"Retrace your steps" ally command

[Berder]

I think allies would be nicer to use if there was a "retrace your steps" command that would send them walking back along the path that you took to get to where you are, including going through chokepoints and corridors. This would be superior to the "retreat" command because:
1. you wouldn't have to select a direction
2. If you want your allies out of the way, back along the path you just cleared is a very likely "out of the way" direction.
3. With this command, unlike with the retreat command, your allies would successfully and reliably go through tight passes and around corners along the path you took, instead of just milling about.

How it might be implemented: store your last 50 steps, numbered by which step they are, higher numbers more recent. When obeying this command, each ally attempts to move towards the lowest numbered square within their LOS (that is, they move towards the earliest square you walked on, that they can see).

[duvessa]

yeah selecting the direction with 50 keypresses instead of 2 sounds like a big improvement

[Berder]

Where are you getting 50 keypresses? You've misunderstood. Two keypresses: t b (tell them to backtrack). Then they backtrack like I described.

This is as opposed to the current method, which is "t r" followed by many keypresses as you select a direction, and then they don't go exactly where you wanted because they have trouble with corners and fitting through corridors.

[tedric]

no dude his point is this would encourage all sorts of silly backtracking and hopscotching around before you explore new territory to make sure your allies' retreat path is always "optimal"

[Berder]

no dude his point is this would encourage all sorts of silly backtracking and hopscotching around before you explore new territory to make sure your allies' retreat path is always "optimal"

No one would do that, since if you wanted them to go in a different direction from where you came from, the retreat command works okay.

[tedric]

if there is one thing i have learned from the Tavern, it is that statements of the form "No one would do x", where x can in any way shape or form be perceived as "optimal", are false

[Berder]

It could not be perceived as optimal. It would just waste turns to accomplish something that the retreat command works okay for.

[and into]

This would either involve 1.) keeping track of exactly how your allies moved on your own, which sounds bad, or 2.) showing your allies' last X moves on the screen (compare to autoexplore tracks used to show how your character came to be wherever it stopped after hitting o). For just one ally, the latter might work without making the screen a mess, but for three or four allies, it would be cluttered to the point of dysfunction.

Adding some global commands on some special screen that allow you to influence ally behavior (by setting things like aggressiveness, etc.) when combined with existing "retreat," "attack," etc. commands, might be a better approach if the goal is to make allies less annoying to use.


EDIT vv Whoops misunderstood what Berder was suggesting, my bad.

[Berder]

This would either involve 1.) keeping track of exactly how your allies moved on your own, which sounds bad, or 2.) showing your allies' last X moves on the screen (compare to autoexplore tracks used to show how your character came to be wherever it stopped after hitting o). For just one ally, the latter might work without making the screen a mess, but for three or four allies, it would be cluttered to the point of dysfunction.

As I described it, the allies retrace your steps, not their own. That's better because you only have to remember where you came from, and also because it would work with allies that you recently created.

[gammafunk]

No one would do that, since if you wanted them to go in a different direction from where you came from, the retreat command works okay.

Yes they would do that, because the situation being described is not one where your allies are retreating in a different direction where you came from, but in the same direction. The "exploring new territory" part is not saying that's where you'd want your allies to retreat, it's saying that you have an incentive to optimize your approach to new territory so you can ensure your allies retreat in an optimal way (away from the new territory, along this path you've just created).

But the whole idea is silly because just using tf and falling back yourself to a better position is what you want the vast majority of the time. Allies have no trouble following you at all. I think I only use tr for permanent allies that I really need to keep alive, and it along with recall have generally worked fine for that purpose.

[Berder]

But the whole idea is silly because just using tf and falling back yourself to a better position is what you want the vast majority of the time. Allies have no trouble following you at all. I think I only use tr for permanent allies that I really need to keep alive, and it along with recall have generally worked fine for that purpose.

The issue is that allies get in the way of your ranged attacks, and also die needlessly if enemies are casting area attacks, and also step ahead of you in the chokepoint and die. I'm thinking of permanent allies like zombies or yred gifts. There lots of reasons to want them to back up while you stay put. t r <select direction> usually works, but is annoying because of the direction selection step.

Of course, you have a point if you're talking about temporary summons, since if you don't want those in a given fight generally you just don't summon them in the first place. That's not what this would be for.

[damiac]

It would also be very nice, and maybe Berder's issue wouldn't matter anymore, if we could just give standing orders to our followers.

Such as: Attack: 1. All targets once sighted, 2. All targets when player attacks, 3. Any enemies who attack the player, 4. Only attack adjacent enemies.

