Rant: Dynast's Current DCSS Analysis

[dynast]

Some weeks ago i decided that i was going back to the first combo i used to play when i was first introduced to DCSS(DrTm) and my goal was to try and see the highest winning streak i could get with a elaborated strategy. Turns out i didnt do well, getting a 2 win streak twice only. BUT thats not the point. The point is, during this time i experienced some frustrating moments that had me thinking and i came to some conclusions about the current state of the game.

Everything i say from here is very subjective and from my tunnel point of view.

1. A player trying not to die plays the first levels of the dungeon like surgery, despite the fact he may have no control whatsoever over the situation, not even a potion to blind quaff if things get ugly, there is not enough amount of exp earned worth of investment that player can effectively use to define anything else than his background start aside from putting 2 levels on stealth to not get noticed by deadly threats to increase his chances of survival in the first floors. During this part of the game the dungeon layout is completely relevant, making a player carefully explore open rooms, turn corners, use doors, etc.

2. By the time the player reaches the temple the game finally kicks in, the player now have a decent skill investment that determines how he will deal with the trip to the lair/orcish mines and enough resources to aid him. Monster density increases and some fearsome creatures start to show up, a early fight against a single hill giant/cyclops/manticore/ugly thing/etc could end pretty bad but its not something that the player cannot deal with.

3. The player reaches lair/orcish mines, The game branches out, in a bad way, and starts becoming a difficult manager, the game allows the player to pick what is easier for him to do, and freely switch in between. The player is now strong enough on his own to deal with most monsters that could appear, only a few threatening monsters dare to show up.

4. Lair/orcish mines cleared, the game branches out even more, offering 3 to 5 more places for the player to pick and switch through.

Monster density only increases from there on, turning the game into a hack'n slash frenzy. New foes that the player had not faced before are just as trivial. Dungeon layout becomes entirely irrelevant save for a few rune vaults like spider and swamp. Consumables stop being strategic resources and become mistake band-aid.

This is where the game boils down to me, and start making me just want to end the run to start the next one, to then die as quickly as possible on the first floor. And this is where i wanted to get to. My final conclusion.

This game is unforgivable forgiving. The first floors highlight the huge differences in species/background efficiency, which makes them relevant, but later on tries to adapt itself to a standard, meaning that every combo, every player choice, unless extremely badly chosen can result in a win. This makes so that some combos can just breeze through the rest of the game while some still struggle with it. But the main thing is that after a certain milestone in the game there is no everage player that would look at his current game and say "im not gonna make it".

My rants are that you can make this game heavily RNG inclined by trying to kill the player right off the bat but at least give him some dice. You dont have to worry about monsters in the late part of the game being too strong for inexperienced players, but worry about still inexperienced players getting to said part of the game.

[milski]

I mean, "the game is over when you reach Lair" is a meme for a reason; there's a pretty solid amount of truth to it. D:1 is the only threatening part of the game, while more extreme, also has a lot of truth to it.

I'm pretty sure you could just fork the game to start you with an identified potion of curing and at least your "D1 is too lethal" argument would go away.

[tabstorm]

So like 90% of the game is too easy to be fun? Agree

Having an overpowered character is sort of amusing but there's not really any excitement in playing it. Weak characters tend to not be especially enjoyable, since you have to spend a much larger amount of time luring monsters to safe areas and resting, but you aren't in that much more danger than you would be on a strong character. Almost all Crawl challenges can be overcome with enough patience. Once you really understand this, a normal game becomes less than enjoyable. When I die I almost always think "If I had just lured X monster(s) more carefully I would not have died", it dosen't feel like I failed to solve a tactical puzzle.

But if you try to get rid of this issue by trying to play for a high score, you get screwed by the RNG so most of your games end in splats.

There's no obvious way to fix this so my entire post is pointless. Even if the entire game played like the early dungeon it would probably get tiresome after awhile, considering that there are thousands of monsters to be beaten per game.

But this is CYC so whatever.

[all before]

I think midgame reform is the biggest thing crawl could do to combat the kind of run exhaustion you describe here. Adding more and more enemies to depths and deeper areas, as crawl recently has done, doesn't change much because at that point you already have enough xp and resources to win. Fewer lair branches/game, shorter lair, shorter mines, and reformed enemy sets in lair and mines would all be things I would love to try playing.

Until then, just play crate crawl.

[duvessa]

Crawl needs smaller levels. 5600 squares is way too many.

[twelwe]

my analsys:

1. a fighter should want low weapon delay and a good weapon

2. all characters would benefit from good gear, gameplans, good luck

3. its best to use int while dex is great otherwise its strength for you

4. new characters are weak and get owned

5. the lair

[Tiktacy]

The game gets boring if you obsess over win rates instead of trying to have fun, it may not and first but it happens with everything RNG based when you get competitive with it. Also, what is with people and win streaks? Its obvious that winning the game is RNG based, actually playing the game perfectly is shockingly easy once you get used to it, but nothing about that is actually fun imo. Its just like in magic how people bring $2000 net-decks to tournaments and look pissed off when they lose to some noob playing an extremely sub-optimal burn deck, they aren't there for fun they are there to win and they are blind to the fact that the game is extremely luck based. That is truly degenerate in my mind, if I ever became like that with something I would probably grow to hate it with a burning passion.

Granted, there is plenty to be said about the satisfaction of winning(that IS the goal of the game after all) but there is nothing impressive about a win streak, you might as well be flipping a coin until you get heads 100 times in a row. Its a game based on RNG, you don't win because you have skill you win because you got lucky enough to not die in the early game then sat through 3-7 hours of mostly repetitive game play.

Don't get me wrong, when I play the game I intend on winning and don't make stupid decisions, but if the game starts to get dull I like to mix it up a bit. Here is just a list of things you can do to make the game more interesting:

1) Switch to xom at any point in the game.

