Nicolas Weeger wrote: > Finally got around to testing the modified server :) > > Choose a dragon/monk. Pretty easy, I must say - at level 1 I went into > the 'dry well' in Scorn, and made it to the ogres and level 4, after which I > decided it was enough testing, besides the ogres were slightly too strong - > meditation would have helped, of course.
Just a note - the pixies and madman have not been modified yet, so are probably easier than they should be. I should make a quick pass on all the monsters to set up some baselines for their AC and the lie. > > So, some thoughts: > * I kinda like the current speed (0.8 for a new char), gives some time to > think and such > * high hp (I had ~30, and 30 sp/gr - didn't yet use spells) means it takes > longer to die Yeah, the higher HP slows down death. But at the same time, as someone else noted, it can be more dangerous to get surrounded now, as it takes longer to hack out. I don't know the tactics you used, but the dry well at least has nice 1 space wide bottlenecks for the monsters, so you can avoid getting surrounded to some extent. At some point, I think at low levels (<3), death should almost be something that is caused by carelessness or over agressiveness, and not unluckiness (presuming player is on beginning maps). It is sort of bad to die on a beginner map because you failed to properly disarm a trap or the like. > * we'll definitely need to improve the monster's moving algorithm, so they > are > smarter :) All monster logic needs improvement. I also think some of these changes, and the balancing involved, open up more possibilities. By default, monsters are somewhat tough to hit now (its not a sure thing). But this really does allow more tuning possibilities: AC - make monsters harder to hit (or easier) HP - how many hits it takes - this also has some effects on spells damage - how monster damage the monster does speed - how fast the monster attacks All these were there before, but I think a problem with tuning speed is that the range of speed for players was really high before - now it is much more modest, so you start to get things like a 'speed 1.0 creature will mover faster than the player' I didn't do a dragon character - I just did a straight fighter, but did find that with the orcs in the beginners dungeon, one still had to be somewhat careful. I think they are probably a bit less dangerous before, so more adjustments are needed. It might be interesting to write up some sort of formula that takes all of those variables into account and gives a proposed difficult/exp rating for them (this would be really imprecise as it couldn't take into account things like spells the monster may cast), but could be useful as a quick dump to see things like 'this monster is way out of whack - either its combat stats needs to be adjusted or its exp adjusted > Globally the changes seem ok, but need much balancing - monsters maybe don't > do too much damage, things like that? Yeah - I'll have to play a lot more with tweaking. Another thing to look at while doing this, which I don't think anyone has done yet, is archery - these changes likely have some effect as to the effectiveness of using bows, either for the better or worse, but not sure which way right now. _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
