Does anyone use lightning bolts?

[slickrcbd]

Of the five offensive spells, it seems odd that one of them seems like just an inferior copy with no advantages over casting Fireball. It always seems like an inferior copy.
Does anybody have any particular monsters that they tend to kill with lightning bolts over fireballs?
Supposedly lightning bolts work on stone golems or animated armor, but I honestly don't recall ever killing them with lightning bolts. They certainly take a lot more MON level lightning than other monsters take fireballs or poison bolts save the red dragon.

While poison clouds at least have situational uses in making monsters move if you get trapped, I never found much use for lightning.
Poison bolts are generally better for solitary monsters, and trollins are particularly susceptible to them to the point where I find groups of two to be better to handle with poison bolts than fireballs (but will fireball a group of four due to it being multitarget).

So, who does use lightning and in what situations?

[timws]

For some reason the game considers lightning bolts a more advanced spell than say, the fireball as it seems to require more mana to cast and also requires 3 symbols instead of the 2 that fireball and poison bolt\cloud require.

Perhaps the damage affects a creature's stamina which is the case in many role-playing games and\or affects their chance to hit, I dunno. Or, the bolt may be able to pass through gates which would be beneficial but not sure.

Other than using them against animated armors, there seems to be no benefit to using them over the other two.

[jayrshaw]

I honestly haven't ever used the Lightning Bolt spell except to experiment when I was newer to the game. It is very expensive to cast, and as far as I know it doesn't do enough damage against tougher enemies which resist fire to be an efficient way of killing them.


--Jay

[Ameena]

Yeah I would consider it more fiddly to click, more expensive to cast, and not really worth it compared to good old lazy Fireball . If Fireball doesn't really work on something (not counting non-material creatures, of course) then I'll just hack it to death physically with some help from any nearby door if available .

[Sphenx]

I ran a little experiment. Lightning bolts are more effective on stone golems and animated armors. Using a master wizard champion, it took me around 100 fireballs to kill a stone golem vs. 16 lightning bolts. Against one low HP animated armor, it was ~20 fireballs vs. 6 lightning bolts. However lightning bolt raw damage tend to be always less than a fireball.
And by checking some numbers, I (re)discovered you can kill a Water elemental with poison cloud. But that's not the topic.

[slickrcbd]

I didn't know you could kill the golems or armor at all with fireballs. For the longest time I thought they were immune to magic the way mummies are immune to poison.
Nor did I know the water elemental was vulnerable to poison clouds.
However 16 lightning bolts explains why I never killed a golem with one. That is a lot of mana. Even six for an armor is a lot.

[m1ckey]

Never bothered w/ lightning bolts either.
Of course I knew they´re more harmful to "knights" since the 80´s.
BUT just not worth the hassle...

[jayrshaw]

I thought Stone Golems and Animated Armor enemies were immune to Fireballs, too...


--Jay

[Ameena]

I don't think I ever thought anything was immune to anything (except non-materials being untouchable except by certain attacks, of course), but based on how slowly some stuff died to certain effects I figured they were at least highly resistant. Makes sense, though - if you're entirely made out of metal or stone, a bit of fire ain't gonna do much .

[jayrshaw]

According to ChristopheF's Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia, Stone Golems and Animated Armor enemies should both indeed be immune to Fireballs. Here is a link to the relevant page:

http://dmweb.free.fr/community/document ... e-details/


"Fire resistance
Resistance to Fireball and Lightning Bolt explosions. Value 15 means the creature is immune.
Poison resistance
Resistance to magical spells involving poison. Value 15 means the creature is immune."


Stone Golems and Animated Armors both have a value of 15 for Fire Resistance and Poison Resistance, so Fireballs theoretically shouldn't land any damage against them.


--Jay

[ChristopheF]

I checked in the source code. Fireballs and Lightning bolts cause two sources of damage.

