dcss mechanics tier list


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Post Tuesday, 26th September 2017, 14:59

dcss mechanics tier list

I was looking at that thread about ghosts and I realized I'd never committed my crawl mechanics shit list to writing, so I thought I'd give it a shot:

SS: Food/hunger
S: Identification, curses/ashenzari, stairs
A: Allies, player ghosts, duration spell mechanics, lack of checks on high turncount tactics (kiting/luring etc.)
B: monster equipment, ammo, equipment swapping esp. jewelry, staves, and weapons with defensive properties, wands inventory, misc. layout issues*
C: shops/gold, nemelex, spell fail rates, direct damage spell mechanics, combo character creation model, persistent levels/dungeon geography
D: decorative vaults, trash monster generation

*: misc. layout issues here means layouts heavy on corridors and chokepoints, lack of structure, unsuitable for manual exploration.
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Post Tuesday, 26th September 2017, 21:28

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

S: Inventory Management, Wands, Throwing, Ammo, Harmful Potions, Useless Scrolls, Swappable items with defences
A: Vampires
B: Food
C: Auto-explore implementation
D: Rupert

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Post Tuesday, 26th September 2017, 21:41

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

SS: ghosts
S: random Pan lord abilities not being shown
A: Beogh being HO only
B: Jiyva not being easily accessible

that's it
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 16:12

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

SS: pressing directional buttons to move on the grid while monsters are present, and pressing directional buttons or tab to attack monsters
S: pressing o to autoexplore
A: pressing a to use cool god abilities
B: pressing z to cast spells
C: pressing f to fire ranged weapons
D: pressing anything to look at or interact with floor items
F: pressing anything to eat or butcher

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 16:43

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

tome4 mechanics tier list

SS: admins can read from and write to any file on your computer as long as you're logged in in-game
S: you can pay money to transfer items between characters
A: a memory leak potentially occurs every time an actor tries to deal damage
B: the game continues to release paid DLC and recently increased the number of talents past 1,500 (almost all of which can be randomly given to enemies), meanwhile every class in the game suffers from a decade-old, game-breaking bug with sustained talents
C: you can "sell" items directly from inventory at any time, but savvy players take their valuable items to a specific shop instead, as that specific shop gives you more money
D: you have to get certain achievements to unlock certain classes. after unlocking them, you need to get further achievements in order to unlock some of their skill trees

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 17:56

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:tome4 mechanics tier list

SS: admins can read from and write to any file on your computer as long as you're logged in in-game

What in the serious fuck, really?

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 18:14

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Yes. The lead developer refuses to acknowledge it for obvious reasons, but I assure you it is true. This capability was only added after many years of development, so I think he originally really did intend to just make a game, and eventually decided that making it into malware could be a great way to get more money (or just for kicks, or maybe he's just so stupid that he doesn't realize this is a bad thing, hell if I know).
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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 19:38

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:Yes. The lead developer refuses to acknowledge it for obvious reasons, but I assure you it is true. This capability was only added after many years of development, so I think he originally really did intend to just make a game, and eventually decided that making it into malware could be a great way to get more money (or just for kicks, or maybe he's just so stupid that he doesn't realize this is a bad thing, hell if I know).


for real the guy who made the breeding caverns probably is just stupid as hell
take it easy

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 20:19

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:Yes. The lead developer refuses to acknowledge it for obvious reasons, but I assure you it is true. This capability was only added after many years of development, so I think he originally really did intend to just make a game, and eventually decided that making it into malware could be a great way to get more money (or just for kicks, or maybe he's just so stupid that he doesn't realize this is a bad thing, hell if I know).


Really? Is there any proof of that? I tried to research but couldn't find anything online backing up what you're saying, and that's a pretty serious problem if it's actually happening. Did you find this out yourself or did you read it somewhere?

