Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery


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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 19:35

Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

So, I realize it doesn't really matter much, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the AC+EV high score competition in tournaments. Not that I tend to place in it, just that I like trying to stack a ton of defenses in general.

However, in .16, there's one clearly dominant strategy to do this: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku corpses completely blows any other strategy out of the water. See the highest defense morgue here: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/Happylisk/m ... 153903.txt, it has 438 ac and 41 EV.

Stacking temporary defenses for the escape is hardly new, as players, myself included, have been using might/agility potions, casting phase shift, etc on escape for a long time. And Happylisk did in fact have an absurdly defensive character even before stacking corpse armor - the orange crystal plate armor with rings of evasion and a flail of protection, on a gargoyle. But those were generally available to everyone, and didn't limit highest AC+EV characters to a single god, so I'm less bothered by them.

If this is considered a problem, and it probably isn't, the solution (imho) would just be to cap Cigotuvi's Embrace at +10 ac (value approximate). You'd rarely go over that outside of corpse delivery in general, I think. This may nerf Kiku followers who want to use 2-3 deliveries for a tough fight to have +20ac? I'm not sure how often you would do that, as there are few times you can tell a tough fight is coming up and also have 3-4 turns to spend buffing up without taking more damage than it's worth. Probably just for pan/hell lords around the corner, possibly tough zig floors? If we want to preserve this, we can set the cap to be higher - say 20 or 30 ac, and still block characters getting +350ac.

Summary: I assume no change is all that necessary, but I think it's worth discussing. Possibly cap the bonus ac/sh around 10 (or 30 if you like kiku).

Sar

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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 19:42

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

tasonir wrote:there's one clearly dominant strategy to do this

note how the char you posted is a Gr in OCPA with maxed armour

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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 19:52

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

I did in fact note that already, if you'd like me to double note it, consider it now double noted. :D

My point was that you could take a gargoyle, stack him with some absurd randart +23 CPA, randart the hell out of all armor slots, have the ring of robustness and shoalin for rings, and end up with something absurd like 120 ac, 50 EV (they have a ton of +dex on all those randarts).

This would be about HALF of the ac/ev score that an octopode with no rings of evasion/protection can get by just casting embrace with a full piety bar's worth of corpses, who gets ~300-350 ac from the spell.

Yes, the number 1 player took advantage of both traditional defenses and the spell + kiku trick, but only the spell + kiku is necessary to completely outclass any setup that doesn't use kiku, which was my point.
Last edited by tasonir on Monday, 30th March 2015, 19:56, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 19:54

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

Saw a discussion on this in ##crawl-dev. It looks like they are more likely to remove AC+EV category from future competitions than rebalance around this combo; which isn't that broken with a more sane number of corpse calls at once. AND probably still less powerful than Corpses + Simulacrum in practical gameplay.
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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 19:58

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

tasonir wrote:the spell + kiku is necessary to completely outclass any setup that doesn't use kiku

and being a Gargoyle is necessary to completely outclass any setup that doesn't involve being a Gargoyle

unfr: Gargoyle (not really)

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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 20:00

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

As far as I know the idea belongs to Xen, he was the first player to use the combo in the tournament.

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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 20:14

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

Ah, and he even did it on an octopode who only had a single +4 ring of protection, which is pretty close to my hypothetical octopode above. Ending up with 134 ac and 43 EV is enough to beat even very powerful gargoyles who don't use embrace, and he didn't fully abuse the trick; he still has 5* piety rather than going all the way to 0* piety and getting the full 300 ac instead of +127.

I can understand why devs would instead remove the AC+EV category, but I'd rather try to fix it than see it go. Maybe they can just disallow characters with the "corpse armour" effect in their morgue? Ie, fix it in the tournament script, rather than in the game.

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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 20:20

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

It doesn't matter (in terms of game design—obviously people care about shooting for the title personally), nor should it matter for game design. Cf. speed runs (time or turncount), etc.
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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 20:40

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

Octopodes. *thinks*

With statue form (30), Phase Shift (8) stoneskin (15); Weapon and Buckler of Protection (+8); 6 rings of protection/evasion at their max normal spawn level (+6 x 6), ponder Hat (+3), brooch of shielding (+8), robustness (+8) and shaolin (+8); 124 AC+EV

OpMo has Min Dex of 21 (if player put all optional into it) and max of 26. 36 - 39 EV [with no other bonuses]; 43-44 EV [Cheibriados]; 44-46 EV [Agility]; 46 EV [Both] (diminishing returns; can't have more than 50 EV from normal evasion).

