Petition/Ideas to Keep the Madness in Madness!

[grmblfzzz]

As some of you probably know, Stition recently beat Madness/Roguelike, and I also have a contender loafing around in the east. Aside from class specific abuses that were largely dealt with (i.e. Ambuscade), there are a few factors that really hinder difficulty in modern tome, and some proposed solutions here. Some of which are deliciously evil and fun! As always, I'm aware that the majority of players don't want crazy difficult things, but since DG introduced madness I have faith that he'd like to see the higher difficulties remain difficult!

There are two main general issues as I see it: All the set bosses (including the last ones) are kind of pushovers compared to randbosses (or the player!), and enemy AI/pathing/awareness is still terrible. I'd sincerely hope for these or other solutions implemented probably on Insane/Madness.

Problem 1: Wussy bosses

Due to a wide variety of factors including general power creep, new sweeter artifacts/randarts, infinite scaling hurting enemies more than player, etc, all of the set bosses are incredibly easy. In madness particularly it's sad comparing them to random randbosses.

Solution: Forgot who proposed it, but Starkeep has been messing around with an addon that does it and I think it's an elegant and interesting solution: give the set bosses at least 1 (hopefully more for like The Master/Last bosses) randboss trait! That is, add some random class traits on top of what they already have, not replace. This not only makes them much more challenging, but also makes them more interesting and a unique challenge per game. Also fits in with the theme of Madness of bosses all over the place, and doesn't require messing around with each individual encounter


Problem 2: Pathing (Still!)

If you bother being tactical, there's just an infinity of ways to abuse the horrible AI pathing. Even completely without digging, just roaming around corners, enemies just lose track of you and mill about (even with hunted). It's trivially easy to disengage from all but the most wide open/crowded levels and rest indefinitely without enemies being able to find you. Can post video's of people milling about for thousands of turns without finding me if required.

Solution 1: Hackem_muche found the difficulty and made an addon for this long ago, some of which may or may not have been implemented (didn't keep up with the coding, but there were some ambiguous 1.05 patch notes...). Either way, I think he just reduced/capped their tendancy to completely lose track of you when out of LOS... and I assure you that there's no meaningful improvement in current pathing. I propose radically reducing their losing track of you factor, ideally to not at all. When hunted... you should feel hunted!

Solution 2: Alternatively, if you wanted to only localize real difficulty to madness, you could make it so that when you get hunted they maintain awareness (at least for a lot longer) instead of it lasting only a couple of turns.

[SageAcrin]

Trust me, enemies constantly staying aware of you forever gets really old, really fast; Back in the Release Candidates, it happened for a bit and would lead to 80% of Trollmire instantly swarming your location on entry, for an example.

I'd suggest just extending the Hunted awareness period if anything.

For the bosses... why randboss? Make them Rare. Rare's less of a raw stat multiplier, is the main difference-the interesting thing is the added class, not just making them more damaging/durable, right?

Having said that, I'm not sure if that would interfere with their drops, in either case. It might; May need special coding.

[grmblfzzz]

I disagree on the awareness getting old! I quite fondly remember ye-olde ToME before that shenanigans was implemented. The thing is that on non-Madness, even enemies granted perfect awareness (that is, non-decaying awareness), would still only have it once they became aware of you. Mind you, I only recommend these changes for Insane+, but at the very least having the hunter buff lasting a *lot* longer would remove lots of abuse potential. This milling about/ease of disengaging at will is probably the single thing that effects the relative ease of things. Even on madness, it's very rare that you can't escape/rest to full with the greatest of ease without even leaving the level.

As for the boss part, not sure if I was clear. Not saying they should be just pure randbosses, or rares, etc. I'm suggesting that they keep all their base stuff and have a random class's traits *added* to them on top of that. I'd recommend one trait for most, maybe 2+ for key ones, which I suppose would technically be adding rare/unique to them. For instance having the master also have random solipsist/corrupter/whatever traits. This would serve to both make them more challenging by adding to their talents/hp/etc (most all set bosses actually have very few skills being part of the problem), but would make each encounter more unique.

As is, barring some very few exceptions, all the set bosses are just relaxing interludes to actually challenging things... which is really the opposite of how it should be.

