I think ammo should be something you worry about. In the base game, ammo is not plentiful; as your stockpile dwindles, you become ever more anxious to find the next bolt/thrown vending machine or rune room ASAP. Many people seem to view this as a flaw, and address it by dumping copious quantities of ammo on the player's head. Having used Secret Sword to generate somewhere on the order of 100 throwing knives, 70 or 80 kunai, and 50 or 60 throwing stars just on DL 1... I'm not sure this is healthy for a roguelike game. When you melee something, you're not getting "free attacks" that ranged characters should be jealous of, you're risking the most vital of resources: your health. When you cast spells, your mana is evaporating. The player who doesn't keep an eye on their mana will die almost as surely as will the player who runs out of health. Similarly, when the player makes ranged attacks, normally you must keep an eye on your ammo and always have a retreat plan just in case. Alternatively, you might have some backup wands, weapons, or spells. But the way modders are changing the game, you're going to never have to worry about ammo, and thus rarely if ever have to worry about your health. Perhaps we should treat the smithing of thrown weapons, tinkering of bolts, and alchemical bombs as something akin to Leyline Walker or Blood Magic - a support skill necessary for those who want to focus on their art without overworrying about their art's resources. In that vein, I could see creating a secondary support skill that generates ammo, but I don't think your attack skill should give you free ammo. It's your game, and your mod, but that's my 2 cents and I'd love to hear others' thoughts.
Ok, so my 2 cents now. I do agree that free ammo is something that is unbalanced with what warriors have. It still isn't that strong compared to what properly-created wizard characters can do, but that's another issue. Now, we actually have 3 problems instead of 1 problem here. The first one is the fact that warrior characters are slightly under-powered (at least in the original game, as some mods help alleviate this problem somewhat, but without there being more of these mods, every one balanced [or simply more base game skills], it still remains there), and something needs to be done with that (I know that Essence's CSR does something with that, but it's the only alternative for that right now. The second one is the fact that the only available solutions to the ammo problem are either crafting (which has limited supplies unless you get the Clockwork Knight skill tree [but that's not that much of a problem if you only craft bolts/throwables], and rapes your available inventory space utterly [which is currently a major problem with all characters that use tinkering/smithing/alchemy/any mix of the aforementioned]) or ammo spawning. Now, if there actually was a way to get some weak ammo freely (meaning one could use something that provides absolutely no damage bonus, or even a negative one, but can be easily replenished, thus not being forced to choose whether to get an ammo-spawning skill [and thus having an entire storage of ammo] or not doing that because it's unbalanced [and risk running out of projectiles in every fight if he's unlucky]), then one would be able to choose whether he prefers to craft strong ammunition or get cruddy ones for free, and it would be slightly better (because, let's face it, if there is any problem in a rogue-like game that only has 1 solution, like the ammunition problem here, then something went wrong). The third problem is the brokenness of counter stat - if it stopped being "the one stat to rule them all" in melee combat, then warrior builds certainly would be more viable. Because it's not that ranged combat is too strong there (let us ignore bolts of mass destruction and other weird stuff for a moment), but rather the fact that melee combat gets too risky to get into ten-foot distance within a monster even if you are playing a tank character when you reach the deeper part of the game; properly built melee characters can be pretty resilient and have no trouble with out-damaging their ranged colleagues, but what is it worth if you can go from full health to re-rolling a character in one turn because RNG decided to give you a counter-critical and critical in the same turn. And I reckon the whole solution to this problem (I mean ammo spawning) came from the fact that wizards can easily resupply their reserves by simply waiting and melee characters don't need resupplying (aside from occasional strong bolts/bombs) for specific monsters or monster zoos), while ranged rogues need ammunition to survive and have no way to actually get it if they don't fill their inventory with junk, which many people loathe to do.
My inexperienced view on thrown weapons is summed up as "anything and everything." I think everything should be throwable, to include vending machines, armor, corpses, flesh cubes and everything conceivably heftable. But limited distance and damage per item. A vending machine should only be throwable 1 grid in front or to the close side of the character's grid with light damage to the monster in that target grid. Shields should have limited distance, but further than armor and for more damage. Potions for long distance, but not as far as baseballs, knives and obvious thrown higher damage thrown weapons. Basically be able to use your environment semi-realistacly. What would Jackie Chan do? Not sure if this could be moddable, but that is my .02, without trying to dissect the above posts.
