Dungeon Master Forum

No, I had other things to attend in that annoying dungeon called real life and thus quit the game at exactly the spot where the party is in the savegame I sent you. I did not enter the next room. After I had time to resume RTC I quit as usual everything that takes ressources on this old laptop, started the game as usual, loaded my savegame as usual, and I'm not sure anymore, I think the "game loaded, ready to play" screen appeared, and the game crashed when I clicked "OK", along with the usual diags report message. When I repeated the procedure as described above though the bug did not reoccur.

One slight adaption request for the damage resacling you already did: You said that now a golem will do 999 damage to a fully armoured character. Since at this scale of damage armour probably wouldn't do that much of a difference anyway, can you make it 999 before calculating in armour? That way there would still be a slight difference whether a tank or a robe is hit; Daroou developed into a full-fledged tank would be able to barely survive a single blow, while everybody else probably wouldn't. What might also help to remove that instant death problem might be not simply increasing the damage total, but rather its random range, so that a golem hit will PROBABLY do 999, but on occasion will score only some 600. If I remember correctly original FTL-DM had quite a broad range in the random component, albeit with a relative stable average, it seemed to me to be based on the Gaussian curve (whatever that is exactly called in English).

Lunever wrote:One slight adaption request for the damage resacling you already did: You said that now a golem will do 999 damage to a fully armoured character. Since at this scale of damage armour probably wouldn't do that much of a difference anyway, can you make it 999 before calculating in armour?

Actually the effect of armour is a percentage one not a absolute one so it does make a difference even at high damage values.

Lunever wrote:What might also help to remove that instant death problem might be not simply increasing the damage total, but rather its random range, so that a golem hit will PROBABLY do 999, but on occasion will score only some 600. If I remember correctly original FTL-DM had quite a broad range in the random component, albeit with a relative stable average, it seemed to me to be based on the Gaussian curve (whatever that is exactly called in English).

Again, RTC applies the randomness as a percentage scaling so works for high values. I'm not sure what DM did, but RTC does use a Gaussian curve (or at least an approximation to it for speed reasons!) with a very wide spread (about 20-200% if I recall).

Ok, right then. Maybe I could judge that better for playtesting purposes if you'd allow an config OPTION to display lethal damage.

Or make that part of the RTC dungeon, if Beo could love with that.

George, I sent you a couple of suggestions about monsters' AI developement for V0.38+ per PM&email. I hope it will be of any use for you.

continuing report

Made it through level 09 (scorpions) by now. Tricky, but it was possible to get through. Never before realized how important fear weapons are. The bug with the malfunctioning teleporters mentioned elsewhere should be already fixed.

Gee, gigglers that take 6 MonFulIr before dying... I just hate them. Had to play most of the dungeon with empty hands.

But the tricky part will come now: Level 10 (water elementals). It offers only few spots that make good monster traps. It wil probably quite a challenge to get through.

One more minor bug: Recently the game increasingly often quit the game upon the parties death instead of offering me to reload the last savegame. Why does the engine do this? Does it possibly carry over a mouse click performed during fighting to the death into the later appearing quit button? If so, can that be fixed? Quitting, restarting and reloading is a bit annoying, especially on an old machine.

Edit: PS: George, I sent you my last savegame via email, just in case you need it to have a look into that strange quitting behaviour.

The quitting problem is a symptom of one of the other bugs that I've already fixed so no need to send me any more save files for this one!

continuing report

By now I passed through level 10 (water elementals). I chose to walk through the wasp's nest. Yet since monsters wander more away from their initial location than FTL-monsters, because they start wandering earlier, I only encountered 1 of the 2 water elementals and had to leave behind a couple of lost wasps. The water elemental took countless hits by MonDesEw and Disrupt, but then I had to drive it off with the horn of fear. Haven't seen it anymore, Grey Lord knows where it is now. However, I still have to make the second tour with the additional cross key. So I will go back via the wasp's nest, creating new wasps on my way, and clean out the trollins cave. Maybe I will encounter a water elemental then once more, in order to see how much they can take.



