[crossfire] Unbalanced spell types

[Joshua Wilson]

Mark Wedel wrote:
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      Andreas Kirschbaum wrote:
     
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      I think the damage should be scaled down by the monster size (measured
     
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      in tiles it occupies). This would mean a spell deals full damage only if
     
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      it hits the whole monster (i.e. the spell covers all monster tiles).
     
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       Do note you need to cover rounding issues.  In the case of the greater 
     
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      demon (42 spaces), that could be a considerable amount of damage.
     
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       And ideally, this should be handled after damage (or maybe as part of) 
     
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      damage reduction from protections is taken into account, since that also 
     
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      has rounding errors (but I think those might have been fixed by randomly 
     
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      determing if the remainder does damage).
     
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      Note that bolt spells currently do have the same problem and deal
     
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      different damage depending on how you hit the monster: hitting a hill
     
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      giant vertically will do double damage compared to hitting it
     
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      horizontally.
     
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      For this spell type I cannot think of a simple solution that works 
     
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      correctly:
     
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      just scaling down by either MIN(monster width, monster height) or
     
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      MAX(monster width, monster height) either does not fix the problem, or 
     
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      weakens
     
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      bolt spells for no apparent reason (to the player).
     
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       Well, the direction of the bolt could be determined and adjusted 
     
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      accordingly.  The gotcha is that perhaps how much of the monster you hit 
     
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      should be of relevance.
     
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       If we take the area spells above, it is certainly likely that any spell 
     
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      will only hit a portion of the monster.  So cone/explosion spells are 
     
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      generally going to be weaker from that change.
     
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       Having the same logic for bolt spells doesn't seem unreasonable - if a 
     
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      bolt only hits 50% of the creature, it only does 50% of the damage.
     
     
This is awfully dangerous sounding - given a bolt spell can NOT hit 100% 
of any monster other then a 1xX monster we will end up nuking bolt 
spells if we are not careful here.

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       That said, one thing I said long ago and hasn't been done is the idea 
     
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      that a monster (or other object) no longer needs an archetype to cover 
     
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      the extent of its image.  With the big image support, a hill giant can 
     
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      be changed so that it is only 1 square, but still appears 2 spaces tall.
     
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       Likewise, demon lords could be greatly reduced in size - their full 
     
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      height doesn't have to be set.  So that can be done to also reduce the 
     
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      footprint of many monsters, also fixing the problem to some extent.
     
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       That said, some monsters, like dragons, can't really be fixed in that way.
     
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