Brutal Doom Monsters

I've grown bored of Brutal Doom for the most part since I discovered Smooth Doom. But one thing that I miss about brutal doom are the monsters being more difficult. Here is what I miss in particular:

Zombiemen: Fired faster and generally more accurately
Chaingunners: Much higher rate of fire, and bullets sprayed the map
Imps: Faster and more frequent fireballs.
Spectres: Actually difficult to see.
Cacodemons: Faster lightning balls.
Lost Souls: Looked cooler.
Barons: The occasional triple fireball attack.
Mancubi: Faster projectile and flamethrowers.
Cyberdemon: Fired faster.
Spidermastermind: That. Fucking. Cannon.

As far as the weapon sprites go, I don't really care. I also have grown to prefer the pistol over the assault rifle because the assault rifle makes it way too easy. I've cleared "difficult" maps using just the assault rifle on brutal doom.

So to put it simply, I'm just curious whether or not there are any other like minded people in regard to this.

I would be stoked if Mark released a brutal Monsters pack so we can have a harder doom without the over the top blood and gore.

All of that being said, some aesthetic things I love about brutal doom:

1. The suffering. I love when I shoot a zombieman, sergeant, or imp and they scream for a few seconds, hop around on one foot, or crawl around for a while.

2. The more realistic explosions, visually and phonetically.

3. Picking up revenant and mancubus weaponry.

Those monster changes is one of the reasons why I abandoned the mod in the first place, it just unbalances some user created levels as well.

Actually, for the vanilla maps I thought the new monsters where balanced pretty well assuming you played with mouse look enabled.

I find Brutal Doom works better in that regard than say, something like Project MSX. Brutal because it remains relatively the same style of game, but MSX puts fast monsters + slow weak player in levels designed for mostly the opposite.

A couple of weeks ago I did something similar. As a way to learn and practice DECORATE, I was trying to improve the difficulty of the monsters without increasing the typical stats such as health, damage or speed.
So I tried improving their AI and general competence: higher rate of fire (to match the player's), not moving randomly after one successful shot, and having a higher range.
It would be interesting to add more complex behavior such as moving towards cover and coming out to shoot occasionally, hiding from the player to ambush them or moving towards other friendly monsters to attack in a group.

I've made several simple DEHACKED mods in attempt to improve balance and/or increase threat of underpowered enemies - "improve" according to my subjective estimation, of course. I had to consider quite a few things, and came to several conclusions.

Enemies shouldn't be too powerful, specially not in a way that kills the player too fast without warning, or that denies the player from entering a new area and forces him to camp behind corners. Enemies should be just enough powerful to provide a challenge, and at the same time be possibly outsmarted during a run-and-gun-styled run - because that's a fun aspect of Doom's gameplay. Actively manipulating the enemies while being manipulated by the map's setup is more fun that avoiding enemies and popping-and-shooting at them while they pop-and-shoot at you. Enemies with lesser health are usually better than enemies with higher health, for the sake of a reasonably paced flow (spending too much time killing 1 enemy is annoying whenever it's repeated) and allowing interesting setups with multiple monsters attacking the player at the same moment, while being all killable within a reasonable time (not too long).

And finally - be aware that players know the exact behaviour of vanilla monsters very well, and they're used to it. Therefore, when changing a monster's trait, always do it for a reason and do it distinctly enough. For example, lowering a monster's pain chance might be an annoying change, so it would probably be better if it remained unchanged - unless it radically improved the monster's combat efficiency, but preferably coupled with some additional changes, to make the new behaviour distinct. Also, generally try to not change the principle of fighting the monsters, unless you have a good reason for it. For example, if a modded Arachnotron fired his plasma too fast, the player would no longer be able to carefully dodge them, which would force him to take cover and camp (=not an improvement) and be annoyed on top of that.

I'm not keen on enemies with overpowered attacks and/or too fast attacks. Sniper-style enemies are ones from the worst offenders to gameplay, as I see it - unless implemented particularly well in a specific map setup. I prefer partially "docile", partially challenging monsters, that can be used in varied ways in different maps.

P.S. The suffering of enemies in Brutal Doom looked/sounded weird to me the first time I've seen it, and obnoxious for the rest of the time.