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 20:32

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

The game allows the server to send an arbitrary string that gets executed as Lua code, and its environment has access to file read and write functions and the socket library that allows making HTTP connections. The relevant code is in web.c:
  Code:
                case TE4_WEB_EVENT_RUN_LUA:
                        if (!luaL_loadstring(he_L, event->data.run_lua.code)) {
                                docall(he_L, 0, 0);
                        } else {
                                printf("[WEBCORE] Failed to run lua code:\n%s\n ==>> Error: %s\n", event->data.run_lua.code, lua_tostring(he_L, -1));
                                lua_pop(he_L, 1);
                        }
                        break;

docall:
  Code:
int docall (lua_State *L, int narg, int nret)
{
#if 1
        int status;
        int base = lua_gettop(L) - narg;  /* function index */
//      printf("<===%d (%d)\n", base, narg);
        lua_pushcfunction(L, traceback);  /* push traceback function */
        lua_insert(L, base);  /* put it under chunk and args */
        status = lua_pcall(L, narg, nret, base);
        lua_remove(L, base);  /* remove traceback function */
        /* force a complete garbage collection in case of errors */
        if (status != 0) { lua_pop(L, 1); lua_gc(L, LUA_GCCOLLECT, 0); }
//      printf(">===%d (%d) [%d]\n", lua_gettop(L), nret, status);
        if (lua_gettop(L) != nret + (base - 1))
        {
                stackDump(L);
//              assert(0);
                lua_settop(L, base);
        }
        return status;
#else
        int status=0;
        int base = lua_gettop(L) - narg;  /* function index */
        lua_call(L, narg, nret);
        return status;
#endif
}
This is also experimentally demonstrated by taking a look at your save file after a special event like Bearscape occurs.

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 20:46

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:The game allows the server to send an arbitrary string that gets executed as Lua code, and its environment has access to file read and write functions and the socket library that allows making HTTP connections. The relevant code is in web.c:

For those interested in looking into this further, a link to the relevant line in the ToME4 git repo:

https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... web.c#L384

and its CDO mirror, although this appears to no longer be updated:
http://git.develz.org/?p=tome.git;a=blob;f=src/web.c

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 20:50

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:The game allows the server to send an arbitrary string that gets executed as Lua code, and its environment has access to file read and write functions and the socket library that allows making HTTP connections. The relevant code is in web.c:
  Code:
                case TE4_WEB_EVENT_RUN_LUA:
                        if (!luaL_loadstring(he_L, event->data.run_lua.code)) {
                                docall(he_L, 0, 0);
                        } else {
                                printf("[WEBCORE] Failed to run lua code:\n%s\n ==>> Error: %s\n", event->data.run_lua.code, lua_tostring(he_L, -1));
                                lua_pop(he_L, 1);
                        }
                        break;

docall:
  Code:
int docall (lua_State *L, int narg, int nret)
{
#if 1
        int status;
        int base = lua_gettop(L) - narg;  /* function index */
//      printf("<===%d (%d)\n", base, narg);
        lua_pushcfunction(L, traceback);  /* push traceback function */
        lua_insert(L, base);  /* put it under chunk and args */
        status = lua_pcall(L, narg, nret, base);
        lua_remove(L, base);  /* remove traceback function */
        /* force a complete garbage collection in case of errors */
        if (status != 0) { lua_pop(L, 1); lua_gc(L, LUA_GCCOLLECT, 0); }
//      printf(">===%d (%d) [%d]\n", lua_gettop(L), nret, status);
        if (lua_gettop(L) != nret + (base - 1))
        {
                stackDump(L);
//              assert(0);
                lua_settop(L, base);
        }
        return status;
#else
        int status=0;
        int base = lua_gettop(L) - narg;  /* function index */
        lua_call(L, narg, nret);
        return status;
#endif
}
This is also experimentally demonstrated by taking a look at your save file after a special event like Bearscape occurs.



Wow, amazing. Guess I should let my friends who play ToME know about this. Thanks for the information!

