From: kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu (Dr Nancy's Sweetie)
Subject: Balance, Difficulty, and Automatic Players
Summary: Moria-Matic, here we come!
Keywords: playing, games, programs, balance, difficulty, `Woof!'
Organization: Glassboro State College
Disclaimer: My dog Brandy has decided we should add Wolves.
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 01:06:06 GMT


Philippe Nicolle writes that although haggling is just a formula, so is the
whole game:

> Unfortunately, the WHOLE game is just a mathematical formula.  Granted the
> random-number generator is pretty complicated but it's all deterministic...

On many systems, this is not correct.  The random-number generators can be
seeded with the current time, so that the game is different when you play it.
(Some systems have the random-number generator add in the current number of
milliseconds along the way, to further scramble things.)

This could be done with haggling, too: make it so that the shopkeepers are
grouchy sometimes and in a good mood other times, so that it is harder to
predict exactly what will happen.

> We could write a computer program to play moria for us (it would save alot
> of time)...  But then we might as well just get rid of the game and save
> some CPU cycles and harddisk space...  I guess it would make for an
> interesting AI project...

I'm actually interested in doing this; something like Rogue-O-Matic.  The
problem is that Umoria does not make this easy at all.  I think that the
brains of the game should be separated from the display-portion of the game,
and they could communicate with an abbreviated English-like command language.
This is partly to facilitate writing different interfaces (an X interface, a
Suntools interface, and so on), and partly to facilitate writing an automatic
player: Moria-Matic could just run the brain half of the game, reading and
writing the command language, instead of having to read all the cursor
movements to figure out what was going on.  Of course, we have to be careful
not to make it impossible to run on DOS machines with no multitasking.

The fun of writing Moria-Matic lies, of course, in the fact that it would be
hard work.  Writing a program to do haggling was trivial.


Mr Nicolle also writes that he likes the game because it is well-balanced,
and that it used to be harder.  Taking haggling out would make it easier, and
he's opposed to making it easier.

I have a lot of sympathy with this, because I think the game is too easy past
a certain point; and, of course, once you have about 50K gold haggling becomes
totally irrelevant anyway.

I've been working on making the game harder by making the monsters smarter:
right now you can hide in another room to keep the monsters from coming to get
you, but I've got a test version in which the creatures who can cast spells
(including Dragons and most Undead) are smart enough to solve the maze and
hunt you down.  Also, the infamous post trick doesn't work very well anymore:
the Dragons will breath as close to you as they can if they can't see you, and
the summoning monsters will get help if they know you are nearby but can't see
you.  Additionally, I've added some new and more horrible monsters (watch out
for the Terminator Troll; in testing he has wasted quite a few practice
characters).  Of course, going too far in this direction can make the game
impossible, so I've added some goodies as well (don't sell the Staff of Shock
Waves; it's very useful).

All my current additions unbalance the game *way* against the player, but I am
still fine-tuning things to fix it up a bit.  It'll probably be a while before
I'm ready to have anybody else look at everything; I'll ask for beta-testers
then.


Darren F Provine (kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu)
"I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I
 generalize, I don't care." -- Dave Barry
Newsgroups: rec.games.moria