Spider Stomper
Posts: 247
Joined: Friday, 5th August 2011, 13:18
Patrol routes - partial luring/kiting amelioration
It's not intended as a cure-all for the (presumably undesirable) behavior of kiting/luring/pillar dancing, but one step to ameliorate it from a different and less artificial angle.
What if some percentage of monsters had set patrol routes around the dungeon?
It would introduce more risk to long-duration behavior like pillar dancing and kiting, and to some percentage of short duration, but frequently-repeated behavior like luring.
It would also make crawl harder by increasing the frequency of adds during fights and while resting in general. I see that as tactically interesting.
The big issues I see are that it might just replace one boring behavior with another, because now the player is incentivized to go down the stairs and hit 5 until all the patrols that could come through that room have done so. Explore the next room, repeat again.
A couple possibly solutions here:
- This might make the food clock relevant again, and we wouldn't need any more "remove food!" threads. Especially if some patrolling monsters only start to do so after a randomized delay, or after they wake up.
- Patrols could generate after the level is initially entered, perhaps slightly more frequently than random spawns now. Remember, to make pillar dancing more dangerous, it doesn't have to be penalized every time the player does it, just enough to make it risky over the course of the game.