To stay on-topic, here's my tier list:

S: MUTATION
A: Orbs of Fire
B: Neqoxecs
C: rarity of cureMut
D: mutation

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 21:02

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

nethack mechanics tier list

SS: writing down the unidentified descriptions of items in case a mind flayer attacks you
S: elbereth
A: using helm of opposite alignment swapping to carry cross-aligned quest artifacts
B: jousting
C: wresting one last wish from a wand
D: whatever that supposedly abusable lava bug was, man I wish I had figured out how to abuse that

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 21:04

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

iji mechanics shit list:

none, iji is a perfect game

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:03

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Nobody has mentioned the sole occupant of SSS tier.

Mimics. The most fascinating feature in all of Crawl's distinguished history. Whenever you read the words, "The foo chuckles and vanishes in a puff of smoke!", you feel such a rush of satisfaction at seeing this *wonderfully* interesting phenomenon. They're even more interesting than food, which is quite an achievement, since everyone should know that the primary goal of Crawl is to ultimately decide whether to eat a bread ration or a royal jelly. Ghosts, pah. Ghosts are so very wonderfully excellent in their interestingness, yes, but they would be nothing without food and mimics.

To run for an ice cave, only for it to chortle and disappear with a magnificent "poof!", then to read the message "You need to eat something NOW!!!", and then to open that most glorious of menus to decide the greatest question in the game between bread, meat, jelly, or fruit; to do all of these truly admirable and interesting things while being chased by someone's generic MiBe ghost...that, ladies and gentlemen, is the pinnacle of Crawl perfection.

I have my own tier list for them.

S+: Portal mimics.
S: Food shop mimics.
A: Other shop mimics.
B: Item mimics.
C: Staircase mimics.
D: Fountain mimics.
E: Rune mimics.

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:09

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Blomdor wrote:Nobody has mentioned the sole occupant of SSS tier.

Mimics. The most fascinating feature in all of Crawl's distinguished history. Whenever you read the words, "The foo chuckles and vanishes in a puff of smoke!", you feel such a rush of satisfaction at seeing this *wonderfully* interesting phenomenon. They're even more interesting than food, which is quite an achievement, since everyone should know that the primary goal of Crawl is to ultimately decide whether to eat a bread ration or a royal jelly. Ghosts, pah. Ghosts are so very wonderfully excellent in their interestingness, yes, but they would be nothing without food and mimics.

To run for an ice cave, only for it to chortle and disappear with a magnificent "poof!", then to read the message "You need to eat something NOW!!!", and then to open that most glorious of menus to decide the greatest question in the game between bread, meat, jelly, or fruit; to do all of these truly admirable and interesting things while being chased by someone's generic MiBe ghost...that, ladies and gentlemen, is the pinnacle of Crawl perfection.

I have my own tier list for them.

S+: Portal mimics.
S: Food shop mimics.
A: Other shop mimics.
B: Item mimics.
C: Staircase mimics.
D: Fountain mimics.
E: Rune mimics.

See, and here I thought you yearned for the days when they wouldn't just chortle and disappear, but rather become a monster and attack you :)
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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:14

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

did traps get removed?

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:19

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Oh, no no no. They are far more interesting this way, because they now do absolutely nothing instead of *almost* nothing. No half measures, no compromises. They must be actually, entirely pointless to be worthy of the great triumvirate of food, ghosts, and mimics.

Ezero: traps still exist! Thank Trog for this. The game would be so much less interesting without random and generally pointless effects for stepping on certain arbitrary floor tiles. Ossuaries are full of them, hence why they are one of the best areas of Crawl.
Last edited by Blomdor on Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:22, edited 2 times in total.

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:20

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

I honestly kind of prefered it when mimics attacked just because it sometimes meant something other than just "you don't actually get that item, hyuck hyuck". which is just so stupid and pointless

very bad for any character weak enough that a mimic could be dangerous in melee though because it meant throwing rocks at everything so it's kind of a wash but that doesn't really excuse mimics existing

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 22:23

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

But...but "you don't actually get that item, hyuck hyuck" is a perfect summary of what makes Crawl great! Alongside "you have to eat something NOW!!!" it ought to be the official motto. Don't you agree?

