Enhancing CON and IQ - ID: 747
FORUM: Feature Requests
This topic was started by wizardz on 03/10/2012, 23:06:39
This may seem complex, but I'll propose it anyway. Currently there is no benefit from increasing IQ beyond 25 for casters or 18 for non-casters. There is the minor benefit of a larger unconscious range for larger CON, but other than that there is no reason to raise it over 24 if CON is not primary or 25 if CON is primary.
I suggest that for every 2 points of CON + IQ over 60 you gain additional HP still to the max of 10 you get for CON over 14 now. This would have the effect of narrowing the HP add to the higher end of the range. And it would make it useful to accept CON and IQ boosts when leveling up.
Heya!
Thank you very much again.
I will think about this :-)
Kind Regards
Mario
Right now I am thinking about capping all stats to 30 (same as the BT3) to make the endgame more balanced.
In addition, experience points needed for the higher level should be adjusted.
When designing the game, I had no idea that there were so many insane people out there (including me ;-) ) who play far beyond Maruziel's defeat and reach Level 50+. At the actual stage of designing new creatures this backfires at me.
What do you think?
Regards
Mario
Sorry I took a while to respond, but I wanted to think about it.
My knee jerk reaction was negative. Yes, as you can tell from my other posts, I like to over build my party and the slowly but safely explore. A limit of level 30 will severely restrict that approach. It will also make it difficult to cross the lava fields in the Inferno without having your non Mage characters die. Yes, you can resurrect them, but it's not enjoyable for me to let my team members die. The max HP for a Rogue or Monk will be about 500. The max damage for a Monk will make him useless, especially since he cannot use weapons other than the Silversword.
Having said that, it is your game. If it makes it easier for you to program, then perhaps that's the way to go. It will make the game more challenging to play for new players, and that may not be a bad thing. Somehow we need to attract new players -- will making the game more challenging get better reviews and attention in the Apple Store? Perhaps.
Yes, a scale of something like + required XP for each level after 15 is 10% more than to reach the previous level is much more reasonable than the current fixed amount. Although with current battle rewards, arch mages do grow pretty slowly.
Old D&D had different max levels based on race and class. Could we let Monks and Rogues go to level 45 while others are capped at 30?
Could we come up with Holocaust Cloaks tha reduce lava damage by 50%?
Sure you could do either or both. Do we need to? Do the players really want balance? I honestly, do not know.
At least one series of the old PC games scaled the encounters based on party strength and maybe you do that now. Some or more monsters should certainly be immune to magic.
The problem is the same one the designers of Wizardry had -- keeping balance as the player characters grew stronger and stronger was difficult. Eventually, they gave us children of our original characters and then we had to start over rebuilding the (almost) destroyed big bad guy.
Rather than continuing to tweak the random drops, perhaps there should be a few stores that have random inventories of all the good stuff (except the one off's like the Silversword and the Stone Sword). What's available could also be based on level. Then the players can earn the gold through encounters or maybe buy some gold through the Apple Store if they are less patient.
I don't think of the Inferno as the "end game". I want it to continue on. But to be fair, we need to come up with a way for you to modularize expansions and charge for each, individually. Right now upgrades are free for those who bought the base game. It probably makes more sense to have add on modules instead of expanding the current package through more upgrades. There could certainly be other islands and areas we could travel to and continue our adventures. The makers of The Quest have done this fairly successfully in the PC and now Apple world.
I enjoy your game immensely. I've been playing for over a year (although was not a member of the forum for that long due to technical issues) and have played through completely four times. I'll undoubtedly play again under the new rules, if only to see what it's like and write comments in the forum. Thank you for all the work you've put in to giving me countless hours of diversion and entertainment. If you ever need another beta tester, please keep me in mind.
I may add more thoughts as they come to me.
Thank you very much for your message!
Just one thing: Capping the Stats does not mean capping the HP / SP. Levelling would still be very important just to get your party more health and mana.
Regards
Mario
Interesting. I was thinking of it as capping levels...too much the old D&D mentality, I guess.
I do NOT see a downside to capping stats at 30. Assuming monsters could go higher (60 for a dragon or greater demon would not be unreasonable), it would solve the "the party always strikes first" issue some have raised. And as you say, it would make the programming easier.
We still have the infinite re-roll issue I was trying to suggest a solution for with my original post. I have had the discussion with other game designers in the past, that if a player spends more time trying to beat the random number generator than playing the game, the game becomes less fun to play and soon players give up and go away. Right now there are at least three places where the players are "fighting" the random number generator:
1. Rolling up new characters. This is pretty easy to to do with the current set up. It took me about thirty minutes to roll my warrior and my monk and get them starting stat totals of 84 or better. That was pretty easy compared to getting them enough levels to have adequate HP. (This process would be easier if the rolling result screen showed the total, though.)
2. Leveling up. Back in the early days of my playing Silversword I used to hold out for the max possible HP and the best stat. Now it's 23 or better HP (for classes whose max is 26) and the best stat. Early on it would often take over an hour to get the desired result when leveling up. Now it's down to ten minutes or so, but that gets really boring when you are raising three characters four or more levels at one time. Recently I have been working on my Monk who was going up ten levels for every one the Arch Mages were going up. If we make it take more XP for each new level that will make fewer levels to work through at a time, but still rerolling does get boring. The other issue I was hoping to address was that IQ and CON have no added benefit after 18 or 24 (25 if primary). (It would be a lot easier if the player could choose the stat they want to raise when leveling up.)
3. Drops. Getting good equipment for the characters is difficult and takes a VERY long time. I still don't have the Spellwoven silken Gloves for two of my three Arch Mages after 322 million XP. That's why I am suggesting shops that have even the best equipment for sale from time to time.
