Monster balancing and Heartland
Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2012 2:10 am
NPC claims for Heartland (map 4) are not far away, and NPCing can involve dropping monsters in the landscape, so let me lay out what kind of balancing and monster placement I'd like to see in the game. The following guidelines (which can be deviated from whenever it is reasonable) summarize numerous IRC discussions.
The abstract
Most of the currently existing leveled lists in MW, BM, Tribunal and TR_Data are pretty badly designed, and the difficulty of opponents on these lists depends way too much on (1) the player's level (a leveled list can spawn a durzog beginning at level 8 and nothing at all on earlier levels) and (2) dice rolls (a leveled list for a daedra decides randomly to spawn a scamp or a golden saint). I believe that, instead, it should depend mostly on (A) the region of the encounter and (B) the distance from civilization (towns and roads). Leveled lists are good when they consist of enemies of roughly the same difficulty (for example, a wild guar and an alit can be used on the same leveled list), all of them spawning at level 1 (so that level-1 players don't get a puppy license to walk into Mordor).
Why? For several reasons. The fact that Morrowind's roads aren't safer than the surrounding wilderness (and often even less safe due to passing through Daedric shrines) doesn't help immersion very much. The very idea of levelscaling doesn't either. By the time the player spent in Ald-Ruhn, the Ascadian Isles suddenly got swarmed with kagoutis? Really? And no one even noticed it?
Also, the idea of (WoW-style) level zones isn't that bad. It is logical that if you walk into the Armun Ashlands with a character right out of the prison ship, you get your ass handed to you; if you do it as an aspiring Redoran warrior, you will have a fair challenge; and if you do it as a Fighters Guild master, you will have a relaxing hunt. It is not logical that as a level-1 newb, you get a free pass because the leveled lists only spawn rats (or even nothing at all) at this level, that at level 10 you get some medium-difficulty monsters, and that at level 30 you get dragons breathing crimson plague.
There should be safe places and dangerous places, and everything in between. This, of course, means that not all of our lands will be accessible in the early game unless one pulls the difficulty slider very far down. But I think that with the size of our land, there still will be tons of places to explore on level 1, and sacrificing some open-worldedness to immersion feels like a good deal to me.
Levelscaling also tends to be unfair to the players who want to slowly develop their characters, e. g., by training mercantile and speechcraft or reading skillbooks. Instead of just slowly getting better, their characters actually become worse with levelup. Due to the abundance of skillbooks in the towns of the Mainland, this is a problem that needs to be addressed.
The concrete
On imitation: It is easiest to learn from examples, but please don't imitate vanilla MW, and even less our maps 1-2. They follow old levelscaled concepts and mostly have seen barely any balancing at all. Examples of wilderness cells monstered using the new guidelines are the current version of [url=http://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=21201&start=160]Map 3 Claim 2[/url], and the Inlet Bog section of the Mainland.
Choosing the right creature: What creatures should be placed in the world? There are the following choices:
- Placing a regular (non-leveled) creature: Keep in mind that most creatures don't respawn, so once the player has killed such a critter, it will never reappear and the data that it is dead will clutter up the savegame. So, most of the time, you don't want to place such critters. Sometimes they are of use, though (particularly in quests).
- TR_stc_*: These leveled lists contain only one creature each (with rare exceptions, which contain a few creatures with mostly the same properties). They spawn with 100% chance and at every level. So, placing a TR_stc_kagouti differs from placing a Kagouti creature just in the fact that the TR_stc_kagouti will respawn whereas the Kagouti will not.
- TR_stat_*: These lists contain several creatures of about the same difficulty. At the moment, some of the lists don't contain much variety, but this will eventually be solved when modellers introduce new critters. These TR_stat_* lists are separated by regions: TR_stat_inlet_* are for the Inlet Bog, TR_stat_thirr_* are for the Thirr River Valley, etc. Exception: The TR_stat_wild_* lists can be used everywhere (so they only contain universal Morrowind wildlife, like guars and alits). See below for how to read the numbers. "orp" and "ap" means that the list also contains peaceful creatures (these can be more difficult; it doesn't matter since the player won't have to fight them). So don't use "orp" and "ap" for gatekeeper creatures. "sleep" means that the leveled list is used as the sleep creature for that particular region; you can nevertheless also place this leveled creature in the world.
