Walter Landry
18 years ago
Greetings,
After over a year of playing, I have finally managed to defeat
Morgoth. Wow, what an addictive game. Great fun. Of course, in the
course of playing, there were a number of things that annoyed me.
Some of these things are well known. For reference, I played mostly
gnome mages, with an occasional half-troll warrior or high-elf mage.
Easy detection and identification made the game much more fun for me.
For some reason, surviving the early levels was never very difficult
for me. I was almost exclusively a spell-only mage: no ranged weapons
and melee weapons only used on incredibly wimpy creatures. This was
Vanilla 3.0.6.
I have looked a bit at other variants, and they have their own issues.
I like the basic idea of Angband (linear dungeon with town to escape
to), so variants with wilderness and quests is not quite what I want.
I like diving. I also like the direction that Vanilla is going with
the new maintainer, so it seems best to improve upon Vanilla.
In any case, I have compiled a list of the annoyances and some
possible solutions. I think a few of these things have been fixed in
3.0.9, but some of these changes may be too much for Vanilla. If no
one else wants to implement these things, I may get around to it
(especially item #1), but it may take me a long time.
1) Line of sight: This is the biggest problem by far. At the end, I
could trivially kill uniques with no danger to me by digging a tunnel,
filling it with runes, and zapping them before they could even see me.
Specifically, something like
####
#@;##
###;##
####;##
#####;##
######;##
#######p#
I found out about this particular abuse of line of sight when I was on
the other side of it, with a Lich zapping me while I could not see it.
In any case, this makes the end game way too easy. The monsters can't
zap, summon, or teleport-to. They just have to (very slowly) plow
through the kill zone. My monster memory has almost nothing about
Sauron because he never really saw me. Azriel was a pushover. Even
Morgoth was easier than he should have been, because I was able to
create doors to manipulate line of sight.
I think this also showed up in the behavior of pack animals. I have
smart_packs on, and if you are in a hallway, they tend to wait in a
room so as to surround you. They tend to be out of direct line of
sight, but if I cast detect monsters, I can still target them. So I
can zap them from the safety of the hallway, rest when I am out of
mana, and then continue zapping them.
If I was going to fix one thing about Angband, I would fix this. The
basic principle should be that if I can see you, then you can see me.
We can argue whether you can see around hockey-sticks or not, but
vision should never be one-way.
2) Armor, weapon, and item restrictions: The problem is that there are
almost none. Mages get a significant penalty when wearing gloves and
a mild penalty when wearing too much armor. In practice, this meant
that my gnome mage was walking around in plate armor wielding a
halberd near the end game. That is just not right.
If I were king, mages could only wear robes, no shield, weapons only
lighter than 2 lbs, only soft leather boots (no hard leather boots or
metal shod boots), and no ranged weapons. Rogues could only wear
non-metal armor and use weapons lighter than 10 lbs. Priests get a
severe penalty when using edged weapons, there are no "blessed"
weapons, and can only use slings (not bows or crossbows). Priests
should just not be able to fight as well as warriors.
Also, I would not allow warriors to use wands, staves, or scrolls.
Rods are ok. I would probably have to give a rod of recall to
everyone at the beginning.
Now that a lot of items are no longer useful to certain classes, we
can automatically squelch them when they are generated. So you can't
sell as many things in the stores. This would reduce the tendency to
make Angband the game of shopping. It should also help with the Too
Much Junk problem, though I do not claim that it is a complete fix.
I am pretty sure that this change would make the game significantly
harder, so some rebalancing might be required.
As a side note, one thing that does not bother me in 3.0.6 is that
wands and staves never get destroyed during recharging. Since I did
not use ranged weapons, recharging wands was often the only way I had
to actually kill anything. I understand that this has been changed in
later versions. I would change it back.
3) Constitution is too important for mages (and maybe rogues): Mages
should be weak, frail creatures that protect themselves with powerful
magics. Rogues just avoid being noticed until they stab you in the
back. This really gets annoying after stat-gain, where mages are
wearing rings of constitution rather than rings of intelligence.
I would fix this by making the shield spell also add level*6 temporary
hit points to the total. All damage comes from those additional hit
points first. Healing potions don't affect the additional hit points.