There are a couple more places where players might be fighting the random number generator more than playing the game, but not seeing them mentioned elsewhere in the forum, I'll skip them.
I admit that after the first two paragraphs, the rest of this post is presumptuous of me. It IS your game, to program as you see best. It has been tremendous fun for me as it is. I would like to see more others also enjoy it.
I like the idea that shops should have random (good) loot from time to time. I will think about this.
As for "fighting" the random generator - I like dice rolling, and I like the Bard's Tale approach to that. I agree that this is an ancient method of creating your characters. Today in all RPGs you are in total control of distributing points etc. But Silversword wouldn't be a Bard's Tale Style like game if it would change the system of dice rolling and randomness.
I know how some players feel about this, and it seems that having a random generator forces everybody to re-roll until they hit the maximum.
I officially state now: To play through the game, you don't need any character anywhere near 84 points stat sum at the beginning ;-) I don't play the old save-roll-reload game until my characters get max HP / SP upon levelup, but I know that some players do. It is up to you, really. The game doesn't demand it. If your success in the game would rely on good random numbers, I would have missed my goal. I like it when players get the chance to try things out. They can start with an average party and don't reload on bad rolls - and they can try to max everything out. Some people say, this is bad game design, others say that it gives more replay value. I say, it's Bard's Tale ;-)
It is my game in terms of creation and copyright - but it is as well your game, because this forum is the best source of feedback for me. And many enhancements were already made because some players wanted to see them. I try to improve the overall game experience, but I don't want to change this game in something other than a Bard's Tale clone. If I would, I would leave my small niche where I have comfortably settled in :-) And then, the players+press would kill me, because Silversword can't compete with other, commercial, non-indie RPGs. My approach to that will be Silversword 2. But that will take some more time (and money).
Anyway - your thoughts are most welcome, really. I admit that I am my only testplayer right now, and this costs a lot of time and can't cover all situations.
Kind regards
Mario
Thanks for listening and thinking about our posts!
Just tested the 10% increase on XP needed after 14...
Right now my monk has 11.8 mio. xp - level 63.
After the change he would need 268 mio. xp for 64...
This would be a huge impact on the game... but I think it could be worth it.
Combats in the expansion are likely to give over 100K xp...
What do you think?
Kind regards
Mario
EDIT: I plan on changing the amount of XP needed for 14 to 200000 for every class to compensate this.
I got out my spreadsheet and looked at some numbers.
Yes, 268 - 12 is 246 million points needed for the next level. At 100k per combat that's about 2460 combats for that next level up (versus 3 at the current scheme). If as you say you change to a 200k base that drops by about 35 million to about 211 million or 2110 combats.
The differential to the next level after that is just under 27 million or about 270 combats, which I think is a lot but not unreasonable. (Or under the 200k base 23.8 million or about 238 combats.
If you switch to 5% instead of 10% (I looked at 9, 8, 7 and 6, but 5 is the lowest I think you should consider) for your monk level 63 would be at 48.4 million or about 150 more combats. And the differential to level 64 only about 27 combats. I actually don't think this is enough.
If you switch to 6% level 63 would be at 67 million, level 64 at 71.2 million.
If you switch to 7% level 63 would be at 93 million, level 64 at 101 million.
If you switch to 8% level 63 would be at 132 million, level 64 at 143 million.
If you switch to 9% level 63 would be at 188 million, level 64 at 205 million.
I do like the concept, and I would prefer 7% from a the next level is not outrageously far, while the following levels are not too easy to attain perspective.
I don't think you should convert characters (neither making your monk level 41 and reducing his HP to 717, the max for that level if it is above that under the current scheme nor giving your nor increasing the monk to 243 million thus making him level 62 under the new scheme seem reasonable). The former method would result in players feeling cheated out of the increases they worked for;the latter would give the players billions of unearned XP. And both would take programming time you could spend on better things.
I say if it makes the expansion more balanced you should do this change. It will impact existing players but I think that is outweighed by the benefit for the game. I think 7% would be better than 10% and also better than 5%.
Kind regards,
Craig aka wizardz
Just my 2ps worth:
I chose the default party.
For the first 15 or so levels I didn't even consider re-rolling on level ups but just took the result through ignorance and naivety. It wasn't until visiting the board and reading the character guides I realised what was possible.
From then until level 30 I re-rolled on crappy stats but often took 75% of max because re-rolling takes ages and is not fun for me.
I killed M. with AMs only at spell level 3 or 4, no Stone Blade (hadn't found it yet), Bard with arrows (which started to crit hit which was unexpected).
I only levelled to 30 because on reading that people had level 50+ and 900+ HP I thought I needed it to have a chance of success. More importantly, probably because I needed a certain spell to get past certain encounters (eg. Grove guardians, bandit cave, marksmen). In fact this worked well progressively. I ended with 20mil XP.
So for me the game was finely balanced. All characters from default were useful and I loved my Monk. By level 30 he was doing 1000+ HP kills, my Bard moved to the Silversword, and Paladin did 500-600 HP damage with a Fiery Avenger. With low AC the Monk hardly got hit with Lava being a problem that restoration or resurrect solved with any XP losses. Don't understand the bad press Monk gets.
So not under or over powered, just right. With various refresh points and refresh songs it just cost some extra journeys but I preferred that to re-rolling boredom.
I would suggest to raise the min values to mid point to remove the need to re-roll poor dice so the re-rollers can still do so. I would have preferred to choose my own stat points but it is not a must.
Once I complete the Dragon part I'm gonna level the AMs as I want to see the last spell at work :)
Great game. Took way too much of my time so glad to get back to life. Looking forward to any expansions.
Thank you Mario.
Btw I ended up with over a million gold so I welcome the expensive special item shop to spend it on.
