Wilderness Difficulty

[Mngwa]

The first thing I noticed about game is frequency of enemies in wilderness. I have version 0.2.3, but I am not sure if this is a version related issue though, I haven't played previous ones too much. Well, when I enter wilderness, I meet enemies almost every 10 moves, and lot of them are pretty hard, that means I die in battle. I usually play with fighter, and thus have quite low speed and dexterity, so I am unable to run away, but enemies are much faster and sometimes stronger than me. Add the frequency and you have serious problem with gameplay. The speed can be related to satiation status - when I get hungry and eat a piece of raw meat, I get overfed or bloated. Problem is that I ALWAYS die in wilderness battle earlier, then I get hungry or at least normal again. I always die overfed, the status lasts incredibly long time.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

To be honest I haven't found the wilderness especially difficult, or at least not much more than the dungeons. Yes, of course when you're low level you can die in an unlucky wilderness encounter, but that also happened in ADOM, right? And there is a dungeon quite close to Terinyo where you can get a few levels before making the trip to the CoC.

PS: in previous versions, there were no wilderness encounters at all.

[MITZE]

From what I've seen so far, the wilderness encounter rate could stand to be turned down some. Haven't played enough to get a handle on the average difficulty of one, though.

You're also right about hunger and satiation--the system, I feel, still needs tuning.

Protip: Enemies seem to have all the problems the PC does regarding movement in the various terrains. Stick to moving only onto grass tiles, and let the enemy do stupid stuff like charge through forest/over hill tiles. Taking advantage of this should allow you to get some free hits off.

[mike3]

I think some of the monsters need to be softened a little.

[Toll]

I find a very big step up in difficulty for any 'large' creature like a Troll. This seems to apply for Troll players too, a Troll character is significantly easier, particularly in early game then any other race I've found.

[Dervi]

Dunno if it's a feature or a bug, but in v0.2.3, wilderness encounters can be evaded by running to the border of the wilderness area, even if you're in melee range of any of the encounters. In ADOM, this was not allowed. Makes wilderness encounters trivial to avoid...

[AJR]

It seems that the wilderness encounters aren't really built with the high degree of variability in a starting character's power. Sure, a level 1 troll fighter can probably take that group of bandits, but a human monk is likely better off running away if he can. Also, random encounters tend to involve humanoid monsters; and in most cases the stronger of these can sometimes do large amount of damage with two handed swords and whatnot.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

It seems that the wilderness encounters aren't really built with the high degree of variability in a starting character's power. Sure, a level 1 troll fighter can probably take that group of bandits, but a human monk is likely better off running away if he can.

Well, life is hard in ADOM... ADOM has never tweaked the encounters, the dungeons or anything according to the power of each race/class. Some R/C combos are much more difficult to play than others, especially in the early game, but this already happened in ADOM I. I don't think that's a bad thing, it's just how the game is, instead of difficulty levels it has wizards and farmers

Dunno if it's a feature or a bug, but in v0.2.3, wilderness encounters can be evaded by running to the border of the wilderness area, even if you're in melee range of any of the encounters. In ADOM, this was not allowed. Makes wilderness encounters trivial to avoid...

I'm guessing tentative feature, but I don't know. Anyway, it's not so trivial when you start getting ambushed by gnoll war parties instead of warbands