Dungeon Master Forum

Hi! I've been away quite a long time by now, but eventually I got a notification about George mentioning V 0.35, and I wouldn't want to miss a chance for some input before it will be released.

Me being away had 2 reasons: First and foremost, I've been drowning in studying and didn't have much time for RTC. But there is also another reason: I've played RTC from 0.15 to 0.34, and I've done everything with it that can be done, even at absurd difficulty levels. For some time I didn't know whether George would take the time to continue developing RTC to 0.35 at all, and I have to admit that I completely lost any interest in RTC, because I didn't believe there would ever be a chance to have the modifications implemented that I would need to get hooked to RTC again, and I would love to get into RTC once more very much. The changes I'm practically begging for have been asked by me several times before, and I hope one day I will get through:

Please, please allow to customize the individual settings that make up difficulty individually, manually and at any time, instead of having them alltogether set automatically upon starting a new adventure with old characters. The settings I'm speaking about are: Monster strength, monster speed, and last but not least nutrition drain speed. Any savegame thus modified will then contain a tiny bit of information about these changes so George can easily identify them and bar them from the global hi-score. That's really all I'd need to praise RTC once more as the damn best version of the damn best dungeon game ever.

Hmm - there are about 15 different parameters that are changed by the difficulty setting (although the 3 with the biggest impact are those you mention).

Making all of these individually configurable seems excesively complicated.

I think that they key point here is not the individual configurability or otherwise of these parameters, but whether or not the game is a challenge / fun to play.

My understanding from your previous postings was that the food drain was too large and so the game wasn't fun and so since then I've reduced this aspect. Are you saying that the balance between the various parameters still isn't right? Perhaps, the food / water shouldn't be drained at all?

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I need to understand your motivation for wanting this change - if you can give me more information about why you want to be able to change each individual parameter then I can understand what best to do about it.

Ok, Ill try to point out my motivation more precisely then:

1) I do like to go on and on with the same old characters and continue to develop them. Which made me probably test the difficulty adaption more than most other players.

2) I do like the game to be a challenge. While it might be fun to try out an archmaster party in a low-level game once or twice, in the long run RTC is right about increasing difficulty for more powerful characters.

3) From the earliest days of computer games I always disliked games that prevented me from getting lost in the game's world by imposing hectical time limits. Thus in DM the problem is that the increased nutrition drain is changing the approach to the game very much. No matter whether I play a high-power or a low-power party, my favourite approach to the game is not the Antman-destroys-Chaos-in-9-minutes method but rather the explore-and-get-lost-in-the-game-for-hours method. With an increase of the drain speed you can't do that, and since there is no more food available than in the standard game you got to kill millions of rats regularly, since the rats are so strong at high levels that the food gained is outweighted by 95% of the food used up even during the very fight to get at food. More important: What I always have been loving most in DM is that sense of realism the game created. Having to eat 10 cheese per 5 minutes of game completely removes that sense of realism. So in a nutshell, an option to simply disable the food drain speed adaption would make me pretty happy and remove the major part of any problems I have with my style of play in RTC. So yes, you did reduce the drain for 0.34 to a bearable level, but that does not change the overall problem of disliking strict time limits and it does not work with a simultanous increase of monster strength and speed, since these both factors also increase the nutrition used up to beat an edible monster, negating most of the actual nutrition gained. And as mentioned before, killing countless screamers and rats gets unbearable boring at some point.

4) If the drain can be optionally disabled like described above I see no strong need to adapt monster strength, yet it might allow players and dungeon designers to customize the game more to their level of gaming ability and make play-testing easier. So I still vote for it, but it has not that high a priority.

5) Monster speed is a different thing. I REALLY appreciate the increase of monster speed that is implemented in RTCs difficulty adaption. I mean, when I played good old Amiga DM for the first time I got all hands full with things to do, but once you get accustomed to the game, you can just to easily run around every obstacle and monster. Many years after Amiga DM I played PC-MS-DOS-DM for the first time in years and I almost slept over during combat. So RTC gave me what I needed: Monster speed and weapon recovery time fast enough to feel that sense of realism I like in DM and its clones. Unfortunately at the highest levels of difficulty the monsters are so absurdly fast that there is almost no playable aproach to tactical combat anymore. So while I do appreciate a hard challenge I would still like that challenge to be playable. With an option for customization of speed a player could define for himself what speed he still thinks to be playable. So I vote for a customization option for monster speed. If that is to complicated to implement a slight decrease of speed at the highest level might also do it. At least it should be possible to take a step of movement without the monster moving in the very same microsecond along as if it was knowing what you'd do before you knew yourself, there should be at least a split-second of monster reaction time even at archmaster level, split-second meaning a time that is at least long enough to allow the player to perceive the reaction visually, instead of having precognitive monsters dynamically glued to the parties' position.