Casting shield while a shield is up only extends the duration of the
spell, but does not resupply the additional hit points. In this case,
rangers would be barred from using this spell.
I would also make the maximum allowed stats depend on class. So a
mage can get as high an Int as possible, but a warrior is capped at
18/100, including equipment bonuses. Similarly, warriors can max out
Str and Con, but mages are capped. Making up a list, it would be
something like
Capped Stats
Warrior: Int, Wis
Mage: Str, Con
Priest: Int, Dex
Rogue: Str, Con
Paladin: Int, Dex
Ranger: Wis, Dex
I also like the idea of having Charisma affect when monsters flee.
That would make it a much more interesting stat.
4) Boring play is rewarded: This happens several ways, and fixing each
one requires a different approach. But the basic idea is to make it
so that boring play is not rewarded.
i) stair scumming
It irks me that you go up and down and be in a completely new
place. I would make the levels somewhat persistent. Going down
from the town, recalling, and teleport level always gives you a new
level, but otherwise levels are persistent. So to get a new level,
you have to get a new set of stairs.
ii) Angband: the game of shopping
This is going down into the dungeon, waiting for 1000 turns, and
coming back up to find those potions of Cure Critical Wounds or
scrolls of Recall. One way of reducing this behavior is to make
every trip into the dungeon significant. Specifically, whenever you
go into the dungeon, the minimum recall depth goes up by one. This
also keeps people from hanging around stat-gain too long. Also, you
can have the shops restock only when either you go up a character
level or down a dungeon level.
Another thing is that all of the normal shops (everything except the
black market), should not sell magical stuff. That is where you get
normal stuff. The black market is the only place that will sell
magical items. Otherwise, I am tempted to waste time by checking
all of the shops for special items. That is less than fun. I
understand that some of this is fixed already in 3.0.9, for which I
am grateful.
iii) Monster farming
Cloned, bred, and summoned monsters should not give XP or drop items.
5) Weapon speed is wrong: A warrior should not be grabbing a dagger to
start. I would fix this by making the number of blows independent of
weapon type. Rather, it would depend on character level. Off the top
of my head, I would make a warrior start with 2 blows/round. Everyone
else (including paladin and ranger) starts with 1 blow/round.
Warriors get an extra blow every 7 levels, paladins and rangers every
10, priests every 15, rogues every 20, and mages every 25.
6) Non-circular detection area: Having the detection area depend on
the size of the screen is wrong. I have heard that this is fixed in
3.0.9. Great.
7) *Id* is not so useful: Because artifacts are static, *Id* is only
useful for the items with random abilities. I can never remember
which artifacts I have already seen, so I end up using the spoilers
for everything. The fix is to implement artifact memory and/or random
artifacts. As I understand it, 3.0.9 implements both, so I am happy.
8) Racial Imbalance: I tried playing humans, but it was always so much
more difficult than other races. Other races already have significant
advantages. There should also be significant downsides from playing
other races. XP penalties do not cut it.
For example, there is no disadvantage to having infravision. You can
just see more. So one idea would be to make fire attacks blind
characters with infravision. Cold attacks would darken the area.
If you innately resist light/dark, then you take double damage from
dark/light.
If one of your stats is sustained, then stat gain potions only work
half the time for that stat. If you received an initial bonus to a
stat, then the effectiveness of stat potions is again reduced by 10%
for every point you get. So Dunadan and High Elf characters will gain
stats much more slowly.
Gnomes are never paralyzed or slowed, so make increased speed only
work 2/3 as well.
High elves can see invisible, so they are always susceptible to
blinding (subject to a save).
Kobolds resist poison, so healing potions only work 2/3 as well.
Hobbits resist life drain, so this seems like the appropriate place
for an XP penalty. A 10% penalty sounds right.
Dwarves resist blindness. Hmm. Maybe make their vision not reliable
past 5 squares. So they know something is there, and they know what
general kind of monster it is (p vs D vs X), but they can't tell the
difference between Sauron and a novice mage.
9) Too Much Junk: As a mage, I only found it to be a minor annoyance.
It was pretty bogus when I was clearing out dragon pits to have the
message "Too many objects" flash up, but otherwise it did not bother
me. But as a warrior, it was pain.
