Æons of Death discussion thread

[Ichor]

The Ultimate DooMer said:

Great stuff, Hexen had too few weapons/enemies to start with (which is one thing I tried to solve). Would that be with extra mana types, or will they compete for the same mana types?

There will still be four slots, but there will be two weapons per slot, except slot 1. The only real difference in mana usage is that weapons in slot 4 like the Quietus will use gold mana instead of both blue and green.

[40oz]

Poor Eternal :( :( :(

[Death Egg]

One time I tried to play this on nuts2.wad.

I almost had to restart the computer.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Ichor said:

There will still be four slots, but there will be two weapons per slot, except slot 1. The only real difference in mana usage is that weapons in slot 4 like the Quietus will use gold mana instead of both blue and green.

In which case the weapons need to be well-balanced or one will override the other and the point of having the extra one is defeated. (even worse if the better weapon comes first like Necrosis mage)

[Katamori]

TrueDude said:

One time I tried to play this on nuts2.wad.

I almost had to restart the computer.

It's not supposed to be a surprise.

[Ichor]

Yeah, balance has been a huge issue. I tried to get the weapons of a certain slot to have about the same ammo efficiency (damage done per ammo used). I also tried to make all of them fun to use and useful in many situations. This includes adding alt-fires to all of them. I think it turned out alright, although a bit more testing is required, of course.

[Lila Feuer]

Giving my two cents regarding randomizers and the people who make and/or play them.

My own unreleased mod that dabbles in practically everything uses a randomizer for enemies, several items and one weapon. Sounds like nothing new right? However what makes my randomizer better is to stick with things that have the same or very similar graphical style to the game you're playing in, and also in the same theme. Seeing technology in Heretic or medieval monsters in Doom or worse, Duke/SW/Blood/Witchhaven rips in Doom engine games look extremely out of place obviously.

It's also possible to be too random and have far too many kinds of enemy instead of a direct concentration on a few key types (I take my inspiration from Diablo in how there's 3-5 types of one enemy class), so if there's an army of a certain class you should be able to see all if not most of them. If you got over say 15 replacements for a Former Human, it's going to be a mess to play.

I also randomize by the class of enemy. Imps should only be Imp class, you shouldn't run into possessed humans or cybernetic enemies. The Hell Noble (Knight/Baron) classes have only satyr monsters in a concentration of the weakest to most powerful. My last update includes the Satyr (Monster Resource version), Hell Knight, Hell Warrior (Monster Resource version) and Lord of Heresy for the Hell Knight class. And the Baron of Hell, Belphegor, Warlord of Hell and Archon of Hell (Hellstorm version) for the Baron class.

Lastly, it's very important to balance them, don't just throw a bunch of enemies in and not bother making adjustments so they come off as too hard. Share similar HP and damage, if one has to be stronger, don't make it overly so or in the worst case scenario the Doom weapons will come off as too weak / use too much excess ammo than the map can supply you with.

[bgraybr]

BurningCadavre said:

Giving my two cents regarding randomizers and the people who make and/or play them.

Your mod is different, its a standalone mod that includes maps and a theme. This is not supposed to some super cool awesome mod that you made with perfect balance and theme. This is just a randomizer by itself. People that want to use it obviously don't care about consistency. Besides, a theme would be kind of pointless since you can use this with any map regardless of theme. I use mods like this when I want to do mess around with random weapons in maps and/or look for weapons/mod ideas. And somethimes just cool to be able to run around and blow up an Archon of Hell with a weapon that I remember from Shadow Warrior.

If this was made less random, it would be just another dumb weapons mod, not a randomizer. Because of the shear number of weapons balancing it would be difficult, besides, everything is randomized so lack of balance isn't noticed as much.

And about the resources being ripped- no one is trying to take credit for the ripped graphics. Everyone knows that the majority of the graphics were ripped. Who cares?

Edit: To summarize, this is just a huge test wad that's fun to play around with, and a good source of ideas. Graphical consistency would almost completely ruin the point.

[40oz]

Spleen said:

Nothing, it's just that my original argument seems stupid in hindsight. Sorry.

Don't be sorry man. You always tend to put up some of the best arguements I see, at least among other people that just go "lol purist." It allowed me to clarify my point too.

It may sound weird but I wanna commend you for finding that hole in my argument against using ripped resources in that ZDoom thread btw. I was pretty sure my argument was airtight until that. Also you didn't just repeat what everyone was saying or making any arguments that were covered in my previous posts. Even though I sound angry (without intention) I like debating against you :)