Energy of the enemies

[Optimus]

So, I am curious, what kind of thought was put in the design of the doom monsters concerning the energy they have.

Some monsters seems to have exactly the amount of energy to make the gameplay more interesting. For example the pink demons have such energy that you sometimes kill them with two shotgun blast and sometimes it's not enough. So, it makes the gameplay interesting, you hit with two shotgun blasts, it doesn't die and you switch to the pistol or fist to finish it with one or two hits.

Same thing with Cacodemon, it's on the fringe, you can kill them or not with two good double shotgun blasts. This also makes you extatic when you manage the second good shoot and you hear the characteristic sound and see the death gfx. It's like playing lottery or something.

And then they didn't design the double shotgun to fire 14 pelets (double the simple shotgun) but 20, was that intentional? So that Demons can be killed with exactly one good close shoot every time.

Imps now are 90% killed by shotgun blast from close range, so you can enjoy having five of them close and kill the in a row of successful shootings. And you count how many succesive kills you have done without failing to kill one with a single shoot. When this happens (from a close range with good shoot where not pellet misses) to fail, I just switch to pistol and iirc always 1 pistol shoot is enough. As if the energy of the monster and pellet damage was designed to be nearly on the fringe.

So, I am curious if there was word from the designers, were these decisions oblivious, to make you bet whether two or three blasts kill some monsters, etc? The give the gameplay a nice touch. There must have been some thought behind it but I would like to know the initial thoughts of the designers.

p.s. Only energies I didn't liked is the cyberdemon which is too tough and has double the energy of the spider mastermind, and then lost souls. Such an ammo waster, you need double shotgun or one shotgun and few pistol/chaingun shots. They have changed this one in PSX doom I see (and the N64 port iirc) to have energy similar to an imp. That was a good decision.

[Grazza]

Remember that the SSG wouldn't have figured in deciding how much health to give the original Doom monsters, as it didn't exist until Doom 2.

But I'm sure there was a good deal of tweaking of the amount of health the monsters had, and the amount of damage the weapons did, so that the game felt right, and the bad guys weren't either a pushover or too much of an annoyance. The BFG, Spider MM and Cyberdemon were probably less extensively tweaked, as they were one-offs in the original 3-episode Doom.

Optimus said:

the cyberdemon which is too tough and has double the energy of the spider mastermind

Uh, you might want to look up the actual figures.

[Lorenzo]

Probably in the future someone will come out with an equation giving you the correct values of player health, monsters health, weapons damage and so on in order to have the perfect gameplay.

But waiting for that equation, game designers have to rely on their instict and on a lot of testing.

[Optimus]

Oh, just checked Cybie is 1.5 of Spidermind.
Still, the spidermind should have more energy. Or, better the Cybie less energy because it takes time to be killed and one miscalculated strafe and you are dead.

I just found that the wiki pages on monsters and weapons are crazy. There are even statistical data for damage, how many hits from a weapon kills every monster in avarage, min, max, etc. Crazy!

[ASD]

I don't need to switch to pistol or fist when I shoot something critically with shotgun or SSG. There's tons of ammo in maps usually.

[Face23785]

Optimus said:

Oh, just checked Cybie is 1.5 of Spidermind.
Still, the spidermind should have more energy. Or, better the Cybie less energy because it takes time to be killed and one miscalculated strafe and you are dead.

I'm guessing when they designed the spidermind, they figured they'd give it less health because of the superchaingun. They probably didn't realize so many players would find the BFG in episode 3, or that some of us would have the balls to rush the spidermind and pulverize it with it. Don't forget, we're analyzing it almost 20 years later. Most of us have been playing Doom for years. When I first played it, even the Bruiser Brothers killed me all the time.

On the other hand, maybe they wanted to make the invasion hierarchy a touch realistic by having the overall leader, spidermind (similar to a president or emperor) be less powerful than the guardian cyberdemon (similar to a General).

[Use]

Optimus said:

Imps now are 90% killed by shotgun blast from close range...

Ugh...shhh, don't let Maes hear you.

[xvertigox]

Imps now are 90% killed by shotgun blast from close range, so you can enjoy having five of them close and kill the in a row of successful shootings. And you count how many succesive kills you have done without failing to kill one with a single shoot.

For groups of 3+ imps I always use the ssg so I can kill 3/4 at once and save shells.

[betabox]

xvertigox said:

Unless you miss you should kill imps close range with the sg 100%. For groups of 3+ imps I always use the ssg so I can kill 3/4 at once and save shells.

It's happened many times to me, too. Right up in their face, a single, fully used Shotgun shell doesn't kill them. Other times, a single Shogtun blast from a couple feet away, not even totally aligned, kills them.

[Grazza]

Yes, xvertigox's claim is wrong. The stats are available, so there's no need to guess or spread misinformation on this stuff. Also, I don't think that 4000/3000 = 1.5.

[Gez]

Grazza said:

The BFG, Spider MM and Cyberdemon were probably less extensively tweaked, as they were one-offs in the original 3-episode Doom.

Probably also this:

Also I'd spend more time on the bosses. Like several of our games I felt more had gone into the sub-bosses (I loved the Maulotaurs!) than the main boss, because the main boss always gets done last when there's no time to do it right.

MRJ was talking about Heretic of course; but I'm pretty sure the same thing applied to Doom as well.

[Optimus]

I made a little room with imps in a big row and low ceiling on the heads of the imps to keep them from moving so I can carefully blast them with shotgun. Usually I could kill 10-12 in a row before one shoot doesn't entirely finish one imp, at unlucky times this happened after 5 or 6 kills. Yeah, what a silly thing I am doing in the morning :) (will try it with cacos too :)

p.s. With cacos, I killed 24 out of 51 with two SSG. Funny is the distribution, sometimes you get to kill 5 in a row, then the next 7 are not killed, then 3 in a row, then the next 5 are not kill, etc. I guess the pseudo random generator of Doom does it. So, you are lucky in a real game if having to fight a small horde of Caco's you hit the lucky sequence where you kill 5 in a row with 2 carefully placed SSG each. Ok I'll stop now :)

p.p.s. No I didn't stop. Anyway, I found I didn't know the baron of hell could sometimes be kill with 5 SSG shots, I thought he always needed 6. Even with a ratio 24 / 51. Wow!

[xvertigox]

Grazza said:

Yes, xvertigox's claim is wrong. The stats are available, so there's no need to guess or spread misinformation on this stuff. Also, I don't think that 4000/3000 = 1.5.

Whoops. That's interesting. So how does damage work in Doom? I know there is an element of randomness but the RNG is inefficient/predictable or something? Does distance play any part in determining damage (not including bullet spread)?

[Mithran Denizen]

xvertigox said:

I know there is an element of randomness but the RNG is inefficient/predictable or something?

The pseudorandom number generator in Doom is actually a fixed table of values, so yes, it's predictable, though it's not like you can predict the damage of your next shot during actual play, because so many things in the level call P_Random that you'll never keep track of them all. Tool-assists are probably another story, though.

Does distance play any part in determining damage (not including bullet spread)?

No, the hitscan either hits, or it doesn't, this isn't Wolf 3D.