[crossfire] races

[Mark Wedel]

On 05/29/10 02:11 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:

>>    If a troll tries to play a mage, he is in bad shape.  While putting
>> warnings up might be nice, I'm not sure of a good mechanic to do that.
>> Perhaps in those cases, just having the class description make it clear,
>> something like 'Power is a key attribute for wizards, and any starting
>> wizard should have at least a 20 power' or the like.  So when the player
>> chooses a troll and sees a -4 pow penalty (or whatever it is), maybe
>> realizes that isn't a good choice.
>
> Manually put warnings in the race description, and when you select a class -
> since you already know the race.
>
> I think the character creation logic will be changed, correct?
> So if one can select at the same time race and class, just put a big warning
> when the race is not balanced, or when the class isn't adapted at all to the
> race.

  Yes - could be done.   Main thing in that case is to make sure it stays up to 
date, eg, if a new class is added, all the races for which that class is not a 
good fit needs to be updated.


>>    But some danger can be a race/class combination that is too powerful.
>> Balance is an overall achievement - that all classes&  races are basically
>> on-par with each other.
>>
>>    So while having lots of races is likely to lead to some cases of the race
>> not being very powerful, and thus hard to play, you may get other cases
>> where the race is too powerful, and too easy to play.
>>
>>    But balance can be hard to achieve in many areas.  One might say 'this
>> spell is just to powerful - that is why that class is too good', but
>> tuning down that spell affects every class that uses it, as well as items,
>> so may have more consequences than intended.  This is one reason why
>> balance is so hard.
>
> So what?
> If the combo is too powerful, people who use it obviously don't want a
> challenge, and they like the game like it is, so that's good :)
> Others who like challengs will just use another combo.

  If it was that simple, no problem :)

  But balance is all inter related.  If some combo is too powerful, it probably 
means they can clear out dungeons that much more easily, which leads to a 
proliferation of more stuff in shops.

  Conversely, map makers may design maps to challenge the powerful combos, which 
leaves the normal/average characters a map that is nearly impossible to complete.

  Some of this can get fixed by having good 'reference' characters that 
mapmakers can use to see how the map plays.

  But you probably still don't want to have things that are too powerful.  But 
with a potentially revised stat systems, the higher stats shouldn't be as much 
an improvement.

  Probably best to change things around, and then see outcome (just by looking 
at highscore file, one can see what races/classes get played a lot, and if all 
the top characters are a selection of just one or two races/classes, may be sign 
they need some balance).