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[Kornel Kisielewicz]

I am planning to rewrite the monster placement code, and hence in another topic I asked for monster danger levels. Now that I have a fairly good set (thanks Blade!), I decided to run some scripts and see what sum of danger levels would come out of the existing levels on different difficulties. Each difficulty had at least 10 full runs (yeah, I cheated xP), and for each I took the sum of danger levels of all monsters on a given level. I averaged them then, and created a chart in OpenOffice.

The results even for the same level on the same diff were really varied, mostly due to the different level types (Arena/Caves etc), but these are the averages. No special levels were visited.

The danger values are:
1 - Former Human
2 - Former Sergeant
2 - Imp
3 - Lost Soul
3 - Former Captain
4 - Demon
6 - Cacodemon
6 - Hell Knight
6 - Pain Elemental
7 - Former Commando
9 - Arachnotron
10 - Baron of Hell
12 - Mancubus
14 - Arch-Vile

The results are:

Level/Diff	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	Sum	Average
Easy	5	14	12	17	23	26	23	21	24	31	26	35	43	49	50	36	56	79	69	72	47	56	47	73	934	38.92
Medium	7	22	23	32	25	36	25	34	33	41	42	59	76	64	69	75	78	88	81	75	68	82	91	87	1313	54.71
Hard	9	39	36	43	42	57	42	40	59	74	90	83	93	81	105	110	96	107	95	104	101	115	122	126	1869	77.88
Ultra-Violent	13	68	49	71	70	87	115	121	116	121	126	130	151	133	117	129	138	141	129	131	128	141	130	132	2687	111.96

In a more readable image:



I'd like you people to discuss those -- Danger Levels for a given level will be fixed in the new generator -- I don't have a good guess for the values though :/. Any suggestions? What about the modifier to the Danger Level sum depending on level type (arena, caves, mazes, etc)?

[Blade]

You just need to make difficulty that is increasing slightly from level to level. Also you need to make "first level where appearance is possible" for every monster that is depending on difficulty level, it won't be fun if RNG would spawn on 2-nd level on UV 4 AVs instead of humans, imps, and demons.

My version: (24-th level - 2-th level(1-st is precreated, it should have the same difficulty as now. Maybe) / 23(QuantityOfLevels)). That's average speed of difficulty increasement. For all difficulties i used same method: before 15-th level(Phobos base) level value is increasing accordingly to AverageSpeed, on level 15(begin of Phobos Hell) it gains an additional +1 to level value and +0.5 to Average Speed. Only on UV i used another tactic, there i set two points on increasement: level 8 and level 15.

Level/Diff	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	Sum	AverageSpeed
Easy	5	14	16	19	21	24	26	29	31	34	36	39	41	44	47	50	53	57	60	63	66	69	72	75	975	2.6
Medium	7	22	25	28	31	34	37	40	43	47	50	53	56	59	63	66	70	73	77	80	84	87	91	94	1317	2.8
Hard	9	39	43	47	51	55	59	63	67	71	75	79	83	87	92	96	101	105	110	114	119	123	128	132	1948	3.8
Ultra-Violent	13	81	84	87	90	93	96	100	103	107	110	114	117	121	125	129	133	137	141	145	149	153	157	161	2733	2.8

First appearance levels(i don't know about the situation on difficulties that are less than UV, so feel free to fill it):

Monster/Diff

Imp

Lost Soul

Former Captain

Demon

Cacodemon

Hell Knight

Pain Elemental

Former Commando

Arachnotron

Baron of Hell

Mancubus

Arch-Vile

Easy

2

2

3

3

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Medium

2

2

3

2

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Hard

2

2

2

2

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Ultra-Violent

2

2

2

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

8

8

Don't know now about specific numbers of level type modifiers.

[Malek Deneith]

One question Blade - isn't Demon appearing on level 2 regardles of difficulty a little bit early? (Especially compared to lost soul's 4 level). I know it's quite easy to kill once you get CShotgun or Chaingun, but fighting demons with just Shotgun/Pistol can lead to many early deaths, especially among new players who aren't as accostumed to DoomRL as many veterans here.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

I plugged your statistics into Excel. The halfway change isn't at all visible:



I also played around with a solution, and came up with such a chart:



The sum adds up similarily, and the idea was that Easy is linear, Medium is not much more than Easy (remember that easy has additional benefits!) and UV needs to have a high capacity quick. Things of note:

-- UV must have lots of enemies in the beginning -- former foo's are not that scary with a shottie, and things start to get messy once you come to the stronger enemies. Let it feel like UV :)
-- UV should be more based on the apperance of stronger monsters, not on the sum of their levels.
-- Easy is easier than Medium anyway, because of the rule changes
-- UV's difficulty over Hard is mainly in the earlier appearance of stronger characters -- to make the levels at least a bit populated with the biggies in it it needs a fairly high DL level all round

And another question -- how should the types affect the DL? We have the basic current types:
-- Normal
-- Cave (fairly open area, one type of enemies however)
-- Maze (very cluttered area)
-- City (more open area than standard? Or similar?)
-- Arena (very open area)

It seems logical to decrease Arena DLevel sum, because you have them all going at once. But how much? And what about the others? What about the amounts? Maybe make some calculations for caves?

[Blade]

One question Blade - isn't Demon appearing on level 2 regardles of difficulty a little bit early? (Especially compared to lost soul's 4 level). I know it's quite easy to kill once you get CShotgun or Chaingun, but fighting demons with just Shotgun/Pistol can lead to many early deaths, especially among new players who aren't as accostumed to DoomRL as many veterans here.

The only reason Lost Soul have 4 is to prevent to spawn player on level 2 into a small room with 4 Lost Souls inside. But, hm, they are good source of exp... Tough decision... I think to make level 2 as starting level for them for all difficulties. About demons: level 3 on Easy would be better?

-- UV must have lots of enemies in the beginning -- former foo's are not that scary with a shottie, and things start to get messy once you come to the stronger enemies. Let it feel like UV :)

I raised so much sum of level 2 because monsters there are just source of exp and ammo, they are preparation for real carnage on level 3-4. And i raised a little amount of that exp and ammo.

-- UV should be more based on the apperance of stronger monsters, not on the sum of their levels.

UV now is only hard on levels 3-13. After that all strong monsters have appeared and sum of every next level isn't much bigger than previous, so you see no difference between level 24 and level 15. I want more monsters on later levels.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Okay, now another question -- I've been wondering wether to use the Diablo-like "Monster Volume" -- a mechanism that makes it so, that only a few types of monsters appear on a given level. I don't know how it would work for DoomRL however -- from the positive side, it could prevent having all types appear at once, from the downside, it might make the levels more boring?

What's your opinion guys?

[tekknej]

i'd prefer if the difficulty for each level was also +/- some rnd % from a general linear... anything to make them not the same... biasing some monsters over other on a given level is also good. maybe not even "only few types of monsters", but some general preferences... like "this level will have much more lost souls than usually"...

[Thomas]

Arena: No cover, lots of enemies at once, this is not a user-friendly level and basically kills any of my games it shows its ugly face in. This should severly cut the DL, by lets say 1/4 to 1/3.

Caves should also lower it a bit. That is all.

* Thomas shakes his fist at arena levels.