Thursday, 11th September 2014, 16:01 by and into
Dipping orc for guaranteed wand(s) of digging doesn't sound great. Zero to two charges don't matter since you often have a scroll of recharging or two by the time you come across Orc.
I don't think exploding ammo is necessary for noise purposes, and it would interfere with one of the dangers Orc already tries to throw at you: Getting surrounded. The layout of Orc (at least Orc 1 to 3) already is basically designed to throw a bunch of dudes at you, all at one time. Orc 1 to 3 is probably the area of the game in which increasing noise would not matter very much since unless you are invisible everything sees you and shouts and the areas are compact and full of monsters already. Moreover, exploding ammo would kill weak orcs for you which makes maneuvering around the tough enemies easier and may in fact reduce difficulty. Plus if three or four enemies had explosive ammo the animations for it would be *really* annoying since they'd lag game play. A single kobold with exploding darts it is not so bad but if 5 orcs were shooting exploding sling bullets at you it would obnoxiously slow down game play.
Ogre Heavers could work, I suppose, and would be funny the first couple of times you see them, but I'm not sure that would do all that much to make the weak enemies in Orc stronger.
I actually think the difficulty for the mines is ok. It is certainly more dangerous than Lair (which has 8 levels no less). There is less variation in enemies but it is also much shorter. What bothers me isn't lack of variation or difficulty in O but the fact that *so* many weak enemies spawn, even stuff that doesn't fit thematically (why the hell do hobgoblins spawn in Orc?) so I'd just say, at least for orc 2 and 3, remove goblins and hobgoblins entirely and maybe tone down the number of vanilla orcs, while increasing the proportion of wargs (which are surprisingly rare in Orc 1 to 3) and ogres, maybe slight increase in trolls as well. Maybe that would increase difficulty a bit but mainly it would decrease some annoyance. Overall Orc is pretty good now though and I wouldn't want it to stray too much from its "swarm you with enemies" every time you go down stairs approach.
If people are into more radical ideas, here is one: No stairs in orc, only escape hatches—though there will be extra ones and at least 3 guaranteed. (Might have to tone down difficulty of 1 to 3 if you are going do that.)