- TR_LC_*: These are mostly old and bad leveled lists. Most of them have the issue that they don't spawn anything at all at level 1, making places that are supposed to be difficult much too easy for noobs. Some are also too broad (liches and orc skeletons shouldn't occur in every tomb). Use them with a lot of care, if at all. I would personally only use TR_LC_skeleton_diff_* (which contain skeletons, separated by difficulty) and TR_LC_dae_diff_* (same for daedra; will be added in the next TR_data update).
- TR_r_*: These are the old leveled creatures for specific regions. They are not all bad, but they scale with level, so I want them to be gradually supplanted by the TR_stat_* ones. For example, TR_r_Thirr_River_Valley_land_* can be replaced by TR_stat_thirr_*.
- ex_*: These are vanilla leveled creatures, similar to TR_r_*. Most of them make no sense on Mainland because they contain blighted critters. The ones that do might still not be very useful.
Out of the above, TR_stat_* are the leveled lists I use most often. TR_stc_* have the disadvantage of being always the same, which can get boring, but is very useful for concrete occasions (like placing a kwama warrior in an eggmine).
Measuring difficulty: Roughly, I measure the difficulty of a monster by its average damage output, with a bonus if the monster's combat stat is above 50 (Tribunal and Bloodmoon monsters have very high combat stats; vanilla ones usually don't), a significant bonus if the monster has magic or weapons, and a slight bonus if the monster carries a dangerous disease (drain end/str/int/will). Here are some examples from vanilla:
d01 (difficulty around 1): rat, kwama forager. (We have some variations on the former.) These should be doable for a player coming right out of the boat with some basic armor and a weapon.
d05 (difficulty around 5): alit, wild guar, nixhound. Scribs would also go here if they weren't peaceful. (The paralysis is why I don't put them under d01.)
d09 (difficulty around 9): kagouti, diseased rats/alits/nixhounds.
d15 (difficulty around 15): shalk, bull netch if they weren't peaceful.
d20 (difficulty around 20): wild durzog, black bear, betty netch if they weren't peaceful, blighted kagoutis, dreugh (I don't know why they're so tough but they are).
d25 (difficulty around 25): snow wolf.
etc. Peaceful monsters don't count at all. Daedra are not on the list since we won't be placing them randomly in the landscape, but if they were, they would have bigger difficulty ratings of course (winged twilight d40 probably).
Heartland difficulty zones: I am only talking about exteriors now; interiors can and should have variation. Here is a quick suggestion of how tough parts of Heartland should be. (Same map without the ugly red text, and here also without the towns.)
Key: Each region has been given 3 numbers and either an "ND" or a "D". The three numbers for each region are:
first, the difficulty of the monsters on and near roads.
second, the difficulty of the monsters which are far enough from roads that they would never attack anyone walking the roads.
third, the difficulty of the monsters that wake you from sleep.
"D" means that some monsters can carry diseases, "ND" means they can't.
The map has a typo (d02 should be d01). Also, Shackville is still a working title. d00 means "none at all".
It should be pretty clear from the above map that the northeast part of Heartland becomes a kind of tutorial area. This doesn't mean everything in there should be easy, but I totally believe it should be possible to start one's game at Seyda Neen, take a boat to Teyn and then rise up to level (say) 10 staying mostly in that place.
Diseases: As the map above shows, I don't like the idea of having them in the Thirr River Valley and nearby. First, they don't add any tactical depth to the game; they're just a major pain in the butt when you're at low levels. And I don't just mean a blighted rat sending your endurance down by 40; anything damaging strength is pure annoyance. I think the idyllic atmosphere of the TRV will be helped by not putting diseased critters there. The other places where I have put "ND" on the map aren't very clear-cut.
Sleep creatures: I think they should be generally easier than the creatures one encounters when awake. Melee fighters usually don't have much trouble with sleep creatures, but archers and mages do, and Morrowind seems already way too biased towards melee.
