Nessos vs. Cheibriados

[cerebovssquire]

But running away from speed 10+ monsters is an option as a Na once you have haste castable, which for a lot of characters (especially light armour + mostly spellcasting characters) means for the majority of the game, or have enough other sources of haste. And moving about in combat (as opposed to away from combat) is easier when your speed is 2.0 instead of 2.8 (Hu*chei speed vs Na*chei speed, iirc).

[NessOnett]

But running away from speed 10+ monsters is an option as a Na once you have haste castable, which for a lot of characters (especially light armour + mostly spellcasting characters) means for the majority of the game, or have enough other sources of haste. And moving about in combat (as opposed to away from combat) is easier when your speed is 2.0 instead of 2.8 (Hu*chei speed vs Na*chei speed, iirc).

I tried hard to make it very clear that there are plenty of other ways in which slowing you down will hurt you, naga or not. Those are examples of those things. But in terms of just the very basic ability to run away unassisted, Nagas already can't vs. the vast majority of things, and therefore are less negatively impacted by the inability to run away assisted at all.

[cerebovssquire]

I tried hard to make it very clear that there are plenty of other ways in which slowing you down will hurt you, naga or not. Those are examples of those things. But in terms of just the very basic ability to run away unassisted, Nagas already can't vs. the vast majority of things, and therefore are less negatively impacted by the inability to run away assisted at all.

If you have enough or even infinite sources of haste, you don't need to run away unassisted if you choose not to. So that consideration is completely irrelevant for a large portion of actual naga of not chei gameplay. Also, how do you arrive at the "CheiNaga is a strong and natural coupling" conclusion if you are aware of these examples?

(even if we are talking about running away without speeding yourself up somehow, there are a lot of cases over the course of a game where you are fighting close enough to the stairs that you can run away from monsters entering your LoS - if you aren't following chei)

[Sar]

If something is coming at you faster than you can run away from it, then your options are to fight, or to use other methods of escape

It's not as simple, no. You can often slither back to stairs (with some enemies tailing you, yes, but you have Naga HP for that), you can slither to a corridor/corner/killyhole you just dug in, you can do the earlygame slither-spit-slither-spit routine, there's more to Crawl movement than binary "I can/can't run away from things".

Source: I played Nagas of various gods.

Edit: also duh, Haste.

[crate]

i dont know about you guys but i move around a lot during combat

[NessOnett]

If something is coming at you faster than you can run away from it, then your options are to fight, or to use other methods of escape

It's not as simple, no. You can often slither back to stairs (with some enemies tailing you, yes, but you have Naga HP for that), you can slither to a corridor/corner/killyhole you just dug in, you can do the earlygame slither-spit-slither-spit routine, there's more to Crawl movement than binary "I can/can't run away from things".

Source: I played Nagas of various gods.

Edit: also duh, Haste.

Those all fall under the umbrella of "other methods of escape." Or are a way to "fight." And therefore do not change the statement I made, which is still accurate, and very relevant. If it were not relevant, there would be no case that base 11 or higher enemies have an advantage over base 1O enemies. And yet things such as adders are considered very threatening for primarily that reason.

[cerebovssquire]

...so running away from enemies and then walking up a staircase, dragging up one of them, or at least less than you were fighting before , falls into another "method of escape" than running away? How can you use a definition that covers such a small area of movement in crawl and still claim it is "very relevant"? Especially since it seems to inform your whole opinion of Na*chei or else you wouldn't say it was a "strong and natural coupling" based on it.

(as an aside, do you think that the fact that so many of your points drag a discussion about gameplay down to a semantic level where you have to constantly explain your interpretation of a word tell you anything about your arguments pertaining to actually playing the game?)

[Sar]

Or are a way to "fight."

In which case it becomes painfully obvious that movement speed is useful not only to escape fights, and having slower movement speed makes character worse at fighting.

[damiac]

Everyone disses Chei, but they are scared to buff him because on the inside, they know he makes Trog look weak. They fear that one more buff will tip him over the edge and make their years of slander go down the drain. #fear-the-chei

I'm pretty sure you're joking, but just so it's clear: I actually like Chei, and I think that Chei is fine as-is. The two things I don't like about Chei are 1) having it come up in so many unrelated advice threads, and 2) having to correct the strange insistence that if you're already slow it doesn't matter how much slower you get, and both of those are really features of certain players rather than the god itself.

If something is coming at you faster than you can run away from it, then your options are to fight, or to use other methods of escape(like tele/blink/etc(. And it that context, it does not matter how much slower you are.

It's akin to wearing a plate mail on level 1. And then claiming that you don't want to use a shield because it would inhibit your spell casting(ignoring the fact that the plate mail has already caused 1OO% fail rate for all your spells(. That tactical avenue has already been eliminated, to the point where further crippling it does not actually matter.


That said, there are tons of other reasons besides the mere running example where Chei slowing you down does have a very visible negative impact. I don't think anyone is seriously trying to argue that. But in terms of that singular dimension, which is a major weakness of Chei, Nagas are less negatively affected because they already fail the footrace(tailrace?( against so many things. But obviously still somewhat affected because things like slugs that you could previously outrun, you suddenly can't.

tl;dr CheiNaga is a strong and natural coupling.

