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Are you imagining chunks and rations remaining separate, or merging? If chunk nutrition and ration nutrition are identical, you could maintain the mechanic/balance status quo by having a rot-style gauge. Ex: 24(4) with the # in parentheses being the # of chunks you have. Obviously further streamlini...

Why does gdr exist anyways? Is it necessary for balance or does it provide interesting strategic nuance? More likely, it is additional formulaic convolution for the sake of simulationism ie 'it feels right'

Except that landing in the middle of a vault/level is totally different from approaching from the safety of a clear line of retreat...

Renove gdr

There's a huge difference between being in favorable terrain with an available line of retreat and being surrounded by unexplored terrain, especially with monsters in los. The second type of situation is the most fun part of crawl, because unlike in most situations there is not an obviously correct ...

I don't want devs to add piety to Gozag like they did to Chei and Fedhas This is not the solution. Piety decay is not a check on slow play because it can be circumvented (by playing dg or worshiping a god w/o important piety costs like hepl). If punishing slow play is not the intent of piety decay ...

Piety decay should be removed and if deemed necessary replaced by slightly higher piety costs. Here's why: 1) Not all gods have piety decay, and for the gods that do piety matters to varying degrees. So: piety decay is an insufficient anti-scumming mechanic. It can easily be side stepped. If an anti...

The continued existence of traps is a testament to just how tough it is to create dangerous situations in a game with stairs.

I don't like that pan exists in hellcrawl. Pan isn't particularly dangerous after depths, especially if you forgo the boss vaults/runes, and by doing pan you make zot/hell easier. It's the same branching problem that existed in mainline crawl: Choose 1 - a longer game with lower mean difficulty (but...

Hellcrawl is different from dcss, and more strategically demanding, so 'new' situations abound when playing. It is tough to trust that you are making the correct play when you haven't tested out all the options. Feel free to input whatever tips you've earned through experience or ask questions of yo...

Shafting is good b/c it is elegant. You don't need to learn any new mechanics to understand how it works: it is the typical means of transport btwn levels, imposed after a long time. A problem with clocks is that they encourage a lot of tedious 'speedrunny' behavior when combined with players/charac...

Exactly. So I do not see anything wrong if good players play 10 MiBe's in the row. We are talking about different things. I like having a few 'combos' to choose from at the start of the game, and I am ok with them being of different difficulty levels. I take issue with 'character building' decision...

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I play other games also, with explicit difficulty levels

Yeah, but in most games difficulty level is a choice made before the game begins, not a player decision to gimp themselves/follow a self-imposed conduct for the sake of a more challenging experience.

Except that good players will choose to build a powerful character that overshoots the game's intended difficulty curve every time if their goal is winning. Such a game is a strategy test. (Obviously speedrunning changes this, but every game can be speedrun. Why not envision a game where winning is ...

If there is one monster left on the floor, the floor has been solved already. It doesn't matter whether you decide to fight or not. If the monster is so dangerous that only strong characters can kill it, and by killing it those characters become even stronger, you get the exact sort of power snowbal...

why should I fight a monster if I can just walk way and get the same XP? If a floor is sufficiently monster dense, avoiding monsters is penalized by increased likelihood of getting surrounded when trying to approach the exit. Why should a player have to fight every monster? In a good game there are...

Hellcrawl is a strategy test. On all but the strongest characters, consumables are needed to survive lategame encounters. If you are low on xp, you need to use more consumables throughout the game. If you lure to good tactical positions you will end up low on xp. If you build an op character in the ...

I don't really buy that features should be removed simply because it's possible for people to cheat by digging around in the game folders. I disagree, but in the case of player ghosts people aren't arguing that they be removed simply because they reward digging for spoilers/"cheating." Th...

I don't understand the "clock doesn't do the right thing" kind of complaint. I have argued that the durable summon proposal is fundamentally different from the hellcrawl antiscumming clock and that it is substantially similar to old dcss spawns. In particular, I have argued that they will...

Also, in a current game I found myself unable to 'turn off' excruciating wounds, except by unwielding my weapon. Were charms changed to be non-toggleable?

If an anti scumming measure is needed to force players to progress, why not just shaft the player? Any measure that doesn't immediately eject the player from the level allows for edge-case abuse, and the 'problems' with shafting the player (lost items) are also present in the 'dump titans on the pla...

Try them on. Are your defenses better in ids than they were without? If you are concerned about rf- don't be, unless the benefit to defenses is trivial. just take extra care around orc wizards and enemies w/ flaming brand. (Also keep in mind you will probably find better heavy armor soon)

>playing yred >using blade hands, wearing ring mail >find ozo's armor >ctrl-f leather >wait a minute there are probably multiple glowing leather armors/robes worn by zombies scattered across the dungeon >continue wearing ring mail the point being that another ok fix would be to make gear worn by rea...

Yred animated allies shouldn't retain their gear. You have to kill gear-wielding zombies after clearing a level if you want to make sure you aren't missing out on sweet loot, etc. Zombie-type allies in general shouldn't retain gear, because it makes 'choosing which one to reanimate' way more of a ha...

Evo is great on a 'straight fighter.' But unless you are following a challenge conduct you should be able to cast spells (even in plate) if you have a remotely reasonable amount of strength and most if not all of your jewelry bound. With ash the opportunity cost of learning spells goes down so much ...

