Pressing bug fixes: Which ones?

[Twinge]

I'm going to go ahead and post my initial responses here (had half of them typed before I knew he wanted the bugs elsewhere :P), then go ahead and start adding to the Project Tools list when I get a chance.


The one thing that probably counts as 'feature request' that I'd say is essential for this bugfix release is some form of crash recovery. The worst bugs in the game are the crash bugs, and that is because there is no way to recover from them and you just lost a character that is often many hours old. Fixing the known crash bugs is great, but making it so you can still reload your game and continue when it DOES crash is even better.

"Uberjackal" effect where summoned creatures and pre-existing monsters, notably jackals, wolves, and chaos servants, get too much stronger by the end game.

To go into further detail, the issue is that only the natural generation rate of monsters is taken into account when applying the increased monster strength effects based on how many you've killed. For most monsters this is fine, and probably even too weak of an effect -- but for monsters that can be summoned and monsters that are pre-set at various places in the game, it causes major issues.

A lazy quick-fix for this issue would be to boost the natural Jackal spawn rate from 25 to 50 and Chaos Servant from 10 to at least 25 (possibly 50). This is obviously not ideal, but it would be a really easy way to temporarily fix it until a real solution could be coded.

Perhaps keep separate counters, so summoned/bred monsters _don't_ contribute to the 'racial experience counter'?

This is a fantastic solution, and not even much harder to implement that my temp. fix above. I think summoned monsters are already flagged, too. I imagine the required coding would be pretty simple:

1) Create a pre-set monster flag, assigned to every monster that is created by the game rather than randomly.
2) Create a second counter for killed monsters only for summoned & pre-set.
3) When a monster is killed, check the flags to see if it was summoned or pre-set. If so, increment new counter; else, increment old counter.
4) When tallying total monsters killed, add together both counters. When checking strength increases, only check the random generation counter.

-Death on a Monday from low HP is still possible (though exceedingly rare)

I think this is rare enough that it is probably fine to leave as is - it IS kind of a hilarious way to die :)

*This might have been intentional, but the "Justifier" artifact is completely useless to priests, despite the fact they can be crowned with it. It's believed that whereas paladins get double damage with it, priests deal half the reported damage.

That is exactly the case. A simple removal of the 'half damage for non-Paladins' effect should fix this fine; it's cool that it deals double for Pallys but it doesn't need to deal only half for everybody else on top of that.

*Cursed scrolls of repair will "break" normally unbreakable equipment like herbs and potions.

Which can then be fixed with a blessed scroll of repair -- this lets you bless huge stacks of items (say, Stomafilla) all at once and is pretty abuseable.

*Necromancers will occasionally start with a tract of chaos or book of Confuscious instead of a spellbook.

They are set to start with a random item from the entire BOOK item set (well, up to danger level 3) rather than specifically a spellbook. This basically means they are just horribly gimped 10-15% of the time, and this should be fixed.

*Most monsters have no resistance to blindness, confusion, stun, or paralysis. This includes the orb guardians and Andor Drakon.

To further clarify this, it is commonly abuseable to throw potions of any of these effects or cursed potions of invisibility at boss monsters and make the fights completely trivial. Most (maybe not all) of the major bosses should not be vulnerable to these effects or at least have a higher chance of resisting them.

I believe the Unicorn starsign actually makes it easier to change alignment rather than harder to as it claims.

Correct - It makes it easier to become chaotic rather than harder. This should only be a matter of changing a *1.1 to *0.9 or something simiarly simple.

So the solution might have to include making gremlins non-humanoid.

That is the best fix for Gremlin Bomb abuse - simply make them not have pockets to pick. One simple change removes one of the most abuseable scummy tactics available and is a lot less complicated than other possible fixes.

Also in the water dragon cave, i think it'd be best to generally exclude everything vulnerable by water from the hoard.

There's a check to see if the randomly generated item is made of Paper, and if it is, delete it instead of creating it. I don't see it look back to create another item in this case, though - so I think it just deletes the item and moves on to the next one rather than generating a new item for the same spot.

I'm not certain on this one, but from what I see I would bet adding a simple loop (or if necessary a goto) so that it keeps making items until it makes a non-paper one for that square would fix this pretty easily.

*The metallurgy skill appears to have little-to-no practical effect on gameplay.

There's a ton of stuff like this, though. I'd categorize this under 'necessary game improvements' rather than bug and say it should be ignored for now, but definitely a priority for later.

Edit2: Metallurgy skill has way more practical use than Haggling for example (especially for the people not reading the GB).

For someone that has all the basic information about the game available, Metallurgy does absolutely nothing, while Haggling at least does something (even if the effect is weak). Even for an unspoiled player Metallurgy's information is pretty paltry; the skills in general need to be better balanced, but again, that's something for the 2nd update and not the first.