10) Priests and Paladins get too many good spells: It seems odd to me
that priests get Clairvoyance, but mages do not. Healings, Dispel
Evil, and Holy Word all make sense, but not Clairvoyance. Detect Evil
is good, but priests also get Detection. Mages have to cobble
together Detect Monsters, Detect Invisible, and Detect Enchantment.
So I would take away Find Traps, Detect Doors/Stairs, Portal,
Clairvoyance, and everything in Ethereal Openings and Godly Insights.
Maybe Unbarring Ways and Recharging as well. Unfortunately, I do not
have anything to replace them with. That would require more thought.
11) Useless spells: Slow monster and sleep monster just need to work
on stronger creatures.
Wonder works well as a wand when you are weak, but I never cast the
spell as a mage. Maybe it should have a reduced mana cost (perhaps
even zero). So it would be like fiddling with forces beyond your
control. Usually good (so that people bother), but sometimes bad.
There might also be a wider variety of bad things happening, such as
filling up the room with similar monsters, or blind, confuse, or stun.
I am also not sure about Earthquake in Kelek's. By the time you find
Kelek's, you probably already have a low fail rate for word of
destruction. Maybe it is more useful for Rangers. Hmm.
12) Constrained Dungeons: It always seemed artificial that dungeons
are constrained to fit exactly into a 9x9 square. They should be
allowed to be any shape and size. I do not know for certain, but I
would guess that there are technical reasons to use a fixed size.
This would require some care when implementing, because otherwise you
might get an infinite level.
13) Inifinite monster mana: Creatures should not be able to heal
themselves forever. I think the best fix would be finite monster
mana. It sounds like a lot of work, though.
One thing that does not bother me is the length of the dungeon. I am
also not bothered that Kronos, The Tarrasque, and Morgoth all occupy
the same dungeon.
-----------------
All in all, I think these changes would more clearly differentiate
classes and races. Trade offs are what makes Angband an interesting
game to me, and this increases their richness and variety.
It also would make the game significantly harder.
-----------------
So those are a list of the problems I saw in Angband. I also have a
list of features I would like. Few (none?) of these ideas are
original to me. Just consider these to be my vote for them.
1) Lit/Dark monsters: Novice priests etc. carry torches so you can see
them from afar. Light hounds permanently light up the areas they
traverse, and dark hounds permanently darken the area. Other
creatures should have a similar effect (Phoenix lights up a large
area, Morgoth darkens a large area). So without ESP, you can never
really see Morgoth.
2) Make large creatures have reach, so they can attack from two
squares away. Similarly, give polearms reach.
3) Displacer beasts should appear to be in a different square than
they actually are.
4) When generating monsters, if you generate a unique but no unique is
left for that level, then keep looking at more powerful uniques until
you find one. This imposes a clock of sorts, because once you kill a
weak unique, you constantly get more and more powerful ones.
5) For some creatures, do not show how much health they have left.
6) If attacking hydras with a edged weapon and you get a critical hit,
you create a hydra with more heads.
7) Terrain (water, mud, lava, air, etc.)
8) Monsters are affected by traps, and rogues can create traps. Also
let rogues steal drops from monsters. Especially if they are
sleeping. Maybe make rogues a weaker warrior at the same time.
10) A Monk class:
Not allowed armor, weapons, rings or necklaces, but can carry a
light source.
Fist damage=1/level with no strength bonus.
Speed bonus=1/level. Can not be hasted or slowed.
Excellent stealth.
Can "hear" monsters nearby, sort of like a limited ESP with noisy
monsters (e.g. not ghosts) with a range of level/10.
Maybe get some inherent resists at various levels: Fire at 10, Cold
at 20, Electricity at 30, Acid at 35, and poison at 40.
Stats sustained at level 40.
Able to jump (level/10 +1) spaces every 50/level turns.
Hit points like a rogue
Can use rods and potions, but not wands, staves, or scrolls.
This will almost certainly require tweaking to get right. But the
basic idea is that a monk would be a very different way of going
through the dungeon.
11) Monsters have a "magic mirror" spell, which creates illusionary
copies of themselves. So you would not be sure of which one is the
real monster.
-----------------
That's all for now.
