Let's talk mino maze

[SirTheta]

So, there's a huge problem with the mino maze and my dander is finally up enough to post about it. I see no reason to post this as an RFE as I honestly see little chance of maze being changed for the better: the changes required are wide-ranging and have little chance of being adopted as a package. Adopting a couple of these changes doesn't fix anything and potentially just throws off the balance even further (as we see has already happened), though maybe if magic map was disabled, there'd be more of a push to change the stupid thing. Anyway, for your consideration, the post below – in convenient bullet point format.

There's a number of problems with the maze:

• The fake levels of the maze make the maze extremely tedious – i.e. it is not fun.
• Enough magic map makes the maze trivial. Teleport helps, but magic map is the really broken part.
  
  • This obviously gives a huge advantage to spellcasting classes and disadvantages melee classes, on the whole. The maze can be completed "in 10 minutes" once you've retrieved the BUGWIL MM scrolls.
• The rewards are insanely good – I've disclaimed the maze before, but you're basically a total idiot if you don't do the maze. Granted, you're practically guaranteed a win at this point anyway, but doing the maze guarantees you a win beyond all possible doubt. It is nearly impossible to screw up after it; this is especially true for low toughness races. Doing the maze is the new grinding for herbs, except the payoff is like an order of magnitude better.

Now, the big one is the rewards, as the rest are easily solved (see solutions below). I'm sure you're wondering why the rewards are too good, so let's go through it!

• The minotaur emperor gives +6 To/St/Pe, -8 Wi, 200d10 corruption points. The stat additions work against potentials and do not care about your current value. The Ancient Stone Beast gives +2 St, +4 To for about 4 corruptions.
• You get something like 3d2 POGA (I've seen 4 and 5 POGA, I think, so 3d2 is simply a guess).
• On top of this you get multiple POCCs and a potion of strength.
• Did I mention a random artifact and three random spellbooks? This is not much incentive, in my experience, but I'll mention it anyway.
• Oh, did I forget THE BEST WEAPON IN THE GAME? Even without tacking on the vastly improved ROTMC, you get a 4d20+16 weapon (20-96 damage) that "adds" a 40% crit rate. Let's not even talk about backstabbing.

So what's the tally here – normally, at least +12 St/+10 To, a nice +4 Wi after you've trained Wi back up w/ morgia, +4 Dx. In other words, the stat gains are utterly gamebreaking. Sois the weapon.

Solutions:

• There are a couple solutions to fake levels. My preferred one, as I'm sure y'all know, is removing the fake levels. They're the real culprit of making the maze tedious – without them, it's a more..."classic" maze experience that isn't nearly as frustrating. The maze could be made a level or so deeper to compensate (i.e. ML8, 9 or 10 would have mino emp). Making the maze deeper should not be done if other suggestions (like disabling MM) are implemented. Gut was discussing on IRC how a fake level could be made apparent in some way – e.g. it contains only corruption traps. I think this is both neat and somewhat obvious to first time, unspoiled maze visitors, so it's another possible solution
• Disable all magic mapping (i.e. including Knowledge of the Ancients) on all maze levels. Optionally, also disable teleportation until the minotaur emperor has been killed (or disable and put an exit at bottom of maze – that would be pretty cool and a bit of a mindfuck – rather appropriate).
• Rewards solution is multipart:
  
  • Put the corpse back to +3 St/To/Pe. Make it -4 Wi instead of -8. Stat additions should ignore potentials and current values as it currently does. Make it give 200d20 corruption points with a floor of 2000 corruption points.
  • 1d6 POGA.
  • POCC, potions of strength, random artifact, and three random spellbooks stay – they are nice added incentive, but not primary reason for visiting. [maybe make it 4 spellbooks and put one on each mino mage, somewhat unorthodox solution that just occurred to me].
  • Put the cow axe back at 3d20+16. It was already a superb and very desirable weapon in 1.1.1 and would still be such. It would actually still be better in 1.2.0 because various other aspects of the game have been fixed (ROTMC gives +Crit, backstabbing does good things, etc.).

also, fix orb guardian corpses, they're still worthless. playing corruption lottery with 4 corruptions for +2 St and +4 To is laughable for most. right idea was had with mino emp corpse. - even ASB with +4 St/To for about 3 corruptions would at least make me consider it.

[JellySlayer]

Removing the fake levels, eliminating the use of magic map in the maze, and setting the rewards back to somewhere between the current state and 1.1.1 seems reasonable to me. I think it's fine to keep the axe more or less as-is and remove the PoGA and the free artifact. +6 St, +6 To and the improved axe would still be pretty nice rewards all things considered.

