[crossfire] Balance changes

[Juha Jäykkä]

>   I think many recipes may be too hard (or do not generate enough of an
>   item) for the ingredients required - that is certainly another balance
>   issue there -  alchemy has never been balanced, it should be done.  But
>   that isn't quite as  main part of the game as say magic and fighting is,
>   and is also balance in a  different nature (difficulty of ingredients,
>   difficulty of recipes, etc) 

This certainly has been an issue - both with alchemy and other item creation 
skills as well. (I will use alchemy as a synonym to item creation skill.) 
Basically, an arrow of slaying X should be equally difficult to create as 
actually going to kill X. Of course, some characters will have easier time 
killing X than others (follower of gaea killing a dread is probably having a 
lot easier task than someone else), so the best situation would be where 
creating Y of slaying X is easy for a character who would have a hard time 
killing X and not so easy for others. That would be difficult to do, though.

All in all, just try to keep creating things about as difficult as producing 
the same effect without the item. Arrows of slaying are easy: the kill a 
single monster, so the effect is quite clear. Obviously, rod of lightning 
bolt is a little more difficult to judge...

>   Just doing damage/range gains per level may be workable with the revised 
> monsters.  In the past, that didn't work when a first level monster had 20
> hp and the level 20 monster had 2000 - there just wasn't any good way to
> scale up the damage on the spell properly.  But it is probably too early to
> really say if that is the case.

There is an infinite amount of functions to choose from. There *is* a suitable 
function to scale up the damage no matter how the monsters' HP scale. The 
question is how to figure out the correct function...

>   But the other issue with different versions is a mix of area vs damage. 

Is this really so hard? Can't we just say that a spell with maximum inflicted 
damage (on stationary targets) of X hit points costs f(X) mana points? That 
way, a bullet which hits a single target and has maximum damage X, costs 
f(X); a bolt which has maximum damage Y per square and envelops N squares, 
costs f(Y*N) etc. That would be quite fair and it would really discourage the 
use of area effect spells against individual targets (although that is the 
player's choice, not something we want to prevent).

>   The harder part IMO is trying to sort that out on the server side.  It is 
> fairly straight forward to say 'a fireball of radius=3, base damage=20, 
> duration=5 cost X sp' and 'a fireball of radius=6, base damage=10,
> duration=6 costs y SP' an balance out those SP or other values.

Could we not use small/medium/large balls/bolts/cones for this? It would be 
less flexible, but easier for players. The damage could scale the same way, 
but damage/area would be less for the large versions than medium than small. 
Total (maximum) damage would be the same. Even if we let players specify the 
kind of spell they want (which is, btw, a nice touch, I think!) the above 
mentioned f(X) -method of figuring out the sp cost should work fine. 

I also think players should be able to create more powerful bullets as well, 
not just balls/cones/bolts. I might well imagine a situation where a player 
has enough mana to cast a bunch of bullets at a single target, but would 
prefer using a single, more powerful bullet to achieve the same result 
faster. Oh, this also means, that we need to discard the easiest method of 
handling player-adjustable area/damage: we cannot simply fix the maximum 
damage of a given spell (and let the player just alter the area). What we CAN 
do, however, is fix the function f to be the same for all spells (except 
perhaps the "fifth" element weaponmagic spells which almost no monster has 
protection against). (I really hope this "fifth element" we discussed in the 
summer is part of what Mark's doing now.)

One further note: perhaps maximum damage in all of the above should really 
be "expectation value of damage" instead. It's more fair since for any large 
area of effect spell you expect never to actually achieve the maximum 
damage - too low probablility - whereas for bullets you expect to achieve it 
every now and then.

>   Traps need to be retuned for higher HP.

Can't we just bind trap damage to dungeon level? If a 1st level player enters 
a 50th level dungeon, he is expected to die - it does not matter if it's a 
monster or a trap that kills him. This would solve the problem that traps are 
either harmless to higher level characters or immediate death to lower level 
ones.

>   What would probably be good to add to crossfire, especially for traps, is
>   some idea of bleeding wounds.

Could this not be done with a new type of disease? 

-Juha