Gerad wrote:I'd value efficient exploration highly -- e.g., explore the nooks that look like dead-ends close to you first before moving off to explore another large segment of the level. This is admittedly more of a turncount/boredom fix than a "help me not die" one.
Turncount fixes translate directly into "help me not die" fixes in Crawl's current ruleset:
Monster respawn rate, monster OOD respawn chance (at depths less than 13), and piety decay (for most gods), all work directly off of turncount. God gifting, as a function of piety, also tends to happen relatively more often with faster turncount progression due to higher sustained piety levels (this is *despite* gift timeouts decrementing at a fixed turncount rate). [There are other indirect reasons why lower turncount helps character survival, but I'm mentioning some of the most commonly applicable here for brevity.]
A more turncount-efficient autoexplore function would mean that game balance for players who autoexplore (most players) would come closer to that of players who manually explore (patient veterans playing for streaks and turncount speedrunners), and would be a Good Thing for DCSS in general.
[An autoexplore function that manages to do the above, while also avoiding suicidal positioning decisions wrt LOS breaks and staircases, would be a vast improvement indeed over the current implementation.]