6) Although they are probably only of minor importance to my suggestions: What are these other 12 parameters you mentioned in your reply? I'm just curious.

3 is an excellent argument - I'll remove the additional drain on food and water altogether.

5 is more interesting; the speed which you're looking for would seem to be about 3 levels down from archmaster, but presumably at that level, you find the rest of the modifiers too easy - is that right? If so, then I think that the best option would be to make the other modifiers stronger so that they're consistent with the speed. That would make the current = master level about the same as the current archmaster (apart from the speed) and the new archmaster basically impossible (which was the original intention).

Ideally, at the top level, you should be unable to complete the game for multiple reasons (as opposed to always one reason, for example if you were constantly running out of food).

For 6, the list is (or was):

- food drain
- water drain
- health attack
- health drain (from poison etc)
- stamina attack
- stamina drain (from movement etc)
- mana attack
- monster rotation speed
- monster movement speed
- monster attack speed
- monster armour
- damage done by monster
- damage done by party

That comes to 13 off the top of my head; there are probably a few more that I've forgotten about though!

I must be missing the point here. Are the monsters too fast? too slow? Is food drain too fast? too slow?

My experience with RTC shows that the monsters and food drain are slower then what I remember from the Amiga (especially the DETH Knights, they can't lay a hand on me in RTC and were a real terror on Amiga). This makes the game easier (that or the fact that I've been through the DM dungeon about 10 times)!

RTC already has 4 levels of difficulty! Take 4, 3, 2 or 1 character through!

The first time through the original Amiga DM, I had to abandon the party on the Rat level for exactly the reasons pointed about above... ran out of food and I was too weak to face the rats. But the second time through, I discovered the expressway and screamer plantation so my food problems were over. The challenges and discoveries are what make the game fun and give it replay value. I still love DM and get bored playing modern marvels like Elder Scrolls and [A]D&D series that are cropping up all over the place.

`K

K wrote:I must be missing the point here.

Lunever is talking about the "extra" difficulty built into the RTC engine which makes everything even harder than the standard dungeon was intended.

Have a look at your config.txt file, and try changing the "DIFFICULTY" parameter to something other than 0. What Lunever is doing is trying to play at level 15, which is impossible because the characters get hungry too quickly (whereas my original intention for this setting was that it should be impossible because the monsters are too strong) - have a go if you dare

K: As George pointed out, it is possible to set the additional increased difficulty manually in the config file. But if you re-import old. experienced characters into a new game (which is one of RTCs features I love most, I've always been wishing for such a feature since the earliest days of DM), the engine will automatically increase that difficulty without any manual control. Which right now gives me the idea to allow the manual modification in the config file not only to increase but also to decrease difficulty (of course not below 0). I suppose that shouldn't be to difficult to implement.

George: Ok, among the other parameters there is one aspect that is also relevant. BTW: With nutrition drain I meant both, food and water drain together. Although the stamina drain is not a factor that makes archmaster level impossible, like food/water drain it is also does not feel to realistic if an archmaster warrior is quickly exhausted by simply walking a bit around. Maybe that should be treated the same way nutrition drain will be treated.

I think the strength of monsters as it is now is pretty well balanced. I mean, Grey Lord, even a screamer puts up a hard fight at archmaster. level.
As you pointed out speed is also balanced up to expert or master-1, but afterwards it gets out of hand. I am not against monsters so fast that they are near to impossible to beat, as I am not against anything other that is near to impossible. I've done it successfully before even at the current near to impossible conditions, but it wasn't an experience that I liked, because the discussed aspects removed any sense of realism from the game, which spoils it altogether for my taste. So with speed, as I said: Please do a slight decrease at the higher master levels, and not an increase of strenght, because the latter does not remove the problem, that monsters seem to react to your actions before you have performed any. If the party takes a step back, I have no problems with monsters immediately following, on the contrary, I always felt that original DM monsters have been reacting to slow. But there should be at least a brief, perceivable moment between the party moving and the monster reacting, to allow for the one thing I feel to be so important: That sense of realism. I'm not talking about making the hard archmaster monsters tame and slow. They may remain almost as fast as they are now, I merely want the reaction time to be perceivable by the player, or at least on the edge of being perceivable.

