Improving Trollmire

[Mithril]

Trollmire is of crucial importance for the first impression new players get of the game. Unfortunately, it has several problems:

1. Difficult navigation. Lots of very frequent, irritating changes in direction required and many annoying dead ends.
2. Little variation. Mostly just trees and trees in the same pattern.

This can be fixed by overlaying the map with traditional corridors and rooms, Of course, here we will call them tracks and glades. This will allow easier navigation and make the map more varied. The "wall" areas will be as the current map. That is, rather densly packed trees that you can squeeze between.

3. A less serious problem is finding the exit which requires wandering up and down the right side of the map. Often feels rather frustrating which is not good for an introductory map.

A proposal for fixing this is fixing the location of the exit at the middle of the right side of the map.

[edge2054]

Here's a recent thread on this same topic.

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=3 ... ire#p99134

[Grey]

I would suggest enforcing space around the exit, to make it a little easier to find. Sometimes it's behind an annoying clump of trees.

Overall I still love the suggestion made before of having the starting dungeon be randomised.

[Canderel]

My comments are split into 2 parts... One is why fix it? And the other is, your fix is an absolutely awesome suggestion.

1. Difficult navigation. Lots of very frequent, irritating changes in direction required and many annoying dead ends.

Use mouse walk... It owns trollmire, because there is no food in the game, mousewalk is not using up a resource.

2. Little variation. Mostly just trees and trees in the same pattern.

Ever walked in a forest?

This can be fixed by overlaying the map with traditional corridors and rooms, Of course, here we will call them tracks and glades. This will allow easier navigation and make the map more varied. The "wall" areas will be as the current map. That is, rather densly packed trees that you can squeeze between.

I think this is a stunning idea, I am just not sure how easily it can be implemented, but it will definitely address your issues with the zone. Actually the dragon zone (can't recall it's name) could use a similar map-generator.

3. A less serious problem is finding the exit which requires wandering up and down the right side of the map. Often feels rather frustrating which is not good for an introductory map.

Well, just ensuring that the exit is generated on your "overlaid" map should fix this, as it will be in a "track or glade".

[Sirrocco]

A few thoughts.

1. Seems like a moderately cool idea.
2. Given that the trollshaws creation code already involves some wide open spaces, it's going to lead to some very open terrain if we don't up the tree generation in the non-glade, non-trail areas.
3. As the tight and twisting paths through the non-glade areas still exist, we're still going to lose escort quests in the trees.

I still say that Old Forest and Trollmire ought to swap map code. It gives the player a simple, straightforward map to start with, while keeping the strange and interesting map for later on. On the other hand, that doesn't mean I'm particularly opposed to this idea on its own. I just had a few thoughts to note.

[Canderel]

Is the main issue losing lost people ?

It doesn't get generated on lvl 1 of trollmire (or does it?), and you can go do kor-pul first if you are afraid of losing escorts (though that's pretty hard too, how about wandering the wilderness for some random beasts?), and at higher clvls you'll have no trouble dispatching the foes (1) and your escort is higher lvl so higher HP.

A meta-game thing like lost people shouldn't affect a decision to make the first dungeon a little easier to navigate...

[Sirrocco]

I tend to think that "make the newbie's probable first escort experience a little easier to handle" is a fine reason to make the first dungeon a little easier to navigate.

Understand that I'm not meaning any of my comments to say "this is a bad idea and will make the game worse". It's not.