ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

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.

You will also have to do something about the Sandworm Lair. Aside from the queen (who is easy to avoid), bloodsprouts, and wall monsters, there is no monster that a level 20 character can't handle easily. The only danger is getting mobbed in a big vault. Judicious use of monster detection, magic mapping, and the stairs makes it easy to get stat potions and great equipment.

Allowing dragons to be created would make it much harder.

Yes, that'd probably be a good idea too.

Okay, I have set up a git branch called dungeon-tweaks. Here are the changes.

- Dragons and ancient dragons can appear in the Sandworm Lair.

- Vault probability has been tweaked a lot. With Ironman rooms, greater vaults now have a 2% likelihood of appearing; lesser vaults, 8%; nests, 20%; pits, 25%; and random vaults, 5%. I may have gotten something wrong though, so this could be subject to change if I dislike the results.

- Monster drops have been improved. The formula I'm using now for object level is the average of monster and dungeon levels, as before, with a bonus of the monster level minus dungeon level for OoD monsters. This change is experimental and may be unbalancing, so please don't post scores for characters using it! Thx.

I'll see how it all works...

Well, that didn't work as intended at all... No effect I could see on vault generation, and high-level monster drops are still not very rich in ego items. I'll be undoing those changes I think.

Edit: I kept the Sandworm Lair changes in another branch though. That dungeon badly needed the makeover.