On 11.05.2023 16:39, Erik L wrote:
I've been pretty busy but I'll try to reply to what I've read so
far.
Thanks for your comments. I'll add my 2 ct below... :-)
Medical kits have the appearance of a "white bag" now so hopefully
that avoids confusion in the future.
This experience fell under my category of "not yet known - better
inspect bag next time". In other words; I wouldn't have expected a
change to be necessary. But I also think that your intended change
makes also sense.
The alignment abuse from attacking from Elbereth should not be too
bad, I think -5? The key difference between Hackem and Evilhack is
that in Evil you get a x in 50 chance of angering the quest guardian
(where x is your alignment abuse score), but in hackem you can go
down to -64, but after that you guarantee you have to kill the quest
guardian to keep your quest artifact. It basically means you can kill
up to 4 peaceful shopkeepers (or always peaceful monsters) before you
cross that, since they are -15 each.
Here I have a fundamentally and strong differing opinion. If I read
the source code correct both alignment records (normal and abuse)
gets incremented by the same amount of penalty, where the normal
record will be leveled over time and the abuse record is permanent.
Permanent effects, non-fixable, but game changing effects are IMO
not a good design principle. Off the top of my head I can think of
a couple ways to address that...
(a) Reduce the amount for the permanent record from x to sign(x),
optionally also increase the scale. That means that 15 pts. normal
alignment penalty would add just 1 pt. to the permanent record.
And add clear messages for the player with every possible abuse.
(b) Introduce a (more or less slow) timeout for that record so
that with sufficient time spent for probation you get (partly or
fully) an absolution.
(c) Have your deity occasionally fix it (by prayer or sacrifice),
either to get full absolution, or a percentage, or have the abuse
record adjusted against the normal alignment (fully or partly).
(d) Any combination of these measures.
(There had been another suggestion some time ago; IIRC, to solve
some specific quest to fix it. - This (IMO) isn't a good choice,
but your mileage may vary.)
Robbing the black market will be more difficult, but I do encourage
people to try! Most of the anti-theft measures from UnNetHack are in
place now, so you can't just phase out. I think the best strategy brainstormed by shadowrider is using a combination of scrolls of
time, potions of invulnerability, and trying to just kill One Eye'd
Sam quickly. I haven't heard of anyone trying that yet though.
In Slashem I just wait for a domestic creature that I can tame
with food. (I seem to recall that scrolls of taming and the like
would not work and have averse effects?) Put all interesting loot
in a spare bag (ideally a blessed bag of holding) and let the pet
pick it up. A magic whistle does the rest. The pet must be of a
strong type (large cat, war horse, etc.) to pick up heavy bags and
get all the loot in one round. - Don't know if that's possible in
Hack'EM as well. (I wouldn't try the melee path, for sure. :-)
That's interesting about the swamp ferns... Might have to look into
that.
It worked astonishingly very well. The problem was only to lure
them around the corners on the a bit twisted Market level design.
But what can be seen with this example is of principal value for
the game design. Wherever you have unlimited items, monsters, or processes/routines that provide unlimited entities, you likely
can create some imbalance; either a positive one (like pudding
farming in older variants/releases), or negative ones (e.g. like
the exponentially growing summoning cascades of high level spell
casters). - Such things need fixing (IMO). (And there are often
quite easy means to fix such things.)
RE: The fear attacks, mobileuser's answer is correct. Also, if you
play as a Necromancer, you will resist most fear attacks (except
dragons).
Yeah. If that works nothing will have to change here; it's of the
type "a new feature to get to know and master".)
RE: Lawful quest. The maggots eating corpses comes from SpliceHack, I
didn't anticipate how it would interact with the dragon corpses in
the Lawful quest, but that's part of the fun of mixing different
features hehe.
But as Mobi Leuser said; as implemented it's completely pointless.
I like mobileuser's strategy of genociding maggots,
That's not only overkill. It's from a design perspective poor; you
need "tool" A to get to "place" B - primitive like a "Leasure Suit
Larry" game (for those who remember).
Better just fix it.
but unfortunately it seems to just result in other 'w' taking their
place. In a recent game of mobile's they were replaced by Hellminths
- which are worms that ALSO eat corpses. This however, is a bug
because hellminths are not supposed to generate randomly, they are
only supposed to be created when a Worm That Walks dies, so that will
require a fix.
Thanks a bunch for your feedback! If you have a github account I
encourage you to create issues on
https://github.com/elunna/hackem/issues. I created issues for the
maggots, grunds error, and Holy spear so far.
On my list would also be the "shambling horror" arbitrariness. While
it could also be nerved (level-wise) to something more sensible I'd
rather remove it completely. IMO it adds almost nothing to the game,
but being a "fancy gimmick".
It will probably be a
while before I crank out the next version, but it's good to keep the
issues updated, then I won't forget about them and maybe others will
be motivated to do PR's!
No hurry, it's just a game! ;-)
Janis
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