Cheers,
Walter Landry
***@caltech.edu
After over a year of playing, I have finally managed to defeat
Morgoth. Wow, what an addictive game. Great fun. Of course, in the
course of playing, there were a number of things that annoyed me.
Some of these things are well known. For reference, I played mostly
gnome mages, with an occasional half-troll warrior or high-elf mage.
Easy detection and identification made the game much more fun for me.
For some reason, surviving the early levels was never very difficult
for me. I was almost exclusively a spell-only mage: no ranged weapons
and melee weapons only used on incredibly wimpy creatures. This was
Vanilla 3.0.6.
I have looked a bit at other variants, and they have their own issues.
I like the basic idea of Angband (linear dungeon with town to escape
to), so variants with wilderness and quests is not quite what I want.
I like diving. I also like the direction that Vanilla is going with
the new maintainer, so it seems best to improve upon Vanilla.
In any case, I have compiled a list of the annoyances and some
possible solutions. I think a few of these things have been fixed in
3.0.9, but some of these changes may be too much for Vanilla. If no
one else wants to implement these things, I may get around to it
(especially item #1), but it may take me a long time.
1) Line of sight: This is the biggest problem by far. At the end, I
could trivially kill uniques with no danger to me by digging a tunnel,
filling it with runes, and zapping them before they could even see me.
Specifically, something like
####
#@;##
###;##
####;##
#####;##
######;##
#######p#
I found out about this particular abuse of line of sight when I was on
the other side of it, with a Lich zapping me while I could not see it.
In any case, this makes the end game way too easy. The monsters can't
zap, summon, or teleport-to. They just have to (very slowly) plow
through the kill zone. My monster memory has almost nothing about
Sauron because he never really saw me. Azriel was a pushover. Even
Morgoth was easier than he should have been, because I was able to
create doors to manipulate line of sight.
I think this also showed up in the behavior of pack animals. I have
smart_packs on, and if you are in a hallway, they tend to wait in a
room so as to surround you. They tend to be out of direct line of
sight, but if I cast detect monsters, I can still target them. So I
can zap them from the safety of the hallway, rest when I am out of
mana, and then continue zapping them.
If I was going to fix one thing about Angband, I would fix this. The
basic principle should be that if I can see you, then you can see me.
We can argue whether you can see around hockey-sticks or not, but
vision should never be one-way.
2) Armor, weapon, and item restrictions: The problem is that there are
almost none. Mages get a significant penalty when wearing gloves and
a mild penalty when wearing too much armor. In practice, this meant
that my gnome mage was walking around in plate armor wielding a
halberd near the end game. That is just not right.
If I were king, mages could only wear robes, no shield, weapons only
lighter than 2 lbs, only soft leather boots (no hard leather boots or
metal shod boots), and no ranged weapons. Rogues could only wear
non-metal armor and use weapons lighter than 10 lbs. Priests get a
severe penalty when using edged weapons, there are no "blessed"
weapons, and can only use slings (not bows or crossbows). Priests
should just not be able to fight as well as warriors.
Also, I would not allow warriors to use wands, staves, or scrolls.
Rods are ok. I would probably have to give a rod of recall to
everyone at the beginning.
Now that a lot of items are no longer useful to certain classes, we
can automatically squelch them when they are generated. So you can't
sell as many things in the stores. This would reduce the tendency to
make Angband the game of shopping. It should also help with the Too
Much Junk problem, though I do not claim that it is a complete fix.
I am pretty sure that this change would make the game significantly
harder, so some rebalancing might be required.
As a side note, one thing that does not bother me in 3.0.6 is that
wands and staves never get destroyed during recharging. Since I did
not use ranged weapons, recharging wands was often the only way I had
to actually kill anything. I understand that this has been changed in
later versions. I would change it back.
3) Constitution is too important for mages (and maybe rogues): Mages
should be weak, frail creatures that protect themselves with powerful
magics. Rogues just avoid being noticed until they stab you in the
back. This really gets annoying after stat-gain, where mages are
wearing rings of constitution rather than rings of intelligence.
I would fix this by making the shield spell also add level*6 temporary
hit points to the total. All damage comes from those additional hit
points first. Healing potions don't affect the additional hit points.