So you could just tell your minions to only attack adjacent enemies, and then your minions wouldn't rush out and get in the way of your ranged attacks in the first place. When you actually want them to attack, you tell them to.

A different character might choose to just have their minions attack enemies on sight.

The big thing is that this means you don't have to spend turns and make noise to get your dumb allies not to get in the way of your ranged attacks.

[gammafunk]

If you're using a lot of ranged attacks that you can't fire through your permanent allies who are numerous and that you also care about keeping alive, you've set yourself up for an annoying game of crawl to a significant extent. To avoid this you can use certain combinations like e.g. bolt of draining with undead, and Fedhas is another way of doing this. If you must use ranged you can't fire through your large numbers of allies, the basic idea is to simply not have your allies around when using ranged. Make them wait elsewhere, recalling them (by the spell or god ability, which Kiku/Yred/Beogh give you) only in instances when ranged is over and you specifically need help. If this recall doesn't improve the situation sufficiently, you're running away anyways, so tf + run away or teleport + recall works just fine. You can even tf, run away some behind a few allies and do a recall when you've got some cover so that your most valuable, high-hd allies become adjacent and your disposable ones eat more of the damage covering your retreat. Always traveling around with your full army in tow when you just want to use fireball or a missile each fight is just asking for frustration.

Retreat is designed to be used rarely, so the tr<dir><enter> process is not too onerous. The command could probably could be improved, but monster AI is difficult to get right when coordinating movement of multiple monsters. So any proposed fix has to be not abusable (which the original proposal of this post fails), an improvement in terms of simplicity of use and/or effect, and must work within the confines of crawl's monster AI (meaning we need correct code that doesn't break crawl's monster behavior).

[Berder]

Keep in mind that I know how to play. You're preaching to the choir. I do all the things you're talking about.

Sure, you want valuable permanent allies to stay away ideally on a cleared level until it's time to recall them, but a retinue of plain zombies at your side is protective. It's not usually desirable to tell your ordinary zombies to wait where you made them.

Retreat is designed to be used rarely

The fact is, if you're surrounded by friendly zombies and trying to take a chokepoint e.g. a door in vaults, you don't want them to step into the door in front of you. You want them to get away from it. Even if you're right that retreat was designed to be used rarely - that's just the theory. In actual practice there are many times involving zombies where retreat is desirable. Another example, there's nothing wrong with using a ranged weapon with zombies around, so long as you tell them to retreat when it's time to use it - but that means telling them to retreat a lot. Such that it's a pain in the neck. If retreat was only two keystrokes it would be less of a pain in the neck.


Actually, now that I'm thinking more about this, in those situations I've mentioned it's usually not ideal for the zombies to keep walking out of LOS, even though that's what the retreat command does. Consider this idea: a "get behind me" command that is two keystrokes. When you issue this command (t g), first the game finds the average location of enemy monsters weighted by HD. Half of your LOS is closer to that location, and half of your LOS is farther from that location. Allies that are obeying the command try to get out of the half of your LOS that's closer to the enemy location, and will refuse to walk into that half of your LOS, but otherwise act normally.

[gammafunk]

That retinue of plain zombies at your side is entirely disposable, so the command you want is just ta or tw. Send them at the choke point because when they're gone, you'll make more plain zombies from the corpses of dead monsters they just killed, quite possibly before all your existing zombies are dead to keep up multiplicative damage effect of having more allies active in los. That's why plain zombies exist, to be thrown at groups of incoming monsters. When hostile monsters start to punch through, you use a bolt spell together with . to end the bolt at the right location so your allies on the other side aren't harmed; even a carefully positioned fireball can work well for that.

Quit making combat more tedious by overusing tr when you should just be letting zombies do their thing. The aim isn't to have the biggest army of zombies you possibly can when the level is clear just so you can then do nothing with them, since they're stuck on the level.

[Berder]

If you're trying to hold a doorway, the absolute last thing you want is a plain zombie getting in front of you in the door. It does much worse damage than you do and dies needlessly. It's much better to keep them as backup and only tell them to attack if you're in an open area. Same with if you want to hit enemies with ranged attacks before they get near you. Telling the zombies to attack in those situations just wastes zombies and reduces your damage output.

[gammafunk]

No, it's not the last thing you want to do, you have a poor understanding of how to use your allies effectively. You keep talking about "plain zombies" (whatever that means) but then contradict yourself by talk of "wasting zombies". They're disposable damage meatbags that are perfectly effective at slowing down enemies at a chokepoint for a while....that's literally the concept of "zombie", right? There are no aritisinal, lovingly hand-crafted purebred zombies or skeletons that must be preserved for show. I use plain old skeletons like this all the time and am able to mix in ranged actions just fine before mopping up with more primary attacks. Even skeletons can kill several lesser enemies and significantly wound stronger ones so I can finish up with ranged. And then I cast more animate skeleton..and then I get more skeletons. With an all-los spell like animate dead it's even easier...

