ALL NOVEL Cliff Goat Buff – Chapter 78
Putting his words into action, Doyle goes back to his first floor and gives it a once over to get a feel for what needs changed.
The first thing he notices is the two goats right in the entrance room. They had been there since Doyle had realized he needed a way to kill any bugs or small animals that might wander in. Now though, with the settlement outside, all it does is force people to be ready for a fight as soon as they enter. Not exactly what he wanted, and so he moved the goats over to the second room after the vine hall, which only had a single goat.
Next thing Doyle changes is in the vine room. He has been holding onto the room as being for the assassin vines. Now with a floor that properly uses them, he can finally admit to himself they don’t really work. There just isn’t enough space to hide them on the first floor unless he turned it all into a mess of vines. So with that in mind he removes the last assassin vine from the room. Then a quick backtrack to straighten out the curvy hallway between the entrance and the second room. Assassin vines were supposed to show up there occasionally, but with such a tight space no one ever fell for it.
After the vine room is the row of medium sized goat rooms. Or rather directly after the vine room is a small room attached to the vine room but that feels stupid now so he removes it. Now the next thing is the row of goat rooms. Except he isn’t really feeling that setup anymore. Basically all the groups that delve now have settled on six man teams and three goats just is not doing it. With that in mind Doyle connects up the first two and the second two rooms. That way there are now two long rooms with six goats a piece.
Of course, that makes the big goat room out-of-place now with only six goats. Luckily, Doyle has 300 points to spend because of removing the assassin vine. So with those extra points he throws in three more goats and he doesn’t forget to give them matching helmets. Almost finished with the room, he adds a finishing touch by making one of the helmets lootable. Since drops resize for the recipient, there should be any problem and Doyle kind of wonders what it will end up looking like.
That still leaves him with 288 points to spend on the floor. Then as he is giving the floor one last look, Doyle realizes he has forgotten something. He can level up the monsters on a floor. That and he has free level ups equal to the difference between the max and min level.
‘Welp, going to have to go and hand out the free levels on the second and third floor now. Plus now that I am looking at the last room here I realize I haven’t really added a last room boss thing on the third floor. Though now that I think about it that isn’t really in line with what I wanted in the first place.’
Doyle takes some time to ponder over his level design so far. Originally he had wanted to make a more friendly dungeon but his paranoia sort of took over. Now here he is with a final room on the first floor that practically takes a group that are on the high end of his planet’s people. He shakes his core and recenters himself. This isn’t what he wanted, and so it has to change.
First thing he does is separate the olive tree and throne room again. The kobold leader stays in the throne room with all five goats and the other kobolds get pushed into the olive tree room.
‘That should push the difficulty down a bit. But. But I still want the leader to be a challenge. Right now I have the free levels on her goats. How about I shift them over to her, raising her level to 4. That pushes her agility, intelligence, and wisdom up so she should be a better opponent without being too overpowered. Honestly, the goats get a lot more oomph from leveling anyway, what with that 3 point growth on strength.’
‘Now what to do with the other kobolds. I won’t have the leader come and help anymore, but they still feel a little powerful for the first floor. Sigh, I know exactly why. They have two casters. That practically requires the adventurers to have two casters as well just to handle them. I guess I can’t help it, I’m going to have to remove one of them and I think it will be the ice mage. With just a healer, even groups without decent ranged support will be able to stand a chance.’
With a sad heart, Doyle changes the ice mage into another melee fighter. Though first he shifts the lootable wand over to the healer. No point losing that. Then with the new female kobold, he gives her the healer’s lootable shield to spread the gear out some more.
He nods to himself, ‘That should do. With five kobolds and none of them ranged, a group of six people should be able to handle this. If only because there should be one person free to do what they want. Still doesn’t take care of my extra points. There are 72 goats worth of points left.’
‘I guess one thing I can do is up the level of the one goat with the loot. Just bumping it to level four uses 12 more points, so that’s a thing. I can also go and up a goat a piece in the two side rooms. The top one can have a level 3 goat and the bottom one a level 2 goat, so there is progression.’
‘Hmm, that puts us at 66 goats left. On the rest of the floor there are 30 goats. Wait, really? Huh, there are exactly 30 goats. I was expecting less round number. Anyway, let’s throw three goats in the vine room. Not working with the kobolds this time though, just grazing. Still way too many goats to place and they just don’t have anywhere to go.’