George: I have thought about the damage rescaling you have performed for V0.38. Since I suppose that RTC limits the maximum health/stamina/mana to 999 as FTL-DM does, can you limit the maximum damage suffered by a fully and heavily armoured character to 998 instead of 999? That way at least a true archmaster tank could survive a single blow? Its just 1 out of almost 1000 points, but it would make a fine difference.

continuing report

For the first time now I had to give up after several hours of trying to crack the trollins cave, where the invincible water elemental from the neighbouring cross-key section has joind the trollins.
Hell, it already has taken several dozen MonDesEw AND vorpal blade disrupts AND I emptied in addition all full dispell charges of the Staff of Manar as well as 2 yew staffs into it - nothing, no effect. By now I'm not sure anymore whether it takes any damage at all from all of this (ok, the disrupt does 1 point of damage - no Mana for Dain potions left anymore - but the spells, dunno), or whether the engine reduces the Mon spells down to 0 or at best 1. If I knew there to be a minimum damage of 1, well, I'd switch to LoDesEws, but then the game wouldn't be very logical anymore.

Given up for now, maybe I'll give it another try later. I would like to know whether the archmaster elementals can be killed.

George: Since teh archmaster monster stats will change anyway in V0.38, you won't give away secrets if you'd tell me:

In the savegame I'm sending you now, is the water elemental moving toward the party killable at all by that party? How many health does it have and how much damage does a MonDesEw inflict?

Whew, finally I did kill them all, even the 2 water elementals (but of course not the remaining sealed off giggler). I really had doubts at some point whether the engine would allow me to kill the elementals. LOL, I even sent my savegame to GG because I suspected that the water elementals really couldn't be damaged by DesEw-spells. I'm still not sure about that, because I finally killed them with Dain-potion-backed-up disrupt (although I pumped a lot of DesEw and a lot of dispell charges from staffs into them too). It is not easy doing that while holding a corridor against a pack of 22 strong trollins in order to prevent them from spreading into the wasps' nest. Lots of warcrying, horn-blowing, abusing the freeze game button to practically return to a round-based RPG (which I had never done before) and save-gaming finally did it though.

Having got a taste from the water elementals I really dread the materializers. 2 elementals took hours to take out. Most materializers might eventually be killed with a staircase and hours of patience, but the last one might really be difficult to defeat. Probably a magic box emergency. The animated armours will probably also be incredibly tough. I think a couple of days will pass before I gather enough patience again for the next 500-strikes-per-monster combat.

Lunever : Are your characters gaining any levels?
Level gains get very few and far between at high levels. Maybe a reward for playing on extreme difficulty levels should be an experience multiplier. That way you would be rewarded for your masochism and advancement would again become feasible.

TheMormegil: I've no idea how the engine is handling this. I did gain 1 wizard level for Hissssa, Halk and Wuuf and 1 priest level for Tiggy, so yes, I still do get XP and levelup, but I really can't tell how much of it actually comes from this game and how much comes from the abandoned archmaster attempts in previous versions or the last completed CSB game. I'd never asked for it, but you are probably right: Like in every battle-oriented RPG stronger monsters should result in more XP and/or (more important) a better gHoF rating. I hope that I will be able to compete the game, because I would like to see that score. Since I have taken very much time and took lots of damage I suspect it might result in an unbeatable negative record for the gHoF.

Actually, I'm suspecting that your score will be unbeatably high!

(and if it isn't I'll take another look at how they're calculated at high levels so that it is)

George: Now that's interesting: In previous versions I always had a much much higher gHoF score when playing low-level, because for an experienced player it is so easy do circle around single monsters in order to prevent them from ever doing any damage. On low-level an experienced player also doesn't have to retreat or make an inplay sleeping pause while executing helpless monsters, he'll also won't have to wait half an hour in a corridor until that water elemental returns he scared away as a last ressort in order to survive. Instead the high level player may happily pursue any foe and outright kill it, usually without wasting much time or reveiving any damage.

At high level, you often have to use patience as your main weapon, which might sound paradoxical considering the fast pace of the game. When encountering monsters like trollins or wasps whose hits won't instantly kill like the bite of a pain rat does, you quickly accumulate hundreds of points of damage.

As far as I know the engine takes a long playing time and damage received as negative factors into account, that's why I suspect that I'd get a negative record. Of course I assume, that the difficulty level is not calculated in much by that algorithm. Am I wrong in that? Is it considered, and if so, how?

Lunever wrote:George: Now that's interesting: In previous versions I always had a much much higher gHoF score when playing low-level

If that's the case you should have said so as it's a bug! Clearly you should score higher playing at a higher level...

Whilst time "time taken" component of the score will be worse, it should be more than compensated for by the "damage done" component (which should be scaled by the difficulty).

