[CF-Devel] Follower of Lythander - to good weapon

Fri Jun 27 02:03:30 CDT 2003

  I'm going to briefly address a bunch of points at once:

1) I agree the speed stuff is screwed up.  I had put out a proposal a while back 
which would narrow the range of speed (min 0.25, max 0.75, but magic could 
adjust that).  Haven't got around to doing it yet.

2) Slaying and death attacks: This is an odd one.  There are objects like arrows 
of assassinating X, which have the death attack. You only want it to be able to 
kill X, and not any old monster.  That is where the code of 'is slaying is set, 
and this is a death attack, only work on monsters this slays'.  Not perfect, but 
I don't have a good alternative.  Arguably, death attacks without slaying should 
just be disallowed as potentially overpowering/abusive.

3) Looking at level 100+ characters and saying they are too powerful isn't a 
great test IMO.  I've played many commercial games, and if you advance the 
characters to where the limit is, the final battles are often very easy.

4) A bunch of monsters levels probably need re-adjustment.  The max level of 
crossfire keeps getting adjusted, and I'm sure many monsters have not been kept 
up to date.  IMO, there are perhaps too many levels in crossfire, which creates 
large gaps of monster power. Those gaps really need to get filled in.

5) I'd be easy enough to modify the pray skill so you get more grace the higher 
level you are (perhaps 1 grace/level you have, or something like it?)

6) There is lots of cruft left over from various times - crossfire is probably 
more generous than most any other game about still letting players keep using 
old characters.  The problem here is those old characters could have things that 
existed from before the rules were put in place.  I think the item_power for the 
character in question is such a case - the character may have gotten started 
from before each enchantment increase item_power by 1.

7) item_power: more tuning may be needed, but I expect it to be on by default in 
the 2.0 release.  IMO, some of the idea of item power is an additional way to 
tuen items.  For example, this sword may clearly be the best sword in the game, 
but if its item_power is 35, and you have another sword of item_power 25 which 
isn't quite as good, that other sword is starting to look a lot more 
interesting.  As the code is without item power, decisions are almost very easy 
- this one does more damage/more bonuses than the other one, so I'll use it.

8) almost certainly some maps may also need to get re-adjusted as code changes 
are made that make the players life more difficult.  The game tends to be 
evolving, and this require that all pieces continue to evolve.

9) I do agree that the characters may look a bit alike.  However, with version 
2.0, each skill has its own exp total.  It'd certainly be possible for players 
to still get all the skills, but presumably the may be a bit more focused (and 
being the best person to use a sword will no longer also make you an expert in 
firing a bow for example).

  However, I consider making skills to hard to gain or two different based on if 
it is a 'class' skill or 'non class' a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it means the 
classes/races are much more different - dwarves have an easier time of 
blacksmithing than anyone else.  OTOH, it could mean a player spends a bunch of 
time playing and then realizes he is sort of screwed becausehe does need skill 
XYZ and just can't get very good at it.

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