Re: CF: Direction, maps and balancing

[Christian Stieber <stieber@cys.de>]

On Fri, May 21, 1999 at 02:52:02PM +1000, Anthony Thyssen wrote:

> Also I think I remember a `hint' or `cheat' where attacking mice
> makes you MOVE faster than just walking through an empty room.
> That should be fixed.

Not just mice. It works with all monsters that you can kill quickly
enough, since you move with your weapon speed while fighting, or something
like that. Conan noticed this quite some ago, but I never considered
it a problem at all since it doesnīt help players in any way (okay,
we probably never tried to devise a proper abuse for that).

> Player speed when he has average stats also needs to be looked at.

Hm... the maximum speed a player has with full "best of" equipment is
either 2.07 or 2.27, depending on weapon preference. Might be less
(speed depends on Dex, doesnīt it?) for some classes.

Thatīs rather interesting anyway :-) The speed has never changed,
despite the new artifacts. mithril chainmail of winter + speedboots
gives exactly the same speed as white dragon scale mail + idaten boots.
I wonder whether they designed the idaten boots to achieve this :-)

Naked players (no armor) get 5.46/5.76, or something like that. Donīt
remember the exact figure. We never found a way to get high speed
without penalties, since we didnīt notice the speed+ bug :-(

Btw, has the bug been _fixed_? When I checked the last time it just
had a quick&dirty workaround.

> In that case speed boots may not increase your hit rate, but may double
> the speed you can ran away at -- making hit and run tacktics feasable.
> Which a weapon with a speed bonus may increase weapon attack rate
> but not movement rate.

Interesting idea. What about rings? Speed+ rings are really useful for
newbies.

Btw, thatīs how the "speedboots" in DSA3: "Schatten über Riva" (donīt
know the english title, if they made an english version at all)
work. When your party is engaged in combat (which has turns, but
still...) each character has a certain amount of movement points
(based on his encumberance, mostly). The speedboots ("Zauberstiefel")
just double your movement points. Now, moving a square takes a
movement point. Casting a spell takes 5 movement points, _and_
finishes the turn. Attacking takes 3 movement points and finishes the
turn. Changing your weapon uses two movement points etc.

There is also a spell ("axxeleratus", IIRC) that gives you a double
attack, so you (usually) attack two times during a turn. I donīt remember
whether it doubles your movement points as well.

So they somehow separated movement "speed" (distance per turn) and
number of attacks per turn. Things are more complicated, since there
are rules that determine when you get to move (this is based on various
things such as courage; my manual doesnīt tell, though).

The same game also has "damaged" weapons (the only exception being the
wizardīs staff which never breaks, has magical properties and never
leaves the wizard), which will finally break. Unless you take care of
them by applying a grindstone(?) to keep the weapons in shape.  If the
weapon breaks you can bring it to a smith whoīll (hopefully; if he
says "You again! Get out of here!"... bad luck) fix it for you (he
takes some money for it and tells you something like "come back in 3
days"). It seems that armor is also subject to being damaged after
itīs been used for a long time. Apparently this doesnīt apply to
magical weapons (Iīve never them damaged or broken) and probably
magical armor.

> It would certainaly make the game more interesting when you can't just
> run away from that dragon fire comming your way! In fact that should be
> the deciding factor!  Normal (unencumbered) speed = dragon fire speed,
> Double speed (speed boots) is faster course

I always found it _very_ interesting that my fully equipped character
runs faster than arrows, bolts and many (all?) spells --- esp, since
2.27 isnīt really that fast; the stuff is just way to slow ("oh, look
at the bolt coming towards you" -- "Ah, that one." -- "Donīt you want to
avoid it?" -- "Sure, but let me finish my meal first, ok? Itīs still
5 squares away...").

> It would certainly stop `wading' effects when you can only attack as
> fast as both you can the monsters reach each other.

You mean a player will be able to see what heīs going to kill? :-)

> At the moment it it far too much hack'n'slash.

:-) As I said some time ago: pupland is a lot of puzzling. I believe
that I know all of pupland (there is just one treasure room I havenīt
been able to enter, and there _may_ be hidden maps I havenīt
found...), but I have not seen very many places where you can get exp:
it has a strong emphasis on puzzling, and it almost takes cf to itīs
extreme in that area (ok, some conversation keywords are _really_ bad
and should be improved (if it hasnīt been done already)). The main
continent, on the other hand, is hack&slash. Granted, I still havenīt
found the floating castle --- I looked at all the maps with crossedit,
and I know all of them, so I know it doesnīt exist :-)

Anyway, I think there is too much time being wasted making good
existing maps worse, instead of working on the game core or new
(esp. non-newbie) maps, or at least finishing unfinished maps.

Christian

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