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That said, I agree with your point that it would be more fun if the player was forced to use consumable more often. The problem is balancing rate of consumables given against rate they're "required". One of today's balancing factors is that good players use consumables with more appropria...

Siegurt's ladder suggestion would help with this particular issue, though it might be worth simply tossing the ID minigame and using ladders earlier too, depending on how consumables typically become available.

The outs exist in crawl in the form of consumables, it's just that early game you often don't have them or are forced to use them blindly due to ID minigame, so sometimes in early game they're not available no matter what your usage strategy is. I don't think curing + TP would help with drastically ...

I think it is not just the players become better, the game also become easier, and I think mostly in a good way (although I personally do not like some ways in which it become easier). Most recent patch changes don't have things that suggest the game is easier. I'd weight much more on part of the p...

duvessa wrote:
Moanerette wrote:Then a player can still escape those 'Sigmund and Grinder and two orc priests in a room oh my' occasions, but that would be it.
These situations are good and players shouldn't get an automatic escape from them

Going up stairs is not an automatic escape from them.

Dynast did quit recently, as did Demise between the two most recent tournaments. I'm not sure what kind of retention can be realistically expected in a single player game though. How many thousands of hours do players like him, Yermak, UV4, Demise, Manman, Malcolmrose, Elliptic, Pedritolo, etc have?...

How about making all upstairs single use only? Then a player can still escape those 'Sigmund and Grinder and two orc priests in a room oh my' occasions, but that would be it. No dancing. You could soft lock yourself this way, so it's not ideal. If really bad situations on-down are an issue, that co...

^ Yet the "elite" are the primary justification for arguing in favor of things like shafts and early RNG, ironically. I've not seen a heavy representation of elite players preferring trap effects though. While you can lose to pure RNG just off a really bad D:1 layout and such, there's no r...

I mean, we COULD just brute force make going upstairs take longer. Say the ceiling is really high or something (huge monsters are flying on these floors anyway, so it's not exactly a stretch). Players aren't going to be too excited to stairdance if it's like putting on a piece of armor while adjacen...

player melee attacks are frequently pretty competitive with [agony's] average expected damage especially if target is already hurt. For a 5 slot spell it's hard to justify running it. Agony was really good, and I imagine it to still be good for lots of characters. I feel like I'm belaboring the obv...

Another proposal: I don't think anyone has yet mentioned the bcrawl approach of (iiuc) having a small chance to penalize the player each time they take stairs. I guess you might do something like this if you don't mind some stairdancing and don't mind how exploration is currently centered around ex...

I can't speak for implojin, but I think coming in here and saying that no prior discussion or argument about these issues exists, that no arguments or evidence have been marshalled, when this is clearly, demonstrably untrue and abundant evidence to the contrary exists in the archives of this site, ...

While much of the necro school is still excellent, it was an odd step to nerf these to the extent that it's largely not worth running them. Especially agony; a fair few things are immune outright. It's power boosted, but can still fail...and player melee attacks are frequently pretty competitive wit...

^ I basically said the same thing (luring is best discussed separately), in response to it being mentioned here. As for discussion on what is degenerate/tedious, that IS relevant to this thread specifically. Any alteration to stairdancing, nerf or not, should ideally make the interaction less so rat...

A reasonable case can be made for luring incentives directly, however. If monsters are truly threatening, even from a thematic perspective luring is intuitive. Good (from winrate perspective) positioning is intuitively obvious to players with hundreds of wins, in the same way the AC being good is in...

Yeah. The only attractive thing about GDR is that it's correlated to equipment with high AC. But that's because you get high AC, not because of GDR.

Also I believe it is not off topic in this thread, shafts are trying to solve a problem which does not exist in games with explicit difficulty levels i.e. to make the game not-so-boring for experienced players. At the same time shafts create problems which are not present in games with explicit dif...

It would probably get too annoying if put throughout all of crawl, but I could definitely envision a branch using this to be interesting as an alternative to the "x monster is twice your speed", "your own movement is hampered", or "marked/lots of noise" variants of anti...

I believe we can just make the game easier on easy difficulty level and harder on hard difficulty level You're handwaving a LOT of detail here. Why not "just make DCSS play better" while we're at it :p? In practice, it's not trivial to do these things. STS and crawl are very likely design...

Is it technically viable to have monsters on separate floors continue tracking the player and use the stairs like any other action as long as they're aggro? This is similar to proposal #2 and effectively makes stairs like a one tile hallway on the Y axis. This seems like the most solid design soluti...

The fact that you have done stairdancing wrong does not negate points made here about the centrality of stairdancing in high winrate crawl or any of the judgements made about its impact on crawl gameplay. That you claim stairdancing is optimal does not make it optimal. Sometimes it is, sometimes it...

I honestly do not really understand how "perfect play" comes into this picture, whatever you mean by that. Stairdancing and freqeuntly retreating to safe territory is a very simple tactic - I cannot imagine what complex strategy you envision with this machine learning example. This simple...

banishing a monster can completely destroy its items and some of its XP; surely that is more annoying? Not really, there's no optimal/self-safety behavior of hunting it down ASAP so it doesn't approach by surprise in this instance. It's gone for all intents and purposes, permanently if it's not uni...

Since we're getting away from consistency between player and monster options anyway, this one is a glaring example that could do with a little improvement. Blink/banish/damage effects are all fine on player distortion, especially blink is dangerous but something you can factor when using it. That is...

Some are good, some are bad. Granular discussion of each and the reasons for it might be interesting. when i was in middle and high school i was one of those annoying "debate me" atheists and just a giant asshole in general (as you do when you're in middle and high school (i'm still an ass...

