[CF-Devel] Armour encumberance to speed.

[Mark Wedel]

dnh wrote:
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      This morning I had a thought about how we currently handle the speed
     
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      limits that are imposed via armour.
     
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      The discussion formed because Philc was annoyed that only +1 AC was added
     
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      from getting to 30 Dex (instead of 29) where as 30 Pow has a massive
     
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      difference along with Con. I pointed out that Dex is mostly used only for
     
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      speed and that is it mostly useless beyond a certain amount because armour
     
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      has set max speeds attached (exceptive speed bonus (boots of speed etc)).
     
     
 The bonuses for pow and con could of course be toned down.  One reason the
bonuses for those appear really huge is because its a cumulative total (the con
bonus applies to about 12 levels, were the dex is not adjusted in that way).

 In reality, at high levels, dex bonus to ac may be pretty meaningless or very
important.  Ac is used for determination if a monster hits (via physical) attack
or not.

 At high levels, AC is probably meaningless - most creatures don't use physical,
and those that do will probably hit you even if your AC is 10 points better.  Or
its very imporant - too hit chance are rolled on a d20 basically, so if the
monster needs a 5 and you get 10 ac points, it now needs a 15, greatly reducing
the chances you can be hit.

 At low levels, this means if your AC is good enough, you will basically never
get hit.

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      I suggest that instead of making an upper limit to top speed we impose a
     
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      ratio. It will be based roughly on standard dex stats (about 20) for each
     
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      item, but instead of stopping when you reach (1.73 for example with PDM)
     
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      it keeps going. So at say Dex of 30 a player may be able to move at 2.8
     
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      (completely arbitrary).
     
     
 It wouldn't be hard to do something like you get some portion of your speed
that is above the max dictated by armor.  But note that the speed bonus gained
via high dex (25+) is really a lot.

 Also, it has been suggested at least once that max values for stats get removed
- if that is done, then I would expect a much more linear system.

 
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      This has a few draw backs though, firstly it will make the player more
     
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      powerful and already we are starting to make things just alittle too easy
     
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      for warriors as I am sure roWer will point out. Secondly it may make some
     
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      items suddenly unbalanced (unavoidable really with a change such as this)
     
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      but I feel many items still need alot of basic revision (powermail for
     
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      example I feel is slightly to powerful compared to the wizards
     
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      counterpart, midnight robe.
     
     
 It strikes me that only real reason to do this is because not enough is gained
from that really high dex.  The real question is of course, is this really a
problem?  You get even less from that high charisma.

 My bigger problem is that I think such a change will have very wide spread
benefits.  Even at low levels, this could make a difference.  This could result
in a complete re-arrangement of what the good armours are.

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      Regardless I think this should be added to CVS and such issues then be
     
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      looked at, if we spend five years discussing every minor change, things
     
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      which may in the future add a great amount of fun may be ruled out simply
     
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      because they are;
     
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      a) to hard to do
     
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      b) create a large long term amount of work
     
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      c) don't _feel_ right to some people (for example I think removing .xpms
     
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      still isn't 100% agreed on not because .png isn't better but because it
     
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      just doesn't seem right to remove all the xpms).
     
     
 This should not be checked in until after the 1.0 release.  this is not the
time to be checking in things that will potentially have significant effects on
balance.

 Unrelated to this, I'll quickly go over the points above:

 A & B: Someone has to do the work.  I typically have no problem taking on
something that is hard to do, but realistically, the current set of developers
have a finite amount of time, and can't do everything that someone suggests. 
Also, none of the developers (to best of my knowledge) is getting paid for
working on crossfire, so what stuff gets done is stuff that interests the
developers.

 As for point B, if people agree ahead of time to do that work, I don't think
that is a problem.  Some stuff in the past few months seemed to fall into this
area.  The problem I have with this is if someone does some amount of stuff and
then expects others to pick up/make all the rest of the changes.  I don't think
that is fair to the others unless they have agreed to pick up that work.

 As for point C, I think that is just a problem with group efforts.  Its very
easy to do something is everyone agrees.  Its even pretty easy if 90% agree. 
But what happens when its 60/40?  Now right now, the number of developers is
small, but if this number grows reasonably large, then some smaller decision
making group may be necessary.  The danger is alienating users and developers
(as a devils advocate point of view, think about joining a project and saying
you want to do this and that and the other thing, and the people in charge keep
saying no - you'll probably say this is a waste of time and move to something
else).  But really, that does need to happen - I've rejected patches from people
simply because I did not consider them good patches (ie, quick and not really
maintainable approach taken, which means that down the road, someone else will
end up having to fix it up).

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      I can probably make this armour change but I just felt important to make
     
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      that point. I understand most if not _ALL_ crossfire-dev people are quite
     
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      busy living their lives (I know I am), but we aren't up to version 1 yet
     
     
 We should be at version 1.0 soon.  I'll probably roll another release (0.97)
simply because 96 had enough bugs that I want get something out there again. 
And we'll probably need to make some form of roadmap for the 2.0 release and
what things go in there so two people don't do conflicting changes (simple
example would be adjusting stat bonuses and someone else doing a linear stat
system)