Re: [Crawl-ref-discuss] Vampires

[<jp...@mi...>]

Hey Jarmo, good to hear from you!

Yes, I got your mail but I decided it would be best to wait until this message
appeared on crawl-ref-discuss, so my reply would make more sense to the rest of
the team.
I hope you'll be pleased to hear that most of your listed features have been
implemented, as I simply took them from your patch. :)

For now, I'll only comment on aspects I handled differently or am unsure about.

> -Most suitable classes are assassin and death knight.
>  Fighter, summoner, and necromancer are ok.

I think Vampire Summoners (even though other undead are automatically excluded)
make a lot of sense, but I'm not so sure about Necromancers - it's sooooo easy
for Vampires to create skeletons to raise. Not that I've ever played them in a
way that wasn't fighting or feeding.
Oh, and David suggested having one of these (maybe Fighter or Assassin?) start
barehanded, so that Vampires use their biting more often from the get-go. I'm
not quite sure just how often unarmed combat happens when the main melee is
done with a weapon.

> -They especially like human blood.

I've added contaminated blood (jackals, ...) giving lower nutrition, and blood
of poison creatures sometimes making *hungrier*. Hp regeneration stays the same
for all types of corpses (except human/elf, obviously).
Also, mutagenic blood will make a vampire mutate once I've changed that part in
mutation.cc. For some reason, I think vampires should be able to mutate.

> -Corpses nutrition is base on their weight.

I've kept that, and also made eating delay depending on corpse weight. The
factor could be tweaked, I guess.

> -Fresh corpses are main source for food. Blood potions should be rare.
>  It is no bad thing if player is out of food sometimes. This is why I
>  didn't include blood potions to Fulsome Distillation. But it may be ok
>  if chance is low enough.

Fulsome Distillation now has 1/30 chance of producing !blood (instead of water)
for clean chunks. This is not a reliable way for vampires to stock up on blood.
The prob. for blood potions is 1.11% overall, and I've actually found one in one
of the many (extremely short) test games. If that's too high, we could reduce
it.

Now for the really difficult part: I don't understand why or how they should
become "more dead" and "more living" respectively when in a state of
hunger/satiation. I did keep the effects on resistances (I'm including other
attributes here as well) and regeneration (though I allow hunger as
intermediate state with rr/2, so that regeneration is 0 only for starving).

But the one thing I'm REALLY against is that they can't drink potions while
hungry.  This is handled consistently for both Mummies and Ghouls throughout
the game, and I thought that addition was confusing and probably would make
playing them much harder, esp. as they'll already have lowered to zero
regeneration and then can't even quaff !healing.

> -It seems that I also made hunger rate dependaple to current hp.
>  I probably wanted to encourage careful and sneaky playing style.
>  It costs more to heal bad wounds than small scratches.
>  They kind of burn victims life force to heal themself.

This seemed rather complicated to me, so I left it out. The way I read it, it
was: you're hungry, so you regenerate more slowly and once you take hits (which
heal more slowly) you become even hungrier. That's some kind of circular logic I
didn't get. Could you please explain that again?

> (I did experiment other ways to balance hunger and regeneration, but this
>  was most interesting.)

Interesting maybe, but is it also intuitive?
Oh, btw: I added a line to the status line/screen saying "You do not regenerate"
for special cases like starving vampires and general sickness. Maybe the reason
should be added to make it more useful.

> -They can turn into vampire bat. (This is cool, and that is the main
>  reason for this ability :). It can be used for fleeing and hunting next
>  weak victim. Turning into tiny and weak bat is only way to regenerate
>  naturally when you have no food. No casting spells or zapping wands in
>  this form. Originally turning into bat made you drop all your equipment,
>  but that was bit too much.

Yeah, the bat form is really cool! :)

They're still too strong (in terms of power) and I'm afraid that's all my fault
as I changed the fighting code as a whole.
I've restricted some interactions, but not all. Here's a list of things bats can
do in my version they can't in Jarmo's: memorise spells, zap wands, cast spells,
quaff or read.

The "problem" here is that in spider form you can do all these things. Yes,
there's a difference in that bats are a more natural transformation while
spider form is fuelled by magic, but I tend to think that vampires are magical
in general, so...

I guess you interprete bats as a much more natural and integral thing than I do,
seeing how in your patch vampires can transform into bats from the beginning, at
a cost of nearly zero, whereas I make the chance depend on Invocations (!) and
they only gain this ability at Xp level 3.

One major change concerns the fighting system. I should probably have simply
copied your methods, as I suppose you've done a lot testing. The problem was
that I started out with an older version of you patch that was lacking biting,
so I added that manually and when I later saw you'd added it for a later
version I tried to merge the two versions.
The idea is that vampires get the (new) Fangs mutation, so unarmed attacks can
be of the biting type. For vampires in particular, 2/3 of all other unarmed
attacks are changed to biting instead.
These unarmed attacks are rare (at least for UC skill 2), so you hardly see it
in the beginning of a game. When biting, there's a chance the vampire will
attempt to draw blood depending on its hunger state (1/8 when satiated or full,
1/4 when hungry, 1/2 when starving), but they will never draw blood from
poisonous or mutagenic creatures (though I think making them ignore these
safety measures when starving could make sense). So far, I've never seen any of
my Vampires actually drinking blood from a living creature. For bats that works
reliably (though I dropped the probability and reduced the nutrition gain).

Cheers,

Johanna