List of balance / bug / general game improving suggestions

@jhffmn

I will add to 2 by suggesting make tinker give a much larger amount of basic arrows, and give smith the ability to make throwing weapons.

Currently you can burn through 20 or 30 arrows just to kill a few diggles on floor 1. So when you are getting maximum of 9 arrows per tinker that's not helping one bit. Skills that just quit dealing damage like that can't be played as primary.

 

Perhaps make things like the cursed gear vary between gameplay modes. EE would have no curses on Krong, DM would have the normal stats and a way to purify your gear (purity potion?), and GR would have more beneficial stats when blessed, but curses would be far more painful than before.

Also, area effect damage should harm me if I sit in it, not just walk over it.

Shield Bash can also be cast on any enemy at any distance. Am I throwing my shield?

 

@jhffmn As long as the hunger clock is only on Going Rogue, I am okay with that. Lousy starvation.

 

I was just thinking about it, and a hunger clock wouldn't be that hard at all to implement.

Just chain an effect on to the end of Well Fed named "Satiated", that lasts for like 30 turns and does nothing; after that expires, add your hunger effects in increasing order, each of which does damage over time (like "Peckish" which does 1 HP damage every 2 rounds for ten rounds, "Hungry" which does 1 HP every round for twenty rounds and has some penalties, and "Starving" which does 5 HP every round forever and has even worse penalties). Any of the hunger effects can be cleared by gaining HP, though if you didn't eat you just go back to Satiated.

New characters would start out with the Satiated status effect.

 

30 turns is not that long a time in terms of getting around the dungeon. You would have to eat twice in every room to keep from getting debuffs. The concept is solid though.

For resting: Pitch a small tent and sleep in it while there are no monsters around. Increases regen rates a bit, and automatically uses turns until you regain all of your health/mana. If a monster interrupts you or you finish, the tent cools down for about 100 rounds.

 

Rather than push dredmor away from the genre it was created to be, how about we keep the anvils as is and prevent scumming in another way.. (or not prevent scumming and let people cheat if they want, its not affecting your game)

1 When you drop an item on the forge it would say
"Krong requires you to record your journey for his blessings!"

This basically just means that if you click yes, the game will add the blessing and overwrite your last save file with a new save.

2 Add a check when the program starts to not allow multiple instances of DoDredmor to run at the same time. That way people cant load a second copy of their save before using the krong anvil (and thus avoiding the prekrong save)

Someone could get creative with a software sandbox and still get around it, but with the way a good sandbox (such as sandboxie) works it would be a real pain in the ass to target your non sandboxed save with a sandboxed instance of the game (and steam). File pointers and stuff. Most people wouldn't bother lol.

 

Nah, still scummable in the time-honored tradition of Nethack: copy the save to another directory.

How awful would it be if there was simply an option for it in the New Game setup, where selecting 'Anvil Always Beneficial' would edit the RNG's number to make a positive enhancement happen 100% of the time? Like multiply by 100, and >=100 gives a positive.

 

Hmm, it appears someone here doesn't realize repairing damaged weapon/gear is a time honored roguelike classic.
@123stw I'm talking about you.

"
Currently you can burn through 20 or 30 arrows just to kill a few diggles on floor 1. So when you are getting maximum of 9 arrows per tinker that's not helping one bit. Skills that just quit dealing damage like that can't be played as primary. "
The hell? Diggles have like 7 health. Arrows with even a wooden crossbow, and plastic arrows at that would do 2, maybe 3 damage. If Archery gives a damage boost at level 1.
That's a maximum of 4 arrows per diggle. And I don't think they have armor.
And according to what I've seen in Let's plays, the health bonus monsters get doesn't seem to be working. Because it takes 7 damage to kill a Diggle on Dwarvish Moderation, and it takes me 2 hits to kill a Diggle doing 4 damage each on Elvish Easy.
So, they have the same health.
Going Rogue's bonus health isn't even that much higher than Dwarvish Moderation, but I don't think they get more than 8 health.

So, Where are you getting 20 to 30 arrows?

As for the Anvil, let's just agree that it should be left up to the user to adjust it.
And yeah, copying the save file for this game every time to avoid a not so good roll, is just silly, and makes me want to give the person a scathing look.

I know it's an annoying thing to fix, but still, look at the TweakDb.xml file. Tell me that adjusting that is not more dangerous and cheat worthy than leaving the Anvils alone.
Seriously, I could make Going Rogue easier than Elvish Easy by changing 5 lines. Why do we need to nerf Anvils, Plox, with that file easily editable by anyone.

Also, I wish I knew what half the things in it meant.

 

Honestly, there's just a point where it's not worthwhile to try any more - and if people have to savescum to exploit something, that's a reasonable place to stop. Even Nethack doesn't try too hard to prevent that.

If you really wanted to close most of the loopholes, you would have to store savegames on a server somewhere, embed all the nice XML files in the game's executable itself and run something like VAC (does it work for non-Source games?).

