My new found love of fastmonsters

I've now started consistently playing with fastmonsters on and I freaking love it. It makes you actually have to try at Doom, without it the difficulty mostly comes from having do dodge mass projectiles (for me at least) but with fatmonsters you actually have to be aware of all monsters and have to react reasonably quickly to avoid damage (with hitscanners). It makes the game so much more exciting. The downside is that it makes the autoaim deficiencies much more apparent. Who else pretty much always plays with fastmonsters enabled?

I do, though as my reflexes are deteriorating with age there are some levels I can't beat on -skill 4 -fast anymore.
Even then, I prefer to switch to -skill 3 -fast before I turn off the -fast option.

It would be nice to have more specific options e.g.

• One to make the monsters attack more often
  
• One to make demons & spectres run faster
  
• One to make fireballs faster (this is the first one I would switch off.)
  

I'm working on a wad that alters the AI to make monsters more dangerous without drastically changing them (lowering painchance, more health, attack more often etc). I'm trying to keep it balanced. I can whip up the options you mention as mods but they'd have to be run under zdoom, would you be interested?

If I remember right the "attacking more often" part is a hard-coded check for the -fast flag in A_Chase and cannot be changed in DECORATE. Is that not the case? This is not the same as the +FASTER flag.

A good AI improvement would be for the monsters to take your speed & direction into account when aiming their fireballs (so if you run in a straight line they will all hit you.) Maybe even do the same with polar coordinates to catch players circlestrafing at constant speed. I assume there must be a source port with this capability somewhere.

finnw said:

If I remember right the "attacking more often" part is a hard-coded check for the -fast flag in A_Chase and cannot be changed in DECORATE. Is that not the case? This is not the same as the +FASTER flag.

I'm sure there's a flag that makes monsters shoot from further away and from even further away.

finnw said:
A good AI improvement would be for the monsters to take your speed & direction into account when aiming their fireballs (so if you run in a straight line they will all hit you.) Maybe even do the same with polar coordinates to catch players circlestrafing at constant speed. I assume there must be a source port with this capability somewhere. [/B]

Legacy has monster projectile prediction IIRC I know for sure there is a port that has it.

I occasionally like playing on -fast, but as you kind of said yourself, the autoaim deficiencies become that much more frustrating. Then there's getting chewed on by a demon while your SSG blasts all go through it thanks to the faulty blockmap.

I like it better on ports with the blockmap fix, no autoaim and full mouselook. I find -fast with those options to be roughly similar in difficulty as regular UV with the original blockmap, autoaim and horizontal mouselook.

Regardless, PEs can become extremely annoying depending on their placement, and on tightly balanced maps (for regular UV) -fast can break encounters, so I tend to stick with the default behavior.

I've played with it on for over a decade at least...without it the game's just too easy for me. It is a bit disproportionate (only some shots fly faster, only demons move faster, hitscanners and demons and pain elementals become infinitely more dangerous, cybers become less dangerous etc.) and sometimes you'll bump into a map that can't be completed. (I don't use autoaim though, and use full freelook/jump/crouch for killing/dodging purposes...which is probably why even Sunder couldn't stop me :P)

finnw said:

If I remember right the "attacking more often" part is a hard-coded check for the -fast flag in A_Chase and cannot be changed in DECORATE. Is that not the case? This is not the same as the +FASTER flag.

You can specify the behaviour for each mob using +ALWAYSFAST/+NEVERFAST to turn on/off the constant attacking behaviour, regardless of skill setting.

finnw said:

A good AI improvement would be for the monsters to take your speed & direction into account when aiming their fireballs (so if you run in a straight line they will all hit you.)

Thing_ProjectileIntercept does so, but I've not tried to use it in decorate. (plus additional hacks would have to be made to stop the projectile firing at ground height).

xvertigox said:

I'm sure there's a flag that makes monsters shoot from further away and from even further away.

+MISSILEMORE/+MISSILEEVENMORE.