[Items] More materials

All new ideas for the upcoming releases of ToME 4.x.x should be discussed here

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Asmageddon
Cornac
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[Items] More materials

#1 Post by Asmageddon »

Having a lot of different materials, of course tiered so alchemy works fine would be much more interesting and would introduce a lot of variety into the game. They should be randomly(weighted using rarity) assigned to items.

Few examples of new materials:

Metal(-like) materials:
* Stone - heavy physical damage. Only like 5% chance for an enchant. Cheap
* Bronze - between iron and steel.
* Silver - additional damage against undead and evil.
* Gold - quite weak but makes for valuable items. Usually has slightly stronger enchants.
* Cold steel - additional ice damage
* Hellstone - can cause enemies to burn, fire damage. Decreases hp regeneration.

Wood(-like) materials:
* Ironwood - hard like iron, very strong. Bows made from it require strength to use, staves have physical damage bonus.
* Living wood - Part of ent body, grants absorption of nature damage, increases damage from fire. Regeneration enchants are more likely and more powerful(if they're present)
* Fungiwood - Hard, wood-like body of giant fungi found deep underground. Often deals poison damage. Some varieties glow.

Leather/cloth(-like) materials:
* Spider silk - very strong and light. Enchants often include speed increase.
* Ethereal cloth - zero armor/defense/physical saves, does not weight anything. Usually heavily enchanted, randomly distributed protections/vulnerabilities against elemental damage types.

Oh, and if you don't like how I spam ideas, just tell me to stop now since I'll be posting a lot of them in near future.

Reverend Bizarre
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Re: [Items] More materials

#2 Post by Reverend Bizarre »

No. The bonuses that you're describing better come from egos, not materials. There are 5 types of materials per material category: wood, leather, cloth and metal, and the game is working good with this quantity. If there were more of 'em, there would be a lot of clutter.

[Edit] As for the last line of your post: you registered only recently and I suppose that you don't have that much experience with ToME 4 (though here I may be wrong). In this case I would recommend you to play the game more before posting the ideas. Also, you can try to discuss 'em first on IRC (rizon.net, #tome).

Grey
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Re: [Items] More materials

#3 Post by Grey »

I say spam away, but give some more consideration for how the current elements work together in the game. The ideas you've given here are straight out incohesive with the current game structure. Also ideas work better when you apply real numbers to them. This lets them be more easily assessed, both externally and internally (for instance, if you sat and looked and what figures a material between iron and steel would have you'd quickly see it'd be pointless).

And definitely consider redoing some of your suggestions as egos. "Living" staff type sounds quite interesting for instance.
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lukep
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Re: [Items] More materials

#4 Post by lukep »

I agree that most of these seem more like egos than materials, see this (quite old) thread for some other material type ideas. As for spamming ideas, go ahead, it's a lot easier to ignore bad ideas than it is to come up with good ones.
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hamrkveldulfr
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Re: [Items] More materials

#5 Post by hamrkveldulfr »

Just a quick little addition, cold steel/iron should be protective or do extra damage to magic based enemies. it has almost always been a magical ward, or an item used to hurt the various magical fauna in many mythologies

Asmageddon
Cornac
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Re: [Items] More materials

#6 Post by Asmageddon »

I think it would be very interesting if certain materials had special properties, so you can enchant/imbue items that already have some special properties. Egos alone are a bit boring.

On one hand if there are too many, there is no way to remember which one does what, and on other if there are too few, it's boring.

I discussed this with few people in RL and they were generally in favor of this idea.

Currently egos are assigned completely randomly, which is imho a bit weird. If different materials had different ego capacity/bias and their own special properties, it would greatly increase diversity of items at little cost, compared to adding tons of new egos. But well, whatever you say.

Patryn
Thalore
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Re: [Items] More materials

#7 Post by Patryn »

Asmageddon wrote:I think it would be very interesting if certain materials had special properties, so you can enchant/imbue items that already have some special properties. Egos alone are a bit boring.
Basically I agree, when I think back to old tome Dragonrider Coat, DSMs, etc.etc.
However, tome4 chose to go the way towards less clutter and digging through tons of trashy loots in order to "clean up" the map. And thats totally fine since its designed with this mentality - changing it now would cause things to break on other points of the game.
Currently egos are assigned completely randomly, which is imho a bit weird. If different materials had different ego capacity/bias and their own special properties, it would greatly increase diversity of items at little cost, compared to adding tons of new egos. But well, whatever you say.
And here's where you are wrong. If you add a materialtype that favors the generation of certain egos of the same "category" it would in effect *reduce* diversity. Why? Because that would mean more e.g. firebased items are generated and thus less of the other types. Due to synergy this would favor going a fire-path over other paths because it's easier to get decent equipment for it.
Thus less diversity because more ppl take the firepath and discard all the other stuff as "trash".

Asmageddon
Cornac
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Re: [Items] More materials

#8 Post by Asmageddon »

If you prefer you can already do that. If only one material favored fire egos, the difference would not be that big, especially if items made of it would be rare.
The base iron/steel/dwarven steel/stralite/voratun would have completely random egos assigned as it is now, only more exotic materials would have their "preferences".
Patryn wrote:However, tome4 chose to go the way towards less clutter and digging through tons of trashy loots in order to "clean up" the map.
It's not like you need to add more items. Just make them more diverse.

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