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VeryAngryFelid: one more thing came into my mind. You keep worrying about not having an "easy" mode after making the game too hard by shaft, cutting down extra branches, downstairs only, etc. You propose conduct plays and extra races instead. Well, my core proposal (several years ago) was...

Bad things about shafts: 1) missing timed portals without player's fault is annoying. You may play perfectly but you cannot do much when you got shafted two floors down while going to the portal 2) they don't scale good enough. Shafting from D:13 to D:15 is not a big deal, shafting from D:1 to D:3 a...

And for not-Tr-Gh-Vp he actually improves it! How so? By making me check spell hunger and gold in order not to starve? It was a semi-joke post, for "caster" he is annoying, but if you play "melee" dudes he removes all the eat chunk mini game which is a great thing. I use options...

Front loaded difficulty is caused by many factors, I may even miss some: 1. To make the game winnable for beginners, it must be winnable with bad skilling/strategy (I use strategy mean long term decisions like equipment, etc. as opposed to tactics here). Currently it is. But since we want to make s...

Annoying thing about shatfs is missing times portals. Broken thing about portals is being shafted 2 floors when you have just entered a level or even started playing. Bad thing about shafts is that it punishes autoexplore and greatly favors from having scroll of magic mapping. Interesting thing abou...

Interesting thing about probabilities from real life is that scientists pay unproportionally higher attention to events which can destroy mankind than their probabilities deserve. Just because the consequences are too harsh. Scientists don't say "we can ignore those events because they are very...

I don't get it. Good players can streak and thus we need shafts to differentiate the players??? It is like a competition between runners and since many runners can run long distance, we need sometimes to shoot at them from pistol. If a runner didn't evade the shot, he/she was not a good runner. Is i...

Argument "we need shafts to differentiate good players from better players" is not valid, games use difficulty settings for that. In crawl it means good players should be able to infinitily streak 3rune games as MiBe and better players should be able to infinitily streak 3 rune games of Hu...

nago wrote:And for not-Tr-Gh-Vp he actually improves it!

How so? By making me check spell hunger and gold in order not to starve?

sanka wrote:For mummies and spriggans she does not change the food game.

With those characters I don't use Gozag for another reason - too close to cheating.

I don't care about Gozag as long as it makes food game worse than it already is.

You do have to be careful about this. Such AI can often be baited into awful trades. A lich that only crystal spears in DCSS won't summon nasty stuff instead, and if a player has high EV and dmsl maybe it really shouldn't be only firing crystal spears. It's non trivial to make the AI play perfectly...

I think replayability will not suffer, there are dozens of species/backgrounds/gods/spells, every game has different loot, some of which can be game-changing. I don't like replayability when it means I have to fight the same monster 10 times and each time it feels like fighting a different monster d...

If they always smite, then you do not need to develop an intuition about the game since the outcome of the battle would be much more clear, therefore there is no possibility to compare the probability of winning a fight to other probabilities of dying. Is it bad? I recently started playing a new ga...

Well, I very often commit suicide around Depths. We just perceive the reason differently. My problem is not that the monsters do not use their best action. My problem is that they are too week compared to you! (And there are too many of them: popcorns, popcorns, popcorns.) Yes, one way to buff them...

I am not quite sure. In the first case you can predict a battle outcome with really great certainty from the beginning, so it is boring to play it. In the latter, after every action you should judge the situation again, therefore there is tension. You can try to estimate whether it is better to run...

Probably I didn't explain well enough what I mean. I am not suggesting to use a "some complex AI with an internal state", I am suggesting to use "AI chooses the best action" model. For instance, if monster has fireball and lightning bolt, it checks PC resistances/AC and repeatedl...

sanka, Ok, we are different then, I just shared my feelings. I have about 10 characters in Depths+ suspended forever because I don't enjoy them, every fight feels like a broken RNG machine: if all those monsters decided to cast their best spell with at least average damage, I would die instantly fro...

Chess is a silly comparison. It's a deterministic game. Crawl is a dice game, more like backgammon. In backgammon there is a clear difference between better and worse players that shows up in statistics across numerous games. The confounding factor is that crawl is absurdly long, so the importance ...

People do not like when an orc priest smites four times in a row or when a lich decides to cast crystal spear three times in a row. Indeed. Consider you are playing chess vs AI and AI can checkmate you in 1-2 moves. Yet instead of winning AI randomly decides to do a stupid move. Why? Just because. ...

I'd recommend going for the demon whip. As far as I understand it is the only demon weapon which is 1h for Sp. Otherwise stay with short blades as Trog is very likely to give you a demon blade eventually, especially if you start training Long Blades. Basically there is too much XP in the game for Sp...

There is nothing shameful or wrong in dying but if you want to become better at this game you should somehow learn, either from guys who reliably win and give you advices or from your own analysis of what went wrong. Keep thinking "but the long sword had holy, why should I use sword with rElec ...

True, haste/blinking/teleportation are not required but they are among the best escape tools (and you really need the best one when Ancient Lich starts bolting you with lightning when you don' have rElec). I think lightning ignores 2/3 AC, not 1/2. PS. By the way Ancient Lich is arguable the most da...

I am not sure why you are talking about wizards when it was an Ancient Lich. The ancient lich casts a spell at you. The bolt of lightning hits you! * * * LOW HITPOINT WARNING * * * You block the skeletal warrior's attack. You feel better. The ancient lich gestures at you while chanting. The bolt of ...

