (I have three
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chars all about level 110) althought I have never really spent much time
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trying. Does devourers give the plagues? (i really hope so =) I have been
No, devourers gives no diseases because they don't use "path wounding".
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Retributive strike.... WOW! that spell is, sorry to say it, rubbish.
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Firstly, i cast face of death a few times and my key accidently sticks,
Are you saying that face of death killed you? That should be impossible.
If retributive strike killed you... no comment.
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Mostrai... I pretty much no negative god (except maybe the slaying =).
I've long thought the religions were out of balance, but I don't play
enough to know how out of balance, and no one 'till now has responded
to my request, "Hey, are the religions out of balance? I want to grant
disease spells to specific religions so they'll be rebalanced."
Diseases can easily be tuned from wimpy to awesomely powerful.... They
can fix balance issues.
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I feel Sorig is well balanced, although i haven't really played around
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with plague so i am ignorant there. Perhaps the suggestiong of instead of
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plagues giving elec spells? (hint: CHAIN LIGHTNING /hint)
Chain Lightning would seem to fall under the mage spell umbrella.
If you want to code it, we could stick it in the game though.
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Most of the other gods are abit tame for my tastes, Ruggillis avatar
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rawks.. but no armour really means only my dragon has any use for it at
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all.
I think that is fine.
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lastly, cult monsters are abit of a stange thing.. devourers gets all
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these, while mostrai gets the crappy things i ever did see.. even the arch
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warrior of mostria is gay. They creatures have about as much brains as a
Hahahaha. Does mostrai NEED a powerful set of cult monsters or do
the other spells allow reasonable advancement ability? If not needed for
balance, I don't think we should change it.
As to the mess pets make in an apartment, well, it's up to YOU to potty-train
them. Just blow a few spells over them if they won't learn to kill
them off.
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Characters.
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Well my only few gripes are, Quetzecoatls get REALLY jibbed at high
Yeah, I realize that, and so are the Fireborn, to an even greater extent.
I've already addressed this to some degree in my proposal to do a
class/race split that I sent yesterday. Will you read it and comment?
I compensate Fireborn and Quetzalcoatls for their drawbacks by giving
extra net stats and some special abilities.
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worn? ps. the image for the Q is abit stuffed, it always wants to point to
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the left making it very slow to move without actually running, you press
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move it turns steps then turns around again (lag hurts for this alot).
I've no idea what to do about THAT.
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I feel the half orc gets alittle over balanced with the prot poison. later
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on most if not all characters will not be worried about poison so taking
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so many points of stats is alittle unfair.
Hmm. See my recent post to this list on class/race split.
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Wraith is neat, perhaps immune to disease would be nice in there?
Done already in the CVS repository by adding "undead 1" to the wraithplayer
archetype. I removed "protected physical" as compensation, and added
"immune poison". (All of which makes sense for a wraith).
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the other characters are all goodish, barb, wiz, dwarf and some warriors
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are by far the prefered.
Under my new system, all classes are stat-neutral (not counting Cha) except
Monk, who get +5 net stats as compensation for not being able to use weapons.
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now for my BIG point (which I am very willing to have a shot at
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implementing), protection/immunity.
Are you talking about partial protections adding much like armor?
This patch has been written, has been done, and is waiting for Mark to
merge it. (Mark is the head developer guy).
Like a protected 50 fire + protected 40 fire = protected 70 fire?
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I admit I know where the WDSM is and i did have help in finding it and i
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think it would be easy to balance it out, just remove immune cold from
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there (leave prot cold). I think without that the game is alittle silly,
Heh. I don't know enough about the mapset yet to get WDSM. I code more
than I play. (Therefore, I need people like you to help me with play
balance.)
The pupland maps got changed recently to make WDSM lots harder to get,
and to add startequip 1 to it, so that if you drop it, it's gone.
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Obviously the sword should be godarised after it has the damage types not
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the slaying, this I feel would allow the devourers abit more chance in the
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pantheon and stop those
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(weaponmagic)(elec)(fire)(death)(depletion)(drain)'s from popping up?
People seem to agree with you. Whenever a god touches a weapon it should
be consecrated to that god, and no other god would touch it after that
except to destroy it. Want to code this up? It shouldn't be hard.
I'll put the patches in for you.
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ps. could someone tell me, if you get slaying then those damages only
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attack the creature that is slayer correct? ie if the aforementioned
No, I believe the attacktypes always apply, but the monster appearing in
the "slaying" get triple damage or something.
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My first idea (I don't really like calamity, I feel it is not pretty and I
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like my weapons to look pretty... GO THE SHOOTINGSTAR!! =)) was to add
Calamity got toned down somewhat recently, and yeah, it is ugly, deliberately.
It's a spectre's sword, remember, that existed by sucking the lifeforce
of a king. :) It is supposed to be destroyed. I've gotta make the
Lord Spectre a bit more rare, I guess.
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weapon is considered the same as a dagger of sorig? correct? so you can't
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add your god to it? bahhhd. I understand a Darth_bob's dagger of sorig of
I don't know.
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A too heavily counted on item I think. Dragons and fireborn get completely
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jibbed, no armour and crappy stats. The only way to get immunity to fire
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is through armour which is also silly. Enchant armour scrolls make the
"Immunity to fire" is what is silly. Though fireborn and quetzalcoatl's
start out immune to fire.
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stuff god like, ac - 57 and arm of 99... nothing touches you except
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lightning the major magic and disease. either making it get heavier
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faster.... with WDSM it stops getting heavier after 6.7 because it has
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already got +90? that seems to be a bug to me cause you can keep
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enchanting and get the AC higher without the weight restrictions.
