Re: CF: incompatible objects (was Re: Experiments)

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

On Thu, 26 Aug 1999, Raphael Quinet wrote:

[snip]
> In the earlier versions of Crossfire (more than five years ago), there
> were very few monsters that could cast fire spells and cold spells at
> the same time.  And except for the high-level hack-and-slash maps in
> Brest, there were very few areas that had both fire dragons and cold
> dragons close to each other.  I understand that you do not want to
> restrict the protections because there are too many areas in which you
> really need to be protected from both fire and cold, but I think that
> the best solution is to change these maps.

Good point. I found that a lot of maps are somewhat tedious to play and not
very interesting, because you just have a jumbled mishmash of all kinds of
monsters, and they are about the only interesting thing in the map -- there is
no storyline, no plot, nothing, just an irrational combination of incompatible
monsters. In fact, I noticed that many maps touted as "high-level" use strange
combinations of monsters just to have, so it seems, as many different
attacktypes as possible to make it "hard".

> I think that the FireTemple maps are a good example of what we should
> try to do: a whole set of maps in which the player can expect to see
> lots of fire monsters and almost no cold monsters.  Actually, this is
> something that I like in most of your (Peter) maps: the areas in which
> you can find the various types of monsters are usually well defined.
> This is something that should be done for most maps.

How about monsters like Dreads that can actually cast fire AND cold AND poison
spells all at the same time? Or worse still, giant wizards, who has a whole
repertoire of spells to pick from? I suppose we could make them the "ultimate
hardest" monsters, if we make it impossible (or at least very inconvenient) to
have both fire and cold protection at the same time.

But honestly, I still can't swallow the fact that these monsters can blow all
this mess of spells at you (ever seen a Dread blow both fire AND icestorm at
you simultaneously?!) and YET be immune to all these spells at the same time.
Do these monsters have these immunities because of the way the maps have
become what they are now, or do they fit in the original framework?

> <rant>
> Actually, I think that most of the current maps that require the
> player to be more than level 20 should be changed because many of them
> are using some bad combinations of monsters.  How could you have a Red
> Dragon and a Chinese Dragon in the same room anyway?  It does not make
> sense, they should kill each other before the player has a chance to
> see them.  Most of the high-level maps were done by players who were
> bored after having reached a high level, and wanted to create some new
> challenges for their characters.  Unfortunately, many of these maps are
> simply too hard and require more and more powerful items.  I would like
> to re-think the current set of maps by keeping only the low-level and
> middle-level maps, and very few of the high-level maps (the dragon
> quest is good, a couple of pupland maps are good, but that's it).  All
> IMHO, of course.
> </rant>

Which reminds me... there are some particularly annoying maps where the
monsters seem to have developed an immunity to almost everything except
physical attacks (or worse, can be hurt only by weaponmagic)... no, I'm not
talking about powerful monsters, I'm referring to maps like the Dragon Hangar
on Dragon Island where the dragons have developed immunity to physical
attacks... Now, if such monsters were found somewhere in some super-high-level
quest, where you were probably WARNED beforehand of their (basically)
invulnerability, I wouldn't have minded. But a ROOM full of physical-immune
dragons in the middle of town... now *that* does not make any sense to me.

Alright, enough of this rant. I've a suggestion to make. :-) Could we possibly
make it such that incompatible monsters will *automatically* kill each other?
For example, we could make it so that cold dragons and fire dragons would
fight each other on sight, or something. I know the current monster AI doesn't
work for this, but when the AI is ever improved, I'd suggest this be taken
into consideration. I think this would at least cause mapmakers to think twice
before putting incompatible monsters on the same map, since they could just
start killing each other before the player reaches them. And even then, who
knows if they would stop fighting each other? I mean, a cold dragon and a fire
dragon who are duking it out with each other probably won't even notice a
little insignificant adventurer who stumbles upon them.

Or better still, mapmakers can design maps that have two incompatible races of
monsters fighting with each other, and the player has to find some quest
artifact while trying to avoid getting killed by the two fighting parties.
This could allow for some interesting map designs/storylines. :-)


T

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