Honestly, there really isn't any great solution to the Maze because the fundamental problem is that maze levels aren't fun to do, period. They take 10x the effort to explore as regular levels, and the exploration doesn't feel particularly productive or fruitful; they're just endless and tedious, all the more so with the trick walls and secret doors everywhere you need to check for.

[elenie]

I like these suggestions. I have done the maze only a few times in 1.2.0 because it is SO tedious. Yes, the improved rewards are nice, but they don't address the tedium issue. It is also a bit too random, so if you get lucky or have lots of Magic Mapping, it's bearable, but if you get unlucky you sure will have a horrible time in there :-)

So if anything's done to change the maze, it'd be nice if it became less of a slog. Even if that means upping the difficulty, and/or nerfing the rewards I'd still be a lot more likely to go in there than I am now.

[Stingray1]

Didn't read any posts. The maze is fine as is. The rewards is just enough incentive. I'd hate to see the struggle to get to the bottom level removed, it is what makes the maze such a wonderful place. Magic mapping is available for the weak minded.

[Superteeth]

Ever since I started playing 1.2.0 I have always gone to the minotaur maze. I think the rewards are quite powerful, but the only thing I agree with is that magic mapping should be disabled (which will bring the rewards in line with the difficulty of a real maze). I know that if you try to read a scroll of magic mapping on the final level the scroll is torn to pieces by some force. I don't see why magic mapping cannot just be completely disabled, since it does disadvantage the melee classes (and I have only played melee classes or classes that do not have a super high rate of spellbook drops, so I have only had magic mapping available to me once unless it was through the Bug Temple scrolls).

[grobblewobble]

If you want to see a real maze, try the Orc quest in Adom 2. No fake levels, but so large that it doesn't matter. Only took me about five hours to find the bottom. And that was with the shard of elemental earth (which lets you see and walk through walls).

Back on topic, I think that making the fake levels in some way different would be a good idea. Nerfing the corpse and the weapon back to their 1.1 versions, too. The axe already got a boost because 2-handed weapons have been buffed in general. And 4-5 PoGA is a bit much, yeah.

I think disabling magic mapping is a bad idea. A melee class can get it from the bug temple. Disabling magic mapping would hurt everyone, melee classes as much as casters. It would mean that the tedious, grinding way becomes the only way to do the maze..

[Superteeth]

I think disabling magic mapping is a bad idea. A melee class can get it from the bug temple. Disabling magic mapping would hurt everyone, melee classes as much as casters. It would mean that the tedious, grinding way becomes the only way to do the maze..

The tedious, grinding (although I don't see how it is grinding) way is the only way to do a maze. Thomas Biskup himself said that he was not interested in making optional areas easier, but I don't know if he has anything against making them harder. He chose to increase the rewards to make up for the difficulty of the maze. It just doesn't make sense to me to decrease the rewards again. People may end up complaining that the rewards are not worth it again (at least for melee classes who will find it difficult to clear the bug temple without a lot of brute force or good ranged attacks). In my experience, the scrolls of magic mapping only map out one fake descent, and I have to walk through the rest of the maze the tedious way (usually I only have to go down one other set of stairs all the way through to get to the final level after that, but the mindcrafter I am playing right now had to map two and one half fake descents, one and one half of those by walking). I did get lucky once, and only once, with the scrolls of magic mapping, and managed to get all the way to the bottom with two or three scrolls to spare.

However, it just doesn't make any sense to have magical areas that do not prohibit you from doing things that make the place trivial (for instance, consider how Darkforge was changed to make it much harder to conduct a raid, or how it is not possible anymore to just bolt all the bugs in the temple and wilderness area to death). Following that line of reasoning, I don't see why the maze just doesn't allow magic mapping at all. As I said before, the last level does not allow you to use scrolls of magic mapping, and presumably the spell fails as well. Thomas Biskup did that for a reason, although it is more or less pointless because it is not hard to just use detect monsters to find the general area to teleport to.

In my opinion, consistency demands that the whole place forbid the use of magic mapping. It is a maze. It is supposed to be tedious. You shouldn't be able to just zap a spell a couple of times, teleport to the stairs, repeat a couple of times, and kill the emperor. You might as well not call it a maze if you can do that. Surely the minotaur emperor knows that there exist spells that allow one to map levels, so surely he would tell his mages to put an enchantment on the maze to prevent the use of such spells. Hell, they did it on the emperor's level (I know that this is more or less an appeal to realism, but it applies logically just the same, since it is supposed to be a maze, and mazes are supposed to be tedious). To make up for the tedium, just keep the rewards the same. It is not that hard to walk the maze. My mindcrafter walked one and a half false descents, past the 90 day limit, and only got two corruptions. If you find it to be too tedious if Biskup (hopefully) changes it to prevent magic mapping (which in my opinion is the only thing that needs to be changed), then don't do it. It is optional. It doesn't make sense to me that people think it is necessary to do the maze because the rewards are so good, and then complain that it is tedious and bash their heads against their keyboards every time they find a fake level 6 or have to actually search a MAZE for the stairs down.

