ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

First the good. TOME has excellent class design and unparalleled potential for varied gameplay, through both its class design as well as underlying game mechanics. It's pretty, well designed, and diverse.

Now the bad. The monster balance leaves something to be desired. I find my games falling into an unfortunate rhythm that resembles early Diablo 3 gameplay (running through meaningless levels fighting meaningless mobs looking for a gold boss). Or mowing a golf course spotted with landmines. Every now and then there's this really great tense exciting bomb disposal scene, but the vast majority of time you're fighting to stay focused so you don't autopilot into something and pop. I realize the game has evolved a lot over the years, I'm just suggesting it might be time to take a look at the bones of the thing. Also note I use Diablo 3 as an example not because its a pseudo roguelike but because it was a particularly glaring example of overly prevalent whack-a-mole type gameplay, I think the boss disparity is a large reason why D2 seemed so much more fun.

As far as short term, reducing the disparity between normal mobs and boss mobs would be huge. As it stands now the game is much more fun on madness difficulty but it makes the bosses impossible, on normal difficulty it feels like autoexplore should just bump attack non bosses for you, a waste when you look at the sheer amount of tactical options. I am currently in the process of adjusting my own game

Now for some longer term ideas.
1. If a fight doesn't serve a purpose, it doesn't belong in the game. This means that *every* monster should pose some sort of challenge or tactical puzzle. Fast and dangerous, tough and dangerous, numerous and dangerous, ranged and dangerous...

2. Bosses are tricky. In a stats based game, you cannot simply give bosses massively more power, as it creates a power disparity; (seen in early Diablo 3) you're either challenged by normal mobs and bosses are just impossible, or bosses are a challenge and the rest of the game is too easy and boring. Some good ways of mitigating powerful monsters...
- Ability weaknesses, mostly through avoidable attacks. For example an ability that showed its area of effect a turn before it took effect, thus dodgeable.
- Counterable and reactive abilities, 'power attack' that makes your next attack do considerably increased damage, a good time to use shield block or a stun. 'casting time' serves this purpose in other rpgs - something is about to suck, here's your last chance to do something about it.
- General weaknesses, The Mouth for example. These can be easily put into templates for elite randomization. A couple examples: Lumbering - +hp/damage, -move speed, You would want to stay at range, or Commander - spawns with or summons mobs, relatively low individual power.

3. Scaling. It is relatively simple to increase the scale of a game. Is it also seductive. "Whats better than 1 orc? Ten orcs!" But 1v1 1v2 1v3 combat is far more satisfying than 1v10 combat. In fact AoE combat is fun in a game designed around single target. I'll use the solipsist as an example, the contagious nightmare with DoT effect would be awesome if you had to work for it, instead solipsist has a low cooldown AoE beam effect from the get go and spends the first 10 levels of a normal difficulty game pressing Z, 1 1, Z, 1 1. It makes the eventual AoE sleep... underwhelming. A focus on less but more important mobs as well as less AoE would do a lot for the intricacy of the game. TOME should be the game where you pin one orc, blind the next and kill the 3rd... Currently thats possible but unfortunately unnecessary in 99% of situations.

4. A note on randomization. Ideally encounters should be randomized into groups as opposed to individuals. An ogre elite and 3 orc rogues is quite a bit more interesting than an ogre a rat a snake and a dog. This also enables far more tactical options from a design standpoint. Ambushes, commanders giving aura based buffs, enemy healers, etc. If the analogy is cooking, randomization is like stirring the pot. Too much randomization and you're eating blended soup, its good for a while but eventually all kind of ends up tasting the same, even when you add new ingredients.

I'm gonna take a break for now, I hope some of these ideas are useful to somebody somewhere. I'd be happy to elaborate on anything here including boss templates or class/mob rebalances.

Already something I've worked on once before and plan on making more code for.

glad to hear it, I'm working on it as we speak, mostly combing through the files looking for important numbers. Anything you could recommend as a short term fix? Was looking at raising the level range for zones, or I guess it would have to be the max level (which seems set really low) but I'm not sure how that relates to experience gain, does double level = double exp?

There's no short term fix, not really.

The issue isn't raw power levels-anyone can just jack up numbers and make a lot of similar enemies wandering around. Some of the mechanics you mentioned(pre-set mobs) are very much already there, and generating a dungeon where every single enemy is equally dangerous leads to rares being unbelievably brutal every time, which leads to two rares being a fatal situation and the game degenerating into an RNG mess.

The proper way to handle this is, as you mentioned, give a bunch of enemies more defining characteristics(more minor but meaningful resists, more defined traits), set up some enemies as "support fire" types that do something else besides just blast you(but are bad at raw damage), so you have to prioritize your targets based on what they can do, and generally define enemy roles in the same way you do class roles.

I did this with the critter tweaks, and it took pretty well(though some of those need some tweaks themselves), so I feel like I'm on the right track on this.

For an example of how well just jacking up stats works, though, check out Nightmare. Which actually works a lot better than you'd expect(and indeed, generally does a good job of that everything-is-a-threat constant minefield you talked about, if you can manage to survive the REALLY high end occasional threats. Avoiding the aforementioned RNG mess effect requires either grinding, point reshuffling, or a few other obscure or vaguely degenerate effects. Optimally, it wouldn't, but it's sorta hard to avoid there...). That might scratch your itch until a more deep general overhaul can be done.

well sure thats what I mean for short term, if I find a good way to nerf the bosses then I'd just play the whole game on insanity or wtv... its just a matter of finding the right numbers to change.

