[crossfire] Gameplay notes

[Alex Schultz]

On Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:18:13 -0700
Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:

> > For summoning, maybe a fix would be to make base monsters tougher,
> > so they can really help the player kill things, and not just hit 2
> > times before being destroyed...
> > Maybe increase hp a lot, like tenfold?  
> 
>   That seems reasonable, or perhaps other adjustments like better ac
> or better armor.
> 
>   One weakness of lots of monsters is their armor rating tends to be
> pretty low.
> 
>   I think right now, summoning basically just uses the 'stock'
> monsters and makes some customizations to them.  One could see why
> they are pretty weak - player is expected to kill dozens of them, so
> it is going to be a lot weaker than the player at same level.
> 
>   Probably best to make up a separate set of monsters archs which are
> used for summoning - these may have same name, but are tougher - this
> lets one tweak them a lot better than trying to adjust the code that
> makes changes to do the right thing, because I could imagine for some
> summoned creatures, giving them a huge number of extra hp would make
> them way too good.

It's been a while since I've played or been involved with CF, but I'd
like to point out that in my experience summoned monsters are generally
much more impaired in attack than toughness.

To see what I mean, have two players enter the arena using summons and
"petmode arena". You'll tend to see that most summons are unable to
kill other summons in any reasonable amount of time. It tends to be a
stalemate when monsters fight eachother because they usually
regenerate faster than they get damaged by a monster of equal strength.
The situation would be the same in using summons against anything else,
and simply giving better hp/ac/armor will not alone help.