Re: CF: incompatible objects (was Re: Experiments)

[Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com>]

Hwei Sheng TEOH wrote:
> 

> Good point. I found that a lot of maps are somewhat tedious to play and not
> very interesting, because you just have a jumbled mishmash of all kinds of
> monsters, and they are about the only interesting thing in the map -- there is
> no storyline, no plot, nothing, just an irrational combination of incompatible
> monsters. In fact, I noticed that many maps touted as "high-level" use strange
> combinations of monsters just to have, so it seems, as many different
> attacktypes as possible to make it "hard".

 There was a discussion a few months back about this, and just general
playability.  One problem that was observed at that time is that many maps (even
low level ones) just have a swarms of monsters.  The problem observed for such
maps is that there is limited number of tactics.  I believe the idea in the
future was to go for fewer monsters (more 1:1 or 2:1 challenges), but the
monsters accordingly tougher - in this way, there is more tactics, and I think
more satisfaction when you actually defeat the monsters.

 As it is now, you do some quests and it is like 'Thats 20 dead wyverns now. 
Maybe eventually I'll kill them all and be able to go onward'.  In many cases,
if you can kill 2 or 3, you can probably kill 20, just a matter of time and
pacing.


> How about monsters like Dreads that can actually cast fire AND cold AND poison
> spells all at the same time? Or worse still, giant wizards, who has a whole
> repertoire of spells to pick from? I suppose we could make them the "ultimate
> hardest" monsters, if we make it impossible (or at least very inconvenient) to
> have both fire and cold protection at the same time.

 I would like to see a little more pacing on some of the spell casting
monsters.  If you are fighting those ultimate monsters 1:1 and they cast one of
those spells, you could try to get out of the area of affect.  But when you are
fighting 3 or 4 at the same time, you have so many overlapping spells, there is
no such thing as out of the area of affect.

 I will note that the big wizards don't really do anything players can't do -
players can cast spells of almost every type it rapid succession.  To counter
the big wizards, perhaps protection to magic potions might be in order - these
would not do anything against dragons whose attacks are non magical, but big
wizards attacks should definately be magical, as should most of the dreads.

> 
> Which reminds me... there are some particularly annoying maps where the
> monsters seem to have developed an immunity to almost everything except
> physical attacks (or worse, can be hurt only by weaponmagic)... no, I'm not
> talking about powerful monsters, I'm referring to maps like the Dragon Hangar
> on Dragon Island where the dragons have developed immunity to physical
> attacks... Now, if such monsters were found somewhere in some super-high-level
> quest, where you were probably WARNED beforehand of their (basically)
> invulnerability, I wouldn't have minded. But a ROOM full of physical-immune
> dragons in the middle of town... now *that* does not make any sense to me.

 I think that is annoying.  I also think that even the high level monsters that
are immune to most everything are annoying.  Some monsters can basically only be
affected by 1 or 2 specific attacktypes.  How interesting is that - makes the
monster tough because you have to have the particular attacktype.

 There are probably too many maps that rely on making things tough by making
monsters immune to most everything and/or tossing in a whole mess of monsters.

> 
> Alright, enough of this rant. I've a suggestion to make. :-) Could we possibly
> make it such that incompatible monsters will *automatically* kill each other?
> For example, we could make it so that cold dragons and fire dragons would
> fight each other on sight, or something. I know the current monster AI doesn't
> work for this, but when the AI is ever improved, I'd suggest this be taken
> into consideration. I think this would at least cause mapmakers to think twice
> before putting incompatible monsters on the same map, since they could just
> start killing each other before the player reaches them. And even then, who
> knows if they would stop fighting each other? I mean, a cold dragon and a fire
> dragon who are duking it out with each other probably won't even notice a
> little insignificant adventurer who stumbles upon them.

 I would argue a lot of the responsibility should fall on the mapmaker.  No
matter what we try to enforce via programming, I am sure there will be a
mapmaker that can bypass/get around it through some means.  So I think the key
is more to be much more selective in what maps get added to the game - this
involves closer examination and ideally playtesting by someone with good
judgement.

 That said, there will probably be an enhancement in monster logic at some time
that they will attack whatever did them the most damage (and not necessarily do
a straight line to the player).  So if a couple incompatible dragons are
fighting each other, they will probably keep on doing so even if the player
starts doing something.

 However, this does not necessarily fix the problem, as it relies on the two
dragons to be able to damage each other.  Back to the mapmaker above, I could
forsee one that says 'I really want the character to be attacked by 2 dragons at
once.  Hmm - they want to attack each other?  I'll fix that - i'll make them
immune to each others attacks'.  Back to monsters immune to most everything.
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