The maltese crypt, aside from the bugs I posted about separately, is in desperate need of balancing. In its current state, the maltese crypt is basically a cheat code for the player, while missing its potential to be rewarding in the right ways. It also is not dangerous, much safer than fighting random bandits, which fails to live up to its potential.
Here are the problems, broken down in terms of relative seriousness. I also made a saved game and attached specifically exploiting certain things to demonstrate the extreme potential, but as I will discuss, the balancing problems are present even in normal play.
CRITICAL BALANCING ISSUES
Critical Problem 1) Attached saved game, my player character has over 1000 max hp, saved the test after quickly wasting 3 months at sea to prove it is permanent. It is incredibly easy to achieve this. The player just needs the toughness perk and a bunch of bandages. In the very first room of the crypt when entering from spreightown dungeon, there is a mist.
The player just needs to walk into it, and then press forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards, in rapid pace to keep hitting the poison and getting the hp bonus. Meanwhile, use bandages to slow the health loss, that combined with toughness regeneration should make sure the poison very slowly hurts you, especially as your hp goes up. Very occasionally use an antidote. In about 10 minutes, and for a couple thousand gold in bandages, your character will have over 1000 max HP.
Now, this is 10 minutes of being exploitive, but even in normal play the permanent HP bonus is very unbalancing. In my normal game of just exploring the crypt, I only expored half and already had a bonus 56 HP boost just from randomly running into the mists while exploring. Without ever trying to go after them or use this.
Extensive exploring of the crypt even by a player with no specific intention to go after the mist can result if 50-100 HP max increase easily. This is a huge difference, and makes the player overpowered in other aspects of the game, even without purposely exploiting things. If the player instead goes after the mist, then several hundred to a thousand HP is possible.
Suggestion 1) I would say eliminating the HP bonus entirely would be reasonable and easy. There is little backstory presented to the mist, and the mechanic is not overly fun. Alternativelly, make the mist heal the player's current health (not increase max hp), but poisons them, so the player has the choice of effectivelly turning an antidote into a healing potion--which is close enough to current situation that all the dialogue from the monks would fit and not need to be edited. If the max hp bonus were retained, it should be capped at +10 HP from this source, but I think it is best eliminated. Especially since this is so easy compared to the apothecary in the same town, which actually is a fun and developed mechanic!
Critical Problem 2) The Maltese crypt is one of the least dangerous dungeons for a well prepared player, and even random bandits in the spreightown dungeon above are more dangerous. The reason is simple--the maltese knights don't have ranged weapons. If the player has professional fencer perk and a good sword, he can almost always succeed at blocking, and taking out even multiple maltese knights is fairly easy (and it is easy enough to avoid them and ambush them one by one, given their behavior, though there is little reason to bother). A secondary reason is they are all using the maltese sword that falls behind in power above level 10, making them less dangerous than bandits in melee damage as well. Add to that the terrain, the coriddors creating natural bottlenecks with only 1 or 2 getting access to you, and the whole dungeon is incredibly easy.
I think the creator tried to make them difficult by making an hp boost shortly after the undead monk rises, to make them tougher. Currently, there is the bug I mention where if you hit them right away you go quicker than their HP boost, and they die right away, but if that were fixed it would only prolong the easy fights and give you more XP.
The fundamental problem is they can't pierce blocks, and against a prepared player the AI needs ranged weapons to really pose a threat. Additional problems are they have limited sight radius so they don't gang up well, and the narrow hallways prevents them from doing so regardless.
My character has taken on 6-8 of them all bunched up in a group in a hallway a couple of times, with hardly a scratch on him. Even when 2 of them come from opposite ends in a room, one backstep and they are lined up and easy.
Without any real danger (to a character of lvl 10-12 or so with professional fencer), the whole dungeon just feels like it never lives up to its promise.
Also, of course the mazelike nature of it doesn't add much challange, because following the "always turn left" mathematics rule will always solve any maze and find an exit (unless you are in an interior wall, but in that case you just switch it once to the right and it works again). So you can never get lost, and there is no danger from that.
Suggestion 2) Maltese Knights gets some kind of ranged weapon, perhaps a throwing knife or an old style pistol from the early explorer's era. If not, at least give them better swords with a high piercing value, at least at some chance when player level increases, or give them automatically perks that help them pierce blocks better. Program them to be less blind and more responsive to noticing a player and grouping up.