To be able to win reliably you need to learn when to escape. Fighting several wizards when a single lightning bolt can kill you is a bad idea. Fighting Ancient Lich along with other monsters is also a bad idea. Some levels don't give you choice but Crypt is not among them. Did you have haste/blinkin...

I guess the metric we want is "proportion of games where the character died after shafting before getting back to the original level". There should be an increase in this value, but whether the increase is too big would then be for the devs to decide. I believe there is no milestone "...

It would be interesting to know the average number of shafts per lost game. Why? Many (most?) characters die on floor 1-2 without any shafts. Does it show if shafts are dangerous or not? Probably it is possible to find characters who died to shafts (shafted and then died in 20-30 turns) and compare...

The funny thing is that I checked his last Na game and he had about the same levels in armour and dodging, axes at 18 etc. so I am not sure what we are talking about

I can say this until I'm blue in the face. I just checked the online database. For 0.23 the current average shafts per won game is 2.24 (down from the 2.5 when I checked on just the tournament games). IMHO currently you are saying something like average number of deaths per won game is zero and thu...

I interpreted "go with heaviest armour and Broad Axe + Large Shield" to be a late-game strategy. If he's training stealth early on, it's safe to assume he's not wearing plate at that point. (Because you need a lot of stealth skill for it to have any impact on a character with plate mail, ...

The heaviest armor is a bad idea for Naga because for instance +2 scale mail (2 from enchantment and 3 from base) gives the same AC as +0 plate armour (5 from base) while EV is higher in the former of course. Even +2 robe can be optimal (gives just 2 AC less than +0 plate does but does not decrease ...

petercordia wrote:which of the things he did are harmful?

go with heaviest armour, don't train Dodging at all, only start training Axes around XL7-10, but then never turn Axes off until it hits 27

I hope you realize some of those things were pretty bad and were done by dynast just for fun. I mean, I explicitly described it as "goofy". Sorry, English is not my first language and I don't know this word. Online translator gave me "foolish; harmlessly eccentric" which is quit...

He created this goofy yet pretty reliable build you'll see in every of his morgues: abuse poison spit early on, pick Gozag, go with heaviest armour and Broad Axe + Large Shield; don't train Dodging at all, only start training Axes around XL7-10, but then never turn Axes off until it hits 27. I hope...

About abyss, I'm not a big fan because too much of the time the player outclasses the monsters there. Pretty often it's sparsely populated and tedious too. At its best though, abyss can produce nice chase dynamics, similar to what sometimes happens after shafting. Did you miss "before Lair&quo...

I don't see those problems with Swamp. As is it limits movement considerably, it's scary even before rune level, I like the monsters variety and they work well together. The argument "they are in billion other places" does not look valid to me, having the same monsters in different branche...

I keep coming back to this point, but looking at where the thread is going, it bears repeating: The good thing about shafts is the outcome of being shafted, namely being on a level, perhaps with depth out of the PC's comfort zone, without immediate recourse to stairs. Many complaints about shafts r...

When you open the door, you are instantly shafted 2 levels deeper Or maybe a transparent teleport-in only vault, with a shaft as only exit? I think it is better to give the reward only after returning. It will be closer to current shafts (the floor you shafted from is rather easy after you return) ...

I see there are two types of players: those who like exciting moments/deaths for no reason and those who don't so it looks like we cannot have everyone happy. But actually the same situation was with player ghosts so probably we can adapt ghost solution to shafts. For example, shafts are placed insi...

Too powerful IMHO, imagine finding it early when you fight jackals and convert their bodies to allied orc knights. Also it will encourage dragging weak monsters to fights with strong monsters, cleaving allows you to just hit the dangerous monster and get allies or extra smites from those dragged &qu...

If you already have 3 runes and are going for 15 runes, then it is a good idea to switch to TSO indeed. Anyway distortion is awful brand in extended, last thing you want to do to fiends or pan lords is to blink them. If you want just 3 runes, then staying with Oka and using the demon whip is complet...

I hate shafts because they punish player for no reason and you can do nothing about it except healing fully before doing any exploration (and casting Apportation to pick up all items in view which is boring/stupid). Can we replace all shafts with monster which has a new spell "You are instantly...

Making skyscrapers instead of one storey buildings will result in people dying when falling out of windows. Don't get me wrong, I like your suggestion, it is definitely better than current situation. I just think that probably devs should not spend their precious time on implementing some non-trivi...

This will result in "why didn't the game show me a confirmation dialog when I accidentally clicked that button on javelins of penetration" threads. I think it can be better to generate unbranded javelins instead of returning/poison/steel/silver ones.

Hellmonk,
Could you please give an example of interesting spell or better an example of a game with lots of interesting spells?

Yeah. Basically "this would technically make sense from a realism perspective, but adds nothing to the game except the tedium of avoiding it". It also somewhat nerfs gourmand, and the only point of gourmand is to make food less tedious. Realistic =/= fun. Really true. When I try a new RPG...

There are many games about preparing/eating pizza, I even remember playing one in previous century. Go play them instead

Please no. Do you really want to check satiation level every time you eat with gourmand or as troll?
Eating is wasted time and key presses, let's not make it worse.

I like how some people say that crimpson imps are good for learning other monsters, other people like that crimpson imps are unique and third people like crimpson imps because they are annoying. I wonder if any valid reason to remove any monster can exist in this crazy world.

Statue form + UC is really great too. Actually top score DgWr didn't even have statue form, just dragon form (though it was in 0.19 so unlimited haste as spell).

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