The Tavern

This may look somewhat interesting in an abstract sense, but running through it, you either lose half an hour of real time, doing it manually, or you have the game clock log several thousand turns against you in auto-explore. Either way you do it, you lose, for no discernable purpose. Reminds me a bit of the very old Swamp layouts that were axed for good reasons.

I don't think I'll ever be good enough at crawl to care about auto explore taking too many turns. You're on another level, man.

Anyway, if you care about your score, then surely real time doesn't matter, as you're playing extra slow in that case and skipping most of the game? If you care about speed running, then surely your bot does the floor in a few seconds? If you care about speed and score and the same time, you are so above me in skill level that I can't even begin to comment on that!

Jokes aside, I agree with you in that your games shouldn't be extra long just because you run into a certain map. Holy pan and Zot with teleport traps on choke points have the same problem.

Usually, auto-explore is just fine for me, even on levels like that. But during a tournament my vanity commands me to want my name show up as high on the lists as possible, with even a high score on a combo (which I didn't get), and then these levels need to be done with as few turns as possible. And I do have FOMO (fear of missing out), which means that I need to look into every nook and cranny of the map in case it may hide the one item I need to make this game a winner.

Autoexplore murders turncount in general and is strictly less safe than experienced players doing it manually, which is a problem when discussing tedium-encouraging mechanics. I don't know how to balance this against the fact that attaining low turncounts has some genuinely very challenging aspects too. It isn't ONLY tedium, but the tedium is mandatory.

Amusingly I shave like 20k turns off of runs where I equip regen gear early and then leave it on. Sometimes more, especially after the buff to it.

I think unless you are extremely careful, and even then, if you do not employ auto-explore, it is all too easy to lose a valuable turn-or two by stumbling into something and not reacting soon enough. I do note the notion however, that it is hypothetically safer for experienced players to go full manual. I would argue however, that the best situation is for an experienced player to go manual, but combine it with auto-explore strategically. This requires that you change settings so that you see movement 1 tile at a time instead of those hyper-warp jumps from point a to b, so that you can press a key and interrupt auto-explore. In this scenario, it's not too tedious to maintain some manual exploration and guidance and then let auto-explore cover clearing larger bulks of territory when it is strategically more sound.

I think there are safe-movements, meaning you only move if nothing is visible. Combining with forced more when something just goes invisible, they allow safe manual exploration if needed. I used to use it, but I am too lazy nowadays and die instead.