Critical Problem 3) The maltese monks are way too good a source of gold. If you talk to one after death, and they roll the friendly undead guy (which is most of the time), they give you above 7,000+ gold everytime you ask about their story (sometimes it is above 10,000). 7,000 gold for killing one of these easy guys is way too much. Not to mention it makes killing a couple of monks worth more than finding the buried treasure chests! Which means exploring the dungeon is kind of pointless, and the treasure chests don't feel as epic and fun, because just kill three monks in a minute and you made far more. EDIT: Note that corpses in the crypt give much more gold than corpses in the abbey (they have slightly different dialogue tree optons, but seem to have drastically different gold rewards)
Fixing the bugs I posted in the other thread will actually make this much worse, as the biggest thing slowing this down right now is after awhile the monks bug out and you have to switch scenes to get them working again.
The creator seemed to recognize this problem, because he added a thief maltese monk to occasionally be spawned and steal all the player gold. However, this is easily avoided. First, there is a chest right outside the crypt in the spreightown dungeon, just exit and take a quick left, where the player can store his gold in 50k increments or so. The exploitive player will probably be exiting this regularly anyway, to reset the bugged monks. Second, and more importantly, a simple cobblestone to the head of the fleeing thief monk knocks him unconscious, and the player can then reclaim his gold by talking to him and stealing (rather than killing). A Thief knife might work too, but it is more convenient to walk around with a sword and cobble stones equiped. Sometimes the thief escapes, but it is very rare, and storing in the chest every once in awhile ensures not much will be lost.
I tested and timed myself, and a player wishing to exploit this will make about 200,000-300,000 gold per hour of playing, easy. That is with the bug slowing things down. This is far too much.
Even playing normally rather than farming them results in far too much gain. You will slay many monks in order to explore the dungeon, and upwards of 50 seems reasonable. Even with some bugging out you are looking at several hundred thousand in gold just from this source, because you will be changing scenes to fix the other glitches the corpses bugging out creates (like the corspes bugging out removing the HP boost from the undead monks mechanic, making the fights even easier), thus restoring the ability to get corpses.
Related point, but the rep bonus the monks give if you refuse their possessions is also unbalanced, and in particular renders the thief meaningless. It is just too easy to slaughter these monks, and getting a rep boost every monk goes too far.
I ended up starting mostly ignoring the knights after I made the first 250,000 easily even while focussing on exploration rather than hunting them, and I plan to donate it to the church so as to not unbalance my game. It really is way too much (it took me several hard and dangerous days of jungle hunting to save up the 150,000 my castaway currently has with loansharks in his ship buying fund, and to make and keep this kind of cash in an hour or so with no real risk just feels wrong)
Suggestion 3) Remove the monetary reward and the reputation boost from the options with the dead monk. Instead, they just give you their sword. Also keep the small random chance of them giving a minor item (I think this is already there, they seem to occasionally give me a minor jewel or cross or something). That is more than enough monatery reward from selling them. But it doesn't make sense they are carrying huge bags of gold anyway!
If more rewards were desired, a little better stuff could be added to the treasure chests, keeping the focus where it belongs.
MODERATE BALANCING PROBLEMS
Problem 4) You can indefinitelly repeat digging for the treasure chests, even after finding the chest. In particular, this means infinite french noble swords and valuable minerals found on the way. The only price is occasionally using a poison cure potion, and occasionally breaking a shovel (so buy 30 in town and you are set).
The dangers of digging are too few and weak--the undead pirate's knife breaks if you block it for a bit, and then sometimes he even runs away and gets chased by the monks. The grandmaster comes to check his treasure is laughably easy to kill. The 6 maltese exorcists are easy when they aren't set to be immortal (it is buggy, sometimes they are, sometimes not), and running away is simple enough.
And it kind of doesn't make sense you could infinitelly dig up french noble swords, gems, etc. Finding the chest should be the focus, and finding stuff along the way great, but the stuff along the way shouldn't be better than the chest and never ending.
Suggestion 4) Turn off the positive digging events after the chest has been found once. Maybe make the chests have a little better stuff to compensate and keep the focus there, so digging up the chest doesn't make the player go "ahhh, not that soon!". Or make it limited, so you can only dig up say 3 french noble swords in the whole dungeon ever. Same to limit the valuable minerals and such. Also maybe increase the strength of the exorcists, grandmaster, and native mummy.