Casting shield while a shield is up only extends the duration of the
spell, but does not resupply the additional hit points. In this case,
rangers would be barred from using this spell.
I would also make the maximum allowed stats depend on class. So a
mage can get as high an Int as possible, but a warrior is capped at
18/100, including equipment bonuses. Similarly, warriors can max out
Str and Con, but mages are capped. Making up a list, it would be
something like
Capped Stats
Warrior: Int, Wis
Mage: Str, Con
Priest: Int, Dex
Rogue: Str, Con
Paladin: Int, Dex
Ranger: Wis, Dex
I also like the idea of having Charisma affect when monsters flee.
That would make it a much more interesting stat.
4) Boring play is rewarded: This happens several ways, and fixing each
one requires a different approach. But the basic idea is to make it
so that boring play is not rewarded.
i) stair scumming
It irks me that you go up and down and be in a completely new
place. I would make the levels somewhat persistent. Going down
from the town, recalling, and teleport level always gives you a new
level, but otherwise levels are persistent. So to get a new level,
you have to get a new set of stairs.
ii) Angband: the game of shopping
This is going down into the dungeon, waiting for 1000 turns, and
coming back up to find those potions of Cure Critical Wounds or
scrolls of Recall. One way of reducing this behavior is to make
every trip into the dungeon significant. Specifically, whenever you
go into the dungeon, the minimum recall depth goes up by one. This
also keeps people from hanging around stat-gain too long. Also, you
can have the shops restock only when either you go up a character
level or down a dungeon level.
Another thing is that all of the normal shops (everything except the
black market), should not sell magical stuff. That is where you get
normal stuff. The black market is the only place that will sell
magical items. Otherwise, I am tempted to waste time by checking
all of the shops for special items. That is less than fun. I
understand that some of this is fixed already in 3.0.9, for which I
am grateful.
iii) Monster farming
Cloned, bred, and summoned monsters should not give XP or drop items.
5) Weapon speed is wrong: A warrior should not be grabbing a dagger to
start. I would fix this by making the number of blows independent of
weapon type. Rather, it would depend on character level. Off the top
of my head, I would make a warrior start with 2 blows/round. Everyone
else (including paladin and ranger) starts with 1 blow/round.
Warriors get an extra blow every 7 levels, paladins and rangers every
10, priests every 15, rogues every 20, and mages every 25.
6) Non-circular detection area: Having the detection area depend on
the size of the screen is wrong. I have heard that this is fixed in
3.0.9. Great.
7) *Id* is not so useful: Because artifacts are static, *Id* is only
useful for the items with random abilities. I can never remember
which artifacts I have already seen, so I end up using the spoilers
for everything. The fix is to implement artifact memory and/or random
artifacts. As I understand it, 3.0.9 implements both, so I am happy.
8) Racial Imbalance: I tried playing humans, but it was always so much
more difficult than other races. Other races already have significant
advantages. There should also be significant downsides from playing
other races. XP penalties do not cut it.
For example, there is no disadvantage to having infravision. You can
just see more. So one idea would be to make fire attacks blind
characters with infravision. Cold attacks would darken the area.
If you innately resist light/dark, then you take double damage from
dark/light.
If one of your stats is sustained, then stat gain potions only work
half the time for that stat. If you received an initial bonus to a
stat, then the effectiveness of stat potions is again reduced by 10%
for every point you get. So Dunadan and High Elf characters will gain
stats much more slowly.
Gnomes are never paralyzed or slowed, so make increased speed only
work 2/3 as well.
High elves can see invisible, so they are always susceptible to
blinding (subject to a save).
Kobolds resist poison, so healing potions only work 2/3 as well.
Hobbits resist life drain, so this seems like the appropriate place
for an XP penalty. A 10% penalty sounds right.
Dwarves resist blindness. Hmm. Maybe make their vision not reliable
past 5 squares. So they know something is there, and they know what
general kind of monster it is (p vs D vs X), but they can't tell the
difference between Sauron and a novice mage.
9) Too Much Junk: As a mage, I only found it to be a minor annoyance.
It was pretty bogus when I was clearing out dragon pits to have the
message "Too many objects" flash up, but otherwise it did not bother
me. But as a warrior, it was pain.
