What is bad about permanent allies

[MainiacJoe]

I'll split this myself from the 'which gods would you remove thread"

I see fairly consistently here the idea that permanent allies are bad design-wise, often enoguh that I'd call it a consensus. But coming late the party, I'm not sure why this is the consensus. What is so bad about them?

NB I've not ever played a Yred or Beogh character. Perhaps if I had it would be obvious, but please indulge me and take the time to write it out. I appreciate it, this has puzzled me for a long time but TBH I didn't want to advertise my noobishness by asking, until now.

[Sandman25]

My main problem with permanent allies is that I start playing "Save the allies" game instead of normal crawl: all those trips to stairs to tell them wait, waiting for allies to catch up, stupid opening of doors (cannot happen in trunk) etc. I even died once trying to save an Orc Warlord in Vaults.

Edit. Also Orcs are incredibly stupid in Swamp, they will drown all the time.

[goodcoolguy]

Like all allies, there's a balance issue. Allies are just better than anything else you can have going on and they're cheaply available in a number of ways. The issue is intensified by the interface issues of allies, running afoul of crawl design philosophy in a big way.

The permanence issue, in my opinion, is overblown. The main problems have to do with getting your dudes to follow you across levels and so on and are basically UI issues. People who have a mental model where your odds of winning don't max out tend to sweat things like dead permanent allies. I think this is the wrong way to think about it, but it's something people feel they have to worry about. Hepliaklqana gets this part of it right, but gets the more important balance part totally wrong unfortunately.

[Gongclonker]

I like permanent allies. It's sort of self-balancing. I play as carefully as normal when I have a Hep ally, and don't really feel THAT much stronger because of it. When I have a Beogh messiah going, it can snowball the floors a bit, but commanding the orcs becomes such a micromanagement issue that I don't bother with careful play as much as I should. It's very hard to keep allies alive, especially specific, individual allies, for long - so the ring-of-meat-shields strategy only works so well even if you dig/disintegrate out the level to set up an advantage. The same seems to be true for durable summons, spectral mobs, etc.

As for why people don't like permanent allies, my guess is that they detract from the consistency of the game, since you have a guy with you that is constantly ready to suck up some or all of your XP for a kill, and the lengths of branches are designed to more consistently deliver XP to the player than a system with allies will sometimes allow. Commanding them and gifting them stuff is sort of janky, but if they had AIs that were as good as any skilled player's, being able to do those things would be borderline OP anyway.

[Shard1697]

The interface for getting allies what you want them to do is awkward and clunky at the best of times(when I tell you to WAIT HERE I want you to HOLD STILL), it gets a lot worse when you are incentivized to actually micromanage it in order to keep your very useful and also mortal allies alive.

Not fun to have an orc warlord standing in a poison cloud, you blink away and yell "follow me!" and he refuses to walk towards you out of the cloud, then tell him to (r)etreat to a clear tile and he still refuses to walk out of the cloud(probably because an enemy right next to him was tapping him with a melee attack before he would move each time, making him forget my orders in favor of attacking the enemy)... and so he gets fatally poisoned and dies like an idiot, and all the time and XP spent training him up is gone.

[duvessa]

Crawl's allies make your actions revolve around them on every turn that they exist. This is pretty bad.

[MainiacJoe]

Crawl's allies make your actions revolve around them on every turn that they exist. This is pretty bad.

That sounds like it describes summons, too, which I've gathered you see as very strong. So I think what you mean is, summons is strong gameplay but bad design because of how they warp your decision making. Permanent allies are worse than summons because the decision making is warped all the time. Did I get that right?

[genericpseudonym]

The decisionmaking is also more warped by permanent allies. If your ice beast dies you're just out 4 mana. Either you recast it or you run away and try again later.

If Garbeogh the orc warlord dies you lose a lot more. So even if the player himself is in little or no danger he has to constantly worry about babysitting his stupid orcs.

[duvessa]

Yes, both of you are correct.

[Sar]

this might sound really stupid to you but people who pick Beogh probably actually enjoy the idea of keeping their orcs alive

the interface could've been better, of course

[Shard1697]

Speaking for myself, I pick Beogh because I like the endgame of rolling around murdering everything with a pack of orc warlords. I don't really like the process of getting to that point very much.

[dowan]

A major problem is most allies use the same AI as the enemies. An AI that is purposely incredibly stupid, which works fine for enemies, but not so much for allies. So they do stupid things like walk into mephitic clouds in swamp and drown themselves, or walk into your line of fire, or walk in front of your OOD and then have the gall to get mad at you...

[duvessa]

I guess a more succinct response to this topic would have been "literally everything"

[dowan]

Succinct yes. Useful... not so much.