3 stage labyrinth.


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Shoals Surfer

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Post Saturday, 21st September 2013, 10:07

3 stage labyrinth.

What about making labyrinth 3 stages. Later stages would produce twice and 3 times as much loot as current labyrinth. You wouldn't be able to loot each level. When you find stairs up there would also be stairs down. If pick up loot from stairs the down stairs is closed. The first level of the labyrinth would be same as it currently is. Second stage is could be huge labyrinth third stage would be huge and also you couldn't tell which way the exit is by labyrinth tiles. Maybe the whole level should be steel-walls.

Maybe in each stage hunger clock would be faster.

I'm open for other ideas how to make stages 2 and 3 harder to crawl through.


PS. Maybe 3 times loot is bit much, maybe just 1x 1.5x and 2x the normal loot.

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Post Saturday, 21st September 2013, 10:36

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Maybe 1 piece, 1/2 current loot, and 1 times current loot for the three levels?

Level three has damaging cloud generators. Maybe there are new hunger clouds with a better name than that.

Autopickup preventing descending would be annoying.

Putting two and four Minotaurs at the end of 2nd and 3rd stages, and using more open stages for those final vaults could be fun.
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Dis Charger

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Post Saturday, 21st September 2013, 11:18

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Actually you really wouldn't need to hard prevent the player from picking up the loot...there tends to be enough HEAVY SHIT there you have to leave a lot of stuff behind unless you are troll/ogre strength, in which case half of it is useless to you anyways.
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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Saturday, 21st September 2013, 11:58

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

An alternative is to give labyrinths 0 stages and give the multiple stages to another portal.
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Post Saturday, 21st September 2013, 12:03

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

This could also be done with teleporters to keep from putting stairs in portal branches. Random teleports could be guaranteed to land you back in area 1, or to keep you in your current area, or could be rejiggered to summon hostile chaostaurs from the abyss.
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Post Saturday, 21st September 2013, 17:44

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

As pubby said, the problem with this proposal is that you adding more Labyrinths to the game.

This enhances all the current problems with Labyrinths - they're longer so you have to go through the unfun experience longer, and they have more loot so you're worse off if you don't go through them. I don't quite see what you're looking for in this - do you like labyrinths and wish they were longer? Do you think this would make labyrinth haters like them more? (It wouldn't). Labyrinths were already made to spawn once per game because two in a game were too much. Adding three one after another is not a good idea.
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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 04:30

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Hot damn it appears to be exactly one month since the last post in the last labyrinth topic.

Here's an idea- why not make labyrinths have a unrandart minotaur axe that is good, but almost definitely worse than other things, that give you a bucket of points. Then make it more monster-full. This way, it isn't a strategic annoyance, merely a completionist one. (For the record, I freaking love labyrinths. People who complain about them but not volcanoes or ice caves being nigh-impossible without having the right resists at that point in the game frustrate me)
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Dis Charger

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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 04:46

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

I, for one, actually like the Labyrinth, mostly because it has a unique puzzle generation algorithm; though I think it could use to have more monsters than just the minotaur. Nonetheless there are portal-less games so you can do without all of them...
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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 05:30

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

I wonder if Labyrinths could be improved at all simply by not making the labyrinth take up as much space as possible, making them, say, 30x30 instead of 70x80.

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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 11:35

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Well any change that results in less labyrinth would be positive yes.

Shoals Surfer

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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 14:08

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

TeshiAlair wrote:(For the record, I freaking love labyrinths. People who complain about them but not volcanoes or ice caves being nigh-impossible without having the right resists at that point in the game frustrate me)


Plenty of people dislike ice caves and volcanoes, too. (I don't really care for them and will often go in, take a look, and decide "forget this" and leave.) The big difference is that ice caves and volcanoes are still more or less regular Crawl, just with some environmental peculiarities. Labyrinths break much of the usual simplifying interface, making them quite tedious for many players in a way that other portal branches just aren't. I say tedious because it's quite rare for the maze aspect to present any real challenge. You just poke around until you find the right set of tiles and go that way, occasionally resetting and trying to move around the perimeter when that fails.

I definitely find labyrinths unfun, but the disproportionately good loot --- especially the very high chance of a generated rod --- make them hard to pass up if I'm interested in winning (which I generally am.)

