Preserving vanilla unbalanced DF with exploits or fixing it?

[UserOfThisSite]

I'm not talking about very obvious oversights and bugs, but rather in-game features that makes gameplay too easy.
1) Teleport->Anchor inside shop, so you can teleport there at night and just grab everything.
Solution: Casting Teleport->Anchor inside any shop can be a crime or 100% failure. In case if it's just a crime, then guards will always present inside shop, until anchor expires.

2) Tamriel guards never invented a bow and don't know what it is, so you can kill an army of them by walking backwards and shooting.
Solution: Give them bows, they can use their standard axe-swing animation, I don't think it's a problem.

3) Reentering dungeons, that have loot piles nearby, so you can just grab it over and over and over, because dungeons are refreshed everytime you enter them.
Solution: If you leave a dungeon, you can't reenter it for ~month. The door will be locked, it'll be unbashable, unpickable.

4) Refusing a guild quest doesn't give negative rep, which means there's simply no reason to not give player to do whatever quest he wants to do, so he has to refuse them until he gets the one he wants to farm easiest quest for getting promotion faster. So it's just an oversight and bad design, either penalize for refusal or give a choice to player. But the latter won't make the game better.
Solution: Refusal will give negative rep, to prevent savescumming - when you start a new game, random seed for each guild is created, it'll be used for quests, thus savescumming will be useless, when you receive bad quest. Because if you load the game, you'll again receive the same quest, because everything is already precalculated since the beginning. Going to another guild in another city also won't help you, all guilds will share the same random seed. You'll have to either complete this quest or suffer negative penalty for either failing it or refusal.

5) Advantages/Disadvantages poor balance and well-known obvious exploits.
Solution: Completely rework point cost of many advantages, disadvantages and HP per level.
HP per level should cost much more, not just 1 point. 2 points for each up to 15 and 3 points for each up to 30.
Forbidden shields combined into one "Forbidden Armor: Shields".
Forbidden chain and leather either removed or it can give only 1 point each, not just leather (chain gives +2 currently).
Forbidden plate should give more points, not just 5.
Forbidden materials must be reworked completely, the point costs make no sense at all. Steel gives +10 points, making it a must-have universal pick for any build, because there's not much difference between steel and iron anyway, while Daedric, the best material in the game, gives only +2 points, what the logic here? Daedric and Ebony are only ones that can give at least some points to you, +5 for Daedric, +4 for Ebony. While Silver, Elven and Dwarven can give 2 points each, everything else - just 1 point.
Phobias either must give more penalty to you and more bonus to opponent or give less points. Especially animal phobia, because there're no dangerous animals in the game.
Damage in holy places - decrease points you get from it or make it instakill you in holy places.
Inability to cast spells in light/darkness + lower ability to cast spells in light/darkness + inability to regenerate spell points - must belong to the same group and you should be able to choose only 1 from it. Even without exploits, you can still take both inabilities to cast spells and then inability to regenerate spell points must be a natural choice, since you can't cast spells anyway, thus the overall bonus to your points will be too high. And obviously lower/inability in light shouldn't give must points (+1 for lower, +2 for inability).
Immunities - only 1 should be allowed to take, because taking all immunities turns Willpower into a dump stat - you no longer need to do any save throws, because you're immune to everything.
Expertise in weapon should cost must more points, it's a powerful advantage and costs only 2 points. 10-13 points will be a fair price.
Increased mana obviously can cost more points for higher multipliers.
Health regeneration and rapid healing can all be general, there's no reason to pick only during light or general, when you obviously need only darkness due to the gameplay.
Bonus to hit can cost less. It's not "Expertise in weapon", which gives not only the bonus to hit, but also damage. Bonus to hit creatures only gives you accuracy, not damage, thus it shouldn't cost so much points.
Spell absorption - again, there's no reason to pick only light or general, when you need only darkness, so it must be combined into one and cost much much more points, like 35.