[Berder]

Well, then it seems it is you who has the poor understanding. Zombies are meatbags and you don't shed many tears if they die, but they're useful meatbags. It's better to conserve your herd of zombies for a really dangerous encounter instead of wasting them in every encounter where you don't actually need them.

Also, imagine you're using rod of clouds or a cloud spell. Or imagine there's a fire crab. You don't want the zombies walking into the clouds and killing themselves, which they will happily do without supervision.

Also, zombies and summons/allies in general are more effective at dealing damage in open spaces, where their superior numbers allow them to surround the enemy. So you don't want to send them into a chokepoint single file. That's just wasteful play. Especially if the chokepoint is a door with a crowd of enemies on the other side, as happens a lot in vaults, which means that when the zombie walks forward he's getting hit by 3 enemies at once and dies promptly.

-- op-streaking greaterplayer Berder

[crate]

the problem here is really that permanent allies exist

[gammafunk]

Any time you would possibly want to "conserve" your "plain zombies" (haha), you would not have them around you and recall as necessary (it seems they are so very precious, after all) after using your rod of clouds. If you want them to hold a door, you need to learn how to use them effectively, and this would be the same as for summons. The way it works is, you use ta to send them forward to the door, and when they kill something and move a bit into the hallway, you issue tf to fall them back a bit out of the hallway. You then ta to send them back to the door to continue the process.

That's really just how allies work, and OP is frustrated because he should be asking for help in Dungeon Crawling Advice rather than proposing ill-conceived gameplay features in CYC. Trying to "conserve" zombies who could perfectly easily kill a fire crab for you, even doing so out of los when a fire crab is somehow dangerous, is bad gameplay.

Perma-allies that you truly care about are pretty tedious to keep alive for a host of reasons (probably the motivation for crate's comment), but of course that would not even be remotely solved by a new, broken version of tr. The best you can do when using ranged with powerful allies you should be trying to keep alive is not use incompatible ranged attacks.

[crate]

To be fair it is beneficial to conserve your zombie allies when you can. The main reason players don't bother is because trying to do so is an enormous headache (same reason very few people actually used twisted resurrection, for instance). Of course, this is precisely the sort of behaviour that crawl claims to want to eliminate, but there's not really any way that I've thought of to be able to keep permanent allies without also encouraging this sort of annoying micromanagement.

[njvack]

the problem here is really that permanent allies exist

Yup. Keeping Beogh allies (even warlords) alive can be really frustrating.

DAMN IT OREG! STAY OUT OF THE !@#$ MIASMA! SERIOUSLY!!! NO! DON'T WALK INTO THE POISON...

auauuuuugh.

[gammafunk]

Yeah, it's not as if I deliberately "throw away" zombies, but it's easy enough to keep their usage relatively reasonable in terms of cost/benefit without caring too hard what happens to any given one, since it's pretty darn easy to make more.

I'd imagine any fix to perma-allies would somehow involve giving them all sane level-up paths along with specific caps on their numbers by ally type, and then having them never actually die but enter some kind of temporary "disabled" state, but it all gets pretty complicated pretty fast and it's kind of hard to see how this would be better than just some kind of temporary summons in the end.

[njvack]

it's kind of hard to see how this would be better than just some kind of temporary summons in the end.

I get emotionally attached to Beogh allies. It's the reason I play Beoghvites, and it's unique to Beogh (well, a little with Yred, too, though the allies are kind of undifferentiated there). This may be because I like RPGs and it kind of makes Crawl into an RPG which I know it isn't but whatever. I'll put up with interface screws and frustration and suboptimal whatever because I like going through the dungeon with Oreg and company. When he dies, I'm not upset mainly because I lost a warlord, I'm upset because Oreg was acted like an idiot and now he's dead.

Temporary summons (even with powerful named orcs, I think) would, I think, rather kill that.

What might help it would be a Lazarus ability -- for Some Cost (lots of piety? MaxHP? XP?) you can revive a fallen ally. It might work best if it was a large tactical cost (self-torment? heavy draining?) and needed a very fresh (15 turns?) corpse, so you'd need to put yourself in whatever situation killed your buddy and then do something dangerous.

I would do this even if it were objectively suboptimal play, because again, this is one of the few places where Crawl encourages me to be emotionally, rather than numerically, invested in the game.

And again, yes I know I crawl wrong.

[damiac]

Regardless of how you think zombies are 'supposed' to be used, currently you can already order them to retreat, and stay out of the way, and use your ranged attacks. It's in the game right now, and you can do it, but it's annoying.