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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 14:25

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Also, just because volcanoes and ice caves have fire and ice in them, that doesn't mean you need resistances to do them. This isn't angband; you won't explode if an ice beast hits you and you don't have rC. =P
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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 15:17

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

mikee wrote:Also, just because volcanoes and ice caves have fire and ice in them, that doesn't mean you need resistances to do them. This isn't angband; you won't explode if an ice beast hits you and you don't have rC. =P


My Sp died to volcano eruption in 2 turns and my Mf died to freezing clouds in 3 turns (both from full hp). They would easily survive with rF+/rC+, I think so because both would get to no-clouds place in 4 and 6 turns correspondingly.

Mines Malingerer

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Post Sunday, 22nd September 2013, 21:29

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

I think the labyrinth part of the labyrinth part gets boring fast. If anything it should be smaller.

The risk of starving isn't high enough as you can prepare by simply carrying a few rations. Maybe the player should lose all food items on entering and find them in the loot at the end.

Shoals Surfer

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Post Monday, 23rd September 2013, 13:16

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Kalma wrote:I think the labyrinth part of the labyrinth part gets boring fast. If anything it should be smaller.

The risk of starving isn't high enough as you can prepare by simply carrying a few rations. Maybe the player should lose all food items on entering and find them in the loot at the end.


Update to idea. Since doing labyrinth 3 times would be probably too much for person liking labyrinth. It would probably be better idea to use teleports to get you streight to labyrinth you want to go to. Generally the idea would be that harder labyrinths would take exponential amount of more food (on average) For linear amount of more treasure. So level 3 labyritnh could be designed more complicated and such to.

Anyway I guess 3 stage labyrinth was bit too crazy idea. (Anyway it seems that no one is positively interested in the idea so i guess it's just better to let the thread die.)

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Post Monday, 23rd September 2013, 13:53

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

siprus wrote:
Kalma wrote:I think the labyrinth part of the labyrinth part gets boring fast. If anything it should be smaller.

The risk of starving isn't high enough as you can prepare by simply carrying a few rations. Maybe the player should lose all food items on entering and find them in the loot at the end.


Update to idea. Since doing labyrinth 3 times would be probably too much for person liking labyrinth. It would probably be better idea to use teleports to get you streight to labyrinth you want to go to. Generally the idea would be that harder labyrinths would take exponential amount of more food (on average) For linear amount of more treasure. So level 3 labyritnh could be designed more complicated and such to.

Anyway I guess 3 stage labyrinth was bit too crazy idea. (Anyway it seems that no one is positively interested in the idea so i guess it's just better to let the thread die.)


Labyrinth reform would have a good deal of support, as many people don't like them, while removing them is controversial. So I think it is good to be considering how they might be improved. I think if this is the route you go, however, just making Labyrinths more like level 2 when it spawns at lower depths, from the get go, and closer to 3 when it spawns on deeper floors, would streamline things a lot. In any case, with a shortened maze element and more "standard" Crawl threats, but themed accordingly and offering a different flavor of challenge. I think that would be a good design goal. However, fiddling with more teleporters after entering the portal in order to set difficulty level (a feature that is somewhat against Crawl design anyway) seems like not much of an improvement. The easiness of Labyrinths is only one complaint, and not the major one, against them.

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Post Monday, 23rd September 2013, 14:07

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

and into wrote:...more "standard" Crawl threats...

I think this would go a long way toward improving the general opinion of labyrinths. More vaults, monsters, threats of death other than starvation would help alleviate the complaint that labs are too different from the rest of the game.

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Post Monday, 23rd September 2013, 15:32

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Right now, there's exactly one exit to a Labyrinth, and "mapping" your way through is pretty much unnecessary. While I imagine it would take some heavy coding, how about having the Labyrinth generate 4 paths to the exit vault, and making each path populate with one of many possible threatening chambers. Some could definitely be easier to deal with than others, even before considering the fact that different players will have different skill sets and equipment when they arrive. If a player finds a particular pre-exit chamber he doesn't like, he could choose to go back through the Labyrinth (a major headache, but one that would be MUCH easier if the player mapped his way through instead of simply Stimulus-Responsing like we currently do to find the exit) to find a possibly easier way out instead. This makes the generally harmless concept of starvation a slightly bigger threat, requires at least one Standard Crawl Monster Slaughtering experience apart from the minotaur, and would result in the experience being much less monotonous. Heck, expanding the exit vault block would even reduce the labyrinth itself, resulting in less time in the unfun portion.

The question is, do we even WANT to have players consider mapping their path as part of the game, and if not, does a branch that is literally a great big maze really belong here, and are we doing the concept justice?