-stat training from herbs/corpses/Garth is based on currently modified stats instead of base stats (leading to abuse of sickness and starvation to pump stats artificially high)

This system definitely needs to be overhauled, but I don't think it really qualifies as something that should be fixed right now. A high priority for the 2nd update, though.

Adom was never supposed to be balanced in all it's aspects. Leave {Candle Birthsign} as is

True, it doesn't need to be perfectly balanced, but it should be BETTER balanced, and Candle is strictly the best birthsign as it currently stands. However, this isn't a bug, and is something to look at for the 2nd update.

[grobblewobble]

1) Create a pre-set monster flag, assigned to every monster that is created by the game rather than randomly.
2) Create a second counter for killed monsters only for summoned & pre-set.
3) When a monster is killed, check the flags to see if it was summoned or pre-set. If so, increment new counter; else, increment old counter.
4) When tallying total monsters killed, add together both counters. When checking strength increases, only check the random generation counter.

The game already keeps track of which monster are bred or summoned and
which monsters are not, because you can't sacrifice bred/summoned monsters
at altars. So creating such a flag is probably not even needed (or it already
exists).

[fazisi]

Hey was saying to add a flag for pre-set monsters, monsters that are placed specifically for vaults and the like instead of randomly created by the RNG. The specific one for me that comes to mind is spider lesser vaults but this goes hand in hand with dark elven spider factories making them so buff to begin with.

[Twinge]

So creating such a flag is probably not even needed (or it already
exists).

Yes; the line above what you quote said that I was pretty sure a summoned flag already exists so only the pre-set one would need to be created :P

However, thinking about this a bit more the idea isn't as perfect as I had thought. This would still let you abuse summoned monsters as much as you wanted to which is subpar. The idea could still be used, but would need tweaked in some way - e.g. make 1/4th of the 2nd counter count towards strength increases, so they can still power up just not so rapidly?

[mike3]

I think the "piety overflow" needs to be fixed, and also it'd be a good idea to tone down the "uber-jackal" thing for the jackals. If the fear is that doing so would make it give too much XP, just increase the XP falloff-vs-kill (if there's one already there -- if not, then put one in). Rats don't get as strong as fast as jackals & spiders do. Maybe make it closer to rats, maybe just a little higher, or put bigger (or put in if not there) XP penalties on summoned monsters, esp. more common ones (e.g. jackals). There's various ways this could be done but I think the current effect is too much and I certainly don't think toning it down would "break" the game.

[Pumpernickel]

Yes; the line above what you quote said that I was pretty sure a summoned flag already exists so only the pre-set one would need to be created :P

However, thinking about this a bit more the idea isn't as perfect as I had thought. This would still let you abuse summoned monsters as much as you wanted to

What for? I can imagine only one use for summon-farming - the corpses. And those aren't game-breakingly useful. I just can't see any easy profit you can get out of killing 200 jackals - as it stands, you'll get extremely poor exp. to begin with and the exp. per kill will drop drastically with increasing kill count. And jackals drop very poorly - you'd get better item returns from farming the bigroom, with much better xp and less hassle.

[JellySlayer]

What for? I can imagine only one use for summon-farming - the corpses. And those aren't game-breakingly useful. I just can't see any easy profit you can get out of killing 200 jackals - as it stands, you'll get extremely poor exp. to begin with and the exp. per kill will drop drastically with increasing kill count. And jackals drop very poorly - you'd get better item returns from farming the bigroom, with much better xp and less hassle.

Drop rate is fairly efficient with treasure hunter talent installed. 200 jackals would give you ~25 items.

[mike3]

Drop rate is fairly efficient with treasure hunter talent installed. 200 jackals would give you ~25 items.

So why not tone it down a little? Take it to like 12 items, i.e. halve the rate. Or perhaps have, tied to the summoning counter, something that causes the item drop rate to decay asymptotically to zero or a small fixed value (smaller than current rates) as the summoned-kill number approaches infinity, or the item quality to drop.

Or what not still have them get tougher, but at a slower rate? They seem to get tougher even quicker than rats!

There's got to be some reasonable way to fix this, the jackals get too tough too fast the way it is.

[fazisi]

I don't understand what everyone is complaining about. Pressing bug fixes, the thread title says. Wizards don't have a problem with jackals so why is everyone requesting it get fixed?

[vogonpoet]

I don't understand what everyone is complaining about. Pressing bug fixes, the thread title says. Wizards don't have a problem with jackals so why is everyone requesting it get fixed?

Agreed.

"oh no, my PC went from being vulnerable to stone block traps to being a walking death tank in just 40 game days, its completely unreasonable that other monsters in the same game universe should get more powerful over time. Wa wa wa."


Accelerated evolution, learn to love it folks, and stop whining