From: Haran P. <ha...@ma...> - 2007-01-02 18:58:15
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"Darshan Shaligram" <sci...@gm...> writes: > On 1/2/07, Piper Erik <Eri...@zo...> wrote: > >> From: Linley Henzell [mailto:l_h...@ya...] > >> - One thing I meant to do but didn't get around to before I stopped >> working on Crawl was to add a whole lot more branches and make most or >> all of them non-guaranteed (except for Zot, the temple and the other >> planes). That was part of the original plan, which failed mostly because >> the atrocious branch code made adding new ones a real pain. This kind of idea is why I did the branch cleanup. It would be pretty easy to add another branch now, but making it thematic and interesting would be...difficult. (I had ideas for a perma-silenced Library and stuff like that, but concretely building everything would be tough.) [...] >> - I notice that the map display doesn't preserve the colour of stairs >> when there is something on top of them. I added this feature because it >> was annoying to lose track of stairs because an item or monster >> overwrote them on the map. > > I'm actually surprised by this because I thought it was visible. > Anybody seeing this problem? The 0.1.7 defaults should colour the > stairs regardless of what's on top. Seems to work for me. >> - Is Summon Horrible Things permanent? I can't remember whether I left >> it this way, but it shouldn't be. Among other things this devalues the >> main advantage of necromancy versus summoning, which is permanency. > > Yeah! I agree completely. We should also weaken the effect of > monster-cast abjuration, which makes life miserable for summoners > *unless* they use horrible things. Yes, and *definitely* yes. Summoned creatures should resist abjuration roughly in proportion to your Summoning skill, I think. The Tomb should be doable with level 25 in Summoning. >> - Tomb of Doroklohe doesn't really belong; it's an instant panic button >> escape route that is infallible (other than miscasting) in most >> circumstances, and I tried to avoid panic buttons. I think I added it in >> one of my last versions, and I probably would have removed it or toned >> it down later. If there's some way of making it last just a couple of >> turns, or limiting it in some other way, that might be best. > > Thoughts on this? I've considered adopting Jarmo's crumbling-walls > idea for the Tomb. ToD must die. Seriously. It's the most game-breaking spell around. And it's not as if Conjurations/Earth is so weak. If we want to fix it there are a couple of ideas: - make it temporary, indeed (say lasting 2 + coinflip() turns) - make the walls permanent (I think Erik proposed this one); though this is still problematic with a ring of teleport - add a permanent HP or mana cost I don't think ToD would be good even as a level-9 Transmigrations/Earth spell without changes - either you can cast it reliably, in which case you win, or you can't, in which case it's almost worthless. >> - I remember years ago reading a post in r.g.r.dev from someone >> complaining about the defects in the Crawl skill system, particularly >> the 'victory dance', and suggesting an improvement: instead of xp going >> into a pool and being allocated as the character does things, the game >> would distribute xp among skills as soon as you got it. It would keep >> track of which skills the character had exercised in the last several >> hundred moves, and allocate xp proportionally. >> >> I really liked this idea. It's intuitive, it simplifies the interface by >> removing that stupid pool thing that I could never get working right, it >> removes the illogical victory dance, and it puts points into the skills >> which were used to get them. It would take plenty of careful balancing >> to get right, though. > > And the problem is, it'll just lead to stair-abuse and war-dancing > before the kill instead of victory-dancing after the kill. Until Crawl > has the AI to figure out when the player's seriously using the skill > as opposed to victory-dancing, this can't really be done well. Hm. It wouldn't be that easy to abuse, I think; of course it *can* be done. The problem is that it would be a bit hard to understand. I think the current system, though it has problems, is better for now. Haran |