[Stition]

I could imagine the torture of having Argoniel with shield wall and 400 armor, or Elandar as a summoner...
I like this better than just increasing the level of the later content, since levels don't address the bosses being relatively weak compared to regular enemies. I also enjoy the non-linearity of some randomness and the possibility of being unlucky (part of roguelikes).
The hunted! suggestion is amazing, I think it's only 8 turns right now? Extending that would be amazing. One of the most intense places is Braighs' lair, since the sandworms are pretty good at running you down. I enjoy the feeling that every turn is critical and having to run for your life to rest a couple turns.
I'm not sure how difficult implementing these would be, but the hunted duration and possibly radius would be awesome.

[darkgod]

I'll address your concerns
Clearly if madness is winnable it must be considered a bug !

[Hachem_Muche]

I have a couple of suggestions that may address your concerns:

For the pathing and awareness issues:
Yes the addon I made got implemented into the main game -- and quickly raised complaints of how hard it was to keep npcs from tracking you!
(I think this was mostly just players getting used to a more accurate AI.)

There are easily adjustable parameters in the new code that can decrease the error in the npc's estimate of your position when you're out of LOS. So reducing the uncertainty at higher difficulties will make them much better at finding/pathing to you.
There's also other parameters, particularly a range limit, that limits how effectively npc's pass their targets to allies. Raising this limit would both increase the number of npc's that try to engage you and increase their persistence in following you.

As for boosting the difficulty of fixed bosses. I think that adding a random class (like rares get) could be done reasonably easily without affecting other characteristics. How random do you want "fixed" bosses to be, though?
The other thing that could be done is to update their talent definitions to scale better with their character level, including adding completely new talents as they level up. I think most bosses in the game could benefit from this at normal difficulty as they can occur (at possibly very high levels) in the I.D. and players frequently go back to starting zones after they've gained a few levels. The bonus bosses after returning from the east are particularly weak in this regard.

[grmblfzzz]

Three cheers for DG and Hackem_Muche! I'd also like to say, if I havn't at some point, that asside from these gripes I love how Madness turned out with all the randbosses and Hunted (also props to SageAcrin for the initial suggestion if I recall correctly). So fun! Although, perhaps in addition to these changes, maybe we should nerf Stition while we're at it? His patience is inhuman!

To address Hachem_Muche's points: First off, excellent that these things are now relatively easily implemented! As far as the pathing/game difficulty goes, the way I see it is that in modern ToME there's just so much versatility and tools available to the player that simple scaling of enemy attributes isn't enough. If AI awareness was increased throughout the difficulties (as well as the other factors you mentioned), this would help maintain a good slope of difficulty in addition to the current scaling without just ramping everything up to out of control levels.

As for the bosses, while I agree with you that individually tweaking lots of the encounters would be cool, adding new abilities and whatnot... that also strikes me as probably a pain in the ass requiring a lot of work in terms of coding/design/balance. If it wasn't too hard to add some random traits to bosses, this seems like a fairly elegant solution.

Finally, a note on how random is good for fixed encounters... Personally, and I think Stition too, wouldn't mind pretty much any arbitrarily large increase in difficulty or shenanigans related to this. As said, you just have so many tools nowadays you'd have to go really crazy with it to even approach overboard But in general, I think it'd also be refreshing and something you might consider sprinkling into lower difficulties as well. ToME is already one of the *least* random of all roguelikes, and it'd be something that'd make each game somewhat more unique.

[darkgod]

Hehe

As for nerfing Stition .. what about in Madness turns automatically pass after X seconds?!

[grmblfzzz]

I'd like to point out that of particular import for buffing bosses is Elandar: With the way dmg and scaling work he's 2-shottable by probably half of the classes, even on Madness. Poor showing if he want's to rule the world!

[darkgod]

Stuff has been done.

[grmblfzzz]

Wow, looking around at the commits, those changes seem amazing! Your responsiveness to feedback is, as always, impressive and appreciated.

Also, the speed with which you can throw out code when you put your mind to it, heh. Just in the last 10 hours you've demonstrated that you have the energy of at least a thousand Grmblfzz's