Hmm, now RTC V 0.35 is out, but right now I can't test it because I'm not on my own computer.

So I wonder: After all these marvelous "Fixed for V 0.35" postings by George, has this topic also been adressed in V 0.35? Please let me know, I've been looking forward for V 0.35 very much and I just can't endure waiting until tomorrow to find out!

Ok, I did a first short archmaster test in V0.37, with the following result (for now):

- While I always lost interest in previous test somewhere along the food replenishment, this time the game has been usable at least, albeit it IS hard (which is exactly what it is supposed to be). I played for now only the first level of O-DM. My first close-in combat resulted in an On-Master Hissssa dealing 1 or 2 points of damage per falchion chop while the attacking mummy inflicted 479 points of damage. This results in a complete shift of combat tactics: Following a fighter's approach has become impossible, now the only chance to make a stand without a door available is shooting quadruple maximum power fireballs. And even then ... I had to retreat from a couple of Screamers because even the combined full Mana of an On-master party dealed out in lots of fireballs and a few poison clouds was only enough to kill but 2 of them. Tough!

When I jumped down a pit most of my well developed On-Master characters instantly died. While this is unimportant in O-DM, this behaviour might make puzzles impossible, that rely on the party jumping down a pit. Therefore, while I really like most things that increase the challenge, for reasons of realism and dungeon/puzzle-stability I suggest reducing this tremendous increase of falling damage.

- Speaking of On-Master characters: George, you once said, that archmaster difficulty makes the game near impossible to play without an archmaster party. Why is it then, that the RTC engine automatically sets the difficulty to archmaster, although all in all the party in question is rather On-master?

continuing report:

Just played the treasure vaults (mummies / stone piles/ trollins) and had a lot of fun. I didn't think that after all these RTC sessions it could that much fun again! Finally the game forces me to return to the hit&run and hell shut the doors tactics of my earliest FTL-DM-sessions.

One question: Since I'm right now playing not on my own but on someone elses very old machine I'm not sure: George, did you fine-tune the monsters' speed once more? For the current settings seem to be as good as perfect: The monsters are darn fast, but there is a split-second of reaction time remaining, as it should be (at least if it isn't just because I'm playing on an old pentium II).

Speaking of that old machine: Despite having turned off almost everything starting from config options and ranging to disconnecting the machine and disabling even virus protection and firewall, the game sometimes becomes slowed down, especially when there are either a lot of monsters about or a lot of items piled on the floor, especially if either happens when it is rather dark. Is it possible to include some option in some future release so I can continue to play RTC on this old machine, like an option that makes RTC behave like FTL-DM in respect to the number of active dungeon levels?

Ah, and one more request for fine-tuning playability: Due to the faster game pace spell durations seem to be quite short, which results in even the most powerful shield spells wearing off before they had a chance of being of much use during combat, maybe spell durations like YaIr can be a bit less shortened in duration.

Ok, I guessed it would happen at some point (remember - my last archmaster tries had been abandoned at the screamer chamber):

The difficulty setting becomes unreal at some point: I just battled swamp slimes for the first time, and while I could accept the fact that they absorb 2 dozens of fireballs before dying and are impossible to get away from due to their speed and relentlessness when caught in a shutting door, there is one thing that is too exaggerated I think: It doesn't matter anymore what characters you use because every hit of a swamp slime will kill a character without any chance of survival. The only way I was able to kill the first 2 speciemen encountered was by tricking them with a staircase. I've always been cherishing increased monster strength, but if from now on for the remaining game every single hit will result in instant death there won't be any place in the game anymore for character developement or different combat tactics.

So I suggest either the engine calculates the difficulty level differently and only sets an actual archmaster party to archmaster (and not an On-master party like it does now) and/or the increased damage is reduced slightly, so at least a very resilient character has a chance of surviving at least 1 hit.

Grey Lord! I just finished the swamp slime / couatl level.
First half of the monsters I lured into traps and then shot them with lots of patience, second half I drove with fear weapons where I could take the time to gift them several dozen fireballs (those monsters easily absorb 1000 Mana each). Right, monsters should be hard on this level, but since a single spell hit will kill any player character, open combat is no longer an option anyway, and if I have to lure monsters into traps anyway to get rid of them, I don't see the point of making a patience test of every single monster. Cleaning the north-eastern corner of the level alone took me several hours.
So here's my proposal to fix this and at the same time make them monsters even more dangerous: reduce either the increase of their resistance (preferably) or the increase of their hit points (alternately) a bit, reduce the increase of their spell damage considerably, but compensate these losses by teaching the monster AI a few tricks:

Right now every monster just charges right unto the party. Let quick monsters with a strong melee attack keep this behaviour, let slow monsters with strong melee attacks lurk around corners, and first and foremost let monsters with ranged attacks stay behind and even worse: Let them do a player-character-like manoevre, i.e. lurking behind a corner, sidestepping faced toward the party to get a clear shot and then immediately after firing retreat behind the corner. That'd be by far more nasty and interesting than trapping them and then shoot some 50 fireballs upon each and every medium level monsters (I probably don't even WANT to know how much the dragon will take, and I suppose the demons' chamber will probably be unplayable, but I will see that soon enough).

continuing report:

Haha! I just encountered the first wizards eye? Wanna guess what happens if you get hit by a wizards eye at this level? Right, the entire party just instantly dies. So with the current settings there is no difference anymore between what a wizards eye does and what let's say an archdemon does - the effect is identical. Again - this should be adjusted a bit.

I fail to see what the bug is here. As I understand it, you're playing on the hardest difficulty level and you're saying that it's hard? What did you expect

I will however reduce the damage done slightly. I imagine the correct scaling would be such that the dragon causes an average of 999 points of damage per hit and everything else scales down in comparison? Does that sound about right?

Well, depends on. The import characters feature is IMO one of the coolest features of RTC. Imagine that I design a dungeon that includes puzzles that require the party to jump down a pit, or walk down a corridor where they have to take a hit from fireball shooter or a fireball throwing demon, the choice of characters might render the dungeon inoperable, even if the dungeon designer does want to allow imported characters. Its not the hard difficulty I see as a problem, it's the resulting multiple chanceless instant death effects that allow players only in certain dungeons to come up with tricks to circumvent them, while other dungeons become incompatible with the import functionality, whether the dungeon designer wants that or not.

I see only 3 ways of solving that problem:

1) You could reduce the spell damage increase considerably. But in this instance the both of us have quite different approaches: You rather think high level should be virtually unplayable, while I think it should be pretty challenging but still playable, and since there is no no absolute need for these different points of view to become compatible, this might not be the first choice.

2) I think my current On-master part could handle Ee-master difficulty quite well, but the engine sets it to archmaster anyway. A modification of the auto-adaption algorithm to get a result closer to the parties actual average level might help a lot also.

3) A different approach might to allow the dungeon designer to manually override, set or disable the auto-adaption. Since as far as I know the dungeon designer is allowed to protect his dungeon with a password against editing, any abuse by power-gaming players should be largely prevented (aside from that, power-gamers who really want to do it can create super-heroes an a custom dungeon and then import them anyway, and with some programing ability might hack into those settings too).

I dunno about all this. It seems you're the only one playing on such a stupidly impossible difficulty setting. It seems like a lot of work to constantly try balancing this to make it "just right" for you when probably no-one else will ever play any of the games at this level.

It's like playing Doom on Nightmare difficulty and complaining it's tough. It was never designed to be playable at that level!

Also, everything you are balancing for DM might completely go meh for any other custom dungeon....

Yes, it may well be that I over-emphasize my personal preference of re-importing the same party over and over again.

So yes, Beo, you are right, I should stress this topic less, even if I feel that every functionality of RTC should be fine-tuned and balance as close to perfection as possible (but then - its George who has the work with it, not me).
I promise - as soon as dungeons allow for any method to override that algorithm I won't ever mention it again anywhere.

True,. what you really want is the DM JAva sliders, ior their equivalnet where you could make the game faster,m monsters faster, stamina drain more, etc yourself...

That would be perfect to be available for RTC too, but it has been discussed before and proved to be to difficult to implement.
But if there'd be any method of manually determining that I think that party in that dungeon would be best to play at Ee-Master, no matter what the automatized algorithm says, I'll be completely satisfied and wouldn't dream of ever complaining again about that functionalities details.

continuing report

I proceeded through the void. Since there aren't any spell-casting monsters running about it wasn't that special. The battle for the Delta and the Jewel Symal though has been very hard due to the vast number of hitpoints and resistance of the undead guardians. All in all by now I have adapted to a combat behaviour I'd summarize as pump a thousand mana into them, hold them at bay with fear if necessary, and then run and find some door or better a staircase.

I had to leave behind a yew staff because I'm unable to jump down that pit and survive. Luckily its just a staff and not some item important to solve the game.
George, when you have rescaled the spell damage slightly as described by you above, I'll be probably satisfied with that, even if it should still be above what I would have set, but if I may do so, I would like to insist on reducing the increase of jumping damage at least to a point where a healthy character usually at least survives the jump, it is completely ok if he is heavily injured from head to toe to hit points afterwards, I would just like to retain my party compatible to pit puzzles (you just don't have a rope in all places).