EDIT: And yes, I know the Labyrinth gradually rearranges itself. The changes are usually pretty rare and insignificant though, and it's not like you can't track the number of noises you here and let that account for any mapping discrepancies.
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Post Monday, 23rd September 2013, 17:17

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

MoogleDan wrote:Right now, there's exactly one exit to a Labyrinth, and "mapping" your way through is pretty much unnecessary. While I imagine it would take some heavy coding, how about having the Labyrinth generate 4 paths to the exit vault, and making each path populate with one of many possible threatening chambers. Some could definitely be easier to deal with than others, even before considering the fact that different players will have different skill sets and equipment when they arrive. If a player finds a particular pre-exit chamber he doesn't like, he could choose to go back through the Labyrinth (a major headache, but one that would be MUCH easier if the player mapped his way through instead of simply Stimulus-Responsing like we currently do to find the exit) to find a possibly easier way out instead. This makes the generally harmless concept of starvation a slightly bigger threat, requires at least one Standard Crawl Monster Slaughtering experience apart from the minotaur, and would result in the experience being much less monotonous. Heck, expanding the exit vault block would even reduce the labyrinth itself, resulting in less time in the unfun portion.

The question is, do we even WANT to have players consider mapping their path as part of the game, and if not, does a branch that is literally a great big maze really belong here, and are we doing the concept justice?

EDIT: And yes, I know the Labyrinth gradually rearranges itself. The changes are usually pretty rare and insignificant though, and it's not like you can't track the number of noises you here and let that account for any mapping discrepancies.


Mapping a maze is not an effective or efficient way to solve one, and having four different exits with four different reward sets would just encourage people to find all four (after all, if currently people feel like the loot for one lab is too good to skip it even if they don't like the level at all, then how would they feel if there was four times as much loot you could find with maybe three times as much effort) Probably if there were four exits you'd have to close the other three after entering the chamber of the first one.

I suspect you mean something different than I hear when you talk about "mapping" a maze. Which is entirely possible. What I hear when someone says "mapping" a maze is to keep track of every path through the entire maze in it's entirety, which either requires a lot of graph paper and extraordinary patience or a near-photographic memory.

What I do, and this is very efficient for me, is explore until I get some kind of directional indication of the exit (a couple samples of rock/stone or stone/metal interface should give you a good idea if you can keep relative positions roughly in your head) then pick exits which tend toward the direction I want to go, memorize any junctions where I need to make a decision in case I need to backtrack to them, and if I encounter dead ends go back and pick the way not travelled before (always picking "towards" the exit)

One improvement which I could see helping players who dislike labyrinths is the notion of the "golden thread" really just marking squares which the player has stepped on before with a different color (Like xom trails :) this would help people keep track of what paths they've already taken and make the solving of the maze less tedious for people without excellent spatial memories. It's also sorta thematic.

A separate thing which would also help would be to be able to mark positions on the map screen, being able to use the existing waypoints or exclusions (even if you can't auto-travel to them, or see the map *other* than the positions of marked locations) would go a long way towards making the mapping less tedious for some people. Or alternately perhaps getting a stack of markers that you can drop in places in the maze to mark locations on the map, which serve no other purpose and disappear when you leave the maze, having a limited number of markers would also be interesting.
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Spider Stomper

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Post Monday, 23rd September 2013, 18:13

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

There would only be one exit vault with one pile of loot, not four. The four threat rooms I mentioned would each lead into the minotaur's loot chamber. Think of it like a cross made of 5 squares (though the actual layout could vary however the heck you wanted it to). Once you kill the minotaur in the center, you could leave the minotaur's chamber to attack all four threat rooms, but there'd be no loot; at most you'd get some experience and whatever gear the monsters inside were carrying.

As for the mapping, I meant literally mapping the labyrinth's layout, although I was considering using Excel myself :P It's a practice that you could easily argue belongs in a much older roguelike than Crawl, but with that being the case, why do we have a labyrinth minibranch at all? Without mapping, of course, you could simply go back out and stumble around and rely on your imperfect memory as best you could. The most harm that would do would be to burn an extra ration or two, unless the next threat room turned out to be even worse, in which case you'd go back out again... It winds up being a gamble of how much permafood you feel like risking in exchange for safe(r) passage.

I personally tend to leave stones behind me when I finish exploring a branch that's entirely worthless. The labyrinth has yet to change rapidly enough to make this a bad play.
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Post Wednesday, 25th September 2013, 21:06

make labyrinths smaller

nicolae wrote:I wonder if Labyrinths could be improved at all simply by not making the labyrinth take up as much space as possible, making them, say, 30x30 instead of 70x80.



