Attnam Catacombs

8:44 pm	fejoa 	@red_kangaroo: Awesome work! Can you start a thread showcasing some of the changes?	
3:11 pm	red_kangaroo 	I have submitted a new PR for Attnam Catacombs. What do you think?

Here you go.

Highlights:
* Cathedral Cellar vodka can no longer be freely stolen. Sorry, I liked it as well.
* Imprisoned necromancer is no longer lonely - several prisoners and jailers were added.
* Imprisoned necromancer talks about eating bones and drinking blood - so now he can do it!
* Special room added to Catacombs.
* Last level of Catacombs has a boss fight.

I would like to know how people feel about this side-dungeon now. There are rewards for clearing the Catacombs now, but hopefully not enough to break the game.

For anyone interested, here is a script file commented out so that it works with 0.57.

It contains my additions to the Attnam Underground, plus tweaked Crystal Cave, added Lobh-se lair and UT:6 I'm currently working on, so it's not yet finished.

I would be very much interested in any feedback you could have, or comments and criticism.

* The walls are much stronger than I expected based on coming to the catacombs instead of GC1. Radius 2 Legifer didn't even scratch them.
* I sold the SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text. for 1000 GP. You probably shouldn't have such extravagant treasure in such a relatively safe place. SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
[Edit]
* The SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text. was terrifying looking, but I zapped a fireball at it and it went down in just that one shot.
* When I tried to disturb the dead, I got a seg fault.
* Whatever effect should happen, it should happen on 'y', instead of letting you look at the stuff and change your mind. I had to actually choose an item to get it to crash.
* I really like showcasing the ghosts that look like their original creatures!
* Not so much that many of them seem to ESP and run through the walls to come get me. Still, they're weak.
* Maybe a few ghosts of guards should inhabit the final level, with the weaker village types occupying the upper floors.
* Side note: I like the zombies and all, but it still bothers me that they're rotting so that they only exist a couple of hours. I just don't like it that they're all obviously created when you enter the floor.

The walls are unchanged from CVS, I have no idea how tough they are. Do you think they are too tough?

SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.

Also, these seems to be a bug with stairs. When you come back from the first catacombs level to the cellar, do you end up on the down staircase? I think I ended up elsewhere on the level, which happens if the stairs are not correctly linked. I'll have to take a look at that.

Some stuff is fixed, plus I added several minor changes to Attnam. See yoursefl if you like, just replace your Script file with the one below.


It's terrifying in melee, but you're right wands will wreck it. I may give it some resistances.


Hm, that's unfortunately a bug that was already present in CVS. And my coding skills are nowhere near good enough to fix it. :/

If it only happens when you try to take an item from the coffin, I may just make the coffin empty for now.


Yeah, feoja did an awsome job!


Well, SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text., at least I hope so. We could make all zombies similar.

These changes are cool. I like that you have created a bunch of new olterrains using the pictures in the .pcx files. That is a job that has long needed doing

Most likely (I hope so ) last changes were made to this pull request.

Changes:

* tweaked boss - it no longer falls easily to fireballs.
* several rooms added to cellar (guards have barracks and a dining hall),
* NPCs can tell you more about Attnam (and other things as well),
* Attnam has four cardinals (based on Doc/Obsolete/Attnam.txt),
* tomb of the unknown soldier (based on Doc/Obsolete/Attnam.txt).

Enjoy!

Looking forward to checking out the changes!

Just merged your awesome work Red. A really valuable contribution, J_Kahvi would be proud that you've so skilfully incorporated so many of his latent artworks from the files. I've added the christmas trees back in and these can be merged. Maybe we need to think about the valpurium battle-axe again.

In the meantime, can someone please download this version of IVAN (rename-to-zip.doc) and tell me if it runs properly, or whether you get a missing .dll error?

The internet at my flat has is a bit unreliable at the moment.

There's a few dlls missing:

zlib1.dll
libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
libstdc++-6.dll

Thanks!


I'll try to explain my reasoning:

I wanted the zombie of Khaz-zadm feel like a boss, a worthy fight, and also offer a meaningful treasure for its defeat. The zombie already had rather good stats, so I let those be, but I gave it resistances, as Ighalli pointed out she can be felled by a wand way too easily. Optimally, she should be a bit hard to fight right after arriving to Attnam, but doable with good equipment and/or after a floor or two of GC. Valpurium battle-axe was given to her because a) it makes her much more intimidating in melee and b) it is a cool treasure well worth the hassle defeating her.