10) Priests and Paladins get too many good spells: It seems odd to me
that priests get Clairvoyance, but mages do not. Healings, Dispel
Evil, and Holy Word all make sense, but not Clairvoyance. Detect Evil
is good, but priests also get Detection. Mages have to cobble
together Detect Monsters, Detect Invisible, and Detect Enchantment.
So I would take away Find Traps, Detect Doors/Stairs, Portal,
Clairvoyance, and everything in Ethereal Openings and Godly Insights.
Maybe Unbarring Ways and Recharging as well. Unfortunately, I do not
have anything to replace them with. That would require more thought.
11) Useless spells: Slow monster and sleep monster just need to work
on stronger creatures.
Wonder works well as a wand when you are weak, but I never cast the
spell as a mage. Maybe it should have a reduced mana cost (perhaps
even zero). So it would be like fiddling with forces beyond your
control. Usually good (so that people bother), but sometimes bad.
There might also be a wider variety of bad things happening, such as
filling up the room with similar monsters, or blind, confuse, or stun.
I am also not sure about Earthquake in Kelek's. By the time you find
Kelek's, you probably already have a low fail rate for word of
destruction. Maybe it is more useful for Rangers. Hmm.
12) Constrained Dungeons: It always seemed artificial that dungeons
are constrained to fit exactly into a 9x9 square. They should be
allowed to be any shape and size. I do not know for certain, but I
would guess that there are technical reasons to use a fixed size.
This would require some care when implementing, because otherwise you
might get an infinite level.
13) Inifinite monster mana: Creatures should not be able to heal
themselves forever. I think the best fix would be finite monster
mana. It sounds like a lot of work, though.
One thing that does not bother me is the length of the dungeon. I am
also not bothered that Kronos, The Tarrasque, and Morgoth all occupy
the same dungeon.
-----------------
All in all, I think these changes would more clearly differentiate
classes and races. Trade offs are what makes Angband an interesting
game to me, and this increases their richness and variety.
It also would make the game significantly harder.
-----------------
So those are a list of the problems I saw in Angband. I also have a
list of features I would like. Few (none?) of these ideas are
original to me. Just consider these to be my vote for them.
1) Lit/Dark monsters: Novice priests etc. carry torches so you can see
them from afar. Light hounds permanently light up the areas they
traverse, and dark hounds permanently darken the area. Other
creatures should have a similar effect (Phoenix lights up a large
area, Morgoth darkens a large area). So without ESP, you can never
really see Morgoth.
2) Make large creatures have reach, so they can attack from two
squares away. Similarly, give polearms reach.
3) Displacer beasts should appear to be in a different square than
they actually are.
4) When generating monsters, if you generate a unique but no unique is
left for that level, then keep looking at more powerful uniques until
you find one. This imposes a clock of sorts, because once you kill a
weak unique, you constantly get more and more powerful ones.
5) For some creatures, do not show how much health they have left.
6) If attacking hydras with a edged weapon and you get a critical hit,
you create a hydra with more heads.
7) Terrain (water, mud, lava, air, etc.)
8) Monsters are affected by traps, and rogues can create traps. Also
let rogues steal drops from monsters. Especially if they are
sleeping. Maybe make rogues a weaker warrior at the same time.
10) A Monk class:
Not allowed armor, weapons, rings or necklaces, but can carry a
light source.
Fist damage=1/level with no strength bonus.
Speed bonus=1/level. Can not be hasted or slowed.
Excellent stealth.
Can "hear" monsters nearby, sort of like a limited ESP with noisy
monsters (e.g. not ghosts) with a range of level/10.
Maybe get some inherent resists at various levels: Fire at 10, Cold
at 20, Electricity at 30, Acid at 35, and poison at 40.
Stats sustained at level 40.
Able to jump (level/10 +1) spaces every 50/level turns.
Hit points like a rogue
Can use rods and potions, but not wands, staves, or scrolls.
This will almost certainly require tweaking to get right. But the
basic idea is that a monk would be a very different way of going
through the dungeon.
11) Monsters have a "magic mirror" spell, which creates illusionary
copies of themselves. So you would not be sure of which one is the
real monster.
-----------------
That's all for now.
Cheers,
Walter Landry
***@caltech.edu