Good levels: Fire, Ice, Air, Drac, Vaults, Orc, Slime. Elf?, Shoals?, Ranged?
Too hard: Pan, Mummy, Holy.
Too easy: Lair, Snake, Hells, Abyss.
Otherwise problematic:
Spider: too much mana drain, too wimpy monsters
Earth (boring)
Dragon (too many drakes)
Giants (boring, maybe add extra titans).
Dwarf (way too much damage reflection). Note that the point of damage reflection is to prevent mindless firestorming.
Crypt (only interesting with silent spectres)
The levels that are too hard are a fun challenge early on, but nearly impossible to clear when deep, and very hard to escape from.
The easy levels are not interesting, no matter at what depth
Currently, each new level rolls its monster set completely indepently. Ziggurats can be improved by reducing randomness here.
Avoid repitions. (Example, selecting a monster set makes it uneligible for the next three levels and of reduced probability beyond that.)
Bias sets by depth. (Examples: Some levels should not come up beyond a certain depth. Make sure that one (of a short list) set appears on depths 25-27.)
The list of furniture options is currently very restricted. While ziggurat levels should probably stay open in general, different pillars would be interesting (gameplay and variance).
Add shedus, pearl dragons, and ophans (no need to wait until all holy monsters are implemented).
Restrict number of angels in deep levels?
Was just done! Will be incredibly fragile, but also can swarm the player very quickly, I guess. —
claws 2011-09-26 19:01
Arena: small arena (3×9 or 5×7), surrounded by undiggable glass. In the arena, one or a few Pan lords await. The outer part is filled with imps and other minor demons (including some 2 and 3). The audience get special speech, cheering the Pan lords.
God-themed levels (using Demigod code)
Mix giants and dwarves?
Replace ice fiends for blizzard demons in Ice (does leave it weaker then Fire due to the difference between freezing clouds and fireballs + nothing as bad as orbs of fire, but torment here seem out of place.) —
claws 2011-09-26 19:08 stationary monsters (curse skulls (they are mobile now) , statues, oklobs) with many traps, also lava and water
insects, specifically wasps and boring beetles
Ghosts should ideally occur on the ziggurat level they were created on. If that is not feasible, they should only be generated after some fixed depth, e.g. Zig:10. Urgent
Loot depending on monster set: It might interesting to skew loot according to the monster set. (This probably only makes sense once the same happens for branches.)
Examining a ziggurat portal vault entrance with 'xv' should give away the fee. True, you can also see the fee with Ctrl-O but that is not obvious and many players try 'xv'.
All of these ideally depending on monster set.
Some ziggurats could disable gods. These would provide better loot in return.
Ziggurats (perhaps only of the god-disabling type) could contain an altar to a random god.
The architecture of the ziggurat lets you start on top and work down to the bottom. This would be much clearer if (some) storeys had windows through which you can see birds or more odd flying monsters or clouds. Lots of fun things could be added here (night/day, cumulus and cumulunimbus, lightning). It is important that the player is restricted to the room inside the ziggurat.
Make monsters spawn around the player in a sparse distribution (with larger floors) to make Ice/Fire Storm less effective.
Monsters not in the player LOS might wander randomly even if awakened, to keep the monsters sparsely distributed over the floor.
Feature Request 1236 suggested a rune on Zig:27; the discussion suggested some form of a prize, e.g. a pocket ziggurat, possibly evokable to generate another ziggurat portal. A rune is out of the question, and an evokable is a bad idea, since you'll get the item if and only if you have no reason to do another Zig.
