The Tavern

I love mercenaries, and it is really sad that the only way to get them is with Deck of Changes (is it?)
does anyone share that feeling with me? I think a rare-ish shop that sells mercs for double the price you see in the decks would be nice. if there is enough interest, and a decent chance that it will make to Trunk, I could give at shot at coding it. what do you people think?

Yes, it's really sad that decks and mercenaries still exist.

oh, come on. some people have fun using them. (mercenaries, not decks. decks are boring.)
and it is rare to actually see the mechanic of monsters leveling up, which is really cool and underused in my opinion. even the micromanagement is not bad when it is <8 allies.

Some people had fun using divinations, mountain dwarves, summons that attacked out of LOS, etc. That doesn't make them good features.

ok, I'll bite. why are they bad features?

Ally AI is pretty bad, and they require a lot of care and micromanagement to keep alive, which just detracts from the whole experience.

I agree. that's why Yred is annoying, Beogh is unbearable, and Summons are tedious. in fact, the only allies that aren't terrible are mercs. a single one, easier to micro, does not clutter your screen. the two gods would be nice too, if they didn't fill the screen to the point where it becomes very confusing. I don't like summons, but that's personal preference.

chequers wrote:Ally AI is pretty bad, and they require a lot of care and micromanagement to keep alive, which just detracts from the whole experience.

I find having allies fun. it would be great to see a mercenary shop, or some new way to acquire allies.

I don't mind allies, but I tend to agree that permanent allies need the structure of a god to even make them vaguely acceptable.

Permanent allies have a pretty big problem with taking damage.

If they heal: when they take damage, you want to rest up your ally as well as yourself. Player resting is already merely the least-bad of several bad options, so adding more resting in this fashion isn't improving anything. Additionally keeping the ally alive at all is a huge benefit compared to letting it die (since it will eventually heal up), so you run into some of the problem below:

If they don't heal: now the problem is the player wants to go to pretty extreme lengths to prevent the ally from taking damage. Most fights in crawl (because of the scale of the game) are easy and must be easy, so the player can quite easily do this even if it is not the safest way to play a particular encounter.

The ally god in experimental gets around this (to my understanding, I haven't tried yet) by really making your ally more like a summon than a permanent ally. It just has a cap of 1 and infinite duration.

new evocable item, mercenary pact
evoke to summon a mercenary (naga/merfolk minimum, no big kobolds)
evoke again while your mercenary is not on-screen to recall it
evoke again while your mercenary is on-screen to dismiss it
when you dismiss your mercenary, it gets "stored" in your pact and is summoned again when you evoke
if your mercenary dies, the mercenary pact becomes inert
after you gain enough experience, the mercenary pact recharges and can be evoked again to resurrect the mercenary

Mercenaries are fun and I think this would fix many of their problems.

crate wrote:Permanent allies have a pretty big problem with taking damage.

If they heal: when they take damage, you want to rest up your ally as well as yourself. Player resting is already merely the least-bad of several bad options, so adding more resting in this fashion isn't improving anything. Additionally keeping the ally alive at all is a huge benefit compared to letting it die (since it will eventually heal up), so you run into some of the problem below:

If they don't heal: now the problem is the player wants to go to pretty extreme lengths to prevent the ally from taking damage. Most fights in crawl (because of the scale of the game) are easy and must be easy, so the player can quite easily do this even if it is not the safest way to play a particular encounter.

The ally god in experimental gets around this (to my understanding, I haven't tried yet) by really making your ally more like a summon than a permanent ally. It just has a cap of 1 and infinite duration.

this makes a lot of sense, thank you.
I don't think just resting more is such a big problem, but I can see why it is. I'll try the experimental branch, and see.

My main problem with mercenaries is when they fall down a shaft or into a teleport trap and i havent learned the recall spell yet, which leads me to search for a invisible corpse.

Mercenaries are just no longer any fun,
Back when I was a young whippersnapper I could equip my tengu pal with gda, the shield of resistance and an autumn katana, The 1 who shines would then enchant his/her armour and weapons while at the same time benevolantly heal and cure him/her.

Nowadays my naga buddy starts in a robe with a short sword and will stay that way doomed to die to the first fire cloud he meets, even though I found 3 naga bardings could hook him up with some nice randart plate and at least give him a spear.

Luckily we still have Beogh ... right

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