[CF-Devel] resistance on flesh

[Mark Wedel]

Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      Mark W. wrote:
     
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      > Now IMO, it may be a nice feature to actually have bodyparts transfer
     
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      > their effects to the player for some amount of time.  This would
     
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      > actually make some bodyparts more useful, and probably wouldn't unbalance
     
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      > things much with the PR code.
     
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      Hm... maybe an interesting thing if we do it right.
     
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      A few questions and suggestions:
     
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      o There is only one "food-effect"? I suppose additional
     
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        eating will not rise resistance, rather change it.
     
     
 I figure one food effect, but you could have different resistences.  ie, if you
eat something that gives cold res +50 and then something that gives fire res
+50, you would have both, but if you ate two things of cold res +50, you still
only get cold res +50.

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      o How much resistance do we actually hand out? Taking the exact value
     
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        from the flesh is a very bad idea. Even low level stuff like "beholder's
     
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        tongue" has values up to 50%. And shouldn't there be more benefit from
     
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        a "Dread's eye" than from a "beholder's tongue"?
     
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        I think we should make value dependant on level difference between
     
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        flesh<->player. (Flesh should inherit level from the killed monster
     
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        for that purpose.)
     
     
 It doesn't make sense to me to make it a level diff between flesh and player. 
What, at higher levels your body is somehow immune?  At higher levels, the
usefulness will be lessened in any case, simply because the player probably
already has lots of good resistences.

 Ideally, the resistence values on the flesh objects should somewhat match the
difficulty of the monster.  So that dreads tongue would have more resistence
than that beholder tongue.  This makes the eating code easier.  It probably
wouldn't be too terrible - that low level stuff wouldn't have a high resistence,
so it would get destroyed easier by spells and whatnot, but at the same time,
because it is lower level, it is almost certainly more common.

 I would probably say as a rough guess, max bonus would be 25% - thats useful,
not not really incredible.


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      o What about duration? Mabye fix, maybe level dependant...
     
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        We could eventually make the duration shorter if the player
     
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        already has a lot of resistance in that cathegory, for additional
     
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        balancing.
     
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        That way, flesh would be great help for low levels and "hard races",
     
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        but less help for the high level freaks.
     
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        Bad point: We'd need to adjust duration when the player changes
     
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        equipment. Or we calculate it independand every tick, a bit like
     
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        digestion.
     
     
 My initial thought would be duration is based on the food value of the flesh. 
This may mean some flesh is simply less useful (eyes for example).  There could
be a field in the flesh item itself which contains duration, so special flesh
items for some monsters could override this simplistic default.

 I don't really want to try and adjust it by the characters current resistences
- that is just a lot of work (whenever player changes equipment, we once again
need to re-evaluate).  And with PR, you get less benefit as your resistences get
higher.

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      > Note if we do it via special food effects, then presumably the benefits
     
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      > would be given to everyone equally, as you could still stack it with
     
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      > the protection spell.  It would basically mean that you could get a bit
     
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      > more protection by carrying around appropriate food, but with PR, this
     
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      > probably isn't a really big deal.  After all, if you know what your
     
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      > about to face, you do the same thing by equipping the appropriate items
     
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      > with the right protections.
     
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      That very much depends on the amount of resistance flesh items give.
     
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      If the value is too high, it could be a serious blow to balance.
     
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      Don't forget: I can wear all my equipment AND cast protection spells
     
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      AND eat flesh items.
     
     
 Right, but you get diminishing returns.  If you already have 6 items that give
you resist fire 30, eating that bit of flesh isn't going to get you a lot.

 Yes, it will mean that you may not need to find as many protection devices and
wear them all at the same time.  OTOH, carrying around all the different types
flesh may not be a winning proposition - most flesh is pretty heavy, and to
carry around sufficient quantities of the various types would add a bit of
weight to the character - certainly more so than rings, scrolls and amulets do
(which you can then select to choose your different resistences.)

 I would still like to add some rot factor to flesh, so it doesn't last forever
(like the demon icor for example).  To simplify this, perhaps only flesh in the
players inventory or container rots, so you don't need to worry about grabbing
all the flesh on the ground (this can be rationalized that the player is not
properly storing it, while most dungeons are cool so it stays good longer).  To
prevent issues of having 20 flesh items that are the same save for a slight
difference in their rot timing, flesh items with close rot values could be
merged, taking the shortest of the group (one contaminates the other
basically).  Perhaps add an icebox container type that reduces rot speed but has
a limited duration so that players can still get ingredients out of the dungeon
for alchemy.  Adding rotting to flesh would also reduce the usefulness some.

 This is certainly a post 1.0 idea, so would presumably have a while to
balance.  My general guess is that there will be some mods made after 1.0 that
will really shift balance around, requiring tuning.