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Post Thursday, 28th September 2017, 12:30

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Tier List for Go/igo/baduk/weiqi

S: Opening "theory", Super Ko
A: Starting player advantage, Ko
B: Komi
C: Differences between scoring rules, AGA rules
D:

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Post Thursday, 28th September 2017, 17:01

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

tierlists for tierlists

SS: tierlists that go through multiple levels of irony to determine whether S is high or low
S: tierlists that make references to obscure things out of context
A: tierlists that are just a thin excuse for listing gripes with very little thought put into the actual order
B: tierlists that obviously have difficulty filling all the tiers with meaningful content
C: tierlists that actually unironically try to determine the relative power of things
D: this tierlist

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Post Thursday, 28th September 2017, 23:22

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Tierlist for ways to get lots of thanks:

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Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 01:33

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

In retrospect, I should have structured the OP as a Drake meme.
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Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 05:33

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

labyrinth mechanic tier list

S+: Map Rot
S: Disallowing autoexplore
A: Shifting walls
B: Mocking the player about auto explore
C: hungry ghost vaults
D: abyss entrances
E: minotaur picking up randarts

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Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 05:52

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

You forgot exploring the entire labyrinth so that you get all the loot and xp from the vaults

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Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 16:25

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

When ever I try to play normal crawl after doing some hellcrawl I always wind up stopping due to:

Food/hunger
Identification, curses/ashenzari

These things are burdensome in an aboslutely un-fun way and are extremely un-interesting. Chop corpse, eat, chop corpse, eat. Over and over. I have almost never played a character that is seriously truly limited by food either. Id and curses are also uninteresting I just wind up being very conservative about what to use and it just limits my tactical/strategic options. These features have extremely significant and extremely repetitive gameplay weight (i.e you are dealing with them all the time), they have no particuarly useful effect on the overall game (i know in theory the food clock has a purpose, but in a practical sense it does very very little), and there is no interesting thought process to deal with them (you just continuously keep eating chunks or store your food or you just save your ID scrolls, that is it). You never bother trying to find that +5 scimitar because it has no brand and there is just too much clutter and not enough ID scrolls to ever make it worth while, it is literally a dead end. You might as well never bother even spawning the +5 scimitar because eventually I will find a +2 branded scimitar and just enchant it up. In hellcrawl when ID and curse is remvoed I am actually presented with much more nuanced equipment decisions, even though both weapons and scrolls are in more limited supply.

The other stuff is arguable or doesn't bug me so much (yes stair dancing is problematic but it doesn't make the game annoying to play for almost no good effect.)

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Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 18:49

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

severen wrote:When ever I try to play normal crawl after doing some hellcrawl I always wind up stopping due to:

Food/hunger
Identification, curses/ashenzari

These things are burdensome in an aboslutely un-fun way and are extremely un-interesting. Chop corpse, eat, chop corpse, eat. Over and over. I have almost never played a character that is seriously truly limited by food either. Ichand curses are also uninteresting I just wind up being very conservative about what to use and it just limits my tactical/strategic options. These features have extremely significant and extremely repetitive gameplay weight (i.e you are dealing with them all the time), they have no particuarly useful effect on the overall game (i know in theory the food clock has a purpose, but in a practical sense it does very very little), and there is no interesting thought process to deal with them (you just continuously keep eating chunks or store your food or you just save your ID scrolls, that is it). You never bother trying to find that +5 scimitar because it has no brand and there is just too much clutter and not enough ID scrolls to ever make it worth while, it is literally a dead end. You might as well never bother even spawning the +5 scimitar because eventually I will find a +2 branded scimitar and just enchant it up. In hellcrawl when ID and curse is remvoed I am actually presented with much more nuanced equipment decisions, even though both weapons and scrolls are in more limited supply.

The other stuff is arguable or doesn't bug me so much (yes stair dancing is problematic but it doesn't make the game annoying to play for almost no good effect.)


