Re: [Crawl-ref-discuss] Vampires

[Jarmo K. <jar...@cs...>]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, jp...@mi... wrote:

> 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.

But skeletons are weaker than zombies. And vampire usually can't afford to
use zombies because they need food. But if this is problem, you could
sometimes leave no skeleton when vampire consumes body.

> 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.

Unarmed vampire assassin sounds quite good. They have blowgun and it is easy
to get a dagger in early game if you want. So it would be quite gentle hint
to use unarmed combat instead of weapons.

> 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.

This is excellent! But following my logic starving vampires shouldn't 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.

This is also excellent!

> 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).

They are dead but want to be alive. Stealing life force allows them to
feel like living. Blood is like drug to them and they want always more
(no engorged state). They don't have natural regeneration. Only way to
regenerate is to steal life from something living. This is why starving
vampires don't regenerate. The more they eat, the more powerful they
become (higher regeneration etc).

> 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.

Yes, but it follows my vampire logic :)
IMO it should just be made clear to player that hunger state affects
*everything* when you play vampires.

> > -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?

Well, that is one way to see it but I prefer to see it like this:
  - almost no hunger when not hurted (you could even remove that "almost")
  - more food -> better regeneration
  - smaller wounds -> lower hunger rate
  +  there is always bat form

So there is good side and bad side. But indeed this is probably the biggest
thing that needs balancing.

> > (I did experiment other ways to balance hunger and regeneration, but this
> >  was most interesting.)
> 
> Interesting maybe, but is it also intuitive?

Hmm, I'm probably not the best person to answer this.

> 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.
> 

In my logic no regeneration is natural state for vampires and regeneration
is exception.

[about bat form]

> 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.

I tried to make bat form nearly useless for fighting.

> 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...

Spiders have 8 legs so they can easily use 4 legs to use items :)
Bats are also smaller than spiders in crawl. Giant bat has mass 150 and
wolf spider 800.

> 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.

Yes, I see that it's very natural form for them. Vampires turn into bat
when they want to flee or hide. It would actually make sense (to me) if
it was easier to turn into bat only when they are starving or badly hurt.

> 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

Eh, my approach was more like: features first, testing later.
Rewriting makes good for my code.

[UA combat and fighting]

This sound very good.

If vampires feel too weak when starving it might be good idea to
try higher tohit bonus for their bite attack. Or some kind of
powerful neck biting attack instead of stabbing.

-- 
Jarmo Kielosto