[CF-Devel] new quetzal (dragon) race

[Andreas Vogl]

in reply to Mark:
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      As a general note, it sounds like a cool idea. [...]
     
     
Thanks. Nice to hear that. :-)

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      Not really related to this, but a better way to perhaps do 
     
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      such focus in thefuture (for the more general case) would be
     
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      to have training halls in the various cities. [...]
     
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      The idea of eating food below works, but seems more a solution
     
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      because its an easy way to do it.
     
     
Absolutely true. I just want to keep it simple to start with.
Later - if traininghalls are implemented - this could be
changed easily.

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      > The higher the resistance goes, the higher must be both the
     
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      > player's level and the level of the flesh-items to improve it
     
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      > further. The upper limit is 95% resistance, which is of course
     
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      > hard to achieve.
     
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      Tuning of this is a key, but seems reasonable. Items with 
     
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      relatively low resistance values may mean very little gain
     
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      (or don't work at all). [...]
     
     
Yes, it is tricky to tune and balance. I have given the
mathematical aspect a LOT of thought (You should see my design-
paper crammed full of formulaes and level-graphs =) ...)
In the meantime I've got an implementation that makes a good
impression to me and looked good in the testing so far.

It goes like this (calculated with double precision):
(note that flesh level is inherited from the killed monster)

<bonus> = level bonus for lower levels (at low/medium levels the
          resistances can be boosted to a decent basic level ~30%)

chance = MIN( <player level>, <flesh level> ) + <bonus> - <existing
skin-resistance>

if (chance >= 0) chance += 1;   // if chance>0, the chance increases
linear
else chance = 2^chance          // if chance<0, the chance decreases
exponentially

// the chance is proportional to the amount of resistance
// on the flesh (50% is maximum on flesh)
chance = chance * <flesh resist>/50;  
                                  
// for resistance of ability focus, chance is doubled
if (resist = ability focus) chance *= 2;

add +1 resistance if: RANDOM%100 < chance

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      > Special attacktypes (paralyze, confuse, drain, etc) are not
     
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      > included in the dragon-skin feature [...]
     
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      The other problem of giving confuse/drain/whatever resistance
     
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      is that I don't think any foods with those resistances ever show
     
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      up - since the idea behind resistances on food was apparantly to
     
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      increase the odd of the fleshes survival [...]
     
     
In fact, all attacktypes are inherited to the flesh.
But gaining <drain resistance> +1 really isn't worth anything,
so I want to spare players from this kinda dissappointment.

Since humanoid players can get an amulet of free action/shielded
mind, I think it is most fair and balancing to allow
"flesh-artifacts" for dragons with similar effect.
But I'll care about this later when I have finished, tested
and committed the basic code.


Andreas