[CF List] Levels, exp and stats (tewaking the mobs in common)

[Mark Wedel]

 > In the end all of us got better and made it to the maxlev after some days of
 >  immediate playing and the game has begun to bore us beside the fact that
 > there are many quests, things and maps to explore in CF too...so we decided
 >  to tweak the stats of our mobs (cause the most part of the game is hack'n
 > slay in a clever way):

  Note IMO the really problem is that players can get to level 110 in three 
days.  IMO, that is what should be fixed.  Calls to increase max level or the 
max stats don't really fix that much.

 >
 > We had a lot of fun in tweaking all the stats * 3.(better said ATTRIBUTES
 > like STR,DEX,INT...) The mobs became really hard again at all levels and
 > the exp flew in tons...in other words the game made fun again ,but after a
 > while we discovered strange phenomena (like soft walls couldnt be opened
 > after they have been scratched one time..and so on) and sometimes the game
 > crashes too...

  I take it you basically did something like update the arch's so all the 
monster stats were 3 times tougher?  I guess this works in your case, but this 
obviously is not a really good solution for most public servers.


 > The reason was , like you surly can imagine, that lots of stat-lookups and
 > stat-computings have just been desiged to use a (too) short ranged table
 > (capable to manage all stats from 1 to 30 i think).DEX made the most
 > problems (game crashed sometimes when giants threw boulder and so on...) I
 > can understand that this has been made to reduce the computing time but now
 >  its nearly impossible to raise the mobstats above 30. It would need to
 > make bigger tables or rewrite a lot of the code...

  Just extend the tables.  The main crossfire base can not reasonably accomdate 
everything that people may want to do with it - or to do so starts to make code 
that is a real pain to maintain (like 3 or 4 different stat tables or whatever 
else).  Extending the tables shouldn't be really hard - they are in 
common/living.c, and are already defined to the MAX_STAT+1 size.

 >
 > However i just wanted to report that. It would be great if you could change
 > that in the future when you're on rewriting maybe that special parts of
 > code.

  There is no plan to increase the max_Stat, and thus no plan to increase the 
size of the tables.


 >
 > If you know a possibility to make the mobs hitting harder, move faster and
 > cast real mean and mighty without changing their stats , so please let me
 > know [:)]

  biggest thing would be to just increase the speed of the monsters.  Increasing 
dam obviously increases damage.  Increase maxsp (and starting sp) will make them 
cast more spells in most cases.


 > Two thoughts on this: 1)  It implies that CF server has an error in that can
 >  read in stats with illegal values.  There should be error checking to
 > prevent that.


  There is  - that is what the MAX_STAT value is for.  But if you increase that
value without increasing the tables, its not expected that bad things will
happen.  I will note that MAX_STAT is buried in define.h - it is not in config.h
or otherwise place that suggest that is can just be modified and have everything
work.


 >
 > 2)  It is an very interesting idea on how to make the game better. Monsters
 > with sufficiently high stat bonuses (actual values are probably unknown due
 >  to reading past the end of tables) are reported to make the game
 > interesting for characters of relatively high level. That suggests that
 > maybe stat tables should be extended to say 100 so monsters can be made
 > strong and quick enough to be a challenge.  That also suggests that to keep
 >  the game challenging that the max stat for players should remain at 30.

  If you don't change MAX_STATS, things work as expected.

  Note that the stats for monsters have different meaning than for players.

  Strength basically just amounts to a damage bonus.  You can just increase the 
damage and get mostly the same effect (and/or wc so the monster can hit).

I'm not sure what if anything dex really does for monsters - maybe some AC 
points,  Can just as easily increase AC.

I think con is used for hp regen, pow for mana regen.

So for the most part, you don't really need high stats to make the monsters 
tougher, as monsters use native values inherent to them.