This is a good idea. It preserves the flavor of the labyrinth, which appears to be important and fun to some, but removes most of the tedium, which is complained of by many. The question then, I suppose, is whether the actual puzzle-solving aspect of the labyrinth is an appropriate component of the game or can/should it be cropped?

Is there general agreement that the rewards of going into a labyrinth greatly outweigh the rather trivial risks of doing so? There are a lot of ways to grab the loot even if one can not kill the minotaur. The only non-trivial cost is time on the clock.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 01:32

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.



None of the methods work in crawl's maze without paper and keeping in mind food is limited. With maze structure changing it gets even worse.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 02:52

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Sandman25 wrote:

None of the methods work in crawl's maze without paper and keeping in mind food is limited. With maze structure changing it gets even worse.


Following the left-hand or right-hand wall doesn't require paper, just keeping track of what direction you're going, which IIRC is one of the main reasons map changing exists in the first place.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 03:09

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

You can drop stones as marks, probably. I've never done it, yet, but I'm planning to try it out.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 03:24

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.



It's still a puzzle, although a trivial one.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 03:28

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

nicolae wrote:Following the left-hand or right-hand wall doesn't require paper, just keeping track of what direction you're going, which IIRC is one of the main reasons map changing exists in the first place.


Wall-following doesn't work if the goal is detached at the center.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 04:09

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Kalma wrote:
nicolae wrote:Following the left-hand or right-hand wall doesn't require paper, just keeping track of what direction you're going, which IIRC is one of the main reasons map changing exists in the first place.


Wall-following doesn't work if the goal is detached at the center.


Why not? It won't lead you right to the upstair but once you reach the center it's pretty obvious that you're at the center loot vault.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 05:00

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

nicolae wrote:
Kalma wrote:
nicolae wrote:Following the left-hand or right-hand wall doesn't require paper, just keeping track of what direction you're going, which IIRC is one of the main reasons map changing exists in the first place.


Wall-following doesn't work if the goal is detached at the center.


Why not? It won't lead you right to the upstair but once you reach the center it's pretty obvious that you're at the center loot vault.


You said it yourself. You need that little bit more than just wall following algorithm.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 07:52

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

I have a very different proposal for labyrinth reform. I was hoping to flesh this out a bit more before posting, but it seems timely to do it now, and I'm sure it could use feedback. So, here we go...


The problem:
Labyrinths are, at least for a substantial group of players, dull. But they also have good loot, and are not risky for the great majority of players, so doing them is a no-brainer even if the experience is not enjoyed.

The positives:
Labyrinths have good flavor. Portals that introduce a *bit* of a change of pace are good (even if in the current implementation, going from "normal crawling" to "clicking yuhjlknm in various combinations a few hundred times" is too much). The leg up that some good gear from a labyrinth can provide is a nice boon (even if the risk/reward ratio is currently out of whack).

Solution:
Make labyrinths riskier, break up the tedium, keep loot as it is.

I can't see any meaningful way to make starvation a real threat in labyrinths. A lot more hungry ghosts might come close, but they are weak enough that if you can't take them down quickly it would be really really dumb to do a labyrinth because the minotaur will wipe the floor with you. Anything else, like higher metabolism in the labyrinth or satiation-draining sudden events similar to hell effects, would be terrible and uninteresting and add nothing. (You might as well just charge a couple of rations to enter the labyrinth and keep all else as it is currently.)

So... Let's stop pretending starvation is, could be, or should be the main threat in a way that is interesting. This means a slight change in the flavor of labyrinths, but it is a change in the part of labyrinth flavor that is *bad.* ("Beware! Starvation awaits!" No, it doesn't. Let's stop pretending it does. And let's be honest that making it so that starvation matters in labyrinths will only make them worse, not better.)


With that out of the way, let's build on the parts of labyrinth flavor that are good:

Labyrinth only spawns once, so it would make sense that the labyrinth is one special, specific area, not just one labyrinth of many that are out there. And it would also make sense that you would not be the only one who wants to get that loot at the end.

So why not introduce competitors who are also trying to get to the center, whom you have to defeat (or elude) in order to claim the prize?

How this could be implemented is that you would run into intelligent creatures, things like vault guards, orcs, centaurs, maybe even tengus and so on, but only individuals, not packs: These are enemies drawn to the labyrinth singly, like you, and they are trying to reach the end.

