Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Tracker - DCSS
Viewing Issue Advanced Details
ID: Category: Severity: Reproducibility: Date Submitted: Last Update:
7012 Bug Report major always 2013-05-04 22:52 2015-07-25 02:46
Reporter: minmay Local or Remote: Remote  
Assigned To: PleasingFungus Operating System: CAO  
Priority: normal Console or Tiles: Console  
Status: closed Product Branch: 0.13 ancient branch  
Product Version: 0.13-a0-577-g5790aa0 Resolution: done  
Projection: none      
ETA: none Fixed in Branch: 0.16 ancient branch  
Summary: 0007012: Ridiculous zombie/skeleton/simulacrum generation
Description: Commit 630cb13277100dd2dfbdd6881b64086b5580405f changed zombie generation to use depth "correctly." This has made tougher undead generate much, much earlier: hill giant zombies have 75 kills in 0.13-a, which has been around for only a few weeks. They had 91 in 0.12-a which existed for around 8 months, and numbers for 0.10 and 0.11 stable are very similar.

I consider this bad enough to be a severe bug because zombies are among the worst enemies in the game - nearly all of them are slower than you and they have a lot of HP, so there is rarely any danger but they take a very large amount of real time to fight. Furthermore, this is greatly increasing the amount of experience available - an ogre zombie on D:2 is easy to kill unless you are a naga, but likely gives more XP by itself than all of D:1 put together. This seems to throw early-game balance off by quite a bit.

My preferred solution would be to remove zombies, skeletons, and simulacra from random generation entirely since they are such boring enemies, but at the very least, please use a shallower base depth.
Steps To Reproduce:
Additional Information:
System Description:
Relationships
Attached Files:
Issue History
Date Modified Username Field Change
2013-05-04 22:52 minmay New Issue
2013-05-07 00:59 sgrunt Note Added: 0022561
2015-03-06 07:19 PleasingFungus Note Added: 0028607
2015-03-06 07:19 PleasingFungus Status new => resolved
2015-03-06 07:19 PleasingFungus Fixed in Branch => 0.16 pre-release branch
2015-03-06 07:19 PleasingFungus Resolution open => done
2015-03-06 07:19 PleasingFungus Assigned To => PleasingFungus
2015-07-25 02:46 minmay Status resolved => closed

Notes
(0022561)
sgrunt   
2013-05-07 00:59   
Regardless of the random generation or not, there are enough monsters and vaults that place zombies as part of the band / map that having ridiculous monsters generate as a result of this tweak is undesirable.

I've adjusted the zombie selector to scale the out-of-depthness as a function of current dungeon depth (0.13-a0-624-gd04699d), which should help address some of the ridiculousness on the early game side of things (where this is going to matter the most).

I'm leaving this open so we can decide on the fate of undead monster generation in main D, but I certainly wouldn't object to their removal there (they place enough there as part of vaults, bands, etc. already).
(0028607)
PleasingFungus   
2015-03-06 07:19   
Zombie generation was changed to remove slow zombies from D, which makes them a lot more tolerable.

...that probably should have been a different ticket; the original issue was solved nearly two years ago...