Here are the problems, broken down in terms of relative seriousness. I also made a saved game and attached specifically exploiting certain things to demonstrate the extreme potential, but as I will discuss, the balancing problems are present even in normal play.
CRITICAL BALANCING ISSUES
Critical Problem 1) Attached saved game, my player character has over 1000 max hp, saved the test after quickly wasting 3 months at sea to prove it is permanent. It is incredibly easy to achieve this. The player just needs the toughness perk and a bunch of bandages. In the very first room of the crypt when entering from spreightown dungeon, there is a mist.
The player just needs to walk into it, and then press forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards, in rapid pace to keep hitting the poison and getting the hp bonus. Meanwhile, use bandages to slow the health loss, that combined with toughness regeneration should make sure the poison very slowly hurts you, especially as your hp goes up. Very occasionally use an antidote. In about 10 minutes, and for a couple thousand gold in bandages, your character will have over 1000 max HP.
Now, this is 10 minutes of being exploitive, but even in normal play the permanent HP bonus is very unbalancing. In my normal game of just exploring the crypt, I only expored half and already had a bonus 56 HP boost just from randomly running into the mists while exploring. Without ever trying to go after them or use this.
Extensive exploring of the crypt even by a player with no specific intention to go after the mist can result if 50-100 HP max increase easily. This is a huge difference, and makes the player overpowered in other aspects of the game, even without purposely exploiting things. If the player instead goes after the mist, then several hundred to a thousand HP is possible.
Suggestion 1) I would say eliminating the HP bonus entirely would be reasonable and easy. There is little backstory presented to the mist, and the mechanic is not overly fun. Alternativelly, make the mist heal the player's current health (not increase max hp), but poisons them, so the player has the choice of effectivelly turning an antidote into a healing potion--which is close enough to current situation that all the dialogue from the monks would fit and not need to be edited. If the max hp bonus were retained, it should be capped at +10 HP from this source, but I think it is best eliminated. Especially since this is so easy compared to the apothecary in the same town, which actually is a fun and developed mechanic!
Critical Problem 2) The Maltese crypt is one of the least dangerous dungeons for a well prepared player, and even random bandits in the spreightown dungeon above are more dangerous. The reason is simple--the maltese knights don't have ranged weapons. If the player has professional fencer perk and a good sword, he can almost always succeed at blocking, and taking out even multiple maltese knights is fairly easy (and it is easy enough to avoid them and ambush them one by one, given their behavior, though there is little reason to bother). A secondary reason is they are all using the maltese sword that falls behind in power above level 10, making them less dangerous than bandits in melee damage as well. Add to that the terrain, the coriddors creating natural bottlenecks with only 1 or 2 getting access to you, and the whole dungeon is incredibly easy.
I think the creator tried to make them difficult by making an hp boost shortly after the undead monk rises, to make them tougher. Currently, there is the bug I mention where if you hit them right away you go quicker than their HP boost, and they die right away, but if that were fixed it would only prolong the easy fights and give you more XP.
The fundamental problem is they can't pierce blocks, and against a prepared player the AI needs ranged weapons to really pose a threat. Additional problems are they have limited sight radius so they don't gang up well, and the narrow hallways prevents them from doing so regardless.
My character has taken on 6-8 of them all bunched up in a group in a hallway a couple of times, with hardly a scratch on him. Even when 2 of them come from opposite ends in a room, one backstep and they are lined up and easy.
Without any real danger (to a character of lvl 10-12 or so with professional fencer), the whole dungeon just feels like it never lives up to its promise.
Also, of course the mazelike nature of it doesn't add much challange, because following the "always turn left" mathematics rule will always solve any maze and find an exit (unless you are in an interior wall, but in that case you just switch it once to the right and it works again). So you can never get lost, and there is no danger from that.
Suggestion 2) Maltese Knights gets some kind of ranged weapon, perhaps a throwing knife or an old style pistol from the early explorer's era. If not, at least give them better swords with a high piercing value, at least at some chance when player level increases, or give them automatically perks that help them pierce blocks better. Program them to be less blind and more responsive to noticing a player and grouping up.