I thought enchant armor stopped working after a certain point. Maybe
you're working with an outdated crossfire server? But if not, this
is something else I invite you to fix and submit patches for.
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I am thinking of designing abit more map... perhaps including some nice
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armour... much like the great winter mail but for fire.. I thought perhaps
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with enough minus.. even immunity to fire could be balanced abit =)
Talk Mark into putting in the partial protection stuff.
(
mwedel at scruznet.com
)
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Enemies/creatures
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I love fighting everying in Crossfire and it is hard to grow tired.. even
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after getting to the stage where Balrogs and Greater demons are just cool
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to look at... It really bugs me about how demonlords though, for example
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can fire lightning out there shoes (crazy shoes). It kinda removes abit of
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the strat from an attack.. perhaps smacking a demonlords feet might be its
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weakness for example? This to me sounds like real strategy.
Demonlords are weak anyway. Blow a few holy word spells across them
and they're gone. Of course, you have to be a follower of Valriel,
but that's my favorite religion. (I don't play that much so I don't
know better.) But coding to make their "feet" weak would be a difficult
hack that I wouldn't want done anyway. The demonlord is actually very
tall looking down, conceptually, whatever the image may look like.
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All the big fire things IMHO are overpowered, sure a chinese dragon
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hurts.. but at least you can fry them, dragons are strong enough that you
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cant attack them in time, and baby dragons.. those things are worse than
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dragons... immune fire and resistant to both magic and ice??? they die
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after all the dragons... what is going on there...
Yeah, I hate those little suckers. They're far worse than "big" dragons.
Far worse. The little dragons *I* made, the dragon hatchlings in the
dragon pit, THOSE are good baby dragons. They're actually wimpy, not
1/2 a dragon crammed into 1/6 the space!!! (Read, 3x nastier).
And with protected ice and magic? 6x nastier or even 12x.
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which reminds me.. another question, if a creature is big does it take
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damage from every square? ie wizards get a total 9x the damage from a holy
Yes. That's why I like to use holy word on the big demons in particular.
With the Partial Protection scheme, you could give a big sucker like that
95% resistance to those spells, to compensate for their HUGE crossection.
As it is, the only recourse is to give 50% protection and give 'em GOBS
of hitpoints, effectively screwing the poor fighters.
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word than a goblin or demilich would? cause I think it sucks how the big
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things all die first, and the little toots survive. perhaps / the damage
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taken by the number of sqaures the creature is? that would make wizards
Partial protections, man! It would fix this SO neatly.
Give the big suckers protections in the 80% to 90% range.
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I have been reading through the arguements in this mailing list about
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balance.. I feel alot of it is rubbish.. I personally find it very
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difficult to start some new characters.. and I know alot of newbies who
Yeah, the game is too easy for the experts who know all the cheats
and too hard for everyone else. I can't tell you how many times
I've had my wraith roasted by fire. They have depleted con and vuln
fire, boy do they roast easily.
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are STILL having real problems at level 20 or >. I feel the Gods are abit
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gay with half being almost "non commital" to the users and giving pretty
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much nothing really cool or really bad, and the other half (Devourers and
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Rug especially) getting way to much of the old Neg.. no armour for Rug is
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not balanced fairly...
Well, for Rug, I think it means that only Q's would want that religion,
which I think is fine. Devourers is good for wraiths: I was considering
adding a "cause many wounds" spell, which would work like bullet storm
or bullet storm, and finally give Devourers a way to advance that isn't
like cleaning a cargo ship with a toothbrush.
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I feel there is a real lack of mid danger creatures... wyverms and nice..
Hah hah. I've begged on the list several times for people to draw me some
2-square demon images. There needs to be demons middle in power to the
"devil" and the "big demon". No demon images have come. My artwork sucks,
even though I did the Greater Demon image. (I stole that one, sshhhh!)
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perhaps I should focus my map making attention on the low 20s to 50s
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level? make something similar to mwizard for those levels.. (ie not so
That would be cool. Use the random map generator to help you. Even
if you don't include outright random maps in the game, you can use
the random map generator to make a level for you that you can then edit.
I find it quicker and easier to start from. That's one of the reasons
I wrote the random map maker and no one but me has taken advantage of it.
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Since I am still praying to devourers to give plague.. (hoping they dang
Forget about it. Useless, until something is changed.
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Partying up is good fun.. perhaps making sure that how ever something is
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killed.. that area of skill is shared and that only.. (so that you can't
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just party up and let one char sit there and build wis while the other is
Uh, yeah, I think you're right. I don't want to code this, will you
do it?
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end for making a fine game with some BRILLIANT ideas.. (I like diseases..
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never played with that sort of thing before). There is heaps of room for
Thank you. Diseases were my thing, my answer to the question, "Some religions
are too wimpy, how can we balance them?" "Give them diseases as attack
spells." However, no one got round to telling me which religions sucked, and
how much "help" they each needed. Another shortcoming of diseases is
that no one has retrofitted maps/creatures to use disease against players.
(with a few exceptions: diseased needles and liches and spectres).
And as to diseases, the ones in the game so far don't even scratch the
surface of what's possible with them: diseases which sap mana only,
diseases which cause periodic fits of madness (attacktype confusion!),
diseases which actually ENHANCE spellpoint/hp regen, diseases which
make you eat more. (actually, tapeworms.) Diseases which ENHANCE
stats.
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dnh (aka Darth_bob the Tall, Articous the Strange and Carrot the Suicidal)
Have you tried the server at crossfire.csua.berkeley.edu yet?
I *try* to keep it up-to-date.
PeterM
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