All fired up: part two

jdunson brings up a really interesting point in the original All Fired Up post:

Something like an "Aura of Flame" might well be a multiplier; "Increases all flame damage by +200%". Some cases might provide base damage as well, some not.

I had been thinking along similar lines about a number of related effects. Now I have a flexible way of representing multiple scalars (pvals) on an object in Unangband, I'm inspired to immediately extend the types of bonuses that can be represented.

I've already included context specific combat bonuses: to-hit, damage, number of blows/shots, damage multipliers, range; for melee, ranged weapons, throwing, traps, unarmed combat. This addresses the design problem I outlined in Throwabow: if you throw a bow with a high damage bonus, do you inflict the extra damage?

(Aside: I can immediately see from the above, that I need to include context specific damage dice and sides).

What other interesting bonuses are there?

jdunson's 'boost all fire damage by 200%' suggestion is actually more complicated than it initially appears, because of the number of different ways fire damage can occur - as I outline in Different Ways of Killing. There's weapons, spells, magic items (rods, staffs, wands), thrown oil and fiery potions. Do I also boost damage from a flask of oil (or another fire damage source) set in a trap? Does the bonus boost allies fire damage (which in Unangband is treated as equivalent to damage from the player)?

And for effects, such as spells, which persist over time, does the damage boost still apply if the item is removed?

For those bothered by my repeated mention of Team Fortress 2, the way damage effects apply there is another excellent example of unintended consequences of any of the above decisions. At the moment, TF2 has an example of a damage nerf (the Detonator) which is a secondary weapon which only does +35% damage against burning opponents, unlike the weapon it is based on (the Flaregun) which does +200% damage in the same situation. However, if you switch away from the Detonator before the projectile hits, the game no longer applies the nerf, and so you get the full +200% bonus. TF2's history of bug fixes is littered with this kind of interaction (damage bonuses against aerial opponents if they are merely standing on stairs and so on).

So I believe I'm better off by focusing on the context of the damage bonus, and then designing weapons which list the possible related contexts. To take an example: I could add boosts to casting spells by increasing the effective level of the player casting the spells, the effective level of the player when learning spells (which makes more spells available), the failure rate of spells and the casting cost of spells. In addition to a general boost, I could also add spell book specific boosts. A sword of fire would then list each of the above boosts which regards to the fire spell books, along with the relative minimum and maximum values; and when randomly generating a sword of fire item, specific values are chosen.

This does become a problem for the player to compare weapons - which is already a major issue, but hopefully the bonuses are going to be concrete enough to make a comparison (Do I want to be able to cast fireballs, or get an extra +x1 damage multiplier?).

All fired up

A character is wielding a flaming sword (x3 fire damage), flaming gauntlets (x3 fire damage) and enchanted with an aura of fire (x3 fire damage).

Should he be doing:

1) x27 fire damage
2) x7 fire damage
3) +600% fire damage
4) x3 fire damage

This is an important decision that I have to make in the next version of Unangband, and it's vexing me, so I'd like your advice.

Option 1 is clearly overpowered, but one way of thinking about the problem. Options 2 and 3 are two different ways of explaining the same approach: x3 fire damage is short hand for 3 times damage against creatures not immune to fire, which could also be seen as +200% fire damage.

Option 2 is the less intuitive (how does x3 + x3 + x3 equal x7?) but option 3, which rewrites the original problem as "A character is wielding a flaming sword (+200% fire damage), flaming gauntlets (+200% fire damage) and enchanted with an aura of fire (+200% fire damage)." invites the player to think about weapons which might be +150% fire damage, or +87% fire damage. I'm designing Civilisation Revolution, not Civilisation with a V in it, so I like to work with nice whole numbers, not messy fractions.

Option 4 is the vanilla, balanced, safe option, so I have to ignore it.

Thoughts?

Going full time

I'm stopping work for the next 6 months to look after our twin daughters. I'm not yet sure what this will mean for the blog or Unangband development: given that I was spending over 20 hours a week commuting, I hope to have some more free time but that may not end up being the case.

If opportunity permits, I'd also like to do something a little more 'experimental'.

You'll undoubtedly see some kind of change over the next few weeks. That should be indicative of whether things have changed for the better (from your point of view) or whether being a full time dad is in fact full time.

That's the old passage to tc_hydro. We don't go there anymore.

Welcome. Welcome to Team Fortress 2!

You have chosen, or been forced by a bear-strangling Australian, to relocate to one of our finest free to play games. I thought so much of TF2, that I elected to establish this thread here, on the forum so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors.

I am proud to call TF2 my game. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to Team Fortress 2. It's fun here.

Broken home

The Family Business: A shotgun which fires 8 shots instead of 6, with a 15% damage nerf.

Sounds pretty straightforward.