This makes little to no sense to me, maybe you can explain what you mean here a little better? Between auto_butcher and auto_eat_chunks, you should virtually never need to manually interact with chunks unless you're in the process of fighting a hungry ghost (which is the only time you really interact with hunger much at all) Or, I suppose if you never ever hit 'o' (Which is a valid way to play I suppose)

Are you saying that in regular crawl you never wield-id any weapon? Because literally the only possible consequence of wield-id-ing an unidentified +5 scimitar is that you might have to read a remove curse scroll if it turns out to be a -2 cursed scimitar instead (so obviously don't wield-id weapons without any RC scrolls) Or maybe that you're always going to find a branded scimitar before you find a remove curse scroll? (While that might be your experience, I find it unlikely)

I mean there's problems with both hunger and the ID/curse game, but your specific complaints aren't among them...
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Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 20:10

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

I believe he is saying that he finds id and curses so obnoxious that he does not want to expose himself to them by doing things like wear-id'ing the large numbers of potentially useful items that generate, so he operates under the knowledge that his game suffers relative to someone who, like yourself apparently, has an unlimited tolerance for such tedious gameplay.

For myself, I did a soft version of this. I did not check out the vast majority of potentially useful items until I'd reached a late stage in the game and found my equipment sufficiently lacking that going back through that stuff felt prudent. Of course, the resources are almost always there to check as you go, but it's so disruptive of the flow of the game and the benefits generally so marginal that I would rather not deal with it. Body armor is the main culprit here.

I've started to find a more subtle behavior annoying in hellcrawl. In spite of the removal of corpses and a lot of monster equipment, it is still common to produce piles of items when you kill something like an orc sorceror which often produces a good robe. It would be really nice not to have to read a listing of the items in the pile to know what dropped or face wasted piety autotraveling back after clearing the level. I suspect item splashing would fix this issue though. Even better would be more intelligent autopickup to grab potentially useful items like this and progressively destroy obsolete ones.
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Post Saturday, 30th September 2017, 07:49

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Bad mechanics: two combined. Tactical interaction is extremely limited (how simple positioning is, how little size means, very few terrain types), while the results of player choices are decided through extremely opaque calculations. The result is little player agency, and, where such agency is available, it's rendered almost useless by the fact that the player doesn't really know what he's doing. I think this is Crawl's core weakness.
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Post Sunday, 1st October 2017, 07:11

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:nethack mechanics tier list
A: using helm of opposite alignment swapping to carry cross-aligned quest artifacts


If you have a problem with this, Nethack just isn't for you.

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Post Monday, 2nd October 2017, 15:10

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

watertreatmentRL wrote:I believe he is saying that he finds id and curses so obnoxious that he does not want to expose himself to them by doing things like wear-id'ing the large numbers of potentially useful items that generate, so he operates under the knowledge that his game suffers relative to someone who, like yourself apparently, has an unlimited tolerance for such tedious gameplay.

For myself, I did a soft version of this. I did not check out the vast majority of potentially useful items until I'd reached a late stage in the game and found my equipment sufficiently lacking that going back through that stuff felt prudent. Of course, the resources are almost always there to check as you go, but it's so disruptive of the flow of the game and the benefits generally so marginal that I would rather not deal with it. Body armor is the main culprit here.

I've started to find a more subtle behavior annoying in hellcrawl. In spite of the removal of corpses and a lot of monster equipment, it is still common to produce piles of items when you kill something like an orc sorceror which often produces a good robe. It would be really nice not to have to read a listing of the items in the pile to know what dropped or face wasted piety autotraveling back after clearing the level. I suspect item splashing would fix this issue though. Even better would be more intelligent autopickup to grab potentially useful items like this and progressively destroy obsolete ones.


