[crossfire] Unbalanced spell types

[Andreas Kirschbaum]

Currently, for two similar monsters that differ only in size (number of
tiles they occupy), some spells hit the larger monster (much) harder.

This is due to the fact that (for example) cone spells hit all monster
parts individually. Each hit does the same (i.e. full) damage. Hence, a
2x1 sized monster can be hit twice by only one spell. The biggest
monster I'm aware of is a Greater Demon. Its size is 42 tiles, therefore
a fully hitting spell deals 42 times the damage compared to a 1x1 sized
monster.


To me, this is not the right behavior because it weakens big monsters
against some spells. And it's not obvious to a map maker that monster
size does matter. Besides that, you cannot really fix such a monster: if
you just add more hp, it also becomes harder to kill with (say) melee or
bullet spells.

As a solution, I propose to scale down the damage done by the following
spells:

  destruction

  explosion effects

  cone spells

  aura spells

  earth to dust

I think the damage should be scaled down by the monster size (measured
in tiles it occupies). This would mean a spell deals full damage only if
it hits the whole monster (i.e. the spell covers all monster tiles).

All other spells should not be affected by monster size, including:

  ball lightning

  bolt spells

  bullet spells


Note that bolt spells currently do have the same problem and deal
different damage depending on how you hit the monster: hitting a hill
giant vertically will do double damage compared to hitting it
horizontally.

For this spell type I cannot think of a simple solution that works correctly:
just scaling down by either MIN(monster width, monster height) or
MAX(monster width, monster height) either does not fix the problem, or weakens
bolt spells for no apparent reason (to the player).

Therefore, I think bolt spells should be ignored for now.