2) Have a specific goal in mind for what you want your character to be and force it. If you die then try again.

3) Drink every potion of mutation and eat every mutagenic meat you find.

4) Make it a goal to complete elven halls before acquiring a second rune(or entering a branch with the second rune).

5) Try to make a flavorful character, turn it into a story for yourself.

6) Don't use spells or gods that make the game extremely easy.

7) Play a wacky race like Op's, I also enjoy playing demonspawns just because the mutations are exciting to see develop.

[dynast]

The big problem i see with the later part of the game is how it showers the player with a almost infinite barrage of monsters, many of which are completely trivial at that point, then insert a threating monster here and there and expect the player to play cautios all the time to not get caught by surprise, which is exhausting.

I dont wanna have to carefully hit the 70# wave of deep trolls while trying to preserve my HP/MP or rely on good positioning just on the chance a ancient lich might creep around the corner.

[Bart]

The big problem i see with the later part of the game is how it showers the player with a almost infinite barrage of monsters, many of which are completely trivial at that point, then insert a threating monster here and there and expect the player to play cautios all the time to not get caught by surprise, which is exhausting.

I dont wanna have to carefully hit the 70# wave of deep trolls while trying to preserve my HP/MP or rely on good positioning just on the chance a ancient lich might creep around the corner.

Exactly! Remove corners!

...and decrease monster swarm in late game, seriously. Most of vaults are just a test of patience - kill 10 monsters, stairdance, repeat until done.

[archaeo]

before I've had my coffee, I have to ask: it can't be that hard for one of you extremely smart and capable individuals to throw together a branch with fewer levels and monsters, can it? These ideas seem super testable. I think we can all respect the fact that the devs don't want to gut a third of the game all at once in Trunk -- removing things one at a time is controversy enough, lord knows -- but it seems like putting together an experimental branch to actually see whether or not these changes fix the problems is a worthwhile endeavor.

I'm skeptical that removing floors and monsters and making the maps smaller will accomplish anything other than making the game shorter, though.

[Jarlyk]

I think it's fairly common to feel this way in a game once you've played it enough. You reach a point where you feel like the game is 'solved', so if you lose, it's just because you get exhausted and make mistakes. So, really, what's the motivation to keep playing? For some people, that's the point where they are done with the game and ready to move on, to re-experience the process of learning something anew. Though, once you've played enough different games, even that starts to get repetitive, as you start to see the same mechanics and patterns everywhere you go. On the other hand, you get some folks with a more 'completionist' personality, who want to truly master a game as much as is possible. In the case of crawl, this manifests not so much in knowing 'complex strategies', but rather in developing the patience and discipline to execute without making a bunch of mistakes.

My personal take is that DCSS is significantly more streamlined than most other games of its ilk. There's certainly still some 'filler', but 'filler' is actually an important part of game mechanics. You see this in most games, where you have a series of quite mild challenges, punctuated by larger challenges at some reasonably even pace. Likewise you have a series of small rewards, punctuated by larger rewards. Usually the two mechanics are linked. You give the brain a chance to relax and 'recover' from its most recent challenge/reward, giving it a milder stimulation in the interim. If you provide too much stimulation in too rapid a sequence, the receptors will actually down-regulate the gain for the 'noisy' environment, removing much of the emotional impact. In a sense, you need the boredom to keep the excitement. The art of this, then, is finding the right balance so that you don't lose the player's engagement entirely during the down periods. That's tricky to do since everybody is wired differently (and whether a given challenge is actually challenging depends somewhat on player experience), but I do think DCSS is reasonably well-balanced in that regard. You can of course tweak the filler/pacing ratios, but the real challenge is balancing that for the wide range of player skill levels and preferred play-styles.

[dynast]

Alright doctor brain, but that doesnt change the fact that DCSS has a huge difficult scaling issue.

[milski]

Alright doctor brain, but that doesnt change the fact that DCSS has a huge difficult scaling issue.

As do the majority of roguelikes. It might be less of an issue and more "players enjoy getting to work towards being a ridiculous killing machine."

[Jarlyk]

I think I get what you're saying, but it feels to me like it's not a problem with DCSS in particular, but rather with games and gaming in general. Pacing and scaling are always going to be partly a matter of taste. Personally, I think it's at a fairly good level, but perhaps that's just because I haven't played enough, so a greater proportion of encounters are still interesting.

I do think, though, that 'dense' games are more fun in theory than they are in practice, at least for most people.

[archaeo]

Honestly, I think half the problem is that Crawl constantly interrupts your flow with flawed mechanics. A few percentage points of total playtime are consumed by butchering corpses and eating corpses or managing permafood stacks or having autoexplore interrupt because you don't have room in your inventory for 3 fruit. Throw in a few more percentage points you have to spend buff dancing in any situation where even a trivial fight might become non-trivial. Add in a few more for other inventory management tasks, since Crawl has a metric ton of consumables, an assortment of which every character wants. Add in a few more for the endless tactical swapping you need to do in order to keep up with the various resistances characters need past the midgame, not to mention swapping between weapons, rods, and staves. And a few more spent on a more-or-less solved identification minigame.

I think a lot of the complaints about game length would be most usefully solved by improving the game's flow through the removal of these superfluous design elements, items, and mechanics. Then you could just cut the middle out of most branches (does Tomb need 3 floors? Does Hell need a full 28? Does Lair need 8?), and I think the game would be better.

Of course, lots of people think all the things I just named are vital parts of Crawl and roguelikes in general. Whatcha gonna do.

[dynast]

As bad as other roguelikes may be(im looking at you, ToME), DCSS is the only one that i played that failed to add tension to the player, as he may run across a foe that may be far stronger than him, instead it puts the player in a very unconfortable position where it is just trying to not put himself into a bad situation.