Your analysis of the argument didn't account for it. I suppose it's my fault for taking the laughable claim that any mechanic that could cause an unavoidable death necessarily decreases skill differentiation seriously though. Your analysis of dcss shafts is equally applicable to dcss monster or ter...

Like I said, I don't think we need to get too cute per se'. Hep would be pretty solid if literally all that's changed is that "follow" and "stop attacking" mean what they say, rather than waste turns for allies to just ignore the commands anyway. Sure, buffing Hep by allowing phy...

I hold that this differential between good vs average players is lower in the case of high RNG variance (traps) than it is with moderate to low RNG variance (most mechanics in crawl); Well, you say this apropos of nothing, there's no evidence to support (or refute) this, which is what I was saying ...

Actually, we have largely seemed to avoid pinning down what constitutes "interesting" in the context of traps, and particularly what they offer beyond standard crawl. For example when I asked why randomly dying to 1 in 1,000,000 hits regardless of HP/damage taken isn't "interesting&qu...

If you really need something dead in one hit, best to use something that can't miss and has a damage floor higher than the monster's remaining HP.

And you'd best be sure about that second part.

Partial agree and disagree with tealizard wrt corridors. The game uses them a ton, especially early on. There are advantages to this for the player, but it also increases likelihood for long LoS unbroken with crap like orc priests/centaurs where running/managing LoS isn't an option anymore. You have...

You're missing a part of the picture, yes, there's a non-zero chance that shafts will put you in a situation where no difference in skill will make a difference in the outcome, however there's *also* a non-zero chance that shafts will put you in a situation in which skill will make *more of a diffe...

It's unclear to me whether you're agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or partly agreeing with me. Partly agreeing. I don't think "player agency" is necessarily important. At least it's not clear to me what you mean exactly. You don't have any control over whether Grinder generates or n...

Fundamentally, what do shafts do to "make the game more interesting" that you couldn't do by intentionally moving into bad situations? Whenever someone proposes to remove a bad feature like a broken spell or god or having upstairs, somebody proposes: why don't you simply ignore the featur...

I really like shafts, think they make the game far more interesting, and would like to see more of 'em. Fundamentally, what do shafts do to "make the game more interesting" that you couldn't do by intentionally moving into bad situations? People say what you say about shafts fairly often,...

But there are a ton of things you can do to minimize the risk of malmutation and paralysis before they happen... True. You can even guarantee you'll never get teleported into Zot:5 lungs in every single game. ...if you're willing to endure sufficient tedium to make it so. You can *always* scum abys...

27 invo TSO can clear out W:3 with a few potions of lig/mana and fog scrolls pretty consistently. One of the easier ways to get that done, and you're going to push invo really high regardless in a 15 rune. Formicid wall-hugging is pretty reasonable in Pan since you can dig kill holes consistently, s...

Regarding the OP I use allies a fair bit (they are super strong) and don't find it annoying most of the time. I have not experienced any problems with the follow command. A possibly source of frustration is that attacking a monster has a similar effect to issuing an 'Attack!' command. From a power ...

IMO the confirmation for attacking an ally should be different if it causes penance. I think it does now, at least in some cases (I've seen warnings for TSO penance when harming allies). If this isn't already happening for Oka it should be added for that god too.

I'd seriously object to that. It's one thing to have my data freely accessible on the webtiles servers I play on for morgue + leaderboard purposes, but quite another to have it distributed with every copy of the game and its source code. I'm not convinced these are materially different in the conte...

Perhaps the lesson of the existing ally commands is that allies are never going to do exactly what you want and it's not realistic to change that. That's a lesson for another thread. It's a disingenuous takeaway in this thread. The rest of the post doesn't address the points I made and is arguing a...

Congrats! Onto the HuSu

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The suggestion that allies decline to block approaching monsters to enable ranged attacks from the player strikes me as extremely half-baked. If your allies don't block, then they will have to pursue monsters that bypass them if they are melee only, as most allies are. Allies on follow command don'...

^ This can mostly be solved by making your previous command "sticky". If you ordered "follow", anything alive right now will follow you (stay adjacent) until you command otherwise or it dies. If you order "attack" on a target it can work the same as now. If you order &q...

If you want full 50** you actually have to grind Pan until you get TSO's fortress, or sit holding the orb until a Seraph spawns. I hit 30 Pan floors fishing for TSO fortress, but I think one of us got to 50 before finding it. Pretty rough, but probably still safer than camping out with the orb of Zo...

This one ended my tournament streak, not many options here: https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/TheMeInTeam/morgue-TheMeInTeam-20191028-225358.txt But even w/o shafts game can screw you. I've gone down D:2 --> D:3 and had orc priest immediately adjacent, no identified consumables yet (and no duplic...

That depends on whether the comments were based on experience or not. Some of the changes are okay, others are rough. It also doesn't alter the considerations for casters as much one might expect. Foxfire sounds cool for example, but in most cases you just walk into monster range and smash the macro...

BVC is quite excellent too as AoE. Base damage isn't amazing but it has among the most freedom of AoE targeted spells and the constriction utility helps in multiple ways. Often worth the investment into earth/necro if you're doing the other at all.

Even if you do go earth, you're probably better off with LRD/Iron shot than bolt of magma. I've used bolt of magma in like two games ever. One of them was a cosplay challenge that banned all non-fire spells, so I could memorize every fire spell available to me and have levels left over. The other wa...

Problem with skeletons and allies in general is that they will block your ranged attacks outright, which is extremely annoying. They even ignore follow commands to do this. It's true that these will help with MR checks, however. By default many elves have rmsl on and this can be dispelled with Yara'...

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