You're making some flawed assumptions here. I'm currently playing a MiGl of Chei (6 runes so far), and I've done a LOT of running away. I just get beat up at the same time. It's still better than standing and dying though. With a naga of chei, if you need to run away, you'll just take even more damage than you would have as a non-naga. It's not like Chei gives extra stat bonuses to Nagas.

I guess if by "run away" you mean escape up a staircase without the monsters following you, yeah, the Minotaur and the Naga are equally unable to do so most of the time. But if by "run away" you mean get out of the wide open area and into the small hallway 6 steps away, there's a big difference between 2.0 and 2.8 aut a step.

[WalkerBoh]

Is it really already that time of the month again?

[Klown]

Is it really already that time of the month again?

CHEIGAWAGA!!!!!

This thread can pretty much be locked though.
The devs know they have OHK's in a game claiming to have no auto-deaths, and it'll be fixed over time (or not )

[Hopeless]

Is it really already that time of the month again?

CHEIGAWAGA!!!!!

This thread can pretty much be locked though.
The devs know they have OHK's in a game claiming to have no auto-deaths, and it'll be fixed over time (or not )

There will always be one hit kills in Roguelike games. Assuming they really are roguelike. It is matter of what happened to get you there. Tactics (did you forget stoneskin/rmsl before turning the corner?), Strategy (what skills you trained, what stats you chose, gods chosen, etc), Equipment (lots of bad drops and none good for example), are all factors and just because you run into a horribly nasty super speedy Unique does not make that encounter against the philosophy of the game. Now if that Unique is always an autokill on certain character combos then maybe it needs a little tweaking. That's my 2 cents anyway. Probably rather, the combos need a little fixing.

[Arrhythmia]

The devs know they have OHK's in a game claiming to have no auto-deaths, and it'll be fixed over time (or not )

The possibility of unavoidable deaths is a larger topic in computer games.
Ideally, a game like this would be really challenging and have both random
layout and random course of action, yet still be winnable with perfect
play. This goal seems out of reach. Thus, computer games can be soft in the
sense that optimal play ensures a win. Apart from puzzles, though, this
means that the game is solved from the outset; this is where the lack of a
human game-master is obvious. Alternatively, they can be hard in the sense
that unavoidable deaths can occur. We feel that the latter choice provides
much more fun in the long run.

[damiac]

Well, that reply explains why all unavoidable deaths can't be completely prevented. But that doesn't mean each individual case of unavoidable deaths can't be evaluated and prevented in some cases.

For example, it used to be that you could get trampled over deep water the turn before your flight expired. Then next turn, you'd die. It wasn't really even technically unavoidable, but it was really lame, and it's been fixed.

So saying "it's impossible to prevent all unavoidable deaths" isn't the same as "We will not ever fix any unavoidable deaths"

Saying "you could have cast every single buff before you took the dangerous action of pressing the 'o' key" is totally counter to crawl's philosophy, as that would be about the most tedious thing ever.

[XuaXua]

It's pretty tough to avoid an unavoidable death.

[Hopeless]

Well, that reply explains why all unavoidable deaths can't be completely prevented. But that doesn't mean each individual case of unavoidable deaths can't be evaluated and prevented in some cases.

For example, it used to be that you could get trampled over deep water the turn before your flight expired. Then next turn, you'd die. It wasn't really even technically unavoidable, but it was really lame, and it's been fixed.

So saying "it's impossible to prevent all unavoidable deaths" isn't the same as "We will not ever fix any unavoidable deaths"

Saying "you could have cast every single buff before you took the dangerous action of pressing the 'o' key" is totally counter to crawl's philosophy, as that would be about the most tedious thing ever.

I agree. And 'o' could be better implemented imho (in that it tends to lead you over the same ground repeatedly despite there being many blocks of unexplored territory on a given level.) And it shouldn't lead to unavoidable deaths. OTOH, how hard is it to cast the longer dur buffs when you do use it? Being able to see why a death occurred is key to not having it happen again (and again.) Even if that means doing things that you think are tedious. I doubt Crawl's main philosophy is about removing all tedium. That would be an impossible task since different things make different people bored. Instead I think it is about removing obviously tedious tasks that are done by "good" players to avoid playing sub-optimally. (Bread Swinging??)

[tasonir]

Since this is CYC: here's a crazy idea for you.

When worshipping Chei, if your last action was a walk action, you cannot lose more than 50% of your maximum health before your next chance to act. After 50% off, any additional damage is ignored. Chei protects you from those who would take advantage of you while you're taking it easy. This should prevent most terrible posts on the forums, at the cost of perhaps feeling like a "band-aid" rather than a solution. I still think it's fairly elegant for something that comes up very, very rarely.

You could add another protection for taking 50% of your max health if you started out at less than 50% of your max health that leaves you at 1 hp or something, but I'm inclined to think at that point it's the players fault for moving while at less than 50% health. So I'd probably just add the first protection.

[XuaXua]

Since this is CYC: here's a crazy idea for you.

When worshipping Chei, if your last action was a physical movement (walk, stairs) action

FTFY