5) Attribues:
Morrowind and Daggerfall both suffer from Endurance being non-retroactive attribute, thus forcing you to max it as fast as you can. In Daggerfall you must start with 75 END and roll at start to have at least 94+ END, so you can have 100 END on 2nd level to maximize its effectiveness. No other stat has this problem.
Solution: Make it retroactive.

Sorry for the wall of text.

[ACNAero]

Aside from the "weakness to disease/poison/paralysis, immunity to magic" exploit (which they fixed), they intend to leave everything else as close to vanilla as possible. Honestly, if you want all of this, this could very well be a mod that you could share with the rest of the community.

[Jay_H]

Welcome to the forums!

I think these are all excellent ideas to balance DF. We may have some engineering how-to in the future, but having exact ideas about how to balance things will be very valuable. As ACNAero said this'll likely become mod territory, but it has great foundation.

[mikeprichard]

5) Attribues:
Morrowind and Daggerfall both suffer from Endurance being non-retroactive attribute, thus forcing you to max it as fast as you can. In Daggerfall you must start with 75 END and roll at start to have at least 94+ END, so you can have 100 END on 2nd level to maximize its effectiveness. No other stat has this problem.
Solution: Make it retroactive.

This.

Also, as I've requested elsewhere (viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1042), an optional setting to force maximum attribute/health bonus points at level-up would be very, very welcome. (Never been a fan of that kind of RNG - just encourages most players to save/reload anyway.) Welcome to the forums!

[BansheeXYZ]

I'm not talking about very obvious oversights and bugs, but rather in-game features that makes gameplay too easy.

1)1)

I wouldn't be so quick to call any game-breaking exploit in daggerfall a feature. The original devs didn't test spells thoroughly. See: horse indoors, charm, the horrible collision mechanics on range spells. We have fixed many oversights so far. Just because something doesn't crash the game or clip you into a wall, doesn't mean it's not a bug.

In this case, a lvl 1 mage can make a lvl 20 thief look utterly useless. Hell, it makes dungeon looting useless. No chance of failure or detection, doesn't have to pick any locks. It's a bug because there's no way it's intentional.

It's a bad idea making any cast a crime, the player would never see that coming, and if he hadn't saved for a while, he'd be very mad. I think stealing at night needs to work like it does at daytime so that guards still react. There should also be wandering guards at night.

2)

This is true of any range vs melee situation. It also makes no sense from a surrender and escape standpoint. How do you surrender to a projectile? The only solution to making guards harder to kite is to give them a big speed boost or a charge attack. You could also make being "caught" happen on contact, rather than when a guard manages to land a hit on you. It was always weird to have guards taking swings at you before asking you to surrender.

3)

That's a rather drastic "solution". I can think of two ways that this would lock the player out of quest completion, leaving to sell or heal, or the next quest sending you to the same dungeon. Why not just make enemies and loot piles respawn on the first of each month?

4)

I don't like the idea of rep hits, but I like the idea of quests coming in a cyclic order, to be declined for later or skipped on failure, but never skipped on offer. Selection shouldn't be available until top rank. This would avoid repetition and prevent players from doing "Guard the Mage's Guild" over and over until max rep. It would also make it so that you wouldn't accidentally miss high rep quests. Definitely not an oversight bug, but one of those "why the hell didn't they do it this way?" moments.

5)

DFU is still not done, but you'll find that mechanical changes like this are the things that modders are the least interested in. Im a seasoned dota player and gamer and would love to make a game balancing mod and go over the numbers. I'd love to add more mobs to dungeons where they open up into big rooms, and give the player more AoE options to deal with them. I'd love to give specific advantages to hammers (door bashing and knockback abilities) and axes (cleave aoe dmg), so that people don't just use swords. Too bad I don't know C#.

[UserOfThisSite]

Aside from the "weakness to disease/poison/paralysis, immunity to magic" exploit (which they fixed), they intend to leave everything else as close to vanilla as possible. Honestly, if you want all of this, this could very well be a mod that you could share with the rest of the community.