I'm anxious meeting the pain rats soon now, handling them will probably be the toughest challenge so far.

continuing report

Well, I did handle the pain rats and vexirks, though I have to admit that I killed most of them with staircases, and a few by shooting through portcullises.

Until know I could have an eye on monsters' damage progression, but that is no longer possible, because you don't see how much damage something does if it kills the character hit, and by now every hit is instant death, whether it is a rat's bite or a vexirk's spell.

George, can you please allow the damage dealt to be displayed for a moment in the skull picture of a dying character? I would really like to know whether something inflicts 900 or 9000 points of damage.

All I can tell now is that even after calculating in protection spells, protective items, armour and anti-magic & anti-fire each hit does at least 695 points of damage (probably more), because that's the number of hit points of my strongest fighter (dunno, the level-up algorithm had been changed some time ago, maybe today's On-masters have usually more than that?)

Since a real fight with a pain rat is not possible, because every bite instantly kills any charactger, no matter whether it is strong Hissssa or tiny Tiggy: George, please apply the rescale described by you above for spells also to physical combat (.i.e. the Dragon inflicting 999, everything else being scaled down in relation to that). If strong and resilient charactersare at least would be able to survive 1 hit, albeit heavily wounded, the game makes more sense, for now it doesn't matter anymore whether you play a heaviliy armoured tank or a weakly robe in regard to getting hit.

Hmm, just started the scorpion level. I'll proceed a bit more soon, but if I think through the rest of the dungeon, I very much doubt, whether it will be possible to solve it. It's much different from the first 8 / 9 Levels, where always some stairs or closable doors are at hand. Maybe I will have to wait for V0.38 to have a chance at least, but first things first, I'll see how far I'll get with the current settings.

Umm, no, i hate that idea of seeing the damage then the character dying, it just feels so mechanics based = i DM you had the shock, sudden;y someone died! I like that shock...well I don't, but still it's a subtle thing I'd hate if it were gone. Especially if your argument is to loose something atmospheric for the sake of seeing a game mechanic in this very skewed game!

OK - For V0.38 I've reduced the damage done by monsters at high difficulty levels. Playing at level 15, a single blow by the strongest monster (stone golem) on a fully armoured character will do 999 points of damage.

I've also reduced the speed of monster movement a bit (again, only at the high levels) to make it a bit more fun to play and generally give the party a chance of fighting toe to toe.

Ah, thanks esp. since I didn't even dare to ask for the latter. But it sounds very reasonable, because then there will be a difference again in monsters speed, which is somewhat indistinguishable now because every monster will pursue the party so quickly that you can't get away from it. I did not yet meet a stone golem, but I think a stone golem that runs like a giggler might look a bit funny, and that's probably not what Chaos had in mind when placing them in his dungeon.

Now if you also adjust the pitfall damage I think the difficulty adaption parameters will be perfect. It will be still unbelievable hard, but at least in theory it should be possible to complete the game (well, maybe I shouldn't say that before having entered the demons chamber - the demons might eventually be killed after several hundred short raids into it, but whether Chaos can be fluxcaged at that pace of speed remains to be seen. But I will try, maybe I can do it).

Yep, I did all damage at the same time and its scaled in proportion as with the monster damage (just forgot to mention it).

Very good, thank you!

If you would like someone, err, that'd be me, to beta-test the damage adjucation for V0.38 I'd be very happy to do so.

Will you also adjust the initial auto-adaption algorithm slightly so it doesn't shove an On-master party into archmaster level anymore, instead leaving the latter to actual archmaster parties?

continuing report

Ha! No closable doors at hand and the stairs cut off by a monster generator trigger? No problem, I killed many monsters by turning the Deceiver's snake-labyrinth into a weapon. My plan to turn the Zooooom into a weapon however coudln't be executed, because it seems that the monsters (2 wizard's eyes) that are supposed to lure beyond the Zooooom already had wandered into it and teleported into the Deceiver's snake-labyrinth were they died along with the rest. Yet, when I tried to reload my latest savegame it crashed, I mailed it along with the diags to you George, lucky me the bug does not reproduce.

Lunever wrote:Yet, when I tried to reload my latest savegame it crashed, I mailed it along with the diags to you George, lucky me the bug does not reproduce.

Was this the instant you re-loaded, or had you managed to move / fight at all before the crash?