The final *.RTC file that your HoC scores are written into contains all the sub-components of the scores (not just the sums of them that are displayed), so I can apply any bug-fix to your game retrospectively if any is required.

continuing report

Got distracted by that annying real life dungeon again, so I only played about a third of a level until now. Yet, that third is the first third of the materialzier level, and in that first third I killed off all non-generated matterializers! Lol, although I have to admit, that they killed me quite a couple of times until I got them all. Knights are also tough, but with enough Ku- and Ros-potions, a couple of doors and a good horn-of-fear-user they can be defeated. The oitus' nest and the materializer-generator still await me of course...

continuing report

Hah! I did the oitu's nest. I died a couple of times though at first.
But alas, I failed to beat the materializer generator so far, the terrain is not very suitable. I'll give it another try tomorrow.

I just had to retry. After many a death I got lucky and the materializer generator only produced 1 materializer. And, lol, only after having prevailed I noticed that I forgot the skeleton key. So I had to go back and do it again.
Now "only" the golems, black flames, demons, the dragon and Lord Chaos remain.

And you don't have to kill two of those

Nah, if it moves, kill it and take its treasure. And since there still have been a couple of minor bugs in the dungeon, I want to finish my test a usual with everything in the dungeon examined, every possible treasure looted and every possible monster killed.

continuing report

Got the firestaff. The golems did not run around like gigglers as I had feared. Their pace of movement is still measured as it should be.

While the materializers from the generator have been the first monsters in this game that actually shot at me from a distance, the golems have been the first monsters from whom I could move away a step (all other monsters move and react so fast that you cannot break away from them once engaged, except by dungeon mechanics like a teleporter or staircase).

Normally to thoroughly test the DM dungeon after a new version release I'd go up now to see whether good old Librasulus is still properly waiting at the entrance, but since I skipped any screamer or rat killing training to feed my party, I have run out of food now, even after consuming the little savings from the upper levels I had left in the tomb of the firestaff's entrance room, so I'm not equipped to make an expedition up there.

Actually that might be a reason to rather pay the dragon a little visit...

I hope that hungry look in my champions eyes doesn't scare him away...

Dragon died by staircase. Busy hellblazing now. I hope I can do it before my food is out.

continuing report

After several hours of battle most of hell is clean. Only 2 black flames, the northeastern demon, and of course Lord Chaos are left. I hope I won't have to break off to hunt rats, or have to allow the last 3 remaining monsters to stay alive.

final analysis:

Right, today I've done it. I cleaned archmaster Chaos' abode from all distractions and finally fused him.

So now that I've proved that it can be done, how can I still say that it's been to difficult (which I do)? Because in order to be able to play the dungeon through I had to take a couple of measures that severely inhibited enjoying the game, yet had to be done to have a chance to prevail. Some yet not all have already been mentioned above, yet for a last and final time I want to summarize all of them here:

At first I enjoyed very much that I could play at high level again without having all the time the thought in the background "In order to avoid injury I took 20 seconds more than I could have; OMG, the food cost".
Very good! I went on, examined the dungeons details and had to really fight hard even against the lowliest monsters. I even had to retreat from a pack of screamers. It's been challenging and I liked it.
The worms became really hard though, because sometimes I could not make a stand against them to hold a closing door, because they would endure long enough to kill me anyway. Still it was only occassionally, all in all they could be fought.

Then the game balance suddenly shifted upon meeting the first swamp slime. From now on, almost any attack from almost any monster, no matter whether a mere swamp slime or LC himself, would make a kill at every hit. Monsters suddenly couldn't be fought anymore by classical combat. So I changed my strategy: I went great lengthes to lure or drive monsters into spots where they couldn't fight back. Closing doors soon couldn't be held very well anymore, so I took the time to lure lots of monsters back to the stairs, later, sometimes I shot them across pits and through portcullises, then I started using teleporters and fake walls.
This process has been very much fun, I do like that approach, but once I did trap a monster, due to its ridulously high resistance I would just stay there, shoot 20 Mon spells as it, sleep a while, shoot another 20 Mon spells at it, and so on. It was incredibly boring, and my well-groomed tanks were largely mobile mana and item containers, not fighters anymore.

For the next quarter of the game I thus didn't use fighters anymore. Later, when monsters became so resilient, that they hardly took any notice of Mon spells anymore I stopped casting offensive spells entirely and instead used all my mana to largely disable the characters individual differences in the main ability stats and disrupted or berserked anything moving.