Sealife: Water creatures seem to have a supernatural sense of prey. They will charge at the player from long distances, much longer than for any kagouti or atronach. Keep this in mind when placing them. I am not a friend of the (vanilla) h2o_all_* creatures, as they contain both slaughterfishes (easy) and dreugh (pretty hard), with the latter suddenly appearing after a certain level threshold. I don't see why swimming should suddenly become deadly at level 5!
Bandits: These can be mostly arbitrary, as long as they don't block roads (in which case they shouldn't be much harder than the monsters along the roads). One request: please don't put leveled items like l_m_wpn_melee, TR_Random_wep_Melee, random_bandit_6-10, TR_loot_Bandit_06-10 or TR_loot_Smuggler_goods in their inventory. These leveled lists can contain various weapons, which the bandits will then fight with. Thus the difficulty will depend on the weapon randomly selected from the list.
Here is also some older writing on the balancing of Heartland, in case anyone prefers that to the picture.
The Ascadian-style region (starting at 4-13, then going along the Thirr until 4-18, then along the sea coast until the river in 4-2) should contain only really easy wildlife, up to nixhound difficulty. The main roads might not even have that, just rats and stuff. Of course, at certain spots we can have handplaced hard enemies, but they shouldn't block main roads.
Roth Roryn goes up to Kagouti difficulty, again with weaker things on important roads and stronger things in select locations (more to the ashland side). Cliff racers prominently (use TR_stc_cliffracer, not only TR_stat_roth_*!), although not too many on the same spot (this made them pretty annoying in vanilla). The part around Othras Plantation should be as easy as the Thirr River, as it's very close to the noob routes and main cities.
The eastern coast of Thirr might be either like Ascadia or like Roth. I don't think anything harder than a Kagouti is ok here, as again this place is extremely inhabited and lively. We might have some artificial dangers like the breeding Kagouti in vanilla.
Armun Ashlands should not be for noobs. I'd expect at least blighted-kagouti difficulty, but I'm not against golden-saint-like difficulty (if we get creatures of that difficulty modelled!). Again selected roads (including at least one to Ald Erfoud) should be easier.
I think the ashlands in the northern half of map 4 should be easier than Armun, but still not for the early game.
4-39 and 4-38 contain an interesting patch of Ascadian-style lands with rm rocks (mostly along the way to Verarchen). I suppose these can be something intermediate in difficulty. The rm rocks kinda say "careful, this is not quite Ascadia anymore".
The abstract
Most of the currently existing leveled lists in MW, BM, Tribunal and TR_Data are pretty badly designed, and the difficulty of opponents on these lists depends way too much on (1) the player's level (a leveled list can spawn a durzog beginning at level 8 and nothing at all on earlier levels) and (2) dice rolls (a leveled list for a daedra decides randomly to spawn a scamp or a golden saint). I believe that, instead, it should depend mostly on (A) the region of the encounter and (B) the distance from civilization (towns and roads). Leveled lists are good when they consist of enemies of roughly the same difficulty (for example, a wild guar and an alit can be used on the same leveled list), all of them spawning at level 1 (so that level-1 players don't get a puppy license to walk into Mordor).
Why? For several reasons. The fact that Morrowind's roads aren't safer than the surrounding wilderness (and often even less safe due to passing through Daedric shrines) doesn't help immersion very much. The very idea of levelscaling doesn't either. By the time the player spent in Ald-Ruhn, the Ascadian Isles suddenly got swarmed with kagoutis? Really? And no one even noticed it?
Also, the idea of (WoW-style) level zones isn't that bad. It is logical that if you walk into the Armun Ashlands with a character right out of the prison ship, you get your ass handed to you; if you do it as an aspiring Redoran warrior, you will have a fair challenge; and if you do it as a Fighters Guild master, you will have a relaxing hunt. It is not logical that as a level-1 newb, you get a free pass because the leveled lists only spawn rats (or even nothing at all) at this level, that at level 10 you get some medium-difficulty monsters, and that at level 30 you get dragons breathing crimson plague.
There should be safe places and dangerous places, and everything in between. This, of course, means that not all of our lands will be accessible in the early game unless one pulls the difficulty slider very far down. But I think that with the size of our land, there still will be tons of places to explore on level 1, and sacrificing some open-worldedness to immersion feels like a good deal to me.