It wouldn't really be, ElectricMessiah, seeing as every item can only have one action assigned to it, and both "eat" and "throw" are actions. But yeah, if you could get huge quantities of really cruddy ammo, then there wouldn't be a need for skills spawning a lot of higher-level projectiles.
I agree 100%. Resource management is an important component of the roguelike experience. I'm okay with the idea of endless ammo as a side-skill you take in addition to archery or throwing, but I think that concept is potent enough it ought to take a significant chunk of a skill tree to fuel it. Tinkering + Archery works pretty well, and seems like a good benchmark. You get the good bolts, but not without some restrictions. You also get better mid-game crossbows, a bunch of trap skills, and miscellaneous crafting stuff to go with it, so you get something other than just bolts out of the deal. That seems pretty balanced. That said, the argument is valid that Tinkering can take resource management to unnecessary extremes. So something else as an option for those who don't like fiddling with interfaces as carrying a variety of resources would be nice. But whatever that elegant and easy option is, it shouldn't further devalue from the crafting skills. Taking Archery + New Skill X should be roughly on the same power level as Archery + Tinkering, so it's a matter of taste (or which has synergy with other parts of your build) not a matter of one skill being just better than the other. If New Skill X makes a lot more bolts than Tinkering, _and_ does it with less effort or inventory pinch, then those bolts probably need to be much less potent than the ones tinkering gives. Like "crude plastic bolts" with -2 Crit and just 1 damage. I really like your analogy / analysis that a bolt-producing power should be a support skill for Archery the way Leylines or Blood Magic is a support skill for spellcasting. What you're proposing feels better balanced, and makes someone really commit to the character concept, not just splash in infinite bolts as an afterthought. I haven't experimented too much with the skill trees, but is it possible to just add bonus ammo recovery to Perception? Or is <recoverybuff amount="5" /> only possible inside <crossbowSkills> or <thrownSkills>?
Technically speaking, there's nothing stopping us from adding it. Whether it'll work or not, on the other hand, is a completely different question.
I've actually been experimenting with that archery skill modification. From my experiences playing around with archers without that mod, even with Tinkering ammo can be problematic from the start. Either you sacrifice limited resources to inefficiently make ammo instead of saving them up to craft into better crossbows, or you have an ammo shortage and make do with a backup option. However, this is with the option that makes for smaller dungeon floors. It might be different with larger dungeon floors (though I far prefer the smaller floors). Not only that, but the slim few wooden bolts you get to start really aren't enough, in many cases, to tide you over until you can get or make enough to meet your needs. Thus requiring a backup plan like a tree with a pet skill, or a hybrid character. I really do like archery, but if it's only viable with the larger floors then it's not really playable for me, since I don't really enjoy the larger floors. In fact, I actually gave up on Dredmor because of them (then when I tried it again, I discovered a new smaller floor option had been put in and became hooked). I've only gotten down to Floor 6 so far. I wouldn't have been able to manage it without Fungal Arts. In fact, the early floors were practically entirely cleared by my fungal pets before I gradually started to help them melee stuff down and then to entirely start killing stuff with bolts.. Meantime with the mod, I was able to make more headway on my new character than previously before without using pets at all, and I still was feeling like I was running a little low. However, I really wouldn't mind the ammo-generating capability being moved into a separate skill. Even if that meant taking three skills dedicated to archery (Archery, Tinkering, the new ammo-generator). Because in practice the archery mod does not actually create enough arrows in the beginning to make do without supplementing it with ammo from other sources. On the other hand, for some reason my previously played archer on Floor 6, once I loaded her with the mod and started playing with it, was generating bolts faster than she could use them. Not sure what the difference is other than recovery rate, which can be pretty significant. Inventory space is a huge problem with the archery mod, since it spews so many more types of ammo each taking up their own slot, resulting in far more space consumed by ammo than with tinkering alone. In fact, I had worse inventory space issues on the first couple of floors than with the character with four crafting skills (though it didn't help that I had Tinkering as well as Archery). Throwing, I didn't really find to be viable on its own even with the Ninjustu ammo-generating skill, though the recent damage buffs in that mod might've changed that. And it sounds like melee has a number of potential issues. There's also that thing with the enemies that curse your equipment, though that might've been deliberate. Equipment damage isn't without precedent in rougelikes and serve to force you to have backup plans. And upgrading monsters to have more ranged threats (to deal with characters who can snipe/nuke everything from a distance) would make it even tougher on melee types. And if you go for hybrid characters, you run into the issue that for example Tinkering has a very large amount of competition for resources with Smithing, and at least a little for the other crafting skills.