1. When a champion casts a fireball or a lightning bolt, it creates a projectile that you can see flying in the dungeon.

2. When the projectile hits a creature, it inflicts some damage. Stone Golems and Animated Armors are not immune to this 'blunt' damage.
The damage for a fireball is a random value between 10 and 40.
The damage for a lightning bolt in DM/CSB versions 1.x, 2.x and CSB FM-Towns 3.1 is: a random value between 10 and 40, multiplied by 5
The damage for a lightning bolt in other DM/CSB versions 3.x is: a random value between 10 and 40, multiplied by 16, then the kinetic energy of the projectile is added (a value that depends on the spell power and the skill level of the champion)

3. After the projectile hits the creature, fireballs and lightning bolts create an explosion. That explosion inflicts damage that takes the fire resistance of the creature into account. Stone Golems and Animated Armors are immune to this 'fire' damage.

[slickrcbd]

Is that first damage what spell shield cast from items protects you from? I never figured out what it did, since it didn't seem to help against poison bolts or poison clouds, and fireshield seemed to reduce the damage from fireballs and lightning bolts cast by enemies.

[jayrshaw]

Thank you for researching that, Christophe. This seems to indicate that the main advantage Lightning Bolts have over Fireballs is the 5x multiplier for the "blunt" damage you described.

Do you know whether this "blunt" damage is static regardless of the level of the Fireball or Lightning Bolt spell you cast? In other words, would a Lo level (Level 1) Fireball spell and a Mon level (Level 6) Fireball both deal "blunt" damage of 10 to 40 or would there be some other type of multiplier involved for the Mon level spell?


--Jay

[ChristopheF]

In my previous post I described the effects of Fireballs and Lightning Bolts on creatures. In this case attack types like 'Blunt' or 'Fire' are not being used in the source code, I only used these terms for clarity.
Damage from the collision is not decreased by fire resistance of the creature. Damage from the explosion is decreased by fire resistance of the creature, and even nullified if immune to fire.

@slickrcbd your last question is now about the effects of Fireballs and Lightning Bolts on champions. In this case the rules are different. Attacks to the party do have an explicit type (list here).
For Fireballs projectiles, both the collision damage and the explosive damage are 'Fire'.
For Lightning Bolts, the collision damage is 'Blast' and the explosive damage is 'Fire'.

Spellshield does not protect against any of those, it only protects against 'Magic' damage.

Each time you cast Spellshield using a Wand or Teowand (that's the only way), the Spellshield defense amount of the party is increased by 8 until it reaches 50, then it only increases by 2.
Each Spellshield you cast lasts 280 clock ticks (around 46 seconds on the original Atari ST).
While Spellshield is active, damage of type 'Magic' is reduced by the Spellshield defense amount, after the damage was reduced using the Anti-Magic statistic of champions (note that Anti-Magic is ignored on Atari ST due to a compiler bug, see BUG0_41).
The possible causes of 'Magic' damage to a champion are 'Poison Bolt' (Only the party and some projectile launchers in the dungeon can create them, none of the creatures have that ability) and non-ranged, non-spell attacks from these creatures: Grey Lord, Lord Chaos, Lord Order, Materializer / Zytaz, Vexirk, Wizard Eye / Flying Eye.
When there is at least one square between the party and one of these creatures, the creature will perform a ranged attack by casting a spell. These attacks are not 'Magic'.
When the party and the creature are one next to the other, the creature will randomly choose (50/50) between a ranged attack (cast a spell which is NOT a 'Magic' attack, each spell has its own attack type used when the projectile explodes) or a mêlée attack of type 'Magic'. Only in that last case would the Spellshield be beneficial.

@jayrshaw step 2 of my previous post already answers your question: the damage does depend on the spell power and champion skill in versions 3.x only, but not in early versions where spell power and skill level are ignored.

[jayrshaw]

Right - it looks like the "blunt" damage of the Lightning Bolt is actually *much* higher in later versions of the game than the "blunt" damage of a Fireball. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the SNES version of the game is one of the later versions. Now I'm thinking that I should have attempted to use high level Lightning Bolts against Animated Armor and Stone Golem enemies to see how feasible it is to kill them that way.

Based on the formulas you provided, it appears that the spell level multiplier affects Lightning Bolt "blunt damage" but not Fireball "blunt damage." However, the spell level multiplier must affect the "explosion" damage from the Fireball a lot, because high level Fireballs are capable of landing a ton of damage against enemies which are not resistant to Fire damage.