Critical Problem 3) The maltese monks are way too good a source of gold. If you talk to one after death, and they roll the friendly undead guy (which is most of the time), they give you above 7,000+ gold everytime you ask about their story (sometimes it is above 10,000). 7,000 gold for killing one of these easy guys is way too much. Not to mention it makes killing a couple of monks worth more than finding the buried treasure chests! Which means exploring the dungeon is kind of pointless, and the treasure chests don't feel as epic and fun, because just kill three monks in a minute and you made far more. EDIT: Note that corpses in the crypt give much more gold than corpses in the abbey (they have slightly different dialogue tree optons, but seem to have drastically different gold rewards)
Fixing the bugs I posted in the other thread will actually make this much worse, as the biggest thing slowing this down right now is after awhile the monks bug out and you have to switch scenes to get them working again.
The creator seemed to recognize this problem, because he added a thief maltese monk to occasionally be spawned and steal all the player gold. However, this is easily avoided. First, there is a chest right outside the crypt in the spreightown dungeon, just exit and take a quick left, where the player can store his gold in 50k increments or so. The exploitive player will probably be exiting this regularly anyway, to reset the bugged monks. Second, and more importantly, a simple cobblestone to the head of the fleeing thief monk knocks him unconscious, and the player can then reclaim his gold by talking to him and stealing (rather than killing). A Thief knife might work too, but it is more convenient to walk around with a sword and cobble stones equiped. Sometimes the thief escapes, but it is very rare, and storing in the chest every once in awhile ensures not much will be lost.
I tested and timed myself, and a player wishing to exploit this will make about 200,000-300,000 gold per hour of playing, easy. That is with the bug slowing things down. This is far too much.
Even playing normally rather than farming them results in far too much gain. You will slay many monks in order to explore the dungeon, and upwards of 50 seems reasonable. Even with some bugging out you are looking at several hundred thousand in gold just from this source, because you will be changing scenes to fix the other glitches the corpses bugging out creates (like the corspes bugging out removing the HP boost from the undead monks mechanic, making the fights even easier), thus restoring the ability to get corpses.
Related point, but the rep bonus the monks give if you refuse their possessions is also unbalanced, and in particular renders the thief meaningless. It is just too easy to slaughter these monks, and getting a rep boost every monk goes too far.
I ended up starting mostly ignoring the knights after I made the first 250,000 easily even while focussing on exploration rather than hunting them, and I plan to donate it to the church so as to not unbalance my game. It really is way too much (it took me several hard and dangerous days of jungle hunting to save up the 150,000 my castaway currently has with loansharks in his ship buying fund, and to make and keep this kind of cash in an hour or so with no real risk just feels wrong)
Suggestion 3) Remove the monetary reward and the reputation boost from the options with the dead monk. Instead, they just give you their sword. Also keep the small random chance of them giving a minor item (I think this is already there, they seem to occasionally give me a minor jewel or cross or something). That is more than enough monatery reward from selling them. But it doesn't make sense they are carrying huge bags of gold anyway!
If more rewards were desired, a little better stuff could be added to the treasure chests, keeping the focus where it belongs.
MODERATE BALANCING PROBLEMS
Problem 4) You can indefinitelly repeat digging for the treasure chests, even after finding the chest. In particular, this means infinite french noble swords and valuable minerals found on the way. The only price is occasionally using a poison cure potion, and occasionally breaking a shovel (so buy 30 in town and you are set).
The dangers of digging are too few and weak--the undead pirate's knife breaks if you block it for a bit, and then sometimes he even runs away and gets chased by the monks. The grandmaster comes to check his treasure is laughably easy to kill. The 6 maltese exorcists are easy when they aren't set to be immortal (it is buggy, sometimes they are, sometimes not), and running away is simple enough.
And it kind of doesn't make sense you could infinitelly dig up french noble swords, gems, etc. Finding the chest should be the focus, and finding stuff along the way great, but the stuff along the way shouldn't be better than the chest and never ending.
Suggestion 4) Turn off the positive digging events after the chest has been found once. Maybe make the chests have a little better stuff to compensate and keep the focus there, so digging up the chest doesn't make the player go "ahhh, not that soon!". Or make it limited, so you can only dig up say 3 french noble swords in the whole dungeon ever. Same to limit the valuable minerals and such. Also maybe increase the strength of the exorcists, grandmaster, and native mummy.
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