Yea, an Octopode with the Patience to Zigguratscum for a bunch of Evasion/Protection rings might beat a Gargoyle at an AC+EV contest, maybe. Take -MUCH- longer though.
I'm beginning to feel like a Cat God! Felid streaks: {FeVM^Sif Muna, FeWn^Dithmenos, FeAr^Pakellas}, {FeEE^Ashenzari, FeEn^Gozag, FeNe^Sif Muna, FeAE^Vehumet...(ongoing)}
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Post Monday, 30th March 2015, 21:47

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

Sandman25 wrote:As far as I know the idea belongs to Xen, he was the first player to use the combo in the tournament.


To be fair, I got the idea from someone in chat while spectating a CZSO game a while back (don't remember who it was). Also during the tournament I was watching Hurricos clear a megazig, and he mentioned being able to get ridiculously high AC from casting embrace.

In 0.15 I got the highest AC+EV (164 total) after spending a while finding good gear, and it's ironic that I could get a higher total on an octopode with basically no preparation time.
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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 00:26

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

it's fucked up that someone can get the highest rank for "most pizza collected" just by scumming abyss + pan as mummy, which is completely against crawl's design goals. the simplest way to eliminate this is to restrict pizza to a max of 3 pieces generated per game, plus one per zig cleared (for 'power players')

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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 00:45

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

PleasingFungus wrote:it's fucked up that someone can get the highest rank for "most pizza collected" just by scumming abyss + pan as mummy, which is completely against crawl's design goals. the simplest way to eliminate this is to restrict pizza to a max of 3 pieces generated per game, plus one per zig cleared (for 'power players')

Really, any race can scum the abyss for pizza, Mummies only really have a pizza collecting advantage early on, once you're at the 'scumming the abyss for pizza' point, you've realistically collected enough food of other types that you could collect pizza indefinitly no matter what race you are playing.

:)
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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 01:31

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

More seriously, I think the Cigotuvi's is probably a failure as a design, but that's because it's a level 5 spell that competes with and is generally weaker than a level 4 spell of the same school. I would support reworking or removing it for that reason; not for high-AC competitions.

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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 01:49

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

PleasingFungus wrote:More seriously, I think the Cigotuvi's is probably a failure as a design, but that's because it's a level 5 spell that competes with and is generally weaker than a level 4 spell of the same school. I would support reworking or removing it for that reason; not for high-AC competitions.
Weaker than animate dead or control undead? [only two necro-4 spells I can think of] I guess meatshields are better than AC/SH most the time (save against boltspells, in melee range, smite targeted and AoE spells)...wait that's most the time early; not most the time in late or extended. Nah they have separate functions and serve different kinds of characters a lot more than the previous twisted did. Certainly worse for the average necromancer interested in spell damage output though...
I'm beginning to feel like a Cat God! Felid streaks: {FeVM^Sif Muna, FeWn^Dithmenos, FeAr^Pakellas}, {FeEE^Ashenzari, FeEn^Gozag, FeNe^Sif Muna, FeAE^Vehumet...(ongoing)}

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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 02:11

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

bcadren wrote:AND probably still less powerful than Corpses + Simulacrum in practical gameplay.


There are only a handful of situations that aren't easily solved with enough Kiku piety and Simulacrum. The issue here definitely has nothing to do with balance and only applies to that one tournament objective.

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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 02:52

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

Cigotuvi's may be worse than Animate Dead, but if I'm using Death Channel I'd rather have the corpse armour than slow zombies behind me. Just keep going from one fight to the next with a single casting of each spell each time (maybe not even renewing DChan, since it might have lasted from the last one).
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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 04:01

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

My "solution" for this was suggesting removing the AC + EV score boost for 0.17. The category was already dominated by Gr.
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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 05:26

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

Well yeah, the category was already pretty much secretly "who's the biggest ziggurat farmer of them all?".
and into wrote:nor should it matter for game design. Cf. speed runs (time or turncount), etc.

speedrunning exists because score exists

if you didn't want the players to complete the game in low amounts of turns, why the fuck would you have scores based around that?
take it easy
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<Sequell> 20749. Bloax, XL24 VSTm, T:13320: http://crawl.lantea.net/crawl/morgue/Bloax/morgue-Bloax-20140907-000920.txt

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Post Tuesday, 31st March 2015, 15:18

Re: Cigotuvi's Embrace + Kiku's corpse delivery

The existence of scores doesn't affect game play for those who are not interested in speedrunning, and there are plenty of other reasons to have score aside from speedrunning anyway (just off the top of my head: even before getting their first rune, newer players get to have some sense of making progress in a game that has permadeath, thanks to scores). No one wants players not to compete for scores. I was simply reiterating what developers have said on numerous occasions, which is that the potential impact on various competitive "meta-games" around Crawl do not figure into game design decisions. (The game has been made significantly shorter, even though this makes it difficult to compare low turncount-runs between versions, etc.)

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