I just decided to run a character (zombie Wood-Elf Mindcrafter) with Ironman rooms, after a while using normal dungeon generation... It does make the game more interesting in some ways (faster too), but I think it needs some changes.
The big problem is the predominance of huge greater vaults. This is not so good because:
1. Most greater vaults offer fairly lame rewards. The big exception is the GCV, which is very easy to handle and offers tons of artifacts right on the floor.
2. Greater vaults take up a huge amount of space, causing problems with quests, and often making it very tedious to get at dungeon guardians.
3. In addition to greater vaults there are a lot of boss vaults. These are little 10x10 or so mini-vaults that contain guaranteed OoD monsters and objects.
So for anyone with magic mapping, standard operating procedure looks like this:
1. Scum around for boss vaults and GCVs.
2. Tunnel into one, kill everything you can, and teleport away everything you can't kill.
3. Recall to town with millions of GP worth of powerful items.
This is especially trivial for priests, since Mindcraft gives magic mapping and teleport other in one package.
But I have some ideas for tackling the problem...
A. Make teleport other rare and expensive, and perhaps ineffective on certain monsters.
B. Change the vaults so that more difficult ones have better rewards.
C. Make monster drops better, especially for uniques. Make stuff on vault floors not so great, encouraging the player to raid the nastier vaults.
D. Alter the dungeon generation code to favor lesser vaults and pits when Ironman rooms are enabled.
D is the most enticing method I think, since it's so simple, but IMO the rubbish drops are going to have to be fixed anyway at some point - right now really good drops are mostly limited to dungeon guardians. Also teleport other probably shouldn't work on high-level uniques.
I figure I'll set up a new Git branch to test out some of this stuff.
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