[all before]

Greedo has made a shorter version (with a lot of other changes as well), but it's not on online servers. I keep hoping it will be so I can try it. viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17775&p=243639&hilit=version+shorter#p243639

After having played DCSS for a while now, I do generally think a smaller scale is best for roguelikes. There's an innate limit with these games: early on, drops can significantly change your build, but at a certain point your character is in place, and after that you are just collecting xp and upgrades until you win. One of the things I appreciate most about Sil is that the game ends around the time your character feels built. But that's not going to happen with Crawl--the devs want a longish game where after you build a character you feel invested in you go on a series of adventures that you can win so long as you play correctly. And that's totally fine as a design goal, the question is what ways there are to limit tedium during that long post-build portion of the game. Besides just literally making it shorter, I also think changing how loot works post-D and -L would be great. Why make the player complete every floor just so they are sure not to miss that blink scroll or hw potion? Make loot work more like it does in Hell, concentrated at the end of branches, so that players can get there as quickly or slowly as they like.

[Sar]

One of the things I appreciate most about Sil is that the game ends around the time your character feels built.

Isn't the current Sil meta scumming at 950ft until you have enough resources to take on the Throne Room?

[archaeo]

One of the things I appreciate most about Sil is that the game ends around the time your character feels built.

Isn't the current Sil meta scumming at 950ft until you have enough resources to take on the Throne Room?

Yes, but I feel like there's probably a happy medium between a game that's so long that your character is finished developing halfway through and a game so short you have to sit and scum on the penultimate level in order to win.

Which isn't to say I really agree that Crawl is too long, just that too much of that length is spent in a single area with a single monster set. For example, I'd be thrilled if the devs took out 3 floors of Lair, 2 floors of Orc and all the non-slime Lair branches, 3-5 floors of slime, 2 floors of Elf, 16 floors of Hells, capped Pan at ~15 floors, and raised Abyss Rune generation (especially paired with Grunt's abyssrun branch, though I'd cut a floor out of that too). But I'd be equally thrilled (if not moreso) if half of those 30ish removed floors were re-added as new branches and sections of the Dungeon.

[Tiktacy]

One of the things I appreciate most about Sil is that the game ends around the time your character feels built.

Isn't the current Sil meta scumming at 950ft until you have enough resources to take on the Throne Room?

Yes, but I feel like there's probably a happy medium between a game that's so long that your character is finished developing halfway through and a game so short you have to sit and scum on the penultimate level in order to win.

Which isn't to say I really agree that Crawl is too long, just that too much of that length is spent in a single area with a single monster set. For example, I'd be thrilled if the devs took out 3 floors of Lair, 2 floors of Orc and all the non-slime Lair branches, 3-5 floors of slime, 2 floors of Elf, 16 floors of Hells, capped Pan at ~15 floors, and raised Abyss Rune generation (especially paired with Grunt's abyssrun branch, though I'd cut a floor out of that too). But I'd be equally thrilled (if not moreso) if half of those 30ish removed floors were re-added as new branches and sections of the Dungeon.

The issue with shortening branches is that you then have to scale the exp of the monsters based on how much you shortened the branch, otherwise the game becomes significantly harder(for all the wrong reasons). I personally never felt like the length of each branch was an issue. The devs have put a lot of time into improving the quality of each branch over time to eventually create new challenges for the player to face as they dive deeper into a branch. Trying to cut down the length of the branches as they currently exist seems like nothing more than a bandaid solution, the core issue is not with the length but rather the repetitive nature of the game itself and this can only be improved with more vaults and more variety in the enemies within the branch. That being said, everything I've said is moreless theoretical and my opinion on the subject should be taken with a grain of salt simply because the style of gameplay I enjoy is likely drastically different then what most people enjoy(but I'm trying to be objective as much as possible).

[WalkerBoh]

I pretty much agree with Dynast's overview in the OP. You have to pay a lot of attention and play really carefully in the first few dungeon levels (at least on less powerful characters), which is pretty interesting. But once you can clear Lair and Orc, you more or less know what direction your character is going to go and have the tools to beat 99% of the monsters that appear. There are still always some rough moments in Vaults or Depths, but with enough consumables there's not much that's truly life-threatening with good play.

I was actually thinking about this the other day before Dynast made his post, and I decided that the ideal Crawl game (for me anyways) would consist of:

- The entire game up to Lair, which is pretty great!
- Shortening Lair by 3-4 levels, with the last 2 or 3 levels containing the rune branches
- Removing Orc completely and replacing it with Elf (which is shortened to 2 levels)
- Two lair rune branches with 2-3 levels each
- Vaults shortened to 3 levels
- D:15 containing the entrance to Zot, shorten Zot to 3 levels

Obviously this would require a lot of restructuring to work, but to me that's about the ideal length of a Crawl game. You could leave extended more or less intact as far as I'm concerned, because I don't bother with it most of the time. Of course, I'm jaded because I've won enough games to skew my perspective, but for me that at least keeps the most fun parts of the game intact while minimizing a lot of the areas where you can safely hold tab 99% of the time. And in general it seems that Crawl development has trended in this direction for the last few versions anyways (shortening Lair branches, reducing the Dungeon and adding Depths, etc).

[tedric]

Trying to cut down the length of the branches as they currently exist seems like nothing more than a bandaid solution, the core issue is not with the length but rather the repetitive nature of the game itself and this can only be improved with more vaults and more variety in the enemies within the branch.

I think the core issue is the ratio of repetitiveness to game length.

Adding more vaults and enemies would be the real bandaid -- if you "diversify" one branch by pulling in existing foes from other branches, the end result is a more homogenized game that actually increases repetitiveness; if you add more and more branch-specific enemies, the game eventually bloats up until it's unapproachable for new players to get caught up. (I know there are some around here who think we're already past that point.)

Whereas shortening the game is guaranteed to improve the Repetitiveness:Length ratio, because math.

[Siegurt]

Whereas shortening the game is guaranteed to improve the Repetitiveness:Length ratio, because math.

