ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Ok, let's try again.

I don't think ammo creation is a great skill at the moment.

It rewards boring play; namely: sitting in a safe spot endlessly making arrows (or shots). There's no reason why a level 1 archer who's never been in a fight can't have several sets of ego elm arrows, and maybe even some ash arrows. And if your boredom tolerance is good, there's no reason to put more than one point into it.

I think the skill should have two attributes:
- It should be difficult to scum.
- It should reward advancing it to rank 5.

I'm not sure how best to achieve that, but here are some ideas:

1. Make skill level have a bigger effect on the quality of ammo made. Perhaps rank 5 should effectively guarantee you ammo one category better than rank 1. (this could be achieved partly by making rank 1 give you worse ammo than you would expect at the moment...)

2. Make it passive, or sustained. Every unlit square you reveal adds to a counter. When the counter reaches some value, you get a new set of ammo. (magic mapping could be abused here -- ideally it would only work on squares you reveal with LOS, but that might be impractical. And at least you can only magic-map an area once..)

3. As an alternative to (2), make it require components. Perhaps gems would work here. If you make ammo with no gem, you get regular ammo. If you want ego ammo, you need to find the appropriate gem. Higher rank ammo requires higher rank gems.

Repton wrote: 2. Make it passive, or sustained. Every unlit square you reveal adds to a counter. When the counter reaches some value, you get a new set of ammo. (magic mapping could be abused here -- ideally it would only work on squares you reveal with LOS, but that might be impractical. And at least you can only magic-map an area once..)

While i agree generally that AC is boring and cheesy, i'd like to point out something with that one:

It would make the amount of ammo generatable finite. Since the amount of monsters is in theory infinite i guess you can see my problem with this? If instead you based it on monsters killed it might work - but would be tough to balance so you don't run out of arrows vs. trolls as opposed to ants.

Repton wrote:I think the skill should have two attributes:
- It should be difficult to scum.
- It should reward advancing it to rank 5.

I agree. My way to fix these would be:
Make AC always succeed (but arrows created by you should be flagged so that shops won't accept them); talent level would affect arrows' ego and rank this way:
TL 1 : item level worse than yours; no ego
TL 2 : item level equivalent to yours; no ego
TL 3 : item level equivalent to yours; standard ego (flaming; acidic; shocking)
TL 4 : item level better than yours; standard ego
TL 5 : item level better than yours; good ego (icy; slime-covered; elemental)

This would really reward players spending 5 points in it.

I would also suggest that slingers be able to create high-quality ammo more easily. I personally think that archers have an edge over slingers in that they focus on their STR stat, which also aids them in carrying more items, so this would help make slingers a bit more appealing. Plus, in real life, it's MUCH easier to come up with something suitable to fire with a sling than it is to forge an arrowhead, create an arrow shaft out of suitable wood, put the two together and then add appropriate fletching. With a slinger, it can be as easy as picking up a stone.

Remember that these days, archers and slingers have access to the inventory management skill tree. And that scales off cunning...

I made it a sustain and changed a bit how it works

How about doing away with ammo altogether and redesigning archers accordingly? Quite a few problems would simply disappear. Plenty of video games have done this, and it's always a relief to me when I see that I don't have to micromanage stacks of rocks/arrows/bolts/bullets/whatever. The biggest problem is that the game loses some depth, so I'd suggest adding depth to bows and slings. Give them brandings, or give archers talents that brand ammo fired from their weapons or something. There's all sorts of fun possibilities that don't involve managing ammunition.

Dunno about removing ammo completely. I really like having different kind of ammo and the chance of creating it by yourself. Besides, shooting ammoless weapons gets really boring after a while.

I think it would be useful to have specialized ammo to deal against certain type of enemies, for example, piercing arrows/heavy shots (anti-armor), multi-headed arrows/shattering shots (against biological/fleshy mobs), barbed arrows/spiked shots (produces bleeding). But maybe this could be dealt by elements, electricity being useful against armor, fire against bio and poison for consecutive damage.

I think that the way ammo works and the fun of creating it is one of the most fun things about archers right now, so I would be sad to see this removed. Can't say I'm convinced it's broken at all, but that's just me perhaps.

Just two cents, but I've been strongly impressed by Elona's method of dealing with the ammo issue. Basically, you still have both launcher (bow, sling) and ammo (arrow, shot), but the ammo is unlimited and doesn't run out. The system allows you to have specialized ammo without having to deal with a potentially annoying inventory management issue, and scumming -- in the sense of kicking back for X hundred turns and spewing AC to get better ammos -- is a comparative non-issue.

With such a system, the ammo creation skill would probably turn into some sort of sustained ammo enhancement skill or something like Imbue Items for ammo. I could see something boosting the ammo's stats, probably with each level improving an additional aspect (Armor penetration at 1, critical at 2, etc.), for example.

Ammo itself would probably be a bit more rare, but that would be less of an issue. It would also make finding ammo actually interesting and valuable, as you're no longer able to just pull a dozen more stacks of the same thing out of the aether.

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As a side note, AC makes ammo scarcity basically a non-issue. Since it's a non-issue and not really adding anything (Oh, you might have to spend a turn every few thousand switching to another ammo stack in mid fight if you're inattentive, but that's about it.), why not just get rid of it -- that is, the limited ammo aspect -- entirely?

I suggested something like that some time ago: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=21807

Some positive feedback, but obviously it never happened..

i'll jump on this bandwagon. So we get via purchases or looting "Arrows" objects which satisy ammo infinitely.
Hey, we're in Beta - why not try it out?
I think the biggest thing is balance terms of gameplay is ensuring that you have the correct rarity with finding new / better / worse ammo.
It should feel really challenging / rare to find something like slime covered arrows with high damage for example.

I really like this idea. Sounds more fun than doing away with ammo completely but still eliminates the tedium of managing piles of ammo and the chore of ammo creation.

Charlatan73 wrote: It should feel really challenging / rare to find something like slime covered arrows with high damage for example.

It already is very rare though, unless I've been getting remarkably bad luck.

I think I would prefer to have most combat stats to come from the launcher and not the projectile, I don't think I like that the bows only add to damage.

We could still have the stores sell regular ammo but they'd be more useful
And we could also have special ammunitions, some things could still come from the ammo like APR or special effects (e.g. knockback, dragon slaying, explosive)

So, on a regular basis, we'd use normal arrows and still do good damage. On special occasions we'd get our special arrows.