I do have many years experience with Unity and even now I'm making a serious project on it, so I think I can make a mod like that, since it's just the change of values, even 5 years old can do that. I'll go through DFU modding tutorials to see how it all works and may be do something like that. If modding DFU has the same boundaries as TESEdit/CreationKit, then there shouldn't be any problems. As I understand, I can't just edit DFU itself in Unity itself, because then it won't be a mod and thus there will be no way to enable/disable them, unless additional options are implemented with all those enables/disables right in the game, plus it'll turn the project into mess, where each modder adds his own tab with enables/disables for his mods. So, as I said, if limitations of modding will allow me to implement everything I listed in this thread, then I'll do that, I'll try to make modding research today.

[Jay_H]

That's excellent to hear. A standard warning should be that the project still could alter any structure before 1.0, so your mod could stop working at some point or another. If that doesn't bother you, roll right ahead

[jayhova]

3) Reentering dungeons, that have loot piles nearby, so you can just grab it over and over and over, because dungeons are refreshed everytime you enter them.
Solution: If you leave a dungeon, you can't reenter it for ~month. The door will be locked, it'll be unbashable, unpickable.

Doesn't Persistent dungeons fix this?

[UserOfThisSite]

Doesn't Persistent dungeons fix this?

Yes, I didn't know about that mod.

[jayhova]

1) Teleport->Anchor inside shop, so you can teleport there at night and just grab everything.
Solution: Casting Teleport->Anchor inside any shop can be a crime or 100% failure. In case if it's just a crime, then guards will always present inside shop, until anchor expires.

Alternate solution:
A mod that when you teleport into a shop you get a message that pops up saying "You get the distinct impression you have tripped a magical alarm, Maybe you should leave before the city guard arrives" The Mages Guild will inform you either in person or by letter how they take a dim view of the use of teleport for this purpose and that if it happens again you will be kicked out of the guild and the law will be informed.

2) Tamriel guards never invented a bow and don't know what it is, so you can kill an army of them by walking backwards and shooting.

Alternate solution:
Two types of guard. All guards on the wall have bows (what's the point of the wall otherwise?). Bow guards spawn from the walls. Regular guards avoid becoming easy targets. Fortunately, evasive behavior has already been accidentally invented. The way to implement this with guards is to make it so that if you have a missile weapon, and are aiming at a guard, the guard then acts like you have put a small invisible barrier in front of him. The guard tries to more sideways to get around this virtual barrier. When you stop aiming at them they resume pure pursuit. Wall guards do not attack unless you attack first but will pursue you if they can. Wall guards continue to attack unless you are engaged in melee or are standing still with no weapon (in which case they pursue you).

4) Refusing a guild quest doesn't give negative rep, which means there's simply no reason to not give player to do whatever quest he wants to do, so he has to refuse them until he gets the one he wants to farm easiest quest for getting promotion faster. So it's just an oversight and bad design, either penalize for refusal or give a choice to player. But the latter won't make the game better.

Alternate solution:
Mod that allows a limited number of refusals before reducing your rep. Refusals regenerate at a rate like one per week and/or one per quest accomplished.

Alternate alternate solution:
Limited number of quests to choose from. Quests are offered for a certain random amount of time then expire to be replaced by others. You might need to go to another guild hall when one runs out of quests to give you


Some guilds might look upon not taking a quest like not taking a job you don't like, while others (like knightly orders) will look upon not taking a quest as cowardly.

5) Attributes:
Morrowind and Daggerfall both suffer from Endurance being non-retroactive attribute, thus forcing you to max it as fast as you can. In Daggerfall you must start with 75 END and roll at start to have at least 94+ END, so you can have 100 END on 2nd level to maximize its effectiveness. No other stat has this problem.

I tend to agree that bonuses should be delivered on a {stat bonus x level} basis. But again this behavior is intrinsic to classic and should be addressed either as a native DFU option or as a mod. I'm totally okay with removing the exploits with mutually exclusive properties in the way DFU handles that.