Messages

1

Off Topic / General / Re: Starcraft and Brood War is free

« on: April 25, 2017, 09:09:53 AM »

Thanks for the heads-up.

The hell does this game need a remaster for? it's beautiful as it is

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3

« on: February 20, 2016, 10:16:04 AM »

stopped  splash damage from affecting the caster when casting special damage type spells

Good idea! Would be nice to be able to cast slow on fast melee chasers, such as Priam's Guards and shadows, without risk of slowing yourself as well.


Have you actually played your version of the Paladin lately? If you haven't, I'd like to report that the armor maluses aren't really working out well, much as I predicted earlier. I feel like I am better off just running around in leathers instead of my intended class armor! At least until Adaminium, which I want for the acid reduction, and which I get late enough not to care about maluses.
By wearing, say, steel plate armor (gained in Q2),
* I gain 11-12% damage reduction compared to steel leathers (36% - 13% stated on screen, *1/2 in the actual calculations). This is nothing.
* I take a significant hit to speed (I would be okay with this alone)
* I take a significant hit to magic, so I can't buff myself up with Wolf Speed, and casting a magic map or blood shield is a PITA, so is knocking on doors etc...
...unless I drop the armor every time I want to buff myself or knock on doors. Which is annoying, and it's bad game design when a game encourages you to do that sort of a thing.
So plate and chainmail seem pretty much worthless to a caster-melee mixed class like the paladin. I count that as a Bad Thing.

I see two ways to improve the situation:
1. Nix the magic malus.
The speed malus is plenty powerful on its own, considering the mechanics of Speed in this game.
Also the malus makes me want to use Wolf Speed, which is a good thing.
2. Keep the malus, but make the armor worth it.
- I'd make armor give the stated absorption, not stated/2.
- given that, I'd also rework the armors so that even iron plate armor gave no less than 50% (making it worth wearing plate, even in early game where the %s are lowest but the maluses hit the most painfully), but adaminium I'd nerf to 80%, and everything else should be in between.
- then I'd increase enemy late-game damage x2 - x2.5, to balance that out.

Any solution that keeps the magic malus should involve some way to stop the player from going around it. Make it impossible to change armors in-game, for example.

I won't keep harping on this topic, but I thought I'd give my thoughts now that I've put in more time into the class.

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.3

« on: February 16, 2016, 04:04:42 PM »

Yay, installer.

Idea, not sure how good: would it be possible to make it so that only 1, or perhaps 2, sources of a given bonus (fire damage, strength, stealth, whatever) can be active at a time? This might make balancing easier and levelling progression more meaningful.

Also, small request: could your change list be a little more detailed on damage types vs armor types?

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General Discussion / Re: Really funny comment in the codebase

« on: February 16, 2016, 11:56:51 AM »

Heh. This should be a tradition. Hide easter eggs in code, or in games themselves, saying things like "eat healthy and exercise".

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.2.1

« on: February 16, 2016, 11:48:39 AM »

Yeah, I'm perfectly fine with an honest conversation like this.

Hm, I can't say I find your balance vs fun dychotomy convincing. The more unbalanced a game is, the more quickly it becomes boring, and this is true for single player as much as anything else. In W40k Dawn of War there's an Emperor mod, which lets you play a super unit that can obliterate entire armies. Very cool, definitely had to try it... but of course I played with it for 20 minutes and then never touched it again.

A game has to present a modicum of challenge or it's pointless. At least that's how it is with me. Maybe there are players out there - maybe even many of them - who don't care about that and they'll happily play a thief who basically makes the game look like it's set to Enemy AI = Off, or who gains xp at a rate far exceeding other classes.

But if you believe what you said, then this is a difference of preferences, so I guess we won't reach agreement by discussing logic or facts. Just to give you an idea of how much for me balance equals fun, let me link to a changelog of changes I made to someone else's mod to another game: here.

In any case, even if you're not aiming to improve balance, I would have thought that it goes without saying that tweaks to a game should not break what balance already exists in vanilla.