The page you linked to about the types of attacks in this game is also very useful. Without it, you would have no way of knowing (for example) that Screamers and Ghosts use "mental" damage that is not mitigated by armor and is only reduced by the Champion's Wisdom attribute.

It's also interesting to see how many different types of attacks Shield Potions and Shield Spells can protect against. For that matter, while Poison is a type of resistance monsters can potentially have, none of the attacks which can harm your Champions actually deal Poison damage [Poison Clouds apparently deal "unconditional" damage and Poison Bolts apparently deal "magic" damage].


--Jay

[ChristopheF]

Wrong assumption: the SNES version is a direct descendant of the Apple IIGS version, so it is an early one (internally it is a version 2.0 engine as shown by the version checker sensor).

The SNES version of DM is based on the Apple IIGS source code because the CPU in the SNES is very similar to the one in the Apple IIGS.
There are strong clues that the SNES programmers (a Japanese team, with the help of FTL) took the Apple IIGS source code, cross-compiled it on Macintosh (that's the way the Apple IIGS executables were built), then disassembled the resulting object code and started their work for the SNES from the resulting assembly source code. They then patched in everything needed to adapt to the SNES hardware.

[jayrshaw]

Thank you for correcting me - I was just thinking that the SNES version of the game was released so much later than the original version that it was likely to be a later version of the game, but I guess I was wrong.

If that's the case, I probably would have been disappointed if I attempted to use Lightning Bolts on the enemies I mentioned since the formula for their "blunt" damage is much less generous than the formula used for later versions of the game.


--Jay

[slickrcbd]

Wrong assumption: the SNES version is a direct descendant of the Apple IIGS version, so it is an early one (internally it is a version 2.0 engine as shown by the version checker sensor).

The SNES version of DM is based on the Apple IIGS source code because the CPU in the SNES is very similar to the one in the Apple IIGS.
There are strong clues that the SNES programmers (a Japanese team, with the help of FTL) took the Apple IIGS source code, cross-compiled it on Macintosh (that's the way the Apple IIGS executables were built), then disassembled the resulting object code and started their work for the SNES from the resulting assembly source code. They then patched in everything needed to adapt to the SNES hardware.

I was always told that both the Apple IIGS and the Super Nintendo used the same 65C816 microprocessor. Several magazines like "Incider/A+" and "II Alive!" mentioned this in articles in addition to more dubious internet sources.
That said, Apple released the Apple Programmers Workshop (APW) which later got adapted into the Byte Work's ORCA/? environment, but I'm not sure I remember the story on that. It might have been the story of ORCA/M is similar to Claris as a spin-off. However the original APW also had a component to compile Apple IIGS source codes on a Macintosh in their Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW). However while MPW was available mostly for free, APW was always paid and apparently is still technically paid because not even the Apple II abandonware sites have APW available for download.

I'm most familiar with the Apple IIGS version, and I did virtually all my experimenting as a kid on that version. I've rarely done experiments on other versions other than to try things out I learned on these forums. So most of what I say will be highly attuned to that version even if I haven't actually played that version in 15 years, and I can't believe it's been that long since I mothballed my Apple IIGS, although I did try out the IIGS during the COVID Shutdowns of 2020 when I helped my mom clean out the basement of her house, I didn't play Dungeon Master on it.

Nobody probably cares, but just in case what I did with the IIGS in 2020

I tried an experiment with Curse of the Azure Bonds, and I booted up The Print Shop Companion and decided to use an unused pack of pin-feed mailing labels and a black ribbon before they got too old to use to make some return address labels, especially since I'd run out of them and American Stationary said they had a backlog because of The Shutdown, so I thought "Why not use these? Their just sitting in a box and eventually the glue will no longer stick. Why not put them to use? What am I keeping them for?"

In any case, porting code from the IIGS to SNES is not that simple, because all the APIs for accessing things like I/O operations are COMPLETELY different. The Direct page (what previous versions of the 6502 family called the zero page) usage is also completely different.
Unless the code is written in assembly language it isn't any easier to port the IIGS version than the PC version or Amiga version.
If it is written in assembly, then it is somewhat easier to convert to SNES than most other platforms however as you mostly only need to rewrite I/O routines and possibly revamp the interface to account for the limitations of an 8-button D-pad instead of a joystick or mouse and 94 key keyboard.