@DavidB1111: if it helps, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_muller">Box-Muller</a>" is a way of turning a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_%28continuous%29">uniform distribution</a> (flat, what computer random number generators spit out) into a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution">normal distribution</a> (pointy, what people expect most of the time)

 

@DavidB1111

Did I say "a few"? Yes I did. Do you know arrows can miss? A LOT? Yea 2 damage, a group of 5 can easily burn through 20 - 30 on rogue due to miss/block/dodge. And don't get me started about shooting those damn bats.

Really, just go play an archer, and come back with your story about how fun the experience is. We will all take your opinion much more seriously if you can share some story of why you find archer so fun at this point. Don't be bashing me about my true story with pure assumptions.

And if you are using anvil reroll by copying your save, you are "cheating". That's really all there is to it. Respect the RND and don't save file abuse. If you don't like the gamble, then don't use the anvil. I personally never put anything other than cheap rings/amulets in them.

 

@Tacroy Um, okay...I mean, I don't know why you addressed me. Did I miss something?
I honestly have no clue here. What are you talking about?

 

@123stw Why are you so hostile all the time.
No, I will not play an archer, just because you decided to. And no, I have no idea why you magically thought I have played an archer before. Seriously, what the heck. I only use bolts rarely. And believe me, archer is not all that fun, at least from your experiences on going Rogue.
Still not sure why you thought I have fun playing a class I wouldn't want to play in this game ever.

And where are you getting the copying the save from? That's not even what happens in this game...I'm simply explaining that anvil scumming is not the biggest game breaker ever.
Yes, it can be abused, but let's leave it up to the user to decided when to cheat, why to cheat, and how to cheat.
I constantly play this game on Elvish Easy, without Permadeath.
The only times I ever "Cheat" is when the anvil decides to curse me really badly.
And yes, I like my gear to have positive enchantments. Who doesn't.

I just want to know why you're acting like I kicked your puppy.

 

@DavidB1111: Well, you said you wish you knew what half the things in tweakDB.xml mean. They're all pretty self-explanatory imo, except for the ones about "box muller"; I had to look that up.

 

Wait, did someone just say fungal arts was weak? what?

 

Nah, the original poster just confused "boring" with "useless". Fungal is incredibly boring, but it's also hideously powerful.

 

@DavidB1111

He addressed you because you said this in response to his comment about Archery:
<blockquote><i>The hell? Diggles have like 7 health. Arrows with even a wooden crossbow, and plastic arrows at that would do 2, maybe 3 damage. If Archery gives a damage boost at level 1.
That's a maximum of 4 arrows per diggle. And I don't think they have armor.
And according to what I've seen in Let's plays, the health bonus monsters get doesn't seem to be working. Because it takes 7 damage to kill a Diggle on Dwarvish Moderation, and it takes me 2 hits to kill a Diggle doing 4 damage each on Elvish Easy.
So, they have the same health.
Going Rogue's bonus health isn't even that much higher than Dwarvish Moderation, but I don't think they get more than 8 health.

So, Where are you getting 20 to 30 arrows? </i></blockquote>

He was just pointing out that, at least on Going Rogue, Archery is terrible and yes you do need 20-30 arrows to deal with a group of monsters sometimes.

 

Right, well, he should have explained it better instead of going into attack, attack, attack mode. Heck, I didn't know monsters on Going Rogue have a big boost to dodge. I didn't see that on the Difficulty wiki link. In fact, there's no indication that the stats of monsters are superboosted on Going Rogue. Only the health bonus, which either doesn't work on the first dungeon floor, or 1.35 times the standard Diggle health is mot that much.

So, if they don't have superboosted dodge chances, he suffers from horrible luck syndrome. Again, there was still no reason to react like I kicked his puppy and then shot him in the knees.

To Tacroy, thank you. Sorry for not getting it. I just, some of the things in it, I don't even know what happens when I change them. If you know where there's a better explanation for what they mean, let me know. Sorry again.

 

As far as balance goes, I would just stick to what people would do if they don't feel like cheating by doing something outside of the game (copy states, editing .xml). It's up to the player whether or not he wants to possibly spoil his experience by trying to minmax his gameplay.

 

@eisiger Exactly! That is the very base desire of all my rambling. For people to realize it should be up to the end user to cheat or not to cheat. This is why I don't exactly understand such hatred towards cheaters in games. They don't bother anyone else's game.
And highscores are meaningless in the long run. When I'm 10 ^275 years old, (Yes, that means I would outlive Maximum Entropy, and witness the next Big Bang, but this is not a science forum) I'm not going to really care that someone beat my highscore on a game back in 2011.

 

I am not quite sure what I said exactly that is offensive. Maybe a bit too much drama on the description of the archery experience? If you don't think archer needs more arrows to be properly play as a primary offensive skill, play one and see if you can enjoy it.

Or was it's the anvil thing when I said RND manipulation is cheating? I mean, since it's a single player game, it's "up to the player" to Reroll Stats with reset, or to use God Mode, or Infinite Mana. I am just saying the reason anvil provides negative is because it is intended to be a gamble, not for stacking super gears. You take out the risk and you defeated their purpose entirely.