So the question about yaks vs elephants turned into something much bigger... making me almost throw in the towel. First, something that seems to be undisputed:
1. There are too many elephants around. They were conceived as a rare addition to Lair (mostly for one vault) and now they come up also in dungeon and Vaults, in large numbers. 2. Trampling is an interesting mechanic, for example, it can make stair dancing harder or impossible. Apart from this, it doesn't do too much right now. 3. Giving trampling to death yaks leads to an interesting combination: death yaks have reaching, too. The combination of reaching plus trampling should be used, but not for a standard monster like the death yak. I believe that giving trampling to (death) yaks is not good, for these reasons and another one: it seems strange that death yaks are giant (yes, arguing by realism, I know). Next, here is my plan from before, hopefully better explained and easier to understand: a) Make elephants a lot more rare. They could be loners, or come in bands of at most three. (I don't think there's a good reason why they're so common in D and V, but that maybe a different problem.) They can still be used in vaults, but having a rarity of about hydra level in Lair, or a bit higher, would do. This addresses 1. b) Trampling without actual pushing leads to extra damage. This is one attempt to make choice of battle location more meaningful. There are often reasons to avoid being pushed around, for example the presence of other monsters nearby. If you choose to do so, there should be a drawback. c) You can be trampled into water or lava. This looks like an instadeath, but is not quite one: The danger is plain to see, and you can (should!) react in time. It would help to make trampling occasionally more relevant. (Needless to say, there would be vaults which exploit this option.) There are also a number of ways to indicate/prevent the potential instadeath, ranging from messages: "The elephant tramples you. Oh my, there is lava nearby!", to special effects when near lava. The last two try to address 2. d) Yak AI. Eino wanted to make (death) yaks more interesting. So if we find that trample is not the best choice, we could fall back on something else. There were a number of ideas: * do nothing, since slime creatures and ugly things have been dealth with * yaks in a band sees as one, and try to preserve the herd * e.g. if one yak sees the player, it shouts and the other yaks know, too (this mechanic could be expanded for predators hunting in bands, like wolves, who spread out to find you, then zoom in on you) * stampede (attacking one band member makes the others angry) For later, we can try to address 3 by inventing a monster that has both reaching and trampling. It could be non-living or stationary. Ideas for such a monster should not go into replies to this mail. Thanks, David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forrester recently released a report on the Return on Investment (ROI) of Google Apps. They found a 300% ROI, 38%-56% cost savings, and break-even within 7 months. Over 3 million businesses have gone Google with Google Apps: an online email calendar, and document program that's accessible from your browser. Read the Forrester report: http://p.sf.net/sfu/googleapps-sfnew _______________________________________________ Crawl-ref-discuss mailing list Crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crawl-ref-discuss