Since the monsters AI is less smart currently than it used to be in previous versions, and the AI does not cope well with the high speed of archmaster monsters, in the entire game only in 1 single instance monsters actually shot at range at me. All others just waited to be executed, yet due to high stats with low AI that has been a painfully slow process.

And now I have to admit that I kinda semi-cheated:
I not only saved the game very often. I abused saving excessively on the spots where I decided I had to make a stand. I made that stands with the horn of fear, dying every time when the horn was unsuccessful, reloading and so on. Upon reloading I had no choice but to profit from a bug, that reset all indisposed action icons back to ready state.

I also abused the freeze game button excessively: Since all monsters except the golems have been so fast that you could not ever move a tile away from them except by instilling fear, I had to use a combination of freeze game and the Encyclopaedias maps to not get lost or bump into walls to often during combat. On hot spots where I had to make a stand I abused the freeze game button, which I have close at hand beside other functions like spell runes on the custom keyboard, to practically reduce the one and first real-time computer role-playing game to a kind of round-based tactical combat game.

All in all I think that the engine evaluated my On-master party a couple of level to high when assigning archmaster difficulty to it. I could have done Ee-master without semi-cheating (and I won't ba able to do CSB even with semi-cheating if I my party will continue to be evaluated to high). This also produces another paradoxical effect:
In FTL-DM training a DM party as much as possible before starting CSB has been useful in terms of efficiency. In RTC it is kinda counter-productive: While leveling up will make the remaining part of your current game easier, it will make your next game harder. Until you are On-master. Because then you'll already have reached the top of the line. From now on, every level you'll gain will not only make your current game easier, but also your next games. So while the game all in all had been becoming harder and harder, in the last stage of this process it starts to become easier again. An automatized algorithm just can't really be universally valid for all kinds of dungeons, so again I have to remark that dungeon designers should be allowed to override it.

Yet, since George already has announced a couple of fixes for V0.38, I trust that I'll be satisfied in that respect by V0.38.
That is: Normally I would begin a game of RTC-DM now and then a CSB game. Yet that would be probably more fun to do after the release of V0.38.
George, do you already have an idea when approximately V0.38 will be released? For if it'd be soon anyway I think I better wait before beginning my next game.

PS: Couldn't resist testing RTC-DM at least once. Yet since even my strongest fighters do an average of 2 points of damage with a falchion that means I'll have to hit the screamer king about 175 times before he will die. I'm reluctant to try for now, I think I'll postpone that until George will give us a hint when V0.38 will be release. *volunteeringforbetatest*

All I can say is: Congratulations Lunever! I know I would never have the patience required to fulfill such a task!

Absolutely! Your left-mouse button finger must have a huge bunion on it by now! You should probably receive an award for "Most dedicated DM player ever" or something!

Yes, great work Lunever, I have enjoyed following your progress reports

Lol, yet my gHoF-score has been entirely unremarkable. Maybe that algorithm should be worked over, along with XP calculation.

You know, when I first got my hands on Amiga-CSB, I just loved it, not only because of the new and twisted dungeon, but also because it allowed me to play again the characters that had accompanied me through so many hours of playing DM. It was also during that time that I had started playing paper&pen and seeing characters more as persons than as tactical pieces.
So when RTC introduced the universal import feature, I really started to like RTC a lot. Yet that very import feature is intimately interconnected with the difficulty increment. Since I think the import feature to be so import-ant, it's been also important to me to get the difficulty increment balanced. With the fixes George has announced for V0.38 though I trust that this now has been successfully achieved.

Several things:

Firstly, and most importantly, congratulations on beating DM on the hardest difficulty setting!

Secondly, and as discussed previously, I agree with your general sentiment that it was so hard not to be fun. Hopefully, the adjustments I've made will allow toe-to-toe combat with all the monsters.

Thirdly, I agree with the problem with the gHoF calculation; clearly it should take into account the difficulty level. The trick here is that there are logically two difficulty levels merged into one. There is the raise in difficulty due to importing a party that is too strong for the dungeon and this shouldn't be rewarded with increased score. There is also the raise in difficulty due to manually setting an even higher difficulty level and this should definitely be rewarded. I will need to do a bit of experimentation to work out how best to balance these.

Finally, there's V0.38. As ever, it'll be out when its done, but more helpfully it shouldn't be too long now - possibly next week.