Angband Borg

The zborg has been hanging out on depth 76 for a while. He is having trouble killing a level-quest monster. But otherwise, he seems to be fighting well and staying alive. The cyberdemons are really posing a problem for him, as his Vecna and all the summoned liches.

• If the borg is leaving the dungeon immediately due to neededing to restock, he will be allowed to use borg_recover first.
• Borg will try to not use Mind Wave when sitting in an anti-summon corridor.
• Borg will keep track of Wand of S2M and will try to hang on to them for AS corridors.
• Borg will use DimDoor to jump into a hallway when fighting a summoner.
• Resist Shards will be increased in value in order to protect against the cyberdemons and will also take into account Mephistopheles who will summon cyberdemons.
• Slight improvement to how the borg calculates the benefit of using swaps.
• The borg was being overly rewarded for wearing the artifact with PFE.
• If the borg must rest to recharge an important rod (heal or recall), then the no_rest_prep counter is set to 0.
• Borg was not using his Rod of Healing during Questor Combat.
• Slight boost to using Psychic Drain when his mana is low.
• No escaping from Danger Level 4 if sitting in an Anti-Summon Corridor.
• When destroying junk, borg will not consider value of items after depth 40 or so.
• Borg won’t use the DimDoor routine “jump into pit” if he is currently fighting a unique.
• Repaired some problems with the borg shifting the panel to locate off-screen monsters which were attacking him.
• Increased the likelihood of the borg using Psi_Drain on undead and demons.  Previously, he would not cast the spell against monsters whose clevel was greater than half the borg clevel, which effectively limited the use of the spell to monster clevel 25.  He will now use it on monsters up to clevel 60.
• In borg_attack(), the borg will not attack monsters which have not been seen lately (within 2 turns).  But he misses out on opportunities to offset ball attack never_move monsters which have not been detected recently.  Since some never_moves are empty_mind, they would not be deteced by ESP.  So the borg will be allowed to offset ball attack never_move monsters if they have been detected within 20 turns.
• Tweaked the healing thresholds a bit for the last few checks.
• GF_NUKE needed to consider poison resistance for borg_danger() purposes.
• The borg was believing that he could not use a ranged spell attacks against a pass_wall monster in a wall grid.
• Psi_drain spell has a bonus when it’s used when mana is low and the effect (damage) is not limited.
• Removing items that are not ID is more limited now.  He had suffered amnesia and ‘forgot’ about his +16 Ring of Speed, then removed and crushed it.

• When using DimDoor to escape, the borg will now choose a spot further away, if the dangers are equal.  This will allow him to get a few more ranged shots in as the monsters approach.
• Radiation mutation was being considered as a ball instead of a dispel effect.
• Certain Dispel effects were passed positive through borg_projectable, but failed in the project_path() from spells1.c  In effect, it was a ‘knight movement’ error.  They show up from time to time.  LOS() is positive going one direction but not the other (monster->player vs player->monster).  I added the reverse LOS check to verify the projection path both ways.
• Before jumping into a pit and casting Mind Wave as a defence, the borg will check to make sure he has sufficient HP.
• Track bad landing zones when trying DimDoor.  There might be an unseen obstacle keeping him from sucessfully jumping.  And he might try to jump onto the same spot repeatedly.  Now he will track bad spots and select a new one.
• Using Mind Wave as a defence had some problems if he was in a room with a few Raals Tomes.  Borg will now keep track of the danger induced from non-effected (empty mind) monsters.  If the danger is too high, he won’t use the Mind Wave defence.
• There was a crash error being caused by a variable being overwritten.  The problem was in the wilderness grids for tracking town location.  That overwrote the array for tracking glyphs.  When a certain glyph was created, it caused a crash.  It was not fun to track down.

I still do not have a version of vanilla angband that will compile in VS2008.  It might take the dev-team a few iterations before they have the dust settled.  I’ll pick up the vborg as soon as they have a version that is compatible with Visual Studio.

I made several changes and updates for the zborg during this past month. Here is a brief run-down.

• MC are allowed to cast spells when blinded
• No AS-corridor digging if a monster is adjacent.
• Borg was getting twitchy after stepping on a special town door. He could not figure out how to flow over the door; he thought it was impassable.
• Borg will keep track of worn items to avoid looping on Best Combo
• Borg was not looking at the minimum fail rate requests for certain mutation activations.
• Borg will consider unknown grids in a region that has been magic mapped at floor grids.
• Borg has a bounce between flowing to a stair in order to leave a level an trying to pick up an item. I told the borg to not pick up items if he was in the process of leaving the level.
• Borg was bouncing between flowing to an asleep town monster (then not attacking it) and flowing to the shops. Once the monster woke up, he attacked it. Borg will be allowed to attack sleeping town monsters.
• Borg with no food will stair scum to get to the surface. In doing so, he will not chase down monsters or items (except food) while in this state.
• Problem with the borg activating the Mutation Mind Blast, thinking it had a radius effect.
• Borg was casting the Mind Wave defence manuever repeatedly, thinking he was blasting some monsters in a darkened room. He will not be required to have seen the monsters more recently.
• Borg might starve to death waiting for summoner monsters to approach him.
• Penalty for dipping into reserve mana when casting Psychic Drain was removed, since that spell returns mana.
• Borg was incorrectly counting certain utility mutations (like WoR) when he ran low on mana.  If the mana ran out, he thought he was out of the utility, when really, he had it, but it was momentarily out of reach due to low mana.