"Rebalancing" BoE

[Prince of Kitties]

So I'm looking through Sylae's CBoE git code, and it looks to me like some PC skills aren't actually used. Granted I don't have a terribly good eye for code, here's what I see:

 

Archery and Throwing are loaded into a variable, and then AFAICT never used. Ranged hit chance depends entirely on Dexterity, bless level, and item bonuses.

 

Edged/Bashing/Pole Weapons skills are never factored into hit chance (again AFAICT). This is probably why they don't appear to increase it in the character info screen. Close combat hit chances also depend only on Dexterity, blessing, and item bonuses.

 

Intelligence, as I suspected, is not used for many spells, and even then the effect is not significant at high levels.

 

Webs don't have any effect on critters who walk through them. This is because spiders have to walk through them with impunity, and spiders/bugs aren't distinguished from other critters in the relevant code.

 

Now that I've cross-compiled the code under MinGW (thanks Sylae for doing all the work!), I may try to change some of this stuff and upload "rebalanced" Win32 binaries somewhere. There are also other changes I'd like to make:

 

- Currently the Sanctuary spell is kind of useless, except maybe for keeping weak PCs out of trouble; since you can't do anything useful without becoming visible. It would be more interesting if PCs could use magic (perhaps only priest spells) while Sanctuary was in effect.

 

- On the other side of the balance equation, the Sanctuary effect seems to be level independent in terms of how often critters can bypass it and hit you. That should probably be changed.

 

- Likewise, Bless is way overpowered. I'm thinking I should put a cap on it; 8 levels worth of blessing should be enough for a low-level PC, and more is too much.

 

- Poisoned arrows should be more viable. I'm thinking it should take more AP (maybe 5) to use weapon poisons, but the poison should be applied to all wielded weapons. Likewise, weapon poison should be more powerful than Envenom (so that players actually have a reason to use it).

 

- Mindduel is largely useless because it compares against 2 * NPC level. Getting rid of the multiplier should make it usable vs. low-level opponents.

 

- Smite, Flame Arrows, and Venom Arrows are all really pathetic. Their damage should probably increase with level.

 

The general trend I want is for magic, poison, and archery to be more powerful at high levels, while close combat gets relatively weaker. What say you all?

[keira]

(moving this to the boe board)

 

A lot of these issues, I believe, are documented on a mega thread in boe (on mobile, will link later).

 

All of these, of course, can be fixed. CBoE has a compatibility detection, and we can always have it fallback to preserve old scenarios.

 

If you want to register a github account and post these as separate issues on calref/cboe, I'd appreciate it.

[Prince of Kitties]

Ah, thanks! I wasn't aware I'd posted in the wrong area.

 

I'll probably register a Github account at some point today. ATM I'm experimenting with the code changes. I'll see how it goes, particularly with the new caps on bless spells.

[Lilith]

Archery and Throwing are loaded into a variable, and then AFAICT never used. Ranged hit chance depends entirely on Dexterity, bless level, and item bonuses.

 

Edged/Bashing/Pole Weapons skills are never factored into hit chance (again AFAICT). This is probably why they don't appear to increase it in the character info screen. Close combat hit chances also depend only on Dexterity, blessing, and item bonuses.

 

I know that in the original BoE your weapon skill level was used to set your base hit rate, which was the base from which all other hit bonuses and penalties were calculated (hence why it didn't show up as a bonus on your character sheet). I'm not sure if or how CBoE has messed around with that.

 

- Currently the Sanctuary spell is kind of useless, except maybe for keeping weak PCs out of trouble; since you can't do anything useful without becoming visible. It would be more interesting if PCs could use magic (perhaps only priest spells) while Sanctuary was in effect.

 

- On the other side of the balance equation, the Sanctuary effect seems to be level independent in terms of how often critters can bypass it and hit you. That should probably be changed.

 

I'm not sure about either of these; right now, Sanctuary has a potentially useful niche for running away from fights that way outmatch you, although admittedly that's not a situation that comes up very often since scenario designers normally expect fights to be won by a level-appropriate party. You could also recast Mass Sanctuary every round, if you had spell points to burn (and in serious fights at high levels, you usually do). I guess I could see the argument for letting a Sanctuaried character do basically anything other than direct attacks (using beneficial items or healing/buffing spells).

 

- Likewise, Bless is way overpowered. I'm thinking I should put a cap on it; 8 levels worth of blessing should be enough for a low-level PC, and more is too much.

 

In the original BoE there was in fact supposed to be a cap at 8 levels of blessing, and some forms of blessing respected it, but some blessing spells didn't correctly check to see if the cap was being exceeded. So this change would basically just be restoring the originally intended behaviour.

[Celtic Minstrel]

...why are we rebalancing? Making use of skills like Archery which were never used, okay, sure. Significantly altering mechanics though... I'm not sure I like this idea.

[Prince of Kitties]

So far we're not. And soon I probably won't have the time anyway. But I was thinking less "integrate gameplay changes into mainline CBoE" than "publish a BoE remix with different mechanics, for those who might be interested."

 

That said, I'm all for making Archery useful in the mainline version.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Ah, okay. I think mainline should try to maintain faithfulness to the original to a certain extent, so rebalancing should be off in a fork or something. Making Archery (and possibly other skills) actually useful on the other hand seems to me to qualify as a bugfix.