So when someone points out something that's "Optimal but tedious" telling them they're playing wrong is really not the right response.

The original 'retrace your steps' might not be the solution, but saying 'ur dumb git good' is also not the solution.

It would be really nice to be able to just let your minions know in advance what you want them to do. Just following and staying out of your way would be great sometimes, and you can already accomplish that through many extra keystrokes and tedium, and as a result you have less dead zombies than you'd have otherwise.

If that's not practical, at least a two keystroke 'get behind me' command would be nice.

Also: Oka exists. That's a really good reason right there to not want your zombie minions running into your clouds, or trying to shoot through them.

I find it amusing how much gamma's tone changes when it's crate saying preserving zombies is a good idea vs when berder says it...

[gammafunk]

No it was definitely the right response. Players like the OP should learn to pay attention to how their gameplay creates frustration for little-to-no benefit. Someone points out that permanent allies are bad from a gameplay standpoint precisely because the idea of thinking about keeping them alive is frustrating in a game where they can die in a myriad of ways. And the right response is supposed to be "yes, so lets find more ways to enable micromanaging their behavior, to encourage players to use perma-allies in even sillier situations"?

Also my "tone" doesn't "change", I just don't have to spend time pointing out obvious flaws in reasoning in the posts of some people, because they reason very well about the game, often saying things better or more insightful than what I could say. Boy, posts from people like this are sure nice to read, and I've noticed that these posters tend to get thanks from other good posters...

[damiac]

The request was for a less micromanagey way of doing it though, not more. Less keystrokes required, at least.

And if you think 'thank' volume is a good way to measure post quality... I don't even know what to say...

Any time you would possibly want to "conserve" your "plain zombies" (haha)

To be fair it is beneficial to conserve your zombie allies when you can.

Yeah, it's not as if I deliberately "throw away" zombies, but it's easy enough to keep their usage relatively reasonable in terms of cost/benefit without caring too hard what happens to any given one, since it's pretty darn easy to make more.

No change in tone there...

Your argument is basically "Stop playing so optimally if it's so tedious" which is completely counter to the design intent of crawl. You even admitted there's "little to no benefit" meaning, you know there's a benefit. And crate's post agreed with the OP that it's good to conserve zombies when possible anyway.

I think the statement that you are the one with the poor understanding is correct. Plain zombies can be wasted, if they couldn't be, then they'd be pointless. Whether they're 'handcrafted' or 'artisinal' has nothing to do with anything.

[gammafunk]

I get emotionally attached to Beogh allies. It's the reason I play Beoghvites, and it's unique to Beogh (well, a little with Yred, too, though the allies are kind of undifferentiated there). This may be because I like RPGs and it kind of makes Crawl into an RPG which I know it isn't but whatever. I'll put up with interface screws and frustration and suboptimal whatever because I like going through the dungeon with Oreg and company. When he dies, I'm not upset mainly because I lost a warlord, I'm upset because Oreg was acted like an idiot and now he's dead.

Temporary summons (even with powerful named orcs, I think) would, I think, rather kill that.

What might help it would be a Lazarus ability -- for Some Cost (lots of piety? MaxHP? XP?) you can revive a fallen ally. It might work best if it was a large tactical cost (self-torment? heavy draining?) and needed a very fresh (15 turns?) corpse, so you'd need to put yourself in whatever situation killed your buddy and then do something dangerous.

I would do this even if it were objectively suboptimal play, because again, this is one of the few places where Crawl encourages me to be emotionally, rather than numerically, invested in the game.

And again, yes I know I crawl wrong.

People have fun with the role-playing aspects of permanent allies to that end, I guess, but then you'd really want to not use them in the most annoying way possible, e.g. with many ranged attacks you can't fire through. A lot of players (and some devs) dislike perma-allies, so the least that we can do is not make the ally interface worse for non-permanent ones. Devs have taken up projects to tweak the ally gods in the past. I don't know about a "Lazarus ability" per se, but a specific and well-conceived post about something like this in GDD might catch a dev's eye. It could be on a "won't-do" list, for all I know.

Plain zombies can be wasted, if they couldn't be, then they'd be pointless.

I honestly can't imagine what that's supposed to mean. Is it just a haiku? Pretty textbook example of why I love reading stuff from those well-thanked posters instead!

Anyhow we mostly all agree the original idea doesn't work. Proponents of changing tr specifically aren't following up with anything other than dislike of criticism, which of course gets us nowhere. I'm locking this thread, but anyone who can see a genuine problem with tr and offer a coherent and specific improvement is encouraged to post something in gdd.