Crossfire Forum

I was thinking about how all the tiles for all the monsters prevent you from moving through them (since you're attacking the monster), and concluded it would be interesting to have only parts of a monster actually make attacks and actually take damage.

For example, a hill giant (2 spaces tall, one wide) would show up as two tiles still, but the tile that contains the monster's head can be walked in, just the monster's image goes over anything in that tile, since hill giants are tall, and this would make them seem tall, rather than flat.

At the same time, if you stand a space above the head, the hill giant would not be able to attack you (unless it throws a boulder), since you are too far away.

I realize that a change like this would make a vast amount of rebalancing suddenly necessary, since places like the bottom floor of the Pupland Raffle #1 would cease to be an easy experience spot for mages, paladins, etc.

This is already possible with the code as is - a monster (or any object) can have visual height without actually being in the square it extends to.

For some monsters, like hill giants, titans, etc, that makes sense. For others, like dragons, they don't really have height.

I believe the main reason most monsters have no been converted to being tall like you describe is because of the reason you describe - it really changes the balance around in lots of areas and so any change needs to be careful evaluated and maps using those monsters need to be examined (in some cases, the space that the monster takes up may require it to be killed to progress on the map, but if it is now tall and does not use up the same amount of space, you may be able to run around it)

I suspected as much.

I just thought I'd put the thought out there, so that, if someone does decide to undertake the extensive map and experience revamping that would be needed to make such a change, something like that could be implemented.

For now, it could only, at best, apply to newly created monsters.

Note that for the most part, making monsters smaller (eg, hill giants just one space and tall vs 2 spaces) makes things harder for players:

- More monsters can potentially get around the character to attack, where as now, one can use height to potential reduce attackers some.
- For spells, each footprint space the monster occupies, they will take damage. Thus, hill giants will take half as much damage if their foot print is reduced to 1 space instead of two, which means more spells to kill them.
- More monsters can now cram into the same space, which for something like the raffle and other maps, make it harder to try to kill enough monsters to get to the generators (have to kill twice as many). But at least now, most generators will limit output to some monsters before disappearing.

The one area where it can get easier for players is with the higher density - this means spells hit more monsters, and if you have the sp and do enough damage to kill them, it may mean you can kill more monsters quicker, thus get exp and loot faster.

On the Pupland raffle, the boulder you can push out to block hill giants would no longer work, since the hill giants would be able the simply walk around the boulder and bludgeon anyone careless enough or habitually-used-to-that-location-being-easy-experience enough to death, catching them off guard.

There would have to be quite blatant warnings for veteran players if such a change were to happen, so they don't just rage quit when droves of hill giants simply ignore the boulder in the way and go around it, and batter a perfectly good rising character to death.

Like I said, existing monsters will probably not get such a change for quite some time, if ever. New monsters might have a chance with this, since they may already need balancing, this would just add another card to the balancing deck (which does make it more difficult to balance, but gives a feeling of depth in a 2D environment).

But then there'd be the weird transition phase where some polytile monsters have this depth and some don't, making it a pain for users to remember which ones have what boundaries. Then, if they get changed, that would throw whatever the players had so strategically stored in their own memory, or even written down, right out the window, and they'd be back at square one (they'd probably not be too pleased if this change unexpectedly killed their high-level character, or really any serious character, either).

This is an idea that really sounds cool, but would be impractical in both the short term and long term (until it was finished, which probably would take quite a bit of time)