[crossfire] combat, spell & monster balance

[Mark Wedel]

  On my tavern server, I'm going through and trying to balance/re-adjust the 
monsters for the changes.

  I wrote a simple script for myself that dumps out key stats for the monsters 
(wc, ac, hp, etc), and also based on actual play data, calculates odds the 
monster has to hit the player, vice versa, how long the monster would expect to 
live, and likewise how much damage it would expect to do to the player.

  I'm sure my script isn't perfect, but this does general useful comparison data 
  - another thing I do is have a feature where it only dumps all the monsters of 
a specific level - this makes the comparisons really easy - are the wc/ac/hp/exp 
of the monsters all within reasonable values, etc.  This is a sort of slow 
process, but somewhat interesting.

  Now playing with this some, my observations:

- Compared to player level, monsters should generally have similar hp to the 
player - this just is needed to keep player vs player balance - right now, most 
spells do so much damage at high levels (needed because monsters have hp), that 
it will kill another player if hit by it.

- Related to that, it  means that monsters generally need to have fairly similar 
hp at a given level - this goes backs to spell again.  For example, if you have 
2 level 5 monsters, one at 75 hp, the other at 25, but of similar toughness (due 
to armor, ac, damage, speed), that second one is now easy pickings for a mage, 
as AC is meaningless for most spells, as is armor (may have other resistances, 
but probably not for everything - and if so, why not just give more HP then). 
This isn't a hard and fast rule, but that is one thing I have noticed in my 
balancing - in some cases, the HP range varies a whole bunch

- More on HP - reducing the dynamic rage also helps out in spell balance and 
spell reduction - with some creatures have 5,000 hp, there really isn't any way 
within the game to have low level spells increase in damage at a fast enough 
rate to keep up with that, so you get higher level spells.  If monster HP 
doesn't rise so dramatically, it may not be possible for things like bolt spells 
to increase in damage enough to still be effective at higher levels

- Last note on HP - at the low levels, with the revised starting HP on the 
tavern server, the monsters tend to have lower HP with them catching up to the 
player at higher - I'll have to see how this works with spells, but in some 
cases, it just doesn't make sense/work to have higher hp - for example, if a 
mouse had 20 HP, it would take a character probably 4 hits to kill it (and that 
presumes that mouse has an AC bad enough that the character can hit every time) 
- in that mode, I don't think players would ever really be able to clear out 
those mouse and slime infested areas.  I think this may also work better/help 
balance the mages - their starting spell may still be able to kill those first 
level creatures and not kill players, and given they are likely to need to rest 
often to regain mana, that faster kill is likely to offset the time they need to 
rest.

- Related to that, and also to other discussions, it would seem desirable to me 
that as creature level goes up, so does its life expectancy, even though the 
player level is higher and does more damage.  A lot of this is based on maps - 
most low level maps are just maps full of monsters, where as when you start to 
get higher, the maps tend to be more sparse.  If it took 5 seconds to kill a 
kobold, that would be really annoying really fast, but taking 5 seconds (or 
longer) to kill a dragonman likely wouldn't.

- I've also noticed from my script that the total damage the creature does 
relative to the player increases as level goes up (I term this %death of player) 
- a lot of this relates to the above - individually, low level creatures are 
short lived, and don't do a lot of damage, so are not likely to do a bunch of 
damage on their own.  But this also strikes me as a somewhat good thing - at low 
levels, the only option for a character is really to run away and rest - at 
higher levels, many more options exist - potions, spells, scrolls, etc to regain 
HP.  In fact, it seems reasonable that at higher levels, there may be monsters 
who %death > 100, implying that a character can not survive a 1 on 1 battle 
without using magical healing

- One way in which i'm balancing monsters is by the speed they have - most 
monsters have a speed of less than 0.25, and many are only at 0.1 -> 0.2. 
Doubling a monsters speed from 0.2 to 0.4 effectively doubles how dangerous it 
is (more attacks in that time period) - I expect that may be a way a lot of the 
more powerful monsters get adjusted to make up for their loss of hp (that and 
increasing resistance values if they are currently low)

- As per other e-mail, in my balancing, I do tend to be grouping monsters of 
similar exp (and thus danger) at the same level - this once again makes it much 
easier to compare the monsters and see things that stick out

  Just sme random observations and thoughts.