Yeah pretty much.
Checking every little thing is a waste of my time. The fact that Siegert thinks that being able to trivially, eventually, find the nature of a weapon actually proves the whole things a pointless waste of time. Mostly similar for chunks. Sure you can autobutcher etc. and hit o etc but you do get stretches where you just don't generate a corpse or whatever and need to start managing hunger etc. Its an annoying distraction that, in practice, almost never limits my actually real gameplay at all. There are only some fairly small number of corner cases where it matters, granted its very important for those small set of cases. But overall they are both of trivial use while also being significantly annoying. I mean you can easily get nagged about hunger every 30 seconds (real time) and in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying. Its like playing a game while a toddler pokes you in the arm and keeps asking you questions about inane stuff (except I am far more inclined to be patient with a toddler and at least they are usually cute).

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Post Monday, 2nd October 2017, 16:21

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

severen wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:I believe he is saying that he finds id and curses so obnoxious that he does not want to expose himself to them by doing things like wear-id'ing the large numbers of potentially useful items that generate, so he operates under the knowledge that his game suffers relative to someone who, like yourself apparently, has an unlimited tolerance for such tedious gameplay.

For myself, I did a soft version of this. I did not check out the vast majority of potentially useful items until I'd reached a late stage in the game and found my equipment sufficiently lacking that going back through that stuff felt prudent. Of course, the resources are almost always there to check as you go, but it's so disruptive of the flow of the game and the benefits generally so marginal that I would rather not deal with it. Body armor is the main culprit here.

I've started to find a more subtle behavior annoying in hellcrawl. In spite of the removal of corpses and a lot of monster equipment, it is still common to produce piles of items when you kill something like an orc sorceror which often produces a good robe. It would be really nice not to have to read a listing of the items in the pile to know what dropped or face wasted piety autotraveling back after clearing the level. I suspect item splashing would fix this issue though. Even better would be more intelligent autopickup to grab potentially useful items like this and progressively destroy obsolete ones.


Yeah pretty much.
Checking every little thing is a waste of my time. The fact that Siegert thinks that being able to trivially, eventually, find the nature of a weapon actually proves the whole things a pointless waste of time. Mostly similar for chunks. Sure you can autobutcher etc. and hit o etc but you do get stretches where you just don't generate a corpse or whatever and need to start managing hunger etc. Its an annoying distraction that, in practice, almost never limits my actually real gameplay at all. There are only some fairly small number of corner cases where it matters, granted its very important for those small set of cases. But overall they are both of trivial use while also being significantly annoying. I mean you can easily get nagged about hunger every 30 seconds (real time) and in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying. Its like playing a game while a toddler pokes you in the arm and keeps asking you questions about inane stuff (except I am far more inclined to be patient with a toddler and at least they are usually cute).


1. Weapon id really only has any impact before you have ?rc and before that point in the game it functions as a slow down on obtaining power, i think it is reasonable to limit access to powerful items in the early game, a cleaner method of doing so would probably be to directly have level limits for items, but it doesn't have 0 purpose, it just isnt the best tool for that task (however if you are going to complicate your game with things like identify and bad items anyway, using it also as a power limiter does have the appeal of not adding another mechanic) replacing the functions of id with other, cleaner mechanisms would also be a good way to go there.

2. Aww you don't think food is cute? Seriously though i had to manually eat something 5 times in spider when i did it last night (and i play slowly turn count wise), i know my limit for what i consider "nagging" is lower, but i think "once every 30 seconds" might also be hyperbole (or maybe you blow through all of spider in 2-3 minutes i dunno). I suspect a lot of the negative attention food gets is self fulfilling (aka your conceptually annoyed at something so you pay attention to it so you get disproportionately disturbed by its presence) and while you are right that the mechanism's maintenance outweighs its impact (food probably *effects* me twice a game and i have to eat 30-50 times more than that) i also think it's a pretty unimportant impact, all things considered.

Besides, if we didn't have food to complain about in the forums what would we do with our non crawl playing time, likely vent our frustrations by getting into mischief, and start down a road towards being troublemakers, then where would you be, up the river that's where, no crawl playing up the river, that's for sure.
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Post Monday, 2nd October 2017, 17:33

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

How does distortion interact with id?
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Post Monday, 2nd October 2017, 18:27

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Shtopit wrote:How does distortion interact with id?

