melee and missile noise
blowgun, thrown stone, throwing net, awkward throw: none
hunting sling: 1*
hand crossbow, tomahawk: 2
javelin: 3
fustibalus: 3*
shortbow: 5
longbow, large rock: 6
arbalest: 7
triple crossbow, Sniper: 9
*if the attacker uses a sling bullet instead of a stone, also makes 1 noise at their location
melee noise (made at the attacker's square)
silent if a stab, otherwise equal to damage dealt divided by 4 and rounded down, with a minimum of 1 and maximum of 12
Spells, like ranged combat, make fixed amounts of noise.
The approach to noise is completely different for melee and ranged combat. This seems bad to me. The melee noise formula is short and makes a reasonable amount of sense flavour-wise, but the high variance in melee damage - combined with the fact that players are never told how much damage they're doing - makes it rather unclear in practice, imo.
Both approaches have the problem that you might want to swap to a weaker weapon (or spell) for trivial monsters, in order to make less noise. I don't think this is really solvable without getting rid of trivial monsters themselves, or giving players stricter time limits (even if you made all attacks make the same noise you could still lure trivial monsters to places where that noise doesn't matter).
Ranged combat noise is extremely generous to the player. First of all, the loudest missile attack is still significantly quieter than the cap on melee attacks. Second, the noise is made on a square that is distant from the player - it can actually be beneficial!
I think that missile noise should either:
A. use the same formula as melee noise when it hits, and just be silent when it misses (like melee)
or B. if it keeps the fixed noise behaviour, make the noise at the attacker's location instead of where the missile lands. And don't have all these tiny variations in noise by launcher, the stuff below shortbow is quiet enough it might as well be 0 outside Tomb. Just make them all 7.
You could also go the other way and make melee noise constant. Just don't have a bunch of tiny differences between the weapons' noise levels like ranged weapons currently do, please - you could get away with giving the different weapon classes different constant noise values (e.g. 1 for short blades, 10 for maces, 5 for the rest) but nothing more than that.
- For this message the author duvessa has received thanks: 4
- Airwolf, nago, VeryAngryFelid, Yermak