It's not *quite* that simple, shortening the game is only guaranteed to improve said ratio if you only reduce length and don't increase repetitiveness by removing some variability.

Even if we accept your premise (that there is a problem, and it's with the ratio of repetitiveness:length) reducing length can't be done in a vacuum, to reduce length you have to cut *some* content, and content isn't as clearly defined as 'repetitive' as your argument would seem to imply. In some cases it's actually the length itself that creates the lack of repetitiveness.

To give a concrete example of that, if it was generally accepted that the content from levels 4-7 was mostly the same, and thereby it was decided to consolidate it all down to one level, then we'd only have one spawn point for the ecumenical temple, reducing the variation of whether you get an 'early' or 'late' temple, and removing much of the variability of when you choose your god.

That's not to say it's impossible to shorten crawl (further) without removing variability, it's just much trickier than simply 'consolidate a bunch of mostly-similar things'

Additionally there's a certain satisfaction to making it through a gauntlet, there's a satisfaction to be derived from surviving an onslaught, and there's a sense of occasion when you finish something prolonged, which is reduced or removed when it's shortened. That isn't so say many people derive pleasure from repetitiveness for repetitiveness's sake, but there's a satisfaction of achieving results after work invested.

What I would personally *like* to see is that areas that are mostly-samey at least have some sort of progression of difficulty, since that's really the state we want to see, for an area to get more challenging as our character gets more powerful.

[dpeg]

This is a very interesting thread for me, I'll try to add to it.

In a nutshell, I interpret dynast's observation as follows: he (I assume male unless informed otherwise, given that 95% of our players seem to be male) has solved the game. This means that barring the very swingy early game, he can reliably win characters. Doing so with a high winrate requires tedious tactics and there is little strategy necessary, so the game sort of plays itself.

This is unfortunate, but a valid assessment. One way to deal with this: we admit that Crawl has some depth, but obviously not the depth of Real Games (like Go, I'm a Go player). Once you have solved Crawl, you either find a playing style that's still fun for you (for example by choosing conducts you like, as mentioned in this thread, or playing in a deliberate non-tedious way). Or you simply move on.

That's alright, but the question is if Crawl could be improved to make it fun for longer (for players on dynast's level). One way would be to improve depth; this is hard.

One underlying problem is that of branching vs linearity. I believe that Crawl's open tree-like dungeon structure is not very helpful. It's one of the reasons that makes the game so easy. I don't think it is feasible to make Crawl a linear game at this stage, it wouldn't feel like Crawl without branches. But I do think that branching could be done better. The rune lock was a first and, as I keep pointing out, very mild attempt to restrict the open dungeon structure. I believe the game would benefit from much more drastic actions in this directions, such as branches having different monster sets depending on the order in which you enter them (e.g. the first one would be as easy as now, but the second would be harder, expecting the player to have received the items and xp from the first). That's not linear, because you still have choices to skip a level, or even a branch, but it'd much less open.

To my knowledge, these things have never been discussed in the team, and I might be all alone with this opinion.

Inevitably, if the game gets harder, more players die. Streaks will be more rare. I wouldn't mind: when I came to Crawl, it was considered to be extremely hard (I think this was a misconception, and players just didn't know how to break the game systematically), and I enjoyed playing the "unwinnable" final pre-DCSS variant 4.2. This masochistic approach to gaming is probably again more an exception. (But perhaps not among roguelike players? -- we should've asked in those surveys!)


On to some more specific details:

Smaller/shorter game: I find it funny that people campaign so vehemently for this -- we're doing this for a while now! Just looked it up, it started with DCSS 0.5 (2009), when Hive got shortened to two levels (used to be four). I think the shortening will go on, but I also think that at least for mainline Crawl this process should keep the slow rate it always had, cutting a few levels here and there. There are 0.18 plans for Orc & Elf. Like I said, I believe that these cuts will help a bit, but on their own, they cannot solve the underlying problem (in my opinion).

Levels are too big: I agree. In my experience as a middle-class player, the big levels have most impact early on, when you feel like you can really make use of the various staircases, and it's sensible to explore a level completely except for that unique and the ghost, say. Later on, levels feel cumbersome in sheer size, at least to me. I once suggested that "dungeon branch convergence" (by this I mean a branch-wide effect which gets more pronounced as you get deeper) could be about level size: full 80x72 at the start, but getting smaller as you go down. Perhaps still interesting?

Gameplay interrupted by mechanics: I think it's gotten much better now (I should really lobby for auto-butchering as the default option). Perhaps something will happen to (non-permanent) food, perhaps not, but it is noticeably less of a hassle than it used to be. Similarly, if you've been around for long enough, you'll enjoy the absence of sacrificing. More could be done -- ultimately, I think, this problem comes from having *one* map with two purposes: exploration/movement and combat. Games like FTL split this completely, which makes their flow a lot more streamlined. Again, this is not an option for Crawl. Portal vaults were an attempt to do something (little) about this: they're supposedly small (some fail miserably in this regard), and they're not part of the strategical exploration game.

Regarding monsters: Composing meaningful encounters in the non-early game is the holy grail. I have no idea how to achieve this algorithmically -- this is what the philosophy section on "lack of a human game master" is really about. Many vaults, branch end monster sets, or also ziggurats, try this: the idea is that by throwing enough randomised monster collections at the player, some will be relevant and a few even intriguing. The price is that a whole lot of them are standard fare -- trivial problems a la "mate in one move". Ideas for how to improve this are welcome, but I'm afraid it's a tough problem.
It might be interesting to compare how other games solve this. From the roguelikes I know well, Nethack does not even try to solve this (it's broken almost from the start), and Brogue solves this problem in two ways: the game clock is very tight (which makes many design consideration a lot easier, but Brogue is also linear and short) and the later monsters are too hard to clear levels, so that the game becomes assessing when to stop exploring and to start diving. That's a nifty solution, but I am not sure what Crawl can learn from this, if anything. Reports about other roguelike are very welcome, and how they solve this problem. Or don't.