Since monsters who come at you with distortion weapons are identified as having that brand on their weapon, it's pretty much restricted to wield-ID of "runed foo". IMO as long as you don't pick up random weapons for a skill you haven't been training, distortion is strong enough to be willing to take that risk.
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Post Friday, 6th October 2017, 21:07

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

now that i think about it, the tome tier list should probably include "the author's obsession with injecting his forced impregnation fetish in as many places as possible"

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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 00:37

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:now that i think about it, the tome tier list should probably include "the author's obsession with injecting his forced impregnation fetish in as many places as possible"


wait what
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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 01:25

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

charlatan wrote:
duvessa wrote:now that i think about it, the tome tier list should probably include "the author's obsession with injecting his forced impregnation fetish in as many places as possible"


wait what


orc breeding pits
the crypt side quest

probably some lore stuff

NOT the infinite kissign machine you get
take it easy
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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 02:05

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

I still can't totally believe how weird and bad tome was/is.

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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 02:07

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

let's see...orc breeding pits, which are still canon according to the Embers of Rage DLC
again in the DLC, an artifact with an ovipositor on it, which you can activate to lay ritch eggs inside an enemy (ritches themselves can also do this in the DLC)
crypt of kryl-feijan, and demon seeds in general

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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 05:26

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Maybe he just really likes the Alien franchise.
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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 09:26

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Well, dcss had the proposed spider god.
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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 18:28

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

duvessa wrote:nethack mechanics tier list

SS: writing down the unidentified descriptions of items in case a mind flayer attacks you
S: elbereth
A: using helm of opposite alignment swapping to carry cross-aligned quest artifacts
B: jousting
C: wresting one last wish from a wand
D: whatever that supposedly abusable lava bug was, man I wish I had figured out how to abuse that


I don't know if you checked out Nethack's most recent version, but they've basically crippled Elbereth beyond usability now. It decays almost immediately and doesn't work reliably even before then, so it has almost no protective power unless you have the scroll version.

Naturally, they did not re-balance the monster spawn list at all to compensate for the removal of a core feature, so if you want to win games reliably now you have to make your dog kill everything until you've found enough armor and consumables to survive encounters with things like soldier ants and leucrottae. Pet management should probably move to a prominent space on this list now, not sure why it wasn't already there.

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Post Saturday, 7th October 2017, 19:42

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

KoboldLord wrote:Pet management should probably move to a prominent space on this list now, not sure why it wasn't already there.

Oh, this is why I always liked playing with allies in Crawl, because I came from playing NetHack first and pets are such garbage in that.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:44

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying.

I can't believe DCSS still has "poisonous corpses are inedible" feature. It's been, what, 2 years? I do believe that it's that way purely out of spite.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:49

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Food of any kind is an insult, really.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 03:58

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Commit:
After long discussion, we came to the conclusion that inedible
chunks are an experiment worth trying, at least for a week or so.

It's been 2.5 years, and I have yet to hear a coherent explanation for why it's there.

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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 13:00

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

bel wrote:
in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying.

I can't believe DCSS still has "poisonous corpses are inedible" feature. It's been, what, 2 years? I do believe that it's that way purely out of spite.


inedible poisonous corpses only made sense when you could negate it with rpois. That way getting poison resistance would get you some extra food.

Now it serves zero purpose at all.
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Post Sunday, 8th October 2017, 17:51

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

No, it serves one purpose: it makes vampires need to fuck off somewhere else midway through spider when they want to regen

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Post Wednesday, 11th October 2017, 15:36

Re: dcss mechanics tier list

Well, if you accept that food is a good design component, having foodless branches is probably good design as well. It provides some additional food pressure in a small area and increases the feel-diversity of the branches.

Personally, the only positive experience I've ever had with food is as a spriggan. It's a somewhat meaningful constraint there, while being far less fiddly than normal food mechanics. So I'm not really persuaded that corpse-food is good design at all. But given that it exists, I'm glad that it at least provides a bit more variation in the branches.
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