[Fixed for V0.38] Highest difficulty setting too difficult

[Lunever]

But the difficulty increment for an imported party should also not penalize the relative gHoF result - after all you are already penalized for the parties' power by the monster upgrade, you shouldn't be penalized additionally by the gHoF. Of course the gHoF does use the same mechanism for the imported parties, but the difficulty increment upgrades the monsters more than the party has risen in power, probably in order take into account the supposedly superior skill of the more experienced player, probably that will basically still be the case even with the V0.38 fixes, albeit more balanced than it is now.

I think the automatically assigned difficulty level should result in a yet to be determined factor with which the normal gHoF should multiplied with if it's positive or divided by if it's negative, and for manually increased difficulty that factor should be something like doubled. Or at least something approximately similar.

What might also help a lot is to use the inflicted damage before rather then after subtracting monsters' resilience for the gHoF score.

[George Gilbert]

But the difficulty increment for an imported party should also not penalize the relative gHoF result - after all you are already penalized for the parties' power by the monster upgrade, you shouldn't be penalized additionally by the gHoF.

Well, the idea of the automatic upgrade on import is to provide a similar level of challenge to the imported characters as you would get if you chose characters from the mirrors. That's it - everything derives from that.

Therefore what I am absolutely sure about is that by importing a bunch of archmaster characters into a dungeon, you shouldn't be able to get a higher gHoF score than if you used mirror characters. What follows from that therefore is that just by playing at a high difficulty level shouldn't give you a high score (the higher score should be from playing at a level that's more difficult than your characters are expected to be playing at).

Clearly this still needs some work to balance it out but with the data collected in your save game file I'll be able to see what values need tweaking and what ones are about right.

[George Gilbert]

OK, I've been through the data collected in Lunevers game and the scores are not as bad as I thought they would be. The basic details are now on the Global Hall of Champions page (two of the characters managed 5th and 7th places in the best scores recorded).

I guess the fact that a single hit from a monster would kill a party member outright means that his fighting style didn't involve taking alot of hits from monsters! Also the sheer quantity of Mon spells cast (and again, not being hit by too many spells from monsters because they're lethal) gave a very respectable "fire" score - in fact the only person to have a positive score in that area!

So, all in all, I've only had to tweak the algorithm for calculating high scores a little bit. In particular, internally, I've split out the difference between playing at a high level due to having high imported characters (which gains no bonus to the high score) and playing at a high level due to setting the difficulty in the config.txt file (which gains all the bonus).

Note that the total difficulty level is capped at 15 (archmaster), so if you import a party there's a limit to how much of a bonus you can get from the difficulty setting (for example, if you import a level 10 party, then the highest additional difficulty setting that qualifies for the points bonus you can play on is 5). Also the points bonus you get from playing at the high levels is very strongly biased towards the highest levels (think "multiplied by the square of the difficulty level" - it's not actually as simple as that, but you get the idea) so the best scores can only be obtained by playing with the mirror characters which is how it should be (because that's what the dungeon was designed for).

I'll be very interested to see how anyone else gets on with V0.38 (presumably Lunever will find it a walk in the park because the difficulty has dropped somewhat!). Have fun!

[Sophia]

I'll be very interested to see how anyone else gets on with V0.38 (presumably Lunever will find it a walk in the park because the difficulty has dropped somewhat!). Have fun!

I can barely win on the normal difficulty level!

[Lunever]

I'm through with playing the RTC dungeon and fused Chaos once more. The
first levels have been even harder than usual due to the spellbook, but
that's what the RTC dungeon is for after all. I only have 9 out of 10
secrets, and albeit I'm not 100% sure I suppose it's due to the secret area
bug that you already fixed for V0.38.

BTW: Does the engine somehow count into the score the killing percentage?
That is, if you go after every fleeing monster and dig out every hidden
creature (this game only 1 rat escaped aside from the usual giggler), does
the engine reward a 99% killing rate somehow, or does it punish it because
you had to receive a couple of additional blows in order to kill the monster
rather than to scare it away?

[George Gilbert]

It doesn't specifically take into account the kill ratio (in any case, it would be nearly impossible to get 100% because of the generators); the score is merely an indication of how much damage you did to the dungeon versus how much it did to you.

Assuming that your party will kill the rat without taking that much damage back, your score would have been higher if you'd killed it, but not by much.

As for the secrets thing, it tells you when you finish what you've missed (or at least a hint as to what it was). If you let me know which one it is, I'll have a look to see if it was possible to get the treasure without tripping it.

[Lunever]

It's been the worm and wasps secret. I'm not sure anymore whether I skipped it by accident, or whether I had taken the treasure from the adjacent fake wall tile, I assume it's been the latter. I assume this is already fixed for V0.38 according to the other thread about that issue.

Kill Ration: Since it is displayed at the end of game anyway, maybe it should be also taken into account, since when playing at high levels against monsters whose damage you sometimes barely survive, actually killing instead of avoiding them will usually give you a bad score balance, because you never can inflict the 600 or 700 points of damage that the monster does to a character each hit (which isn't a problem for playing if you get out alive and drink a couple of healing potions, but still does affect your score negatively.

BTW it is possible to get a near 100% killing rate even with generators. I thought I passed quick enough past the rat generator trigger before its recharge time was over in order to get out with all rats dead, but according to the killing ration displayed at the end of the game it seems it did generate one more rat that thus escaped me alive. The only monster you really can't kill is the one giggler you have to leave behind in the water elemental level because you only get 2 cross keys for 3 doors.

Apropos giggler: Do I mix up something with CSB, or isn't the moving pit in the materializer level supposed to be operated by a giggler and thus be subject to freeze time (which it isn't in RTC)?.

[George Gilbert]

It's been the worm and wasps secret. I'm not sure anymore whether I skipped it by accident, or whether I had taken the treasure from the adjacent fake wall tile, I assume it's been the latter. I assume this is already fixed for V0.38 according to the other thread about that issue.

Yes, that's one of the ones I changed - in V0.38 its possible to collect the treasure without stepping on the tile that contains it (and the secret floor pad).

Kill Ration: Since it is displayed at the end of game anyway, maybe it should be also taken into account,

It still wouldn't make much difference - you're only quibbling about a fraction of a percent.

since when playing at high levels against monsters whose damage you sometimes barely survive, actually killing instead of avoiding them will usually give you a bad score balance, because you never can inflict the 600 or 700 points of damage that the monster does to a character each hit (which isn't a problem for playing if you get out alive and drink a couple of healing potions, but still does affect your score negatively.

Don't forget that if you're playing at a high level with low level characters then you'll get a points bonus. Playing at archmaster level with mirror characters, that bonus is a positive factor of 100 (i.e. scoring one point of damage against a monster gives +100 points, a monster scoring one point of damage against you only gives -1 as usual).

That makes up for the extra damage you'll take and more.

Apropos giggler: Do I mix up something with CSB, or isn't the moving pit in the materializer level supposed to be operated by a giggler and thus be subject to freeze time (which it isn't in RTC)?.

That's CSB...