[Fixed for V0.38] Poison clouds

[beowuuf]

Have poison clouds stopped doing damage in RTC? Trolins and armoured worms (in SS) seem to be immune

[Des]

I think maybe Sophia has cloned the monsters. DUNGEON_SPELL_VEN from a shooter damaged my characters just fine whilst testing Angel's Egg - in general poison seems to be more effective in RTC than CSBWin, though I might be imagining it. According to the RTC editor poison cloud does 300% damage against a Trollin.

[Sophia]

No, these are default monsters.

However, the typical Trolin from SS has 10 times the health of a Creature Cavern Trolin, so it might just be your perception...

[Lunever]

When I played through O-DM once more I noticed that I could kill many monsters easier with poison than with fire, although according to the encyclopaedia their weakness is supposed to be fire rather than poison.

[George Gilbert]

Hmmm - so we have one person saying their resistance is too much and another saying its too little. Sounds like I've got it about right ;-)

More seriously though, the resistances for each monster are all viewable in the RTC editor so you can see what they all are. Note that they use a different scale (percentage) to the DM and they may not even be proportional to one another so a direct comparison of the values won't be very useful. Having said that though, if you spot any which seem to be way off then let me know and I'll alter the default values.

[beowuuf]

I believe in SS the critters having large health would account for that. However, it is interesting, in DM I'm sure the monsters reacted to the damage and walked back (like door damage). In RTC, do they only fall back to spell damage when they are reduced in health severely?

[Gambit37]

Are the monster resistances in RTC still based on the figures I gave you a few years back after playing DM-PC and doing all that testing/checking of HP values? Or are they now based on exposed values from ADGE? Or simply made up to 'feel right'?

[George Gilbert]

In RTC, do they only fall back to spell damage when they are reduced in health severely?

Yes - the amount of damage required in a single hit to scare them off depends on their "fearfulness" value (i.e. a brave monster can take a beating before it runs off, a wussy monster will run away after a relatively small amount of damage).

I've no idea how DM does it, but this way seemed a sensible way for me to do it!

Are the monster resistances in RTC still based on the figures I gave you a few years back after playing DM-PC and doing all that testing/checking of HP values? Or are they now based on exposed values from ADGE? Or simply made up to 'feel right'?

They're based on the figures you discovered although a couple have since been tweaked as bug fixes.

[beowuuf]

Ah, so a poison cloud, because it does small fast damage, doens't make a monster run away. Hmm, interesting, so trying to drive critters away with poison clouds is much less effective in RTC then!

[George Gilbert]

Correct - in fact old versions of RTC did have monsters run away from poison clouds and everyone complained because it made them virtually useless (i.e. it does a couple of points of damage and then nothing thereafter because the monster has gone!).

[Lunever]

Well, a solution for the cloud may be to determine whether a monster should flee or endure the cloud depending on the monsters' health compared to the clouds power, so a weak monster will endure a weak cloud but flee a strong one, while a strong monster will endure a strong cloud a while before deciding to leave it.

[George Gilbert]

It already does that, perhaps the effect for poison should be stronger though.

[Lunever]

BTW: I didn't mean the poison resistance itself is too low or too high - I meant that some monsters can be easier killed by poison than fire, although it should be the other way round - so it's just the relation between fire and poison vulnerability for specific monsters I was speaking about, not the absloute values. I can't remember the exact situations anymore, and then you never know what you actually did roll on the engines dice during a combat, but at least it might be worthwhile to check whether there are big differences between the Encyclopaedias values and the RTC ones.

Poison cloud - Yes, you can make it a little stronger; currently I never use it.

[George Gilbert]

Made a few small changes for V0.38