Levelscaling also tends to be unfair to the players who want to slowly develop their characters, e. g., by training mercantile and speechcraft or reading skillbooks. Instead of just slowly getting better, their characters actually become worse with levelup. Due to the abundance of skillbooks in the towns of the Mainland, this is a problem that needs to be addressed.
The concrete
On imitation: It is easiest to learn from examples, but please don't imitate vanilla MW, and even less our maps 1-2. They follow old levelscaled concepts and mostly have seen barely any balancing at all. Examples of wilderness cells monstered using the new guidelines are the current version of [url=http://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=21201&start=160]Map 3 Claim 2[/url], and the Inlet Bog section of the Mainland.
Choosing the right creature: What creatures should be placed in the world? There are the following choices:
- Placing a regular (non-leveled) creature: Keep in mind that most creatures don't respawn, so once the player has killed such a critter, it will never reappear and the data that it is dead will clutter up the savegame. So, most of the time, you don't want to place such critters. Sometimes they are of use, though (particularly in quests).
- TR_stc_*: These leveled lists contain only one creature each (with rare exceptions, which contain a few creatures with mostly the same properties). They spawn with 100% chance and at every level. So, placing a TR_stc_kagouti differs from placing a Kagouti creature just in the fact that the TR_stc_kagouti will respawn whereas the Kagouti will not.
- TR_stat_*: These lists contain several creatures of about the same difficulty. At the moment, some of the lists don't contain much variety, but this will eventually be solved when modellers introduce new critters. These TR_stat_* lists are separated by regions: TR_stat_inlet_* are for the Inlet Bog, TR_stat_thirr_* are for the Thirr River Valley, etc. Exception: The TR_stat_wild_* lists can be used everywhere (so they only contain universal Morrowind wildlife, like guars and alits). See below for how to read the numbers. "orp" and "ap" means that the list also contains peaceful creatures (these can be more difficult; it doesn't matter since the player won't have to fight them). So don't use "orp" and "ap" for gatekeeper creatures. "sleep" means that the leveled list is used as the sleep creature for that particular region; you can nevertheless also place this leveled creature in the world.
- TR_LC_*: These are mostly old and bad leveled lists. Most of them have the issue that they don't spawn anything at all at level 1, making places that are supposed to be difficult much too easy for noobs. Some are also too broad (liches and orc skeletons shouldn't occur in every tomb). Use them with a lot of care, if at all. I would personally only use TR_LC_skeleton_diff_* (which contain skeletons, separated by difficulty) and TR_LC_dae_diff_* (same for daedra; will be added in the next TR_data update).
- TR_r_*: These are the old leveled creatures for specific regions. They are not all bad, but they scale with level, so I want them to be gradually supplanted by the TR_stat_* ones. For example, TR_r_Thirr_River_Valley_land_* can be replaced by TR_stat_thirr_*.
- ex_*: These are vanilla leveled creatures, similar to TR_r_*. Most of them make no sense on Mainland because they contain blighted critters. The ones that do might still not be very useful.
Out of the above, TR_stat_* are the leveled lists I use most often. TR_stc_* have the disadvantage of being always the same, which can get boring, but is very useful for concrete occasions (like placing a kwama warrior in an eggmine).
Measuring difficulty: Roughly, I measure the difficulty of a monster by its average damage output, with a bonus if the monster's combat stat is above 50 (Tribunal and Bloodmoon monsters have very high combat stats; vanilla ones usually don't), a significant bonus if the monster has magic or weapons, and a slight bonus if the monster carries a dangerous disease (drain end/str/int/will). Here are some examples from vanilla:
d01 (difficulty around 1): rat, kwama forager. (We have some variations on the former.) These should be doable for a player coming right out of the boat with some basic armor and a weapon.
d05 (difficulty around 5): alit, wild guar, nixhound. Scribs would also go here if they weren't peaceful. (The paralysis is why I don't put them under d01.)
d09 (difficulty around 9): kagouti, diseased rats/alits/nixhounds.
d15 (difficulty around 15): shalk, bull netch if they weren't peaceful.
d20 (difficulty around 20): wild durzog, black bear, betty netch if they weren't peaceful, blighted kagoutis, dreugh (I don't know why they're so tough but they are).
d25 (difficulty around 25): snow wolf.
etc. Peaceful monsters don't count at all. Daedra are not on the list since we won't be placing them randomly in the landscape, but if they were, they would have bigger difficulty ratings of course (winged twilight d40 probably).
