Soulash

Soulash is a fantasy roguelike where you play as a forgotten god set on destroying the world. · By Artur Smiarowski

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Soulash community » Improvements & suggestions

Rebalance enemies and AI persistence.

A topic by necrophile7 created Nov 15, 2021 Views: 665 Replies: 17

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necrophile72 years ago (1 edit)

inconsistency in the strength of enemies is seriously annoying especially since it comes without warning. ex you fight and kill 15 elves, then the 16 comes. he suddenly does 30 damage through your improved defenses while the other elves did 2. And you cant run because he will hunt you and shoot your back until you die. in these events you have pretty much been sentenced to death and there is nothing you can do, all because one opponent happened to for no reason be 30 times stronger than the others. And why does AI never give up on hunting you? they persist for a fourth of the entire map, its ridiculous. fix the spell magic missile, a normal elven spellsinger should not have that.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago (1 edit)

Hey necrophile7, thanks for the feedback. I'm afraid there's not much I can do with it however, maybe you could clarify some things for me? Here's a couple tips and explanations, I hope it will help you.

The 16th elf, I understand you mean you killed 15 elven villagers and huntsman in Anheluna which is a level 3 area, then you went toward Shadowbane and meet level 6 Elven Spellsinger? If so, the power difference is expected. The second elven location is optional and very difficult due to strong magic damage. You can determine if enemies are too powerful for you (higher level) by reading their tooltip. There's a colored sentence that describes the difference, orange and red mean they are probably stronger. Also, the damage difference may indicate that you have high endurance and physical resistances but low willpower and magic resist. In that kind of build, mages will melt your character.

The running away, there are many options in the game to escape. Early on it may be difficult (in levels 1 - 2) because the areas are packed with enemies and until you can clear space to rest it can be problematic. After a few levels, you can acquire many abilities that can help you out, like nomads' quick step that speeds you up, fallen knight lunge, berserker charge, or inquisitor intimidate. Even the grow tree ability can be used to escape. However, escaping some characters like centaurs, or elven grey watchers may be impossible - and that's fine. The game will not offer a "get out of jail" free card in every situation. Some part of the outcome of the battle will be decided by how well you've prepared for it, or where you engaged the enemy.

necrophile72 years ago

sorry, i should have been more specific. Not sure which of the two areas it was but i were lvl 8. I had slaughtered the entire camp and it was easy since they could barely injure me at all but then a elven spell singer came and started nuking my hp bar. i find it imbalanced since i had already killed about 4 other spell singers without any problem. It could be scaling problems with the spell she used (magic missile) or something else but it wasnt an item. I know it wasnt a willpower problem either since i had equipped two legendary rate pieces of armor which boosted my willlpower by 12 but i still took 32 damage a hit.

My problem with the chasing is pherhaps not the speed of enemies, i could use several skills to increase my own if i had them. the problem is more likely tracking and persistence. if you run away from most enemies in this they quickly forget about you and return home but some enemies seem to have almost infinite sight and you can never shake them of. like this spell singer, at one occasion i actually got away and of course i ran some more but when i started healing she still appeared cause she never stopped searching. this feels even more odd since it was night at the last part where it actually happened. About the persistence part, you should get some sort of chase ending trigger. if an opponent has the same speed as you they will hunt you forever but never catch up, it already sounds odd, they should not be that persistent. when someone with the same speed can shoot you and still keep up something even more odd has happened.

I know i probably could have prepared better like you say but i didnt think i would need to for an area two (potentially 5) levels beneath me.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago

Ok, that makes more sense. Arcane barrage has a high weapon damage percent scaling, so if the elven spellsinger rolled a very strong weapon it could have the effect you described. Thanks for the clarification!

Spellsingers have a sight range of 10 tiles without infravision, so nothing special. All enemies, just like you described, don't chase after a couple of turns, but they don't return home at all. They wander around or do some specific activities. I think you might have been unlucky so that the spellsinger simply wandered off in the same direction and found you.

necrophile72 years ago (2 edits)

just noticed, why did you give all AI infinite stamina. of course that makes it impossible to run.

I realize that is a hard thing to fix and its not very urgent. That said i do hope its in the full release.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago

Did I? I'll check, maybe it bugged out when I removed fatigue for zombies.

MrGRAV32 years ago

Maybe separate skill and weapon damage? Instead give melee classes some a skill which would reduce durability loss of weapons?