Until you realise the original shotgun can reload and fire a 7th shot before the Family Business can fire it's 8th.

8 * (1 - 0.15) = 6.8...

Robin Walker, when asked, said "We can't do maths."

Edit: Neither can I.

Broadly boasting

Valve announces 7th weapon to have the initials BB. Robin Walker boasted "We wanted to mimize the number of keys on the keyboard you had to use, and noticed that Pyros, especially, were wearing through keys on the left hand side of the keyboard. By forcing forum goers to use the letter B more frequently, we hope to reduce green house gas emissions required from purchasing new keyboards...."

(Previous weapons: Backburner, Buff Banner, Battalion's Back-Up, Black Box, Boston Basher, Brass Beast. Hats: Backbiters Billycock, the Berliners Bucket, the Blighted Beak, the Brain Bucket and ye olde Baker Boy. Maps: Barn Blitz)

Now they finally fixed the first one...

In a shocking turn of events, Valve decides to release a TF2 secondary weapon that can kill people. Robin Walker, when asked, said "We've only done it once before, with the Flare Gun, and I was worried it would affect the balance of the game. Luckily, we've spent all of our development efforts since the original Flare Gun release balancing it, so I'm confident that we'll only have to spend another 12 months or so getting this new secondary fixed..."

Tinyhack

I proposed an 8 pixel roguelike design (original competition suggestion) following Darius Kazemi's request for a game that would support the hardware he bought back in 2009.

Rob Beschizza has been inspired by a favicon based RPG to implement another 8 pixel roguelike, Tiny Hack, and it's even more fun than I expected.

Just like a dirty, cheating player

One of the biggest challenges in Unangband when fighting some of the higher level uniques is their tendency to teleport away then heal themselves up. This extends fights because it forces the player to track the unique down again and continue - and is doubly challenging if the monster also has the ability to recover the mana points that they used up in the process of escaping. What can result is extend stalemates, where the player is unable to damage the unique quickly enough to kill them before they escape again.

There are plenty of opportunities to break these stalemates: deadly traps, cross-fire from other monsters that may be involved in the fight; but these mostly rely on the monster AI not being smart enough to recognise and avoid these additional threats.

The player is equally capable of using teleports and heals, and has the additional ability to flee up or down the stairs at any point (I've considered allowing uniques to do the same) to effectively reset the level. Teleportation can be a risky escape mechanism, because the destination may be more deadly than the current location, and healing may be overwhelmed by more damage the following turn and permadeath ensures that the player is punished for pushing their luck too far. But monster teleportation and healing is less risky, because the unique is in the position of having overall control of the level: there is no other faction he could teleport into which would threaten him, and the player usually lacks the means of ramping up damage even further (because otherwise he'd already be using it).

Allowing the player to summon monsters is one significant way of addressing this, but not every player is a spell caster capable of doing this. Letting warriors and thieves recruit armies or assassins is another possibility, but outside the scope of the game in the short term: and very much against the fiction of Angband which is a one-sided battle where you are the 'weaker' side. Druids are also capable of using spells to 'prepare the ground' and make part of the dungeon far more dangerous for other monsters. And other roguelikes offer anchor magic of various kinds which prevent both the player and nearby monsters teleporting to escape.

A trap that some Angband variants fall into is offering various abilities to drain monster mana, which since mana inevitably is converted into hit points by monsters which can heal, means that these items are effectively doing large amounts of damage - usually much larger than any other attack is capable of.

I think I have the balance of the above mix right for spell casters in Angband, but I'm welcome to more feedback. I'm more worried about whether I've missed anyway of balancing these abilities. I'd love to hear your ideas on other ways to fix this.

And for the record, I've always loved enemies turning around and using healing magics - Tenchu being the first game where an enemy ninja quaffed a potion just like I had been doing - because it makes you realise on many levels just how cheap, portable, instant, heal all magic can be.

This is why I write games

HallucinationMushroom has won a game of Unangband:

Man, I'm ecstatic! This is a very challenging variant and one I didn't think I'd ever win. I mainly fire up Un for the atmosphere and the first half of the game is my favorite, all the way up to Smaug. It doesn't hurt that my kitchen table roleplaying experiences have almost all been MERP or Rolemaster... it's like retreading old, familiar ground

You can read about his troll bard's feat here.

Foresight

6 trends in gaming.

And in other news, my Battlefield: Bad Company 2 stats reset for some reason.

I now have to grind to get a med kit again.

Seriously.

Blocked

An observation I just made over at Rock Paper Shotgun:

There’s a strong indie tradition of Super Mario Bros remixes. Notch wrote Infinite Mario Bros which is now used for AI and procedural generation research by a number of academics, and Andrew Spinks (developer of Terraria) also wrote Super Mario Bros X.

On the other hand, maybe it just creates a weird fascination with bashing in blocks…