Heartland difficulty zones: I am only talking about exteriors now; interiors can and should have variation. Here is a quick suggestion of how tough parts of Heartland should be. (Same map without the ugly red text, and here also without the towns.)
Key: Each region has been given 3 numbers and either an "ND" or a "D". The three numbers for each region are:
first, the difficulty of the monsters on and near roads.
second, the difficulty of the monsters which are far enough from roads that they would never attack anyone walking the roads.
third, the difficulty of the monsters that wake you from sleep.
"D" means that some monsters can carry diseases, "ND" means they can't.
The map has a typo (d02 should be d01). Also, Shackville is still a working title. d00 means "none at all".
It should be pretty clear from the above map that the northeast part of Heartland becomes a kind of tutorial area. This doesn't mean everything in there should be easy, but I totally believe it should be possible to start one's game at Seyda Neen, take a boat to Teyn and then rise up to level (say) 10 staying mostly in that place.
Diseases: As the map above shows, I don't like the idea of having them in the Thirr River Valley and nearby. First, they don't add any tactical depth to the game; they're just a major pain in the butt when you're at low levels. And I don't just mean a blighted rat sending your endurance down by 40; anything damaging strength is pure annoyance. I think the idyllic atmosphere of the TRV will be helped by not putting diseased critters there. The other places where I have put "ND" on the map aren't very clear-cut.
Sleep creatures: I think they should be generally easier than the creatures one encounters when awake. Melee fighters usually don't have much trouble with sleep creatures, but archers and mages do, and Morrowind seems already way too biased towards melee.
Sealife: Water creatures seem to have a supernatural sense of prey. They will charge at the player from long distances, much longer than for any kagouti or atronach. Keep this in mind when placing them. I am not a friend of the (vanilla) h2o_all_* creatures, as they contain both slaughterfishes (easy) and dreugh (pretty hard), with the latter suddenly appearing after a certain level threshold. I don't see why swimming should suddenly become deadly at level 5!
Bandits: These can be mostly arbitrary, as long as they don't block roads (in which case they shouldn't be much harder than the monsters along the roads). One request: please don't put leveled items like l_m_wpn_melee, TR_Random_wep_Melee, random_bandit_6-10, TR_loot_Bandit_06-10 or TR_loot_Smuggler_goods in their inventory. These leveled lists can contain various weapons, which the bandits will then fight with. Thus the difficulty will depend on the weapon randomly selected from the list.
Here is also some older writing on the balancing of Heartland, in case anyone prefers that to the picture.
The Ascadian-style region (starting at 4-13, then going along the Thirr until 4-18, then along the sea coast until the river in 4-2) should contain only really easy wildlife, up to nixhound difficulty. The main roads might not even have that, just rats and stuff. Of course, at certain spots we can have handplaced hard enemies, but they shouldn't block main roads.
Roth Roryn goes up to Kagouti difficulty, again with weaker things on important roads and stronger things in select locations (more to the ashland side). Cliff racers prominently (use TR_stc_cliffracer, not only TR_stat_roth_*!), although not too many on the same spot (this made them pretty annoying in vanilla). The part around Othras Plantation should be as easy as the Thirr River, as it's very close to the noob routes and main cities.
The eastern coast of Thirr might be either like Ascadia or like Roth. I don't think anything harder than a Kagouti is ok here, as again this place is extremely inhabited and lively. We might have some artificial dangers like the breeding Kagouti in vanilla.
Armun Ashlands should not be for noobs. I'd expect at least blighted-kagouti difficulty, but I'm not against golden-saint-like difficulty (if we get creatures of that difficulty modelled!). Again selected roads (including at least one to Ald Erfoud) should be easier.
I think the ashlands in the northern half of map 4 should be easier than Armun, but still not for the early game.
4-39 and 4-38 contain an interesting patch of Ascadian-style lands with rm rocks (mostly along the way to Verarchen). I suppose these can be something intermediate in difficulty. The rm rocks kinda say "careful, this is not quite Ascadia anymore".
