Ratio of monsters vs. weapons, ammo & health

I'm just about done with drawing out a map. I'll need to add monsters, weapons, ammo, health, armor, and powerups.

So, question: should the weapsons, ammo, etc. match the monsters for each difficulty setting, or should I populate my map with weapons, ammo, health, etc. to be the same for all levels and add monsters for each difficulty level? What mix makes the best game play?

I believe that balanced skill levels require a wise matching among monster number, health, ammo, weapons, armor and power-ups.

That's logical. I may do what makes sense to me and solicit feedback on the map when I'm done.

Depends on the map, and what you have planned for the gameplay. You have big open spaces, then going all hitscanners is a bad idea. Close quarters is not good for rocket launchers. Using plasma against just imps and former humans is overkill, although can be nerve-wracking in low-health situations, since there's always a pause after you fire in which you are vulnerable. When I map, I either map an idea of a location, or a fight that I want to use. This doesn't always work well, but it will direct you into what you can and can't use. Although it is possible to mix things with ... interesting results, heh.

Also, play maps to learn the roles of monsters, and then you can have fun mixing them up. For example demons are meant to block off players and corner them - you can abuse this by having W1 linedefs that move some of them to where the player is running back to, then open up some monster closets the sides of the player to let a pair of mancs smash him up. However, the player can use the mancs to kill demons so the player isn't completely screwed. In this situation, giving the player just a shotty means they have to have armor, which gives them more leeway. But if you give them a SSG or even plasma, you can remove the armor, so that the player has to be much more careful and precise with their shots, in addition to allowing more demons to be used.

Then you also have to think about the map itself - is it in a megawad, or a standalone map? Where in the megawad is it? If it's a single map, keeping the difficulty consistent can be nice, but if the player is much better than the difficulty it can be boring. If the difficulty curves, the end of the curve can end up too hard for the player, while the beginning is too easy.

Well, that got a little off topic ... anyway, I'd decide on either the gameplay or the location before mapping and let that determine what to put in.

E: Wow, completely missed this was about difficulty levels. Uhm, I don't often bother with difficulty levels, but if you need them I wouldn't suggest changing the gameplay too much - a map can play completely differently between UV and HMP by removing just a few key monsters. Try and keep fights as similar as possible, just give the player slightly better odds - if you limit just how many rockets or plasma a player gets in a fight, give a little more, not enough they can spam it, but enough that it would help a better player finish the fight faster. Since the main things that separates levels of players is how fast they react, fire, and use tactics to defeat monsters, you must give the lesser skilled player mostly time.

audiodef said:

That's logical. I may do what makes sense to me and solicit feedback on the map when I'm done.

Your map beta tester(s) should be able to tell you a lot about ammo health armor and monster balances. Maybe consider use of some of the tools available for this purpose as well.

Make yourself a few demos and re watch them a dozen times to be sure there is enough of each of those at certain points in game play and not so much it throws everything off.

It's a matter of preference. For my projects, the same items are effective for all difficulties, and the only thing that changes are monster type, count, and placement.

I like the idea of playing a given difficulty with a set amount of items, and counting on them being there consistently on a different difficulty. Let's say that I'm playing on a level where an invuln is available on skill 3, but on skill 4, it's not there anymore, I'd get pretty pissed that it was "taken" away from me.

Doom Marine said:

It's a matter of preference. For my projects, the same items are effective for all difficulties, and the only thing that changes are monster type, count, and placement.

This is what I do too. Not to mention, less work on trying to configure items for difficulty settings :P. Works both ways, heh. I don't like altering ammo as I consider a little extra ammo as a result of 'easier' gameplay as a lower difficulty.

ArmouredBlood said:

but if you need them I wouldn't suggest changing the gameplay too much - a map can play completely differently between UV and HMP by removing just a few key monsters. Try and keep fights as similar as possible, just give the player slightly better odds

I agree with ArmouredBlood, there are certain fights where simply only removing a single key monster (even an imp or a former human) can really decrease the difficulty (for example, a cyberdemon placed in a particular spot with loads of ammo provided that cannot be downgraded into barons or revenants without significantly changing the intended flow of the fight). Usually I keep those key monsters (or remove several to a point where the fight is still played out the same) and/or remove/downgrade whatever surrounding monsters there are left (this is what I usually do), or if else there are no other options, adding a powerup of some sort helps (for the lower difficulty, that is). An important element to get this right is to playtest, playtest, playtest. Can't go wrong with several playtesters on different difficulty settings.

Related to this, is there such a thing as too much detail? I'm not attempting to use DOOM2 textures in ways they weren't originally intended, but I've been working on a map for two weeks almost as if it were a FT job and while the layout is finished, I'm STILL going over it correcting texture and flat alignment. I was just wondering where attention to detail crossing over into interfering with game play.

One more thing... do players care about the story behind the map? What the base/facility is and what happened to it?

Searcher said:

Maybe consider use of some of the tools available for this purpose as well.

What tools are these?

doom/doom2 map stat checkers.

check balance, ammo, health, monsters armor etc. with these files/utilities.

wadspy
dmtha
tcount
stat

audiodef said:

Related to this, is there such a thing as too much detail?

Yeah - if your detail is obstructing player movement or is really distracting in a spot that you don't want to be distracting the player (little cheap to use distracting architecture to make it harder on the player though ;p), you should remove it. Otherwise just map until you think you're done. If you think you're spending too much time on detailing, you can try doing some speedmaps to help you get down what you need to get a layout working quickly. Often the most time-consuming part of detailing is figuring out how to do a new structure - once you have that down it becomes pretty easy to replicate it and put it in another map. Also, creating border sectors can add quite a bit of nice-looking detail pretty cheaply, timewise.

One more thing... do players care about the story behind the map? What the base/facility is and what happened to it?

Personally, if I can identify parts of the map with locations in a story.txt it's great, but unless you're doing some big stuff with port features, I wouldn't bother beyond 'this is why you're going into that base/cave/hellish area of los angeles'. I mean fanfic can be good, but I like to play doom more.

And uh, with the bit about adding items vs. removing monsters for skill levels, I'm a slaughter lover. Removing monsters removes the slaughter, so that way of balancing is not my preferred, but if I have to do something more sedate, I'll remove a few guys here and there. And I dunno about doom marine, but someone who gives invulns on HMP but not UV doesn't really care about difficulty levels in the first place (like gggmork ;P). But that's a rather extreme example of item addition, where the mapper is basically saying 'you should really play this on UV with iddqd'; I'm talking maybe an extra medkit, or some extra rockets/plasma in a non-bfg map.

Just play around with it until you make something that feels right.

But make sure you have extra ammo than what you need to take into account people that aren't expecting monsters to be in certain places and will not have absolute precision aiming.

40oz said:

But make sure you have extra ammo than what you need to take into account people that aren't expecting monsters to be in certain places and will not have absolute precision aiming.

Also to take into account the blockmap fix in ports - you need more ammo in vanilla