So bottom line: Crawl development is bound to stick to its small steps approach. The game is just too massive for sweeping changes, I am afraid. Having variants that explore more radical approaches is very good. It was great when dtsund started Crawl Light, and it would be cool if there was more like this.

[Sprucery]

Inevitably, if the game gets harder, more players die. Streaks will be more rare. I wouldn't mind: when I came to Crawl, it was considered to be extremely hard (I think this was a misconception, and players just didn't know how to break the game systematically), and I enjoyed playing the "unwinnable" final pre-DCSS variant 4.2. This masochistic approach to gaming is probably again more an exception. (But perhaps not among roguelike players? -- we should've asked in those surveys!)

Linley's Dungeon Crawl was definitely harder in my experience, but you're right in that most players (including me) didn't play nearly optimally. I'm all for making the mid and late game a bit harder. But I think adding more dangerous monsters like caustic shrikes goes a long way.

Levels are too big: I agree. In my experience as a middle-class player, the big levels have most impact early on, when you feel like you can really make use of the various staircases, and it's sensible to explore a level completely except for that unique and the ghost, say. Later on, levels feel cumbersome in sheer size, at least to me. I once suggested that "dungeon branch convergence" (by this I mean a branch-wide effect which gets more pronounced as you get deeper) could be about level size: full 80x72 at the start, but getting smaller as you go down. Perhaps still interesting?

Autoexplore solves this completely to me. Some level map layouts could be a little more autoexplore-friendly though (I've yet to find the perfect value for the wall bias config parameter).

[dynast]

My problem regarding monsters is that you are exploring the dungeon then a pack of ogres appear, you are exploring orcish mines and a pack of ogres appear, you are exploring the vaults and a pack of ogres appear, you are exploring the depths and guess what? a pack of ogres appear. Then add a pack of orcs, a pack of elves, a pack of trolls, a pack of ugly things and there you go, you turned the game into a hack'n slash. Being tactical is not annoying, tedious or exhausting, being tactical all the time against repeated trivial packs of monsters is. The only mob that currently gives me the goosebumps are caustic shrikes, but it takes around 10 games to find one pack and its usually inside a rune vault.

[dpeg]

dynast: Well, that's the opposite of your original rant: a single, specific complaint that can be addressed.

I agree that pointless monsters should not be generated. Ogre bands only matter later on as a function of their mages, so are highly MR dependent (to a player with MR+++ or so, they're irrelevant). Perhaps another ogre leader could help, but I think troll bands fufill that job already.

[archaeo]

One underlying problem is that of branching vs linearity. I believe that Crawl's open tree-like dungeon structure is not very helpful. It's one of the reasons that makes the game so easy. I don't think it is feasible to make Crawl a linear game at this stage, it wouldn't feel like Crawl without branches. But I do think that branching could be done better. The rune lock was a first and, as I keep pointing out, very mild attempt to restrict the open dungeon structure. I believe the game would benefit from much more drastic actions in this directions, such as branches having different monster sets depending on the order in which you enter them (e.g. the first one would be as easy as now, but the second would be harder, expecting the player to have received the items and xp from the first). That's not linear, because you still have choices to skip a level, or even a branch, but it'd much less open.

Part of me thinks that this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I still don't particularly care for rune lock, however mild it may be, because one of the elements that makes Crawl replayable to me is the degree to which the path through the game is flexible.

Personally, I think the issue we're seeing is that there's just too much XP/loot between the player and the runes. Rune lock addresses that problem, in part, by locking away the biggest XP and equipment until you've gotten to one of the other runes, but it doesn't actually seem to fix much; my characters still routinely suck up 33 floors of experience before I ever enter a rune vault, even though it's very rarely necessary. This is why reducing the number of floors is an attractive notion to me, as it retains the branch structure but sharply reduces the XP/loot you can get before you head to a rune vault, the ostensible goal of rune lock.

So, as you say at the bottom of your post, a variant testing more radical cuts to the game's architecture would be an interesting exercise. It's probably not fair for me to say, "Cut 30 levels all at once!" given that the dev team really has been slowly chipping away at the game's length, but these incremental changes make it kind of hard to tell when we'll reach the game-length sweet spot. It's totally reasonable for the devs to take an incremental approach; I think a successful and fun experimental branch might encourage them to go a little further, though.

Gameplay interrupted by mechanics: I think it's gotten much better now (I should really lobby for auto-butchering as the default option). Perhaps something will happen to (non-permanent) food, perhaps not, but it is noticeably less of a hassle than it used to be. Similarly, if you've been around for long enough, you'll enjoy the absence of sacrificing. More could be done -- ultimately, I think, this problem comes from having *one* map with two purposes: exploration/movement and combat. Games like FTL split this completely, which makes their flow a lot more streamlined. Again, this is not an option for Crawl. Portal vaults were an attempt to do something (little) about this: they're supposedly small (some fail miserably in this regard), and they're not part of the strategical exploration game.

You might need to expand on this, dpeg; I'm not sure how splitting exploration and combat maps would address the mechanical interruptions.

I also totally celebrate food being less of a hassle, but as I said in my epic novel (turned spreadsheet) about removing food, that just turns it into an increasingly invisible mechanic that begins to shed every reason we have to call it "food" in the first place. Indeed, all of the many ways in which the mechanics I've discussed have become less painful (rmsl/dmsl changes, autoeating during exploring and resting, inventory bloat reduction, auto ID'd wands, corpse sac removal, etc.) have only highlighted how pointless the rest of it is.

Which isn't to say I seriously expect my wish list to come true, that I'll wake up tomorrow to find that the ID minigame and food had been removed and charms/active god buffs had been reformed; I mean, it'd be a lovely Christmas present, but I'm not holding my breath. I also think the dev team has done a really good job heading in these directions, even if it seems like most of you aren't quite interested in going as far as I would, so I'm not hatin'.

