ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

How about this - when an ooze is first generated on a level, it has a cloning counter with effect akin to DNA telomeres. Each cloning decrements the counter of those produced, and when an ooze has counter at zero it cannot clone.

If the current settings for cloning are felt to be okay (maybe I just don't have the knack ) then it would still be worthwhile to have such a counter, with an initial setting which allows for generation of a large enough crowd to punish the careless ooze murderer. It would avoid having showstoppers created by a duration/area effect - once Mt Doom became unreachable because of brittle oozes on a level which approaches it, the game turns simply became too long in real time. Okay, being dumb enough to set a load of the most promiscuous little gits on fire should be punished, but that's a bit much.

Say it started at 8, the most ham-fisted oozophobe would end up with 2(7), 4(6), 8(5) - - 256(0, no more cloning). So nobody's quite that poor at ooze assassination, but a more likely 50-100 of the things should be sufficient to function as a "wish I'd never started this" crowd.

Maybe with a drop in Ooze HP, or you had better have some serious AoE damage in reserve.

Predawn

Ah rightie, that's the thing, it's not clear to me how stuff currently works - does the HP get shared among the clones. This pack of brittle jobs, there must have been hundreds-thousands, and each turn the poor CPU had to decide what each was going to do next, check for this and that, so forth. The limit to cloning would operate on top of whatever's currently there though, it'd be a way to preserve their ingame nastiness whilst ensuring they can't become a gamestopper.

I'm not sure if this is how it is currently in effect, but with npcs that split, I would have them generate 1 new npc per damage source/turn, with a maximum number of 'splits'/turn based on rank/size. The split npc would have 50% of the current hp of the 'originator', and wouldn't be able to act until a full turn on their speed level has passed.