[CF-Devel] A brief introduction, and some thoughts

[Andreas Vogl]

Tim Rightnour wrote:

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      1) Lythander sucks.  You get stealth, luck (useless, more on that later),
     
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      and attuned to missiles (nearly useless), and some other minor things.
     
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      In return, you get a -40 to Acid and Poison.  -40 to poison is really bad,
     
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      as alot of low level maps have scorpions and spiders, which are basically
     
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      instant death.
     
     
Immunity to confusion, spell regeneration +1 and a holy word killing trolls
- are that really "minor things"? (And spiders don't attack with poison
btw.)

However, I don't want to imply that the gods scheme is all perfect.
Balancing the gods is real hard, therefor good and constructive ideas in
that
field are generally welcomed (Preferably stuff that works with the existing
code). The biggest difficulty is that the gods should be balanced at all
player-levels: low, medium and high. Their advantages should be about equal
while each of them should have a small disadvantage too... And not to
forget,
each god ought to have a special kinda "personality" which is supposed to
fit
with the god's attributes.

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      2) Anyone can worship any god.  A troll can worship lythander, an elf
     
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      Gnarg, etc etc.  I don't think we should restrict it completely, but
     
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      there should be some racial restrictions on what you can worship. A human
     
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      worshipping an elven god is just plain bizzare.  (an elf wannabe?)
     
     
I personally favout the idea of all gods being available to all
races/classes, because restrictions would further complexify the balancing.

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      3) Weapon types.  Earlier someone on the archives had brought up the
     
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      idea of classifying weapons, such as bludgeoning, slashing, etc. I think
     
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      that is a really good idea [...]
     
     
Yes, I think there was a common favour for classifying weapons/armour,
but nobody found the time to do that yet.
The original idea was to introduce an object "subtype" next to the
existing object's "type". The subtype would then further classify
weapons, armour and maybe other stuff as well.

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      Just some thoughts.  I'd be interested to hear feedback on some of
     
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      this stuff. Alot (not all) of it I can produce some amount of code
     
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      for, if it's something desireable.
     
     
To my experience, the Crossfire community is very open-minded for
new ideas and features. However, we're only a handful of active
developers with limited time. So, if the originator doesn't
do most/all of the work required, new ideas usually have little
chance to get done anywhere soon.


Andreas V.