Of course, I also tend to disagree with dynast's central complaint; I still really enjoy Crawl, and even if development had stopped after 0.17, I'd probably continue enjoying it for a long time.

[MrPlanck]

This is where the game boils down to me, and start making me just want to end the run to start the next one, to then die as quickly as possible on the first floor.

I believe that this aspect of the gameplay is what inspired Crate crawl.

[dynast]

You see, when you are fighting ogres and two headed ogres before entering orcish mines they are still somewhat relevant, then you sometimes get the ogre ending and face a few mages and its ok, its threatening and all that, after that you will only meet ogres again at depths and vaults mostly, and those places are usually the last the player is going to visit before winning. Instead of creating another rank of ogres it would be just better to just get rid of them on the later parts of the game.

[dpeg]

One underlying problem is that of branching vs linearity. I believe that Crawl's open tree-like dungeon structure is not very helpful. It's one of the reasons that makes the game so easy. I don't think it is feasible to make Crawl a linear game at this stage, it wouldn't feel like Crawl without branches. But I do think that branching could be done better. The rune lock was a first and, as I keep pointing out, very mild attempt to restrict the open dungeon structure. I believe the game would benefit from much more drastic actions in this directions, such as branches having different monster sets depending on the order in which you enter them (e.g. the first one would be as easy as now, but the second would be harder, expecting the player to have received the items and xp from the first). That's not linear, because you still have choices to skip a level, or even a branch, but it'd much less open.

Part of me thinks that this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I still don't particularly care for rune lock, however mild it may be, because one of the elements that makes Crawl replayable to me is the degree to which the path through the game is flexible.

You probably don't mean it, but to me this sounds a bit like the complaints about "restricting choices" when something is removed (where the goal, as ever, is to increase choices by nerfing or removing the dominating option).

Personally, I think the issue we're seeing is that there's just too much XP/loot between the player and the runes. Rune lock addresses that problem, in part, by locking away the biggest XP and equipment until you've gotten to one of the other runes, but it doesn't actually seem to fix much; my characters still routinely suck up 33 floors of experience before I ever enter a rune vault, even though it's very rarely necessary. This is why reducing the number of floors is an attractive notion to me, as it retains the branch structure but sharply reduces the XP/loot you can get before you head to a rune vault, the ostensible goal of rune lock.

Don't expect too much about sharply reducing pre-rune XP/loot.

I think the main point is simple: if you face a stiff situation in a linear game such as Brogue, then you have to decide between perservering and fighting through it, or skipping it -- neither option might be easy to carry out, and deadly in itself. By contrast, in Crawl you can reliably skip the level, and even the branch, and do something else for a while. This is (part of) how I understand dynast's complaint about "unforgivably forgiving".

Gameplay interrupted by mechanics: I think it's gotten much better now (I should really lobby for auto-butchering as the default option). Perhaps something will happen to (non-permanent) food, perhaps not, but it is noticeably less of a hassle than it used to be. Similarly, if you've been around for long enough, you'll enjoy the absence of sacrificing. More could be done -- ultimately, I think, this problem comes from having *one* map with two purposes: exploration/movement and combat. Games like FTL split this completely, which makes their flow a lot more streamlined. Again, this is not an option for Crawl. Portal vaults were an attempt to do something (little) about this: they're supposedly small (some fail miserably in this regard), and they're not part of the strategical exploration game.

You might need to expand on this, dpeg; I'm not sure how splitting exploration and combat maps would address the mechanical interruptions.

In Crawl and all classical roguelikes, each floor square has two functions: it is part of the travel map, and part of the battle location.

In Crawl, your typical battle arena is LOS-sized, and due to noise a bit bigger than that. Big vaults and rune levels can have noticeably large battle areas. Within your battle area, many little things can matter: walls, water, floor, presence and position of monsters etc.
By contrast, from a strategical point of view (travel/exploration), a map is trivial if it's been explored and cleared fully. If you have a weak-ish/early character, then the level really matters on both fronts: you can check which staircase is best to re-enter the level, how best to avoid certain monsters etc.
But more often, the two aspects of a map meet unfavourably: because our maps are so large, you can almost always lure monsters back to a safe place.

I imagine a tactically interesting encounter to consist of a a perhaps 20x20-sized chunk composed of interesting layout and monsters -- think of a vault. Being able to interact with the map outside of that chunk is detrimental: luring, teleportation, kiting are all aspects of this.

How is this related to gameplay-interruptions: the food clock is (well, one aspect of food is) a strategical effect; when you explore (which takes many turns, thanks to Crawl's huge levels), you get reminded all the time of the strategical costs for playing. By contrast, spell hunger is a much more tactical cost: it's a form of saying "with your current Spellcasting and Intelligence, you can use Freezing Cloud a few times, but if you want to use it as a regular problem solver, you have to do something about it".

I'm afraid I am not doing a good job at getting my point across, so try to imagine a game of Crawl where there is no exploration at all. Instead, you get prompted each time:

You can choose between the following four vaults:

1. Threat: orc warrior band. Loot: only consumables. Cost: 3 rations to enter, can be revisited.
2. Threat: death yaks. Loot: consumables and armour items. Cost: 4 rations to enter, can be revisited.
3. Threat: Minotaur. Loot: lots and very random. Cost: 12 rations to enter, cannot be revisited.

That way, you can cleanly split tactical and strategical effects/costs, and there would be no interruption, because exploration is the choice of encounters.

This is not a problem in a game like Brogue, where levels are small and there is little backtracking anyway. There is some annoying backtracking in Nethack, because it has branches -- but at least the levels are small (80x23). In Crawl, the problem is really annoying because is has huge levels *and* branches. That's why the travel patch was such a godsend.

