Another post on houses

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PowerWyrm
Balrog
Posts: 1574
Joined: Sun 27.11.2005, 15:57

Another post on houses

Post by PowerWyrm » Fri 25.04.2014, 09:53

Having implemented the extensible house system from MAng 1.2 into PWMAng, I'm currently not worrying about house shortage (see the house expansion project for how to deal with the current MAng 1.1), but house availability. Especially compared to V.

Currently, characters start homeless. To be able to get a house, you have to pay for it. The problem is that you will quickly have the need for a house to drop items you don't use: maybe you've found bolts of slay evil, but you are using a nice bow; maybe you've found a couple early potions of healing, but you have 100 hps; maybe you've been lucky to find a scythe of slicing (holy avenger), but your character has 10 STR and he's enable to wield that weapon correctly. Currently, even small houses cost a ton (a 2x4 house is priced around 10k), which prevent players from buying houses at low level (you can find tiny houses for a few k, but what's the point of buying a 1x2 house???).

In Vanilla, every character starts with a house. A house that is equivalent to a second inventory (26 slots). This is a huge advantage at start, since you can immediately drop anything you don't need in your house. However, you can only own one house, and it's NOT upgradable. Once it's filled, you have to make choices.

So how to take the best of the two systems and pull something that would work nicely? Here what I think would be great:
- give each starting character a "deed of property" (scroll) that could be used to buy a house right from the start; the value of the house that could be bought with that deed would be limited to something like 10k
- prevent house expansion in town and immediate suburb (radius 1) and only generate small/medium houses in that area; this would make 5 areas full of small houses available for starting characters
- increase the suburb area from radius 2 to radius 3 and only generate medium/large houses in that area; this would make a lot more room for houses available for high level characters
- only allow 2 houses per character (this is probably already the case on the official server); this allows the player to manage a private house and a public store while still allowing the player to "move" items from one house to another if he decides to buy a bigger house; and the new house creation system allows the player to expand his character's houses at will

I'd like to have feedback about this, since I'm seriously thinking of implementing these ideas in PWMAngband and I think they would be neat to implement in MAngband too.

PowerWyrm
Balrog
Posts: 1574
Joined: Sun 27.11.2005, 15:57

Re: Another post on houses

Post by PowerWyrm » Fri 25.04.2014, 17:09

Zaxx wrote: - give each starting character a "deed of property" (scroll) that could be used to buy a house right from the start; the value of the house that could be bought with that deed would be limited to something like 10k
- prevent house expansion in town and immediate suburb (radius 1) and only generate small/medium houses in that area; this would make 5 areas full of small houses available for starting characters
- increase the suburb area from radius 2 to radius 3 and only generate medium/large houses in that area; this would make a lot more room for houses available for high level characters
- only allow 2 houses per character (this is probably already the case on the official server); this allows the player to manage a private house and a public store while still allowing the player to "move" items from one house to another if he decides to buy a bigger house; and the new house creation system allows the player to expand his character's houses at will
Ok, I've just implemented that in PWMAngband for the next build. Let's see how it goes...

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