‘Guess I get my goat farm. Goodness gracious, I am going to have so many goats. Welp, 63 goats going to be chilling in the farm. To be fair, I probably will still have to spawn in goats on occasion. Though I guess it will depend on if they will go back to the previous farming runs. Without all those weak people around, they won’t bother for at least a little while.’
‘Of course I wouldn’t be in this situation if my goats weren’t so cheap. Maybe once I have more space, I can move more into the main floor. For now, let’s take a step back and look at what the floor is like now.’
‘Okay, seems good. I can change things up later if it doesn’t work out. For now though, I just have to wait and see what the settlement thinks of it. Not that it will do much for the people who stuck around. They all for the most part could beat the floor already. Now how is the second floor looking? I just made it so not much should need changing, but there are those three free levels to use.’
Doyle goes over all the monsters on the second floor. However after a quick once over the numbers don’t add up right. There just seems to be too many monsters on the floor, even if you don’t count the goat farm.
‘Ally, I have a problem!’
In her room Ally stretches and yawns. ‘Weren’t you just messing around with the third floor or something?’
Doyle brings up a screen with his second floor monsters listed out and their costs. At the bottom in red is the number 2494. ‘There are too many monsters on my second floor. I think I forgot to count the assassin vine when adding up the points. Why haven’t I been warned or smacked upside the head by system?’
Ally pauses, reads over the list a couple times and does the math herself. ‘That isn’t good. First things first, nuke enough monsters to bring you under 2200.’
Doyle doesn’t even have to think about it. Just like on the first floor, the assassin vine has become more of a newb gotcha trap. With a simple flex of his mind the assassin withers away. Nothing much else happens, but having it gone does make him feel better.
Ally nods, ‘Okay, now that it is gone lets see what the system has to say about this. I know that you have a little bit of leeway in monsters but definitely not nearly 200 points worth. There should be something in one of the previous tutorial screens. I’m going to have to go and read through a lot of stuff. I guess you can go and work on your floors. Just don’t overspend again?’
Doyle sighs, ‘I didn’t want to in the first place.’
Though Doyle does take Ally’s suggestion and goes back to working on the floors. There aren’t really any changes that need to be done to the floor’s structure, so instead he focuses on the monsters. With the assassin vine already gone, one of the major changes has already gone through and now he just has to tweak some of the line up.
First things first is to reduce the number of axebeaks. Three in the first room and four in the second. Now that Doyle had figured out how to use them, their performance had improved by a large margin. In the ramp room, those four are good enough.
Though speaking of the ramp room, Doyle decides to remove a couple of kobolds from the topmost area. One of each loadout and then removes another kobold from the middle layer, one of the ones with just a club.
Then in the last room he takes out one of the ice mages and two of the dagger kobolds. Those monsters removed, Doyle goes back and recalculates the total which comes out at 1594. That leaves him with 606 points to work with, ironically just enough to put in twice the number of assassin vines as he had to remove. Not that he plans to do that.
Instead, Doyle turns toward the goat farm. There are already enough enemies on the floor so decides to add onto the farm. No more goats, though. With 30 in the farm it is enough to replace every goat except the cliff one and still have ten left over to make more. To expand it, he plans to add another monster to the farm. Specifically he plans to add a small kobold village. There are enough points left over to add in 12 kobolds. Not enough to replace all the kobolds on the floor, but if a group doesn’t finish the floor, it will do.
Then to finish off the floor, Doyle dumps all his free levels onto the cliff goat. A level five goat has 21 strength and 20 constitution so normally he would avoid this but the cliff goat is supposed to be peaceful. If someone wants to get violent, then it could be considered as their own fault.
Happy with his second floor, Doyle moves onto the third. ‘Yep, not much to do here. Then again, I did literally just make the floor. Though now that I look over it I have missed one thing. I have carved nothing on the third floor yet. It will be harder here if I want to keep the whole maze thing. Any distinctive art could make it easier to find a way through. I could lean into it. If every room is distinctive, then none of the rooms are.’
Doyle sits back to think about it some when Ally whistles to get his attention.