_{Disclaimah: all the above (and probably below) is of course written with the understanding that this is your personal mod and I respect that.}

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.2.1

« on: February 16, 2016, 01:01:01 AM »

Uhm. In any other game, this wouldn't be min-maxing, it would be "normal playing". Wearing equipment appropriate to your class. You're supposed to do that, and when that breaks the game, something's not right. Min-maxing is when you take away from some areas to improve others, like, well, what you did with character statistics to create your new classes (80 magic stat at level 1, hello? ).

Not that I wanna argue definitions. And yeah, I only need 2 stealth rings at level 16, but I did wear 4 of them around quest 2-3 I think. I'm looking forward to seeing what you meant by "Fixed."

BTW, does translucency/invisibility help at 120 stealth? Is translucency the same as invisibility?

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.2.1

« on: February 15, 2016, 02:10:32 PM »

That's a lot of good news! Will definitely give it a whirl once it's out.

I've simply stripped out any magic bonus to buff spells.

Ah, so they can't be handled individually.

tiers of spells corresponding roughly to magic levels

I quite like that idea. It definitely plays well with what I was talking about earlier, about the higher level spells becoming preferable once your magic is strong enough.

So no armor will ever protect more than 45%.

Fking knew it had to be something like that. I think I even posted about this not long ago.

However, it would probably be a bad idea to fix it, without upping enemy damage correspondingly. (And remember if you're reducing damaged suffered from 55% to 10%, that's more than 5x effective hitpoints, so that base damage increase for later enemies would have to be big). Enemy damage is already a joke as it is, at higher levels.

Infinite map fixed? Great.

If you were to do the same activity against all of the monsters, you'd gain such a rediculously high level that your hours of bashing would be worth it. I'm surprised you stuck with it long enough to get to level 7.

Hm. I don't know what you imagined I did. I generally just walked up to an enemy and did 1 steal attempt, 1 backstabb, then finished him off with a few fast hits, this took moments. Sure was faster than waiting out the aggro for a second backstab.

Thief activities do give a moderate XP boost but this was not the problem.

I'm level 16 now, doing third map of Lost City.

Now, picking a door is currently 4k xp - per try, and some secret doors can take a lot of tries! But okay, those are very limited opportunities.

Priam's guard gives me about 4k exp for a steal, 4k exp for a backstab, and 700 xp for a normal hit. 9k for just killing him, 13k for steal+kill. And that's if I only steal once. If someone wanted to farm...

I'll trust you that daggers were a factor too, but just sayin'.

Looking forward to the new installer!

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.2.1

« on: February 14, 2016, 02:29:49 PM »

I've seen that other discussion. I'll give it another look some time soonish, since you recommend it.

New observation: acid damage is incredibly good. (Are you seeing a pattern yet with my observations? ).

In fact, I am pretty sure this is the reason sometimes enemy melee hits heal me! Literally, Priam's guard swings at me and I get "you get healthier!". This doesn't happen every time, but every 5th or 10th enemy which I've hit a few times with my Wormtooth starts doing negative damage.

Even without that bug, being able to reduce a dangerous enemy to 1 damage per swing near-instantly is OP. Ever since I got Wormtooth, I don't even need to backstab. I just melee entire groups of Priam's Guards without the slightest effort. Even for a murder hobo, that's too much!

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Hints, Cheats, Tips & walkthroughs / Re: Getting OUT OF the tight-squeeze room in Q6M3

« on: February 14, 2016, 02:56:56 AM »

drop items on death in effect, it largely negates any point going in there

Die next to a window.

swapping the amulet of strength for the sustenance one, probably lowering the lock level in the process, maybe adding a 2nd key to that level for the 2nd secret.

Good ideas.

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Hints, Cheats, Tips & walkthroughs / Re: Location of Adamantium Plate armor in the game

« on: February 14, 2016, 02:55:41 AM »

Ah, that makes sense, thanks.

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Hints, Cheats, Tips & walkthroughs / Re: Aegean God - can he be killed?