Right now my early game strategy is to sit near a forge/anvil to craft and fix up weapons until I get a few levels under my belt.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago (1 edit)

Isn't there plenty of bone weapons, scythes, hatchets, and swords in the early game? I like to play the Berserker often and didn't notice this issue. Sure, the hand axes break pretty soon but they are too strong for the early game anyway and should not last too long. :)

necrophile72 years ago (2 edits)

I think i got a good idea for chases. Give all AI a motivation meter. This meter won't affect anything other than the odds of them giving upp a chase and going home. It would passively decrease every turn in a chase and increase every time they close the distance. A chase would start/be recognized after a set amount of turns spent running, the amount of turns needed to initiate one would reset with every melee attack landed but not ranged attacks or skills. ranged attacks and skills can't stop a chase either unlike melee attacks. this meter would only even be active during a hunt. pls tweak as you see fit, i thought this could be a tactical and usefulf way of deciding the outcome for chases. (both AI and player have to run for the chase countdown to start)

Kamouri2 years ago

How about you just give all items higher durability? Or make weapons do a lot more damage?

Weapon degradation in this game is horribly debilitating.

it's annoying having to carry around a dozen weapons just to burn through them all in just five enemies.

Picking up other weapons and continuing the fight is doable, but not if you're a dex build dagger oriented class. You'll do no damage at all.

Even worse is your bow breaking in the middle of a battle with a bunch of enemies still coming for you.

So far Orc Berserkers and Fallen knights, are the only classes that i had better success with.

That means you might be a little too biased in play testing.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago (1 edit)

Guys if you feel strongly about durability being an issue, there's a mod on our Discord channel that removes durability from all items. It's available in pinned messages on the #modding channel. From what I heard it takes 15 minutes to modify all items if you just want to double or triple it instead.

I will want to keep deteriorating items because that's how the game is balanced, there's tons of loot, even artifacts are not extremely rare, they can be crafted too, but everything is temporary. That being said, I'll do more testing with the bows and daggers, because it's true that bows on AI come into play around level 3, and before that, the only way to get them is crafting primitive bows or having a lucky find in random stashes. There's only one enemy type early that has iron daggers and the situation is similar with craftable stone daggers. I'll play around more with Poachers and Nomads to see how I can improve this, but if you have some interesting suggestions where enemies could have useful early items for these professions, I would love to hear it.

necrophile72 years ago

can you make scaling for summons? currently, all skills scale with your stats except for the ones that raise minions which after a while makes them too weak to use at all.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago

I think minions would be too strong if they scaled, especially the permanent ones that have no limits like zombies and skeletons. They still serve as meatshields in the late game, and I think I'll add corpse explosion synergy so zombies can be exploded, but I don't want a horde of zombies to be effective against gods or late-game bosses.

necrophile72 years ago

no of course, that would make the game easy. if we have scaling for summons it should be almost entirely an increase to hp. That way they would keep being viable meatshields which is their only purpose. late game they cant even protect me since they die in about one hit and then the aggro shifts towards me again. a minimal damage increase could be there not that it would matter. You could add a skill specifically for buffing minions or a single minions. Did you fix skeleton champion? last time it was bugged. and about corpse explosion, i dont know if it changed in the latest version but from what i remember it should change. perhaps make it so it does full damage to minions as well and allowing that to trigger chain reactions. because now there really isnt a situation were it's worth using compared to the other skills.

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago

I've recently finished the game with Necromancer and made appropriate tweaks in v0.7.2 (a few small ones are yet to come). I'm happy about the early, mid, and late game of the Necromancer now. Skeletons provide enough of a meatshield until the very end (while not making your character do whatever it pleases without thinking) and the new Corpse Explosion working on zombies and skeletons make them very viable for big damage (and corpse explosion has no cooldown). I don't plan any more buffs to necromancers in 1.0, other than some AI tweaks.

necrophile72 years ago

wait so you have fixed the skeleton champion bug too? im almost getting a bit hyped. im gonna try it right now

necrophile72 years ago

Just wondering, did you make corpse explosion a chain reaction? thats how i interpreted it. are these changes implemented. If they are, how do i see it and do i need to update it otherwise?

Artur Smiarowski2 years ago

Corpse explosion doesn't have a chain reaction, it started working on zombies and skeletons and has no cooldown. Chain reaction would be way too strong. :)

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