(I really like the subtle flavor this adds, without explicitly saying anything. It implies that labyrinth entrances are shifting around all over the place, like the labyrinth itself. They pop up here or there, sporadically, only to close. And a pack of gnolls or yaktaurs or whatever, somewhere, stumbled upon an entrance. And a lone gnoll—particularly adventurous, or strong, or perhaps just over-confident—disobeyed his sergeant's orders, or a yaktaur his captain's, and slipped inside the labyrinth while his comrades weren't looking.)

While the player is in the labyrinth, the possible enemies that spawn scale up over time, so you have a sense of urgency: Complete the labyrinth pretty quickly, or things might get ugly. There wouldn't be a lot of enemies, and they'd be one-at-a-time, so you could have rather dangerous OoD (relative to depth of labyrinth) potentially spawn if people don't get to the center quickly.

So, if you get to the center quickly, labyrinth is over before it gets tedious, hurray. If you don't, you have these competitors spawn who at least break up the tedium. The loot at the end is still good enough that it is probably worth the risk for most characters to give labyrinth a shot. It is just not a long exercise in not exercising auto-explore.

The depth at which labyrinth spawns would actually matter; if relatively late, enemies could be stronger, scale up faster, and have a higher "total cap" on how strong the competitors get, compared to lower levels.

Labyrinth should be calibrated so that an average run means you face 2 or 3 competitors on your way to the center, with the first one being not so challenging, but just kind of signaling the start of competitors spawning near you in the maze; the second being a bit tougher; the fourth being almost as bad as minotaur himself.

This takes the spotlight off the minotaur, but he still gets pride of place in the center, so maybe not too bad. Enemy difficulty should be scaled so that, if the labyrinth spawns fairly early, the "cap" on the toughness of monsters spawned should be such that the minotaur is likely to still be the "boss fight."

On deeper-level labyrinths, however, you can let all sorts of nasty stuff show up, as this also helps out with the problem that high level characters are not threatened by minotaur. Liches love good loot as much as the next intelligent creature, after all!

If this is done, a few escape hatches should perhaps spawn, so if things start getting too rough, you'll have a chance to opt out. However, only a few hatches in entire labyrinth, so it is unlikely this would be a tactical consideration, only a strategic one, and of a very different feel than Ziggs, for instance.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 08:07

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

three stages or not, but how about we make labyrinth work like caves, I love those much more. It will have auto-explore and a normal mapping and it's own dangers, like boulder beatles rolling from corridors and droping into lava if you dodge them or you'll get an unpleasant amout of damage and will have to fight it. Just an idea, it could be something else, like traps, monsters, lava chasing you, whatever.
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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 12:48

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Labyrinth works like caves, but like Abyss, there is no end.
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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 13:34

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

The problem with adding dangerous monsters to the labyrinth is that you more or less must fight them. Teleports are pretty much a disaster, and even speed/Swiftness will only get you away from the fight if you happen to run in the direction of the center. It seems like it would pretty easy to end up in a situation where to exit the labyrinth you must fight and kill something significantly beyond your character's ability, putting you in a situation where your character has effectively died long before the game actually stops.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 14:03

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

All lab problems are solved by adding a location-specific ability "Call Minotaur". When activated, Minotaur instantly enters your LoS from magic upstairs. The magic upstairs disappear after 10 turns so you can try to either kill minotaur or just lure/outrun him and exit. No loot of course. Too bad it will never be implemented.

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Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 14:07

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

Sandman25 wrote:All lab problems are solved by adding a location-specific ability "Call Minotaur". When activated, Minotaur instantly enters your LoS from magic upstairs. The magic upstairs disappear after 10 turns so you can try to either kill minotaur or just lure/outrun him and exit. No loot of course. Too bad it will never be implemented.

Why would you even enter the lab if you were going to do that? I mean it works as an emergency if you are burning too much food, but I haven't really had that problem.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 11111

Joined: Friday, 8th February 2013, 12:00

Post Thursday, 26th September 2013, 14:20

Re: 3 stage labyrinth.

johlstei wrote:
Sandman25 wrote:All lab problems are solved by adding a location-specific ability "Call Minotaur". When activated, Minotaur instantly enters your LoS from magic upstairs. The magic upstairs disappear after 10 turns so you can try to either kill minotaur or just lure/outrun him and exit. No loot of course. Too bad it will never be implemented.

Why would you even enter the lab if you were going to do that? I mean it works as an emergency if you are burning too much food, but I haven't really had that problem.


I had some games where I spent 20+ minutes looking for Minotaur. Food was not a concern, I just didn't enjoy it and wanted to finish it as soon as possible so I would be ok to trade the loot for exit.

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