Have Labyrinths gotten easier?

[tedric]

Maybe I missed a commit or two along the line, but it seems to me that in recent months (maybe the last year or so) Labyrinths have become much, much easier to solve. It used to be I'd pick a side of the wall and follow it continuously for ages before even catching a glimpse of the mid-level stone, and the path would often dip in and out of that area several times before leading me through it to the center area -- and then that would dip in and out, sometimes all the way to the edge, before I found my way to the minotaur's lair. These days more often than not I walk around a few corners, see mid-level stone, head towards it, and pass almost straight through to the center.

I know there are certain Lab vaults that can introduce loops or open areas, but did the level generation code get changed to make the entire thing more open/interconnected and less maze-like? It's a huge flavor letdown when I'm told that "starvation awaits!" but then find the exit vault less than 100 turns later (which is what just happened in my current game, and is typical of my recent experience). Just want to know I'm not crazy or missing something before I stir things up in GDD.

[EDIT: Of course, the minotaur in this particular Lab had decided to put on an artefact plate armour and I really didn't want to let him just keep it, but after kiting him around for a few hundred turns while my shortbow of flame failed to make much of a dent, my only alternative was to piss off Zin by emptying a wand of draining at him...then recharging it and emptying it again. Turns out the plate was +9, +dex, +str, so go figure. Easy to solve, tough to beat.]

[Patashu]

Unless twiddling the vaults that appear in a labyrinth profoundly change how they generate, I can't see any commit like 'change labyrinth generation'. http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git&a= ... =labyrinth

[Hand of Zin]

I have the same impression everytime I enter a new labyrinth, but since Patashu said nothing has changed in labyrinth generation (probably), I guess it's just that, an impression.
Maybe players develop a "knack" for labyrinth solving after a while. Not that it was ever hard at all, even as a newbie.

[XuaXua]

Las thing that changed were the addition of mini-vaults inside the labyrinth that would add monsters and treasures. I've found those to be of varying challenge, especially the one that was 2 unseen horrors.

[tedric]

Well, back when I was a newbie I experimented with heading straight for the interior sections as soon as I glimpsed them, and it was 99% fail; "keep the river on your right" was the only reliable way to solve Labs, and I wouldn't call that a "knack" -- it's just a heuristic that is 100% guaranteed to solve the maze even if it takes you the long way round sometimes.

I have to think my experience is related to vault generation somehow, because there are certain vault placements that make "keep the river on your right" obsolete by opening things up so you end up trapped in loops. Once those layouts encouraged me to plow ahead toward any darker stone I can see, I realized it was no longer 99% fail and kept trying it, and was successful surprisingly often. But I wouldn't say that counts as a "knack" either; all I did was abandon the heuristic for the most part (I still use it in the cases where plunging in doesn't work right away) because the Labs themselves were no longer encouraging it.

[Roderic]

In the last labyrinth I tried I was stuck. I found a teleport trap that surprisingly worked even with the supposed -ctele and that fortunately sent me towards the stone section, closer to the metal one.

[tasonir]

I lost a pretty promising HuIE inside a labyrinth because I had a rough fight against a trap door spider very close to the minotaur's room. So I backed up after the first spider and lost the minotaur, only to stumble into a second trap spider (I really should have assumed there would be more) and it killed me on the turn it was revealed

So I'd say they're more deadly now, just because the vaults place some fairly dangerous mobs. The vaults do tend to make holes in the actual maze, which makes the maze shorter, but the overall portal is harder.

[nicolae]

Since labyrinth minivaults overlap the underlying maze, it's possible that the increased incidence of minivaults makes it easier to cut through areas directly through the vault instead of having to go around.

[PleasingFungus]

In the last labyrinth I tried I was stuck. I found a teleport trap that surprisingly worked even with the supposed -ctele and that fortunately sent me towards the stone section, closer to the metal one.

-ctele is not -tele.