More defining characteristics would be huge, and monster only classes/abilities. A monster class wouldnt have the same priorities as a player class. Its just more of a long term goal. Though if you've got a project in mind and ever want to brainstorm... I love this stuff =)

great post overall, many good ideas and very unique and accurate descriptions of the current gameplay mechanics.

the current critters are much improved from the ones of betas past, but i also feel they still could be improved to showcase the tactical gameplay

for example: ink squids currently shoot a ball of instant ink at you that can blind. that's cool and thematic with the beast. i think it could be improved by changing the ink spit to an escape (2 or 3 tiles) that leaves an ink cloud in its wake. the code for creeping darkness would be perfect here, an ink trail that spreads from its point of origin, blocking vision on the opposite side.

foxes are slightly quicker than your average critter, but don't really act fox-like. being evasive is one thing, but evading fights is something different. maybe a fox would only become hostile if it's in a pack with other foxes? if a fox pack attacks you, kill most of them and the rest run away? you can hunt them down if you want, but leaving a few living critters on a map wouldn't kill anybody. i'd hesitate to make a fox stay 4 or 5 tiles out of range because enemies like that are more annoying than tactical in most roguelikes.

Bears:
black bears only attack when you get too close, generally mild mannered giants of the forest until you step on their territory.
grizzlies attack whenever they feel like it, and don't discriminate between the player and other critters (they'll attack canines and other smaller animals)
polar bears are the nastiest, for some reason. they're the rarest so they should be nasty
maybe bears could be afraid of snakes or something, attracted to honey trees but scared of the bees

i don't know, just a few more ideas to contribute

I like the ideas, keep 'em coming...

vcntmnd wrote:well sure thats what I mean for short term, if I find a good way to nerf the bosses then I'd just play the whole game on insanity or wtv... its just a matter of finding the right numbers to change.

More defining characteristics would be huge, and monster only classes/abilities. A monster class wouldnt have the same priorities as a player class. Its just more of a long term goal. Though if you've got a project in mind and ever want to brainstorm... I love this stuff =)

Feel free to contribute to this project, although I warn you that it will need coder support if it is to get off the ground. (I can program.. in FORTRAN ..but find the process quite painful.)

As for intelligent monsters, there seem to be a lot of classes that are coded as subraces. Maybe you could split the class abilities off from the race abilities and use these.

That looks interesting though a couple of points, just to be clearer on my thought process.

Daftigod, changing the game style - by adding realistic animals, or ambient mobs if you will, is not really a goal of mine. Changing AI behavior is quite a bit more difficult than changing mob statistics, as well as being less obvious... when you toss a grenade into a guys lap, the brilliant coding elegance of what that guy was going to do over the next ten turns becomes moot. =) Essentially the focus of this thread is to come up with more ways to make the slow parts of the game more tactically meaningful.

Notacorporal, I like those templates very much, I would very much like to encourage you to minimize the randomization factor, and apply those to specific creatures, or creature templates, example 'shadow <animal>' has certain attributes, skeletal, pestilent, etc etc" it is very important when designing systems like this to not fall victim to bloat - in a given zone there should be AT MOST about 3 mobs of a given type. sickly wolves, grey wolves and winter wolves. Each requiring a different tactical approach. Having white wolf, grey wolf, big wolf, small wolf, plague wolf, mother wolf, is bloat, over randomization, the differences blur together and, to us the analogy above, tastes like blended soup.

vcntmnd wrote:Notacorporal, I like those templates very much, I would very much like to encourage you to minimize the randomization factor, and apply those to specific creatures, or creature templates, example 'shadow <animal>' has certain attributes, skeletal, pestilent, etc etc" it is very important when designing systems like this to not fall victim to bloat - in a given zone there should be AT MOST about 3 mobs of a given type. sickly wolves, grey wolves and winter wolves. Each requiring a different tactical approach. Having white wolf, grey wolf, big wolf, small wolf, plague wolf, mother wolf, is bloat, over randomization, the differences blur together and, to us the analogy above, tastes like blended soup.

I think of see where you are coming from. The OP to that thread was aimed particularly at ways to customise rares. I have only played on normal difficulty myself, where rares are genuinely rare, so this maybe looks like less of a problem to me than it does to you.

Okay, so I see why you are talking in terms of mobs now.

vcntmnd wrote:4. A note on randomization. Ideally encounters should be randomized into groups as opposed to individuals. An ogre elite and 3 orc rogues is quite a bit more interesting than an ogre a rat a snake and a dog. This also enables far more tactical options from a design standpoint. Ambushes, commanders giving aura based buffs, enemy healers, etc. If the analogy is cooking, randomization is like stirring the pot. Too much randomization and you're eating blended soup, its good for a while but eventually all kind of ends up tasting the same, even when you add new ingredients.

That happens with some monster "families" like dragons, and some vaults.

I think blended soup would be a fine flavour for slime floors though.