A game in which 'best play' involves exploiting a tactic that is unfun and doesn't require skill to abuse is a bad game. Is stairdancing also ok because if you stairdance that's a personal problem, not a game design problem? Seems like an argument designed to brazenly ignore a game's flaws.

Do people do this? Do people want to do this? Is this actually a problem that needs solving? "I was thinking about playing mummy but i didn't want to wait for tens of thousands of turns on each floor." or "I'm super excited to play mummy because I want to wait for tens of thousands o...

This is missing critical information, specifically what noisy/bloody actions happened leading up to this point. I would say butcher the corpse(s) in the door so you can close it, but that's just my best guess without that information. ...yeah, good point. This changes the scenario quite a bit, but ...

What do you do in this scenario? For the sake of simplifying the question, the player character is a barachian with only a loaf of bread in inventory, and the 'goal' of this game is the continuation of a streak. He has terrible offensive capabilities (UC 1).

Most transmutations are situationally useful because they impact your defenses. Also I feel like the theoretical optimal player would turn off regen between encounters because the benefit to regenerating a negligible amount of hp per turn is less than the benefit of three additional mp which may be ...

Pillar dancing becomes less valuable after lair, but walking away remains as strong as ever. I see an increase in movement delay as an increase in the noise cost of all of my attacks/spells. I don't like the proposed movement delay component to dex b/c that necessarily introduces additional stat-rel...

I'm struggling to think of a sane reason to not take Kiku at temple on DE when not playing for score/turncount. Spending a game dealing with floor corpse management and ally managment doesn't sound like your cup of tea and you'd rather play a quicker game with SICK conjurations in which you are les...

Idk if this has been brought up yet, but charms with drawbacks (ozo's, statform, every charm that costs mp...) break the permacharm system. You should still cancel charms (for free) after every fight, and then recast them when an appropriate threat shows up. The strict remedy to this is 'all memoriz...

>removes recast charms >gives kiku a recast charm god ability (for real tho good shit removing corpses u r a legend) Low piety cost buffs are hardly better than charms, as are summons in general. I think you could move away from old school mp costs on everything other than conjurations, and make a l...

The point of the post is not just that dex is weak. Dex overlaps in terms of effect with str and overlaps in terms of being affected by encumbrance with int. If dex and light armor were stronger than str and heavy armor, the result would be terrible: every character would raise dex instead of str to...

I think hatches and very small floors work better than doors (at least as doors exist in current dcss). You also have to prevent monsters from 'backtracking' to get to you, or else it is always going to be optimal to camp. I disagree with you a little re: backtracking within levels. A game with a no...

double post

**this advice may be the product of confirmation bias and is not supported by concrete evidence** awhile ago the devs changed abyss exit generation so that exits spawn when you kill things: "the substance of the abyss twists violently" etc. i believe that when they did this they may have d...

Minor bug/documentation report: lrd's spell description still refers to "bars of power" instead of numerical spellpower. I needed lrd to be below a certain power so I could spam it to kill enemies on the opposite side of walls in vaults without those walls breaking. On a related note this ...

abyss is pretty unpredictable, so it definitely could have been lethal, but i would guess that you probably could have survived at that level. read teleport preemptively, use god abilities and consumables with abandon, worst case scenario switch to lucy etc.

Veh and sif are so weak because their early abilities do almost nothing compared to most other gods' abilities. +mp can't compete with allies or rage or even +5 to all combat skills. Unfortunately +mp or magic regen really isn't powerful or necessary for most characters. If spirit shield were remove...

If your reason for raising Str is more damage, then "Tr already gets so much Str" doesn't really apply. Strength after 10 provides a linear increase in damage. I personally think raising str is much better than raising dex on trolls, but I value damage more and EV less than most players. ...

The reason I would not like fedhas or kiku twice in a row is b/c now I'm stuck dealing with the terrible corpse/ally management interfaces in multiple consecutive games. I think part of why dynast went gozag every game in his notorious streak (this included waiting to late d until the altar spawned,...

Advice has recently trended towards "ignore dexterity entirely" in favor of str or int. Dex basically just affects the ev provided by dodging to a very small degree: stealth doesn't matter much after the early game and the accuracy bonus matters less than the str bonus to damage. At this p...

I think altars outside of temple could stand to be rarer, maybe slightly less rare than shops. Alternately, they could remain as common as they are and the temple could be removed. If god choice is supposed to be an *actual strategic decision* all the altars need not appear (or a temple with all uns...

by moving god choice to the character selection screen, and removing abandonment and altars, it'd be much easier to dismiss Gozag etc. wins as essentially cheating like we do for DD/Ce/etc. wins Making people decide something else before the game starts is bad UX imo. This would be especially overw...

ezero wrote:you think picking the first altar is a optimal decision.

It often is clearly the correct choice. And when it isn't obvious, well, you have an 'interesting decision' to make.

You can only compare two people who hold the same definition of 'winning' or 'better' in mind, though. "Competing with myself/other players for highest score or highest score given a starting combo" is a metagame, tangentially related to the isolate experience of "playing a game of cr...

Playing this race seems unbelievably tedious... with proper god choice/use of broken things like allies and evo, the late game still won't be 'hard' as a gnoll, it will take a lot longer. I feel like an intended goal of gnoll design was "improve the late game which is long and tedious by making...

How else would you define "optimal play?" FWIW I think there is something to be said for gauging the merits of strategic decisions based on "best practice considering the player is a human and liable to make mistakes in the future." For example: walking around with an elemental v...

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