I think this could take form as a simple patch, shouldn't really take up more than a megabyte or two. Perhaps some map authors could just include the data in their wad so that the monsters always behave in the way the level was built to accommodate, or something.

Linkrulezall said:

I think this could take form as a simple patch, shouldn't really take up more than a megabyte or two. Perhaps some map authors could just include the data in their wad so that the monsters always behave in the way the level was built to accommodate, or something.

That'd be fine. I'm just tired of imps, cacodemons, and barons being boring enemies. It's like, "Oh, twenty imps...well, let me just strafe left and right for a few minutes so I don't get hit."

Or, "Oh, bruiser brothers. I'll just sprint in circles."

Fuck that. I want a challenge.

I remember one encounter from Memento Mori II with walls that open in the four corners of a room to reveal 12-16 imps. This would have been easy to deal with the regular gameplay, especially with the barrels placed near each group of imps. In Brutal Doom they leapt through the air into melee range and did a whole shitload of damage, and of course the barrels were useless because the imps jumped on me immediately.

No thanks.

TraceOfSpades said:

That'd be fine. I'm just tired of imps, cacodemons, and barons being boring enemies. It's like, "Oh, twenty imps...well, let me just strafe left and right for a few minutes so I don't get hit."

Or, "Oh, bruiser brothers. I'll just sprint in circles."

Fuck that. I want a challenge.

They're not boring enemies, you're playing boring maps. You can't just chuck a bunch of monsters into a map without care for their placement or the map architecture.

Woolie Wool said:

I remember one encounter from Memento Mori II with walls that open in the four corners of a room to reveal 12-16 imps. This would have been easy to deal with the regular gameplay, especially with the barrels placed near each group of imps. In Brutal Doom they leapt through the air into melee range and did a whole shitload of damage, and of course the barrels were useless because the imps jumped on me immediately.

No thanks.



They're not boring enemies, you're playing boring maps. You can't just chuck a bunch of monsters into a map without care for their placement or the map architecture.

Just need to have better reaction time for that kind of situation.

But in every wad I've played, I have found the imp, cacodemon, and baron attacks to be boring. Their projectiles are easily avoidable. Granted, tactful placement of these enemies can enhance the combat situation, but it doesn't make their attacks any less boring for me.

TraceOfSpades said:

Just need to have better reaction time for that kind of situation.

But in every wad I've played, I have found the imp, cacodemon, and baron attacks to be boring. Their projectiles are easily avoidable. Granted, tactful placement of these enemies can enhance the combat situation, but it doesn't make their attacks any less boring for me.

Those enemies mainly work when in conjunction with other monsters. Dodging imp fireballs is much more difficult when you got a ton of other attacks to avoid.

(also screw barons, don't use them ever)

AD_79 said:

(also screw barons, don't use them ever)

I use them sparingly. They usually serve as guardians of secret areas.

TraceOfSpades said:

I use them sparingly. They usually serve as guardians of secret areas.

You might as well just use hell knights. Barons are EXTREMELY scenario-specific and only work well under a few conditions.

AD_79 said:

You might as well just use hell knights. Barons are EXTREMELY scenario-specific and only work well under a few conditions.

I'll take that into consideration. Thank you.

scifista42 said:

I'm not keen on enemies with overpowered attacks and/or too fast attacks.

In that case, is your favorite monster the hanged Commander Keen?

I did like the intensity of what some of the monsters brought, but as Woolie Wool said, it sort of breaks some of the maps.

I have been wanting some kind of "Slightly harder Doom", but I've yet to find something suitable other than the -fast parameter.

Glaice said:

Those monster changes is one of the reasons why I abandoned the mod in the first place, it just unbalances some user created levels as well.

yup. messing with the monster's stats and attacks screws up the map. it might make easy maps more difficult, but one can use nightmare or -fast for that.

i find that brutal doom makes everything WAY too hard for me. usually, if i come across a horde of zombiemen, that's not too hard. but with brutal doom, my health goes down to 50 in a few seconds. it's even difficult to get past the entry of Icarus because of the hitscan enemies :/

P.S. yes, i do suck at doom.