Re: CF: Experiments

[Hwei Sheng TEOH <hsteoh@cs.toronto.edu>]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, David Andrew Michael Noelle wrote:

[snip]
> - overgeneration
> 
>     If your hit points or spell points are high enough, and you have enough
> +regeneration or +magic items, you can max out your hp/sp regeneration at
> one point per tick.  This probably also happens with grace, but I haven't
> seen it yet.  For high level characters, this can be pretty annoying.  For
> example, a wizard with 500 maxsp regenerates mana just as fast with magic +4
> as with magic +14.
> 
>     I altered the hp/sp/grace regeneration code to remove this limit, making
> it possible to regenerate multiple points each tick.  As a side effect, hp
> and sp still cost at most 1 food per tick (each) to regenerate.  Less with
> sustenance.

I think this is a *very* good idea... at least the game is beginning to be
less biased against magic users. :-)

> - merging Glowing Crystals
> 
>     I made Glowing Crystals mergable such that a group of _n_ crystals, each
> with _maxsp_ maximum capacity, has an effective maximum of _n_ * _maxsp_. 
> So a set of eight Glowing Crystals can hold 8000 sp.  Splitting them leaves
> as much stored energy as possible in one group and the remainder in the
> other group.  In this way, a mage in the middle of a battle only needs to
> hit one key, bound to "apply Glowing Crystal" to tap the whole bunch of them
> instead of scrolling through the inventory window to click on the one that's
> still glowing.

Sounds good...

[snip]
> - new spells
[snip]
>     Grenades - create a bomb and throw it - like a fireball, but psysical
> grenade - wizard spell
> holy handgrenade - priest spell (I couldn't pass up that one)

Hmmm, I don't know how this would affect game balance, but if we want to add
grenades which are basically the bomb analog of fireball/snowstorm spells, and
psionic equivalents of cone spells like burning hands, why not add other
spells like `chaos storm' (cone), `chaos field' (like fireball), to complement
existing chaos spells; `lightning storm' (cone) to make up for the lack of an
electricity area-effect spell; `sunstorm' (like fireball), `sunflare' (cone)
to complement the existing sunspear (Light attacks).

Of course, this might just throw the game completely off-balance... perhaps we
should start thinking on restricting such spells so that you need to be
attuned to a certain spellpath before you can use the more powerful versions
of a class of spells (eg. attuned Light to get sunstorm/sunflare). Otherwise
spellcasters that learn general spells will have too powerful a repertoire.
Simply making the mana cost higher doesn't really help much, because a
high-level wizard can easily collect many glowing crystals and/or magic power
potions to get around this limitation.

[snip]
> -  new artifacts
[snip]
>     sword of Sharpness +3
> (dam: x2, wc: +2) (Attack: weaponmagic, death)
> Chance of slaying outright, perhaps that's what a Vorpal Blade should do?

Hmm, if you add this, you might want to change something in the Wizard Tower
(Lake Country) -- one of the levels has a Vorpal Blade that you probably want
to have a death attacktype on.

[snip]
>     I also added armour improvement, up to +(wisdom level/7) as compared to
> weapon improvement, which can go up to +(wisdom level/5), and Enchant Armour
> scrolls, which max out at +(total level/10).  The armour value is increased,
> just as it is with a scroll, but it gains no weight.

Hmm, I've always wanted to be able to manually `manufacture' enchanted
armour that has the same reduced weight as magical armour you find in
dungeons. (So that, for example, I can `make' the same robe +2 with the
lighter weight, rather than the heavier weight, which I think is what the code
currently does with Enchant Armour scrolls). So a Reduce Armour Weight scroll
will be good. :-) However, this may cause game imbalance, as high-level
characters will be able to make extremely powerful armour too easily. Perhaps
we can compensate by making such scrolls available only in some very difficult
dungeons, and not in shops?


T

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