« on: February 14, 2016, 02:53:38 AM »

Suppose you edited the game to make some super-wand that deals sufficient damage, I wonder if he has a death animation and corpse. Or if the game just crashes, hehe.

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.2.1

« on: February 13, 2016, 02:56:26 AM »

Hehe, murder hobos. I like that.

Thanks for the explanations.

But, to clarify yet again, I am not asking about standing still vs moving, I am asking specifically about walking vs running. Does the "slower movement modifier" key make a difference to stealth? I'm sorry to keep bothering you, but unless I'm missing something, you never directly addressed that.

Yep, I realize making the game harder is not the scope of this mod... that would require serious work on the enemies, putting more of them in various places, and making them shoot faster etc.

But there are several ways in which this game is easier and simpler than it has to be, and part of what drew me to your mod was the impression that it fixed some of them. For example by adding the casting timeout, so the player can't get high DPS by bursting cheap easy spells. This would have the great effect of encouraging people to use a greater variety of spells, to use higher level spells as soon as their Magic stat lets them cast them reliably.

Unfortunately, you give with one hand and take away with the other. Part of the benefit is lost because of higher damage, but that's part's a good thing per se, and could easily be balanced by making the cast timeout a bit longer, to lower DPS.

But you also make levels improve spells' effectiveness and cost. Because of that,
* lower level spells have more longevity despite increasing enemy hitpoints.
* the highest level spells are less cost-effective in terms of mana. This is because the level bonus seems to reduce the cost by a flat amount, so that at no level are higher level spells equally cost-effective to lower level ones (in classic, Death Cloud used to be the best spell if you could cast it reliably!). Even at the max 120 magic my Fireballs cost 1.5 mana and therefore do ~7 dpm (damage per mana) but my Death Clouds cost 11 mana and therefore do only 2,8 dpm.
That's before counting the improvement to damage, of course. If that is also a flat amount - I don't know - then it improves lowest level spells the most, and thus only makes this situation worse.

Both these effects lessen the incentive to move on to stronger spells. Also, the incredible cost-effectiveness at higher levels means I no longer need to buy mana scrolls, which is a shame; no longer having to pay even a minimum amount of attention to being supplied and to my expenses as a mage.

So after giving it a good deal of thought, the increase to base damage is a good feature (assuming it's a multiplier of the old values and not flat addition), but I'd recommend cutting out the level-scaling of mana-cost, damage, cast timeout, plus I'd lengthen the base cast timeout a bit more. Not to make the game "harder", but to make the more difficult spells more useful relatively to the lowlevel ones.

So these are my thoughts on the mage. I haven't played the melee classes enough to see the deeper effect of your changes, except the thief on which I already gave my feedback. Anyway, just my analysis; maybe you'll find these ideas worth pondering.

Still quite a worthwhile mod, and I'll be recommending it to a friend I intend to get to try the game.

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Editing A&A / Re: Peewee Mod Fork 1.2.1

« on: February 12, 2016, 04:19:42 PM »

I've updated the installer!

Does flanking and backstabbing stack, should I stab from behind for best effect? If so, does it stack additively (8x) or multiplicatively (14x)?

And it's not 100% clear to me, does walking give you better stealth checks compared to running?

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Hints, Cheats, Tips & walkthroughs / Re: Location of Adamantium Plate armor in the game

« on: February 10, 2016, 04:57:38 AM »

Does a Pyrinium breastplate exist at all?

Also, does anyone know what the breastplate bonuses are? At least Obsidian and Adaminium grant some kind of protection, but I'm not sure what from.

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Hints, Cheats, Tips & walkthroughs / Sources of acid protection?

« on: February 10, 2016, 04:01:16 AM »

How do you avoid having your equipment eaten as a melee class? Switch to crossbow and dodge?

The wiki says an amulet of acid protection exists. Where can I find one?

There are no potions or scrolls of acid protection, right? Would be great if they did. Although putting the acid protection amulet in the story after Q3 would do the trick too.