[archaeo]

You probably don't mean it, but to me this sounds a bit like the complaints about "restricting choices" when something is removed (where the goal, as ever, is to increase choices by nerfing or removing the dominating option).

My apologies, but that is basis of my complaint. I totally understand eliminating "no-brainers" in order to increase the game's decision space, but I don't think rune lock does that; instead, I think it merely formalizes and enforces what was already the "optimal" path through the game. As I recall from the original debates on the topic, I said something like, "I'm all for testing this idea"; I think the idea has been tested, and while it does an excellent job of requiring players to at least get one rune before vaults, it doesn't really make that branch end any more difficult or exciting, and it does tend to restrict players' choices instead of increasing them.

But of course, that's just my opinion, and I respect where you're coming from.

Don't expect too much about sharply reducing pre-rune XP/loot.

I think the main point is simple: if you face a stiff situation in a linear game such as Brogue, then you have to decide between perservering and fighting through it, or skipping it -- neither option might be easy to carry out, and deadly in itself. By contrast, in Crawl you can reliably skip the level, and even the branch, and do something else for a while. This is (part of) how I understand dynast's complaint about "unforgivably forgiving".

I think my point is mainly that, rather than making the game linear, making all of the branches from the main dungeon significantly shorter will accomplish the same thing without necessitating a major change in the game's architecture. Ideally, no branch choice is the easy or obvious choice, or the choice reliably depends on the strategic decisions the player has made or the items they've found in the dungeon. Half the reason character building seems to "end" at the midgame is because we have 27-30 floors a player can explore before even setting foot in a rune branch.

I'm afraid I am not doing a good job at getting my point across

Oh, I disagree, that was an excellent description, thank you for expanding on your point.

I have to say, a Crawl that had no exploration sounds like an interesting game -- doesn't Darkest Dungeon do something like this? -- but it doesn't sound much like Crawl, as you acknowledge. Personally, I think that many of these issues go away when you remove the interruptions and make each floor smaller, but I also get the distinct impression that everybody who spends time thinking about Crawl has their own pet theories on how it should be fixed.

[all before]

The problem isn't that the player has a choice between branches, it's that the player has to go back and repeat the branches they didn't choose at a point in the game when they are trivial. If you choose spider over swamp, you still have to play spider after. Also, the choice of S branch is pretty trivial because at any point in time you can go back and select the other option without consequence. Did spider turn out to be too hard? Just leave and play swamp instead. (Optimal-play-wise, you're encouraged to swap back and forth between branches.) These are the reasons why 3rd-rune choice is currently more interesting than 1st rune choice: You don't have to complete V:5 if you do M or A. And V and A at least make it somewhat difficult to leave once you've chosen.

The major way in which crawl discourages players from diving is loot. The XP needed for level gain increases exponentially, so at a certain point you can skip levels without much consequence. But you don't really want to miss those scrolls or potions. That's why I think hellifying loot past D and L would be one way to combat the tactical vs. strategic map divergence dpeg describes.

Trying to give every branch a completely unique monster set seems to me like a mistake. Adding more monster types increases cognitive load on a player, and at a certain point they all seem like minor variations on one another. Does it really matter which hp-sack melee dude a branch has? Which glass canon? A better design goal is for a branch to have a good mixture of threats with a few monsters or layout features that make it unique. Vaults is a great example: big mix of monsters that aren't all limited by a theme, to which is added the various vault dudes that make the place stand out and make combat in it unique.

[Ceann]

It seems to me that being able to move between branches is kind of valuable in the early-mid game. If I happened to find MR then I would be more inclined to go to Orc before Lair because I won't have to worry about getting paralyzed by Orc Sorc. As the items you get are varied and you sometimes go as far down as you can in the dungeon before going to a branch, it really becomes more a matter of meeting certain resist requirements to go to certain branches. Another case for MR most people avoid doing E:3 until they have at minimum MR++ but ideally MR+++ so you won't get banished. So the ability to float around among the branches until you acquire certain items you need to cover the threats of a particular branch is important in my mind. Now if you are playing a Sp or someone with a high natural MR it might seem trivial but different races have different problems with different things.

If the branches forced you do them in a particular order, or lets just say for example you were forced to Orc and then Elf before doing Lair, your death by getting banished becomes almost a guarantee if you do not have the appropriate resists. At which point you get to a point where you might as well make traps on the floor that if a character steps on them, they just die. Now that might sound a little extreme as an example but if you force players to deal with certain threats that they don't have some way to bypass or get around you may as well just be killing them.

The biggest problem that I think of when thinking about changes is that there are so many things in the game that all connected to each other in tiny ways and changing one can have unforeseen large ripples on a particular race,class, item etc. I don't really have any problem with the length of the game, people CAN DO 3 rune run's. You are not forced to do the rest and there are some that like to do all the rest, anything after 3 rune's is optional so I don't see how taking things away from those that want those options is beneficial.

What if we took away all the races except Fe,Op,Mu for a month, I don't think as many people would consider the game "easy". In the case of Fe,Op everyone would just play TM^Chei and statue 50,000 times. The thing that makes the game easier is when you play races with great apt's or obscene racial bonuses "looking at you Gr,Mi,DD" and you pick ^Mak,^Veh,^Trog.

At what point does playing whats easy constitute the game being easy?

Also as was mentioned, any game can be mastered. Like when I was a kid I didn't know about any of the codes for Contra and I just played it endlessly until I could play the game without dying because I memorized all of the attack patterns. The only games that can't really be mastered are ones that are pure chance, so unless someone wants to take up professional coin flipping, there aren't many options for that.

[Ceann]

The problem isn't that the player has a choice between branches, it's that the player has to go back and repeat the branches they didn't choose at a point in the game when they are trivial. If you choose spider over swamp, you still have to play spider after. Also, the choice of S branch is pretty trivial because at any point in time you can go back and select the other option without consequence.

