Re: CF: Crossfire playbalance

[Christian Stieber <stieber@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>]

Mark Wedel (mark@icp.siemens.com) wrote:

> > I support stat bonus maximums for any single ITEM, however.  A
> > taifu +20 with +5 to every stat is just ridiculous.

Not really. It will be a crap weapon (a taifu doesn't have a decent base
damage, does it?).

>  Note that the current stat maximums are 30.  Since characters racial maximums
> at 20, that means to max out every stat, the character needs +10/stat.
> 
>  Some of this is probably caused by new artifact items I alluded to above
> (armor that gives you stat bonus, shields, helms, ...).  As it is now, a
> character could probably max out any specific stat he wants to, but not all of
> them.

A character can max out all stats (maybe with the exception of cha ---
nobody needs that, so I don't know for sure). However, there is an
important tradeoff --- if you don't add your own cheat items to the
game, you need to use a "custom made" weapon to max out all the stats.
However, such a weapon can only get 26 improvements --- so each stat +
removes a damage + (or a weight -).

So the character can have a good weapon (lots of damage and low weight)
or all stats maxed and a bad weapon. The first option is much better.

And there are _still_ things to consider when choosing a weapon --- I have
the dragonbane, demonslayer and axe of b1ff on keys because only the
demonslayer can kill a jessy in one or two hits, only the dragonbane can
kill powerful dragon stuff in one or two hits, and the axe has the best
general damage :-( To bad you can't add "slaying" to your weapons :-)

> 3) Having a database tracking item/artifact creation and limiting creation of
> new ones probably won't help the problem.  Now, the good characters on the
> server get the good artifacts, and don't leave anything else for other people.

Yep. That would be extremely counterproductive. Better remove multiuser
capability before doing that :-)

>  Limiting artifacts only really comes into play if you have several people at
> roughly the same level trying to hunt down the artifacts.

That can be done by a server admin (setting up a competition).

> But as it is now, most of the best artifacts are in known locations
> anyway.

Most? All :-) Although I must admit that I don't know all random artifact
locations --- one tends to ignore most of them anyway.

> this stuff isn't necessarily bad, but is one of those things that does make the
> player more power than they once were.  I think a lot of this adds some nice
> color, but does still give more advantage to the player.

:-) That's it. I'm not too familiar with the crossfire history
(started playing with 0.93.4 --- several months to explore stuff), but
it seems that the monsters and most maps are "old" in the sense that
they have been created ages ago. Pupland is better --- it has the same
old monsters in most places, but adds puzzles that the old hack&slash
maps don't have. So you just run through those maps with your new
hyper-armor and mega-weapon simply because the map/monster designers
didn't know about these things.

I can easily count the dangerous maps:
  - dark angel hanuk casts meteor swarm
  - statue casts meteor swarm
  - great wyrm of chaos has electricity attack
  - snake temple (or whatever it's called) has comets
  - not sure about the three old women
  - somebody in the vally of the sisters has weaponmagic (or something
    else that does damage)
  - avatar of the fire god has weaponmagic
  - unholy goblin assassins have godpower
Anything else I forgot? This is for 0.94.3 --- there might be even fewer
maps due to the god change in 0.95.x. Lots of immunity items, even if I
don't count the greyshield.

It's probably difficult to handle --- adding new attacktypes because
the old ones don't work anymore is not a very intelligent solution :-)

Christian


-- 
Christian Stieber        http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~stieber
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