Lasty wrote:I didn't say or mean anything about unavoidable deaths, tho it is true that very few deaths after d:2 can truly said to be unavoidable. What I'm saying is that I pay close attention to the early game because I have to in order to get past it, whereas I very rarely pay close attention to any specific scenario post-Lair; in fact, I deliberately play a little sloppy post-Lair in order to create situations where I have to stop and think. What I'm saying is that more than 90% of my Lair and post-Lair deaths would have been prevented by playing with the level of care I use in the first few levels of D. What that says to me is that early D is harder than most of the rest of the game, since it almost always demands care and attention, and the rest only sometimes does.
It's possible that some people feel that the late game is harder in part because during the more-rare times when you do need to pay attention you need to make a correct choice from a much larger pool of possible choices, but I don't see that as a factor in the difficulty level of those chunks of the game; having more choices makes it more likely that you have at least one very good choice.
Well, that's a distinction to make, if you have at least one good choice to make most of the time, but you have 20 possible choices, and you have to make the correct choice 100 times, that's fairly unlikely to happen strictly randomly, whereas if you only have 3 choices, your odds of guessing the correct one are much higher.
That means from a strictly *odds based* perspective, i.e. if you were taking random but valid actions, it actually gets more difficult as you progress, rather than less.
Now people don't just take random options, they try to make the best choice, so having more options does mean you have more opportunity for a better choice, which means in that sense it's easier, more choices mean greater odds that the one that would be the most likely to let you win is among them.
*however* the more choices you have, the easier it is to make a mistake, it's easier late in the game to die and then go "dammnit, totally didn't see/remember that I had X consumable which might have saved me" This happens more frequently when you play lazily or distractedly certainly, but crawl's a marathon of good decisions, not a complex single-solution analysis that you only have to do once.
So whether it's easier or harder later in the game depends on how easy it is to select the correct choice over and over again, additionally crawl supplies you with a really large number of choices where the decision process is trivial (Oh, it's more popcorn <tab><tab><tab>) meaning your awareness threshold for bad situations needs to be higher.
In the end, whether you call the late game "easy" or not really depends on whether you're looking at it as a series of problems that need to be solved (The problems get easier to solve) or as a endurance challenge for attention and repeated correct decision making (it gets harder to pay attention and repeatedly make the correct decision, which rises in complexity, even as it lowers in difficulty)
You could similarly say that hitting home runs in baseball isn't "hard" in the sense that it's not hard to know which actions it takes to do so, however it *is* hard to actually do the deed repeatably without lots of practice and only the most successful baseball hitters can do so on a regular basis.
Practice and actual performance get a bad rap when compared to problem solving, invention is 1% inspiriation and 99% perspriation, and lots of other crap I could say that all mean similar things.
Friday, 12th June 2015, 17:22 
(except when playing DsEn with 150% HP for monsters )
