[crossfire] Unbalanced spell types

[Andreas Kirschbaum]

Joshua Wilson wrote:
>
     
      Mark Wedel wrote:
     
     >
     
      > Having the same logic for bolt spells doesn't seem unreasonable - if
     
     >
     
      > a bolt only hits 50% of the creature, it only does 50% of the
     
     >
     
      > damage.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      This is awfully dangerous sounding - given a bolt spell can NOT hit
     
     >
     
      100% of any monster other then a 1xX monster we will end up nuking
     
     >
     
      bolt spells if we are not careful here.
     
     
Of course, we should not blindly scale down by monster area. Since a
bolt spell naturally hits only in one dimension, we should scale down by
monster "diameter". The adjustment Mark Wedel suggested above should be
(IMHO): scale down by the maximum number of tiles you could hit. This
number depends on the bolt direction, so four values are necessary.

For rectangular monsters this would reduce to:

 - horizontal bolt: scale down by width

 - vertical bolt: scale down by height

 - diagonal bolt: scale down by MIN(width, height)


To reduce necessary calculations, we could add five new fields to the
archetype type: scale factors for area spells and for bolt spells in all
four directions. These fields would be calculated only once at archetype
load time. (Unlike to the code I just committed which calculates the
value each time it is accessed.)