Anger/Fear/Placation tags that arent wonkers

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Exactly what it says. Some tags are completely overpowering. Some tags seem useless. Some seem to make unavoidable conditions.
In fairness, tags seem to stack with themselves, so multiple STALK or FRIENDDIED tags will produce double, triple, etc the effect.

For instance:

-PLAYERCLOSE is very, very strong. wolves are playerclose. Adding that as an anger tag makes being close a near instant hostility. Even creatures with <-50 aggro will quickly get angsty with that as an anger tag. Similarly, putting it as a fear tag makes anything turn yellowbelly. Even zombies will run with little provocation.

-MEAT is a completely useless tag, it would seem. Ive had 10 of these as a placation tag and Ive noticed little in the way of discernable placations. Specifically on wolves. I had much better (and dynamic) results just removing the player close tag and doubling down on friendattacked and hurt.

-STALK is useful if used in quanities. the magic number to notice a real change of behavior is 4 to 5. with 4 to 5 stalk tags critters will maintain a tracking disposition and even run from a fire into the dark and continue tracking a player. Good for wolves, who will flee the fire and track you from the dark.

-FRIENDATTACKED AND FRIENDDIED seem relatively useless to. especially when other tags are much more effective at aggro changing.

-PLAYERWEAK is another pretty strong tag, although Im less sure exactly what it entails. It appears to be a relative tag; the monster compares stats? Either way, the critter appears to take into account friend/foe numbers and distance when deciding if the player is weak.

-FIRE. Fire is ungodly effective as a combat weapon, and solid fear/anger token.

-SOUND. Sound seems to be only moderately effective per ‘dose’, but since walking and combat all make noise it accumulates into something I think is unavoidable. Since sound only exists when something is bashed on, the player turns on/off/interacts with stuff, and when the player walks or fights, this seems like a hack to say 'when the player is around, you do [attack/neutralize/flee].

2

I didn’t know you can stack triggers.

MEAT is currently turned off. It wasn’t balanced well, but was relatively expensive to calculate. It only worked on hardcoded meat IDs, but allowed attacking things without retaliation.

STALK works like this: if the critter has anger > 0, it has 20% chance per turn to trigger at power 1, regardless of what is it doing. Results in critters in the bubble getting mad if allowed to, since anger naturally drops only at 10% chance per turn rate.

FRIEND_ATTACKED is currently inverted: it triggers when a friend attacks.
Except not actually a friend, it triggers when the critter with it attacks the player or a NPC and affects ALL critters in the bubble. So a single mad ant attacking the player will get all the moose in the bubble mad. Triggers at power 15.

PLAYER_WEAK triggers if by the end of the planning phase it has a target, this target is non-friendly and it has less than 70% hp. Basically, it picks the closest potentially hostile critter and triggers at power (10 - hp_per / 10).

PLAYER_CLOSE triggers with power 5 when a non-friendly creature is within 5 tiles. Minor bug: it doesn’t include NPCs.

Some triggers are hardcoded to only respect some interactions.PLAYER_CLOSE will not work as a placate trigger, PLAYER_WEAK will only work as an anger trigger. This is because those are checked differently to the rest.
All other triggers can be mixed just fine. You can have critters get mad when near fire, get spooked when in bubble for too long, get calm when hearing explosions etc.

3

ohes

Well, at the least, I tested the hurt tag on a heavily armored critter and found no significant change in the damage it on average required to upset it when I had 5 over just 1. Theres certainly no error message about duplicates.

4

Also, FRIEND_DIED is fairly OP, I had a dog death turn a bear on the opposite end of the view range hostile.

5

Dunno if these tags have anything to do with it, but something that occurs stupidly often to me is a faraway moose will end up engaging with a hostile mob, usually a zombie, kill it, and then immediately charge across a great distance to spill my character’s blood.

The moose in my game are brutal and efficient assassins, ensuring no witnesses live to tell of their murderous acts.