Remember that sometimes this is forced, if I go down into Swamps and find Nikola camping the stairs, or Mara, I might just have to go other places and come back when I either found rElec or I am strong enough to kill the Unique that is in my way. Or you find Kirke and you don't have any MR. I don't think these are quite corner cases because it happens often enough.

[tedric]

I don't really have any problem with the length of the game, people CAN DO 3 rune run's. You are not forced to do the rest and there are some that like to do all the rest, anything after 3 rune's is optional so I don't see how taking things away from those that want those options is beneficial.

I think most (all?) of the people advocating for shorter branches are of the opinion that the 3-rune game itself is longer than it needs to be.

[Ceann]

You have people that are doing 30-40k 15 rune runs. I can't really imagine that they couldn't manage a 3 rune in even less turns. Once you get into doing actual speed runs "which seems to be more about avoiding content than actually playing it" it makes one wonder what exactly you are playing for in the first place. Maybe we should just have the Orb beside the entrance?

[tabstorm]

You have people that are doing 30-40k 15 rune runs. I can't really imagine that they couldn't manage a 3 rune in even less turns. Once you get into doing actual speed runs "which seems to be more about avoiding content than actually playing it" it makes one wonder what exactly you are playing for in the first place. Maybe we should just have the Orb beside the entrance?

The main reason to play this way is that the game is too easy to be fun when played normally. This is mainly due to the ease of luring single monsters to safe areas to fight them 1v1 and then rest up, and in part due to an excess of experience. Playing for score gets rid of both of these issues because there is less experience and because you don't want to waste a ton of turns luring every monster to a safe area. In this way you get tactical challenges that are interesting to overcome, as opposed to "I'm facing a tactical challenge because I was too lazy to lure that enemy to a safe spot because it is a pain." However, the RNG makes playing for score frustrating, since a few items (amulet of regeneration, ring of teleportation, ring/cloak of rPois to name a few) make a HUGE difference in your final score.

Once you realize that you can dissolve almost all tactical challenges by simply kiting more, assuming that you started playing this game for tactical challenges, you are going to have to go out of your way to impose them on yourself. In other words, you are trying to experience the content in an interesting way.

[Ceann]

You have people that are doing 30-40k 15 rune runs. I can't really imagine that they couldn't manage a 3 rune in even less turns. Once you get into doing actual speed runs "which seems to be more about avoiding content than actually playing it" it makes one wonder what exactly you are playing for in the first place. Maybe we should just have the Orb beside the entrance?

The main reason to play this way is that the game is too easy to be fun when played normally. This is mainly due to the ease of luring single monsters to safe areas to fight them 1v1 and then rest up, and in part due to an excess of experience. Playing for score gets rid of both of these issues because there is less experience and because you don't want to waste a ton of turns luring every monster to a safe area. In this way you get tactical challenges that are interesting to overcome, as opposed to "I'm facing a tactical challenge because I was too lazy to lure that enemy to a safe spot because it is a pain." However, the RNG makes playing for score frustrating, since a few items (amulet of regeneration, ring of teleportation, ring/cloak of rPois to name a few) make a HUGE difference in your final score.

Once you realize that you can dissolve almost all tactical challenges by simply kiting more, assuming that you started playing this game for tactical challenges, you are going to have to go out of your way to impose them on yourself. In other words, you are trying to experience the content in an interesting way.

While there are some points in where I would agree, there are some points where I would entirely disagree.

The MAIN factors in getting good scores is POSITIVE aptitudes.
You can consider the fights generally a "check" of meeting certain skill levels in a certain skill. Ex. If you play an IE but you can't cast Icicle in your starting book by a certain point, you will die because using your other Cj spells just won't kill anything.
Now the POINT in which you can meet that criteria is vastly different depending on Race, a DE would obviously meet that criteria much sooner than say... a Mu or a Tr. So now you are talking about turn count based wins that actually becomes based on which race has better aptitude or experience multipliers.

I certainly wouldn't expect to see a 35k 15 rune MuFi or FeCj. The actual scoring system based on turncount is pretty flawed in my mind.

[dynast]

http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/4t ... 234357.txt Just FYI.

If you play a IE but you can't cast icicle it is because you trained something else to use as a killing tool. Also Ice beasts.

[Ceann]

I understand that you could have trained icebeast, it was an example.

My point is that races with positive aptitudes can get to the required skills level for ability's to handle certain threats earlier than those no positive aptitudes. In some cases far before others.
-1 and -2 exp should get point modifiers for end score, because they are forced to kill more things to accomplish the same things.

In regards to the morgue, yea everyone knows Statue is Op.

[dynast]

The MAIN factors in getting good scores is POSITIVE aptitudes.

The morgue was a response to that, in case you missed.

My point is that races with positive aptitudes can get to the required skills level for ability's to handle certain threats earlier than those no positive aptitudes. In some cases far before others.
-1 and -2 exp should get point modifiers for end score, because they are forced to kill more things to accomplish the same things.

I can only assume you havent played a Troll yet, also trolls would have the best highscores if that was the case.

But i guess you are just forgetting about mutations.

[ydeve]

This is not a problem in a game like Brogue, where levels are small and there is little backtracking anyway. There is some annoying backtracking in Nethack, because it has branches -- but at least the levels are small (80x23). In Crawl, the problem is really annoying because is has huge levels *and* branches. That's why the travel patch was such a godsend.

Personally, I don't find backtracking to be a hassle at all in Crawl because of autotravel. Compare this to Nethack where backtracking takes ages because you have to manually take each step. I think one of the things Crawl takes care of very well is making travel not tedious. But like dynast said, there's way too much popcorn in some of the later branches. Ogre packs can go away after Orc, normal orcs and orc warriors can be replaced by orc knights in Vaults, why do orc wizards and priests appear after Orc? Replace them with sorcerers and high priests, etc.