Allow settings for increased difficulty.
issueid=6702 03-27-2021 01:37 AM
Senior Member
Number of reported issues by sylph: 26
Allow settings for increased difficulty.
The game has gotten really easy over the years. Let us crank up the challenge..

Over time, I feel that the new features that have been added to the game have made it easier. To the point where, these days, victory in adom doesn't feel particularly 'special' anymore.

I would love to see a few really game-changing difficulty options that make it harder! Not just 'harder' as in 'less hitpoints, stronger monsters etc like the current difficulty modifiers, but' harder' via some huge key mechanic changes that would result in real paradigm-shifts!

Something like the following options:
1. No hitpoint generation (from natural, and from regeneration items. Healing skill perhaps modified to only work on other characters (ie, pc doesn't heal hitpoints by waiting.) Perhaps having shopkeepers 'sell' healing and providing a small heal with food to compensate.
2. No mana regeneration. Allowing prayers, of course, and perhaps offer slight mana regeneration from 'applying' concentration, importantly costing significant food and time for small gain, so that for the most part the mana given on level up / scroll use / prayer has to last until the next use! I'm aware this would almost destroy many casters, but like I said, paradigm shift! I'd love to see how much a necromancer could rely on shadow touch, or how far recharging wands could take a wizard! This would be *so* much fun!
3. Scroll of identify nerf: make cursed scrolls cause amnesia. Uncursed identify a single item. Blessed identify one item category. (scrolls of identify in adom are insanely strong, and there's actually a lot of fun and skill behind trying to manually identify items, which is lost to how easy it is to use scrolls to identify everything.)
4. Nerfing/removing arena food and stomafilia. Starvation instantly becomes a non-issue as soon as a player reaches the arena. I'd enjoy seeing how the game plays without it.
5. Higher metal items and even *artifacts* made destructible. (item management is a cool mechanic that, like food, is just completely removed shortly after the early game. I'd love to see how things panned out were it a factor throughout the whole adventure.)

I'm suggesting these kind of things, confident that there are many more, with the belief that they would be reasonably easy to implement. They are, for the most part, features that would re-introduce challenging signature adom mechanics that are currently made redundant by certain game specifics. They're not really things that we can implement with 'challenge game' (with the exception of ratling fodder - we could just not eat that!).

I'd love to see these as options, with perhaps a score multiplier for having them active.

I'd love to hear whether this would be implementable, and I'd love to hear other ideas of interesting 'difficulty' tweaks that might make surviving Ancardia a more dynamic, involved experience!

What're your thoughts / suggestions?
Issue Details
Issue Number 6702
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All
Status Suggested
Priority Unknown
Suggested Version ADOM 3.3.4
Implemented Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Votes for this feature 0
Votes against this feature 5
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




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