[crossfire] Monster & player balance, was Re: race/class lacks distinctions

[Mark Wedel]

Wim Villerius wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 10:57 -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
>>   Typically, monsters have lots of HP but are slow relative to players.  Things 
>> probably need to be brought more in line - make most monsters faster than they 
>> are now, make most players slower than they are now (at least in terms of number 
>> of attacks - even first level characters probably have a 1+ weaponspeed), and 
>> give players more HP to balance out those factors (I figure it is easier to give 
>> players more HP than to reduce the damager by all the monsters & spells).
> Having players walk slower would especially hurt low lvls. For them,
> walking is already tidious. But reducing weapon speed might make sense
> since that is effectively reducing damge by two. OTOH this might render
> some monsters really untouchable, namely if their
> regeneration&resistance is so high that a player never can do sufficient
> damage.

  My thought in terms of speed is to generally reduce the range it will be 
'naturally'.  So if you don't have magic to boost it, the range would be 0.25 to 
0.75, based on weight.  In many cases, this may actually make low level players 
faster.  Right now, min speed is 0.10

  Then the various speed items act as a bonus, making you faster.  My idea is 
more to cut down the speed of higher level players some (I believe with high 
dex/str, one can get a 1.20+ speed without any bonus speed objects).

  I think the weight encumberance is calculated should be redone - you should be 
able to carry some weight without it affecting movement at all, and then after 
that, it starts to slow you down.  So in effect, you could carry 25% of your max 
load and still move at 0.75, but then each pound you start picking you up may 
slow you a little bit, like right now, down to 0.25 speed when at full carrying 
capacity.

> 
> Increasing monster speed might not be always a good idea. Evil masters
> are already lightning fast and since they run away when they're low on
> hp, it's fun but hard to kill them. Kind of cat and mouse.

  Some monsters already move fast.  But they are the exception - lots of 
monsters move pretty slowly, and those are the ones I'm thinking should be sped 
up some.  This may make spellcasting harder, as monsters will be able to close 
to you faster at lower levels.

> The only question that remains is what to do with players hitpoints. The
> main problem might be that while players hp change linear (+2 each lvl
> once they have max con) monster's hp go exponentially. So giving a
> player 4000 hp max might make sense compared to big bosses, but that
> factor is just too much for low lvl players facing goblins.
> This suggest both to increase the basic hp with a factor 3 or 4 (newbs
> die too fast) and increase the number of hp gained by leveling.

  It may make sense to try and work on what would be a good number of HP for a 
high level character to have.  Taking a look right now, it seems that at level 
110, HP max out at around 550.

  At very low levels, I'm not sure if HP is much a problem.  Granted, I'm an 
experienced player, but if you head into the newbie dungeon, and are not 
completely careless, you can shouldn't have many problems, and can get to level 
3 (or thereabouts) when you clear it out.

  In any case, rebalancing crossfire probably is a major task. What I'd really 
like are fewer monsters that are tougher to kill and take longer to kill.