Why a battle-axe instead of a hammer? Well, I find axes are rather underused right now - every other weapon category has a special weapon or an artifact that makes it good to train. Axes, though, lack both special weapons and artifacts. They are not actually unbalanced or underpowered (I feel quarterstaffs are, but that may be IMO), it's just batter to train eg. hammers with the hope of finding a thundr hammer, even if you happen upon some nice axes. Thus I wanted at least one cool and powerful axe in the game, so that some players might actually train axes and stick with them through the rest of the game, just as they do with artifacts of other weapon categories.

I might have gone overboard with making it valpurium and not a different high metal, but I think it's balanced by the risk - the last floor of Catacombs is dangerous, there is the necromancer and the zombie herself can crit you pretty bad with the axe. It is true that this guarantees a valpurium battle-axe in each game, but you have to be able to actually obtain it, which in some games will take some time to build up power. And you can also obtain a valpurium sword in each game by praying to Valpurus, which I don't find that difficult to achieve. You can sell the god gifts just as much as the axe - it's true, though, that the cash you get is quite formidable.

If we are to nerf it, I would prefer to either make it a valpurium axe instead of a battle-axe, or slightly nefring the material, but still leaving the zombie with a powerful axe, for the reasons above.

What do you think?

Also, sorry for the trees, I totally missed them. :/

Sorry, but if all it has going for it is that it's valpurium, nobody's going to bother training in axes in hopes of using that. Having said that, you have a point when you say axes aren't too bad. Perhaps it's time to add some special axes? Like decapitator axes that perform worse than normal but have a high chance to behead enemies, or a Destroyer's War Axe artifact that has a chance to shoot a wand of striking beam or something like that.

Awesome! Thanks for checking cap.


It's cool, I patched it up


That'd make for a dangerous boss monster. I'd definitely go after that axe down in the Catacombs!

I would like to have the artifact axe Eptyron from CLIVAN in the main game, it could potentially even make a nice weapon for the zombie of Khaz-zadm. However, I don't really feel up to finding and porting the relevat code from CLIVAN...

I didn't mean for the boss, or any boss for that matter. Just saying we could do with some special axes, both semi and full artifact.

Maybe axes could also gain a special "cleaving" attack, where they would hit more than just one square around you at once. For example, normal axe would hit three squares - the one you targeted and two adjacent squares. Battle axe would then hit all squares adjacent to you except for the one opposite to the primarily targetted square. This could give axes an interesting edge when fighting several foes at once.

Or when standing next to a tame valpurium golem.

There could be a test for team membership?

Yeah, there probably should be.


They probably should try to behead humanoids when they strike them in the head. And uniques might be immune, otherwise decapitator axes would be way too good against them - beheading prevents amulet of life saving from working, so Petrus and Sherry would be way easier to kill with those axes.

I wasn't serious about either of those, I was just throwing out ideas, but it seems you guys like the sound of the decapitator axes. If we're going to balance them seriously, I can think of two ways for two different ways of coding it.

1. What I first said, they perform worse than normal. Since they rely on the gimmick of decapitation they do worse than normal axes against anything without a head to sever. Both less damage and less accuracy, which means for the character to see any decapitation either there's;
A. A high, flat chance of the effect triggering. For example, a 5% chance whenever you swing, or;
B. An even higher chance whenever you manage to strike them in the head (as suggested in the post above) since you need to hit them in the head first. For example, 20%.

2. Trade off damage for accuracy, for even lower chance of decapitation but letting it perform more or less evenly across the board since it won't be relying on its gimmick as much. Low damage, high accuracy.
A. So here it would be something like 1%, and;
B. Here it'd be more like 3%.

These would be special variants of normal axes, not battle-axes, and would spawn randomly.

Now that I'm thinking about it, a quick and dirty fix for axes would be to move halberds into Axe skill. They look like huge axes, orcs could all have the same skill and Mjolak would be an axe.

That... is ... actually a really decent idea. Though to be fair halberds are designed to do a fair bit of poking.

Halberds are literally spears with axe-heads mounted on the end. However, the handling is definitely closer to a polearm than an axe.

I wonder if both Pierce and Slash damage types can be attributed to halberds?

They have both flags, so probably yes.