[Utnapishtim]

As a new player I have only done the maze a half a dozen times, and have mostly found the experience as a whole quite enjoyable, although I can certainly see the reason for varying opinions. A couple of points:

I think the significant difference between blessed magic mapping scrolls and the mapping spell should be noted: with the spell, even after dozens of castings, there are still some unknown areas that might contain the downstairs. Using the spell has not made the maze feel trivial at all, while using a lot of blessed scrolls probably would (have never tried).

The concept of a fake level seems peculiar. The impression that a new player gets while doing the maze a couple of times, is that it is quite natural network of interconnected levels, having 0..2 downstairs, the level number just indicating the depth. I don't really understand some of the discussion about giving more hints to new players as to the "secret" of the maze.

As for the difficulty of optional areas mentioned above, it seems that one central point the OP is trying to make is that the maze might not feel optional with the current rewards. For example, if playing with a somewhat weak character, who might be in danger during the late game, it is not a defensible tactic to forego the massive stat increases etc. This may be a good point. The maze is now always part of my itinerary whenever I have means of coping with it (some way to deal with the mages, confusion resistance, preferably teleport).

When appropriately prepared, the maze is not very dangerous. The tedium is manageable, and it makes you feel you have worked to earn the rewards. However, as there is tedium involved, different people have different thresholds, and OP is obviously right in that the melee classes have a significant disadvantage, it does seem a good idea for the maze be clearly optional also tactically. Perhaps the current rewards are just a tad too much.

To sum up, I would love to see there not being any ways of getting the current rewards trivially, the melee/spellcaster balance to get addressed somehow, and the Maze to made a bit less "mandatory" from a tactical viewpoint.

[SirTheta]

Well, I'll try to explain why I think the fake levels are a problem, which is something gut hit on in IRC.

One problem is that they force you to explore every inch of some levels that have no staircases. Since you have now way of knowing what is fake and what is not, this is a large investment of time for 0 payoff - which is frustrating. Removing the fake levels removes this; if you've found a staircase, you've found a way down and you don't have to map the level all the way to that tiny little dark spot in the corner because it could contain a stair. (this is gut's point, and it is really the biggest one: it adds a large amount of tedium and time on top of already finding the staircases, which is tedious)

Relatedly, the not knowing bit becomes really frustrating. Spending 15 minutes mapping out a level to find no staircase only to have to backtrack but not know if you're going to find the down staircase this time or spend another hour in the maze is just blaaaaagh. Knowing that you're making real progress is half the battle.

Another problem is that it [artificially] makes the maze more dangerous. Mino mages & trap destruction can be dealt with, but adding in illusionary walls [I find them fairly easy to find, but I imagine some others don't] and fake levels [especially this one] increase the potential for stat draining about twofold on average, and sometimes a lot more. The same effect could be achieved without fake levels by linearly increasing from ML1 to ML7 the monster generation from current levels to, say, 2x current levels, without making the player spend an hour in the maze.

There's probably some other reasons they are bad that people can chime in on, but this is why I think they should be removed.

@Utnaphistim: You're right about the spell, but I did the maze in p7 with the spell and found that it made it significantly easier. Not blessed MM-easy, but much easier than exploring [since my current method is to go down as far as possible, then up, down, etc., etc. and going up by a different route once ML5/ML6 down staircases are exhausted. It works somewhat well. Adding spell/non-blessed MM means you can spam the spell to look for staircases (at least until you run out of PP)]. Otherwise, your post is largely what I'm going for, yep

[Soirana]

Well, I'll try to explain why I think the fake levels are a problem, which is something gut hit on in IRC.

One problem is that they force you to explore every inch of some levels that have no staircases. Since you have now way of knowing what is fake and what is not, this is a large investment of time for 0 payoff - which is frustrating. Removing the fake levels removes this

Best idea I've heard [don't recall where that was maybe some non-english forums] was allow horizontal transit.

In nutshell -
fake levels would have some downstair redistro [less levels with downstairs more levels with multiple downstairs]
each fake level would have portal which would allow to switch between levels on same depth
portals would be somewhat tricky to reach and protected by some extra minotaurs
some of minotaurs from protection group could bypass walls [otherwise it is just one on one battle]

In essence while it likely would not speed progress too much it would allow to know that every time you find bloody downstairs you are making progress.