The Stealth Point Refactor

Maze splits character classes between combat, stealth and magic. Each focus has an associated resource: hit points, stealth points and magic points.

v0.9 was released with Stealth Points working the way I originally planned: they are a resource that can be spent to dodge physical attacks and to deliver ambush attacks that used a single modifier instead of those associated with the weapon. In theory, stealth characters would be able to easily give combat characters a hard time (and suffer vs magic characters (spells that can be dodged like missile weapons are not yet unimplemented)), and would be able to use a wide variety of weapons by investing in only one modifier, leaving other points at level up to be spent on other stealth-related stuff like locks&traps. In theory it sounded good.

In practise, it worked fine and balanced, but I overlooked something fundamental about the game - it's a dungeon crawl at heart. Having characters and monsters dodging attacks all the time made many of the battles long and tedious.

For v0.91 I am working on a different balance. Instead of spending stealth points to avoid attacks, stealth focussed characters can spend stealth points to make their attacks deal double damage. The Ambush:Melee and Ambush:Missile (renamed to Backstab and Snipe) still take precedence over the weapons own attack modes, but weapons now have a flag that must be set before they can be used for backstabbing and sniping.

In retrospect, I should have learned from the Wiz8 approach to this.

Some other thoughts on this:

• Stealth points are now less valuable, and stealth focussed characters are going to need more hit points to survive. perhaps 66% or 75% of a combat focussed character (as opposed to the current ~50%)?
• Unlike Wiz8 I am not planning to make stealth characters less likely to be targetted by monsters - I feel this mechanic was too easily abused in Wiz8. Perhaps the Stealth:TerrainX modifiers need to be reduced to two instead of four.
• Stealth characters will now have a restricted range of weapons they can use for this. No more backstabbing with a Giant Sword. Probably a good thing.
• I'm planning a couple of other ways of speeding up combat: adding the Beserker and Lightning Strike character abilities. Another page out of the Wiz8 book. More on those later.
• I considered taking out Stealth Points altogether, and simply making the Backstab/Snipe attacks free (I even implemented this and played around a bit). It seemed better to have to spend Stealth points on it - kept the game balance from swinging entirely away from combat focussed characters. Also it would have involved replacing all the spells that currently operate on Stealth points.
• With this change and the new weapon disciplines I have planned, Combat focussed characters will proabbly end up being more useful as tank/heavy weapon types, while a properly managed Stealth character will be able to deal more damage quicker but will be more vulnerable.
• The dodging code is still there, and I plan on adding a Dodge character ability that will work similar to the current Arrow Cutting one - a nice symmetry there.

The first draft of this code is in the depot, although I still need to do some work to make foe attacks work like this (currently the foes have effectively an infinite amount of stealth points).