[crossfire] combat, spell & monster balance

[Mark Wedel]

Juha Jäykkä wrote:
> Just some thoughts on this... First, the script seems very useful.
> 
>> - 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.
> 
> This has indeed been a real problem for area effect spells and teamplay. On 
> the teamplay topic, there was an earlier suggestion of allowing arrows and 
> bullet/missile-type spells pass right through (think of "beside") an ally if 
> shot from the next square, that is a fighter could block the monster from 
> getting to the archer/mage who could cast stuff from behind the fighter. Is 
> this still on the agenda? I think it seems very useful (and easy to 
> implement).

  Yes - that is something I want to look at doing - it should be fairly easy.

  But there are some special cases.  For example, if in the arena, if you are 
next to someone and cast a bolt spell, you obviously want it to hit them, and 
not start at the space beyond them, etc, so that needs to be handled.

  And the more general question is - outside the arena, should it be presumed 
that this is always desired behavior?  That doesn't work great for servers that 
want/allow player killing (same note as above).  The other possibility is to 
only do that skipping of spaces if folks are part of the same party.

> 
>> - 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
> 
> This is not the whole story. There are also monsters with resist_magic +100 
> that are very hard to kill for mages but are easy pickings for everyone else 
> (beholders come to mind - they are so slow that they are easy kills if you 
> have any melee skills). I think this is ok. It should be possible for some 
> monsters to be easy kills for mages and some for fighters - it again gives 
> more reason for teamplay: let mages handle armour +100 monsters and fighters 
> resist_magic +100 monsters etc.

  My personal thought is there should be very few/no monsters that are 100% 
immune to magic.  I know in some cases this is because you have groups of them, 
and you don't want them to kill each other.  But I think some of this is also 
left over from the days when monsters where either immune or protected, and not 
the current percentage scale - when that change was made, anything that was 
immune got 100% resistance, protection was 50%.

  I think making those creatures 90% (lets say) would still make them very 
difficult (and time consuming) to kill with spells, but not impossible.

  A 'problem' is that lots of maps mix in a whole bunch of different monsters. 
While we want to encourage team play, at the same time, we have to acknowledge 
that solo play (even on a public server) is likely to be fairly common.  And I 
think some of the changes that are being made as part of these balances will 
result in it becoming much more difficult for mages to fall back to melee attacks.

  What this means is that a map with beholders (if 100% immune to magic) may be 
virtually impossible for magic users, but those beholders may only make up 10% 
of the map - that is sort of a waste of a map now.


>> - 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.
> 
> True, too. I think we need to decide whether we give mages area-effect spells 
> or not, because this kind of balance really hinges on the existence of area 
> effect spells. I think we should have them, but not like they are now: 
> fireballs, for example, are totally useless: by the time they are able to 
> kill any monster, you already have much more effective spells. And small 
> fireball, when you first can gain it, is not capable of killing anything 
> except perhaps mice. This needs to be tweaked.

  Spells need to get rebalanced - once monsters hp and the like are adjusted, it 
then makes it easier to balance spells.

  Presuming the idea of elemental spells come in, this is what I'd see as quick 
type of spells:

bullet spells (like magic bullet now) - does good amount of damage at relatively 
  low SP cost, but only hits a single target.  If you are only hitting a single 
target, this should do the most amount of damage

bolt spells - hits a line of targets, does less to each monster than a single 
bullet, but the fact you can hit a long line of monsters may mean aggregate 
damage is higher

cone spells - like bolts, not as much damage as a bullet, but does hit 
potentially a large group of monsters, so aggregate damage is higher

ball spells (fireball & like) - this really depends on size again.  a 2 radius 
fireball should do more damage than a 6 radius fireball to individual monsters, 
but aggregate damage is likely to be more in the 6 radius

  Note that there is also other tuning going on here - the actual cost in spell 
points adjust things.

  But in order to prevent player killing, none of these spells should probably 
do more than 25% of a players total HP damage in one hit.  This means if players 
at the level have 100hp, and monsters also have 100hp, it would take 4 spells to 
kill those monsters (about).  Now as noted above, monster HP will vary - some 
monsters at that level may only have 6, so 3 spells, and some may be vulnerable, 
taking extra damage, so also die faster, etc.

  But just quick thoughts there.


>> - 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.
> 
> Agreed. But, then again, it should not take too long. I remember a time the 
> only way for my mage to kill cyclops or dragonmen was leprosy... The amount 
> of waiting in Meganthrop*'s castle was not fun.

  Right - but I think the thinking was that even at really high level with 
single boss monsters, a battle may take 30 seconds - a lot longer than now, but 
not so long as to be tiring, especially for boss monsters.

> 
>> 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
> 
> True, but this also applies to lower levels. At 1st level, any dragon is a 
> sure death.

  Right - I'm more comparing monsters that the character is expected to fight. 
That expectation is based largely on exp of creature - at level 40, killing 
level 5 creatures is a lot less dangerous than when you were level 50, but the 
amount of exp you get, related to how much you need for next level, is such it 
probably isn't worthwhile.

  Likewise, a level 5 character could attempt to take on higher level monsters, 
with it being appropriately more difficult, but they also get a greater reward.

> 
>> - 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)
> 
> That's a nice way, as long as the monsters are not unplayably fast (without 
> good reason - some creatures might be ok if there is lore to explain their 
> unnatural speed).

  A lot of monster speed was really slow, relative to players.  There are very 
few monsters that players can't easily outrun, because the speed of them is so 
slow.  I'd almost say that speed of most monsters should be increased, but that 
changes balance a whole bunch, so having slow monsters isn't that big a deal for 
the most part.