Crossfire Archive
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: CF: play balance

Peter,
I think the issue regarding game difficulty is not that an expert has
learned techniques that makes the game easier, but that an expert knows
what items to get to make the game trivial.  Some suggestions have been
made on how to make the game harder by making it more tedious.  Those
ideas shouldn't be implemented.  As the game has a sweet spot between
level 10-20, the idea is how do you extend the playbalance for that
range without making it tedious.

>> Alchemy needs to be integrated into the game.  Materials need to be found
>> in maps (salt near the ocean, minerals in mines,,,).  Alchemy books
>> (containing rare formulas) need to exist as artifact items.
>
>Have you seen my FireTemple suite of maps?  It is an alchemy-aware set
>of maps!

No, I hadn't seen them.  I should look at them.  I still there is a
problem that older maps aren't alchemy or religon aware which creates
some odd situations such as an altar changing religons.

>> about the character which impairs natural recovery.  It is a very common
>> theme that powerful items are also a bit of a curse due to their side
>> effects.
>
>This is an interesting idea.  At one point I had plans to make Power
>Crystals do things of their own accord:  possibly beneficial, possibly stupid,
>depending on that Crystal's "personality".  Never got round to it though.

The more I think about this idea the more I like it.  If a player had to
worry about carrying too many artifacts with unequipped artifacts carrying
more of a penalty than if equipped then a high level player cannot easily
carry everything needed to defeat every type of monster.  That should make
the game interesting for longer since part of level 10-20 being interesting
is the player doesn't have the perfect item for every situation.

>> rarely used by monsters.  In fact, if monsters aggressively used the
>> best spells then we might finally reach agreement that some spells are
>> too powerful.
>
>The REAL PROBLEM here is this:  monsters have 1000's of HP, players
>have hundreds.  If monsters used spells with the same deadliness as
>players, then players wouldn't have a chance.

The real problem here is that monsters currently gets lots of mana and
unless specifically given only good spells then they are typically not
very dangerous.  Monsters need to be given more appropriate random spells
for their level and more effectively use them.  That will make them much
more powerful at which point the level of spell given and mana regeneration
get tuned.  Right now you can walk through a bunch of monsters that don't
use their good spells and suddenly get killed by one that gets on a lucky
streak and uses it's good spell several times in a row.

>> I think a key game balance measurement is that difficult monsters are
>> always difficult.  There should be no way to be so good that a powerful
>> monster is not a threat.
>
>Why not?  I think it makes the game more fun.  If I perpetually must slog
>through monsters I've seen before, and which bore me, because I'm too
>weak to get through them to the INTERESTING monsters, the game's less fun.
>If a player likes to do things like battle weaker monsters all the time,
>and never take on ones which challenge him, that's his problem, not ours.
>We cannot fix this.

I think we have a misunderstanding here.  I was suggesting that the big
monsters such as Jessy should always be a challenge.  The point is that
a player should not be able to be so great that there are no interesting
monsters to fight.

>the end of the quest is rewarded with the Demonslayer, a better weapon
>than any other non-"enchanted" weapon that I know of.  The balance is this:
>if a player can GET that weapon, he's already strong enough that the nice
>weapon is a convenience, not a revolution.

The key is that it is a quest item that does retain play balance.  So it
makes the quest worth doing without removing the challenge from the game.

>Regarding unbalancing spells:  I made the spells of "Face of Death",
>"Meteor storm", "ball lightning".  Of these, I only placed "ball lightning"
>in a map.  Face of Death is sort of self-limiting:  I really think the
>spell is only useful to those who don't REALLY need it:  it only kills monsters
>which are much weaker than the player.
>
>Meteor storm, though....  I find myself using that spell very often when
>I have it.  THIS spell may need to have something done about it.  An increase
>in level?  A necessity for SPELL COMPONENTS?  Increasing the level to say,
>25 or 30 might be in order.....

I think the solution to powerful spells is to give monsters at that level
the spell as well so player has to sometimes face the same spells that
the player uses.  If the player cannot risk facing the same spell the
player uses then the spell is too powerful.

								sdw
[to unsubscribe etc., send mail to crossfire-request@ifi.uio.no]