Manual recommends new players not to manually train skills?

[yongri]

So I was reading the manual and under E. Experience and Skills it says:

"The skill screen allows you to change which skills are exercised and at what speed. Note to new players: it is generally not necessary to finetune the skill selection."

How true is this advice???

[rebthor]

Somewhere between completely and very if you use auto-skilling. Experienced players don't use auto-skilling because it does some suboptimal things but few of the decisions made by the auto-skill algorithm are terrible.

[variouselite]

The way that autoskilling works is that it just turns on xp spending for any item class or skill class that you use or equip, and weights them based on your class(as far as i know). So autoskilling works "fine" for new players who dont want(understand how) to deal with messing with manualskilling but manualskilling is far more efficient once you know what youre doing.

[dpeg]

variouselite: Instead of spreading misinformation, you could've tested it. Autoskilling trains all skills that you use, weighed by how much you use it. If you use a single wand (are not an Artificer), then Evocations will turn on, but the weight will be very low. If for some reason you start using wands more and more, then that weight will go up.

On "much more efficiently": That obviously depends on how you skill manually. It is easy to completely mis-skill when you do it yourself. There is no such problem with auto-skilling, and that's why it is recommended to new players -- they already have enough on their plate. rebthor captured it well.

[Sar]

Personally I think that skill training is a part of Crawl gameplay. While bad tactics kill people much more often than bad skilling, I am not sure pretending that skills do not exist is the way to go for new players. Sure they will make skilling mistakes, but that would be their own mistakes.

[variouselite]

so.. other than how the weighting is determined(which effectively doesn't matter to the advice i gave), what was i so wrong about?

[dpeg]

Sar: I believe that DCSS is extremely daunting for players not familiar with the genre. Eino has run studies at his university about this (basically, he and his team sat people with video-game but no roguelike experience in front of DCSS and only watched them). Their results are still informing development decisions at times. To be brief, there is a *huge* gap between what they expect from a game and what Crawl does. And this is why I think it's a good idea to let newbies ignore skills when they start out. You are free to disagree but we (as the developers) really know what we're talking about here. Players will have to learn about skilling, if they want to improve with the game, but there are good reasons to not force it upon them when they start.

Edit: For anyone curious about what I mean by "studies", have a look at the usability reports.

[Sar]

Fair enough, most of my early game memories is a horrible blur of things like splatting TrBes on goldfishes, quaff-identifying potions in the Temple and reading badwiki advice articles.

[dck]

Never read-ID'ing anything until exactly D: 5 and quietly weeping when single unknown scrolls got burned in D: 4.
It still stings a bit.

[battaile]

Oddly enough I find myself using auto-skill more often the longer I've played. Usually I'll leave it on unless there is something that I'm trying to get online that I know auto skill isn't weighting highly enough (e.g. pumping invo or a spell school while your first ability in that school is still unusable)

nb: I know this isn't optimal but there's something about the organic feel of auto-skilling that I find appealing.

[MrPlanck]

I've been playing for a number of years and tend to use auto and at the same time 1. focus skills that I want to train more quickly and 2. turn off skills that I don't want trained. I am okay with some skills increasing slowly based on recent usage. Probably not optimal but I can't be bothered to learn all the skill break points. That's not fun for me.

[asdu]

I have next to no experience with auto skill training (basically, the only times I've ever used it was when I forgot to switch to manual, which is always my first action whenever I start a new game), but I'm fairly confident it does a better job of allocating XP than the average new and unspoiled player.
Honestly, the worst thing about skills for a new player is that the concept of a weapon's minimum delay afaik is not mentioned in the manual (and tbh, even if it was it would likely go unnoticed by 99% of the people who even bother to read the manual), yet it's a crucial aspect of efficient skill training (someone has to explain it EVERY SINGLE TIME a new player asks for advice).

[moocowmoocow]

I have next to no experience with auto skill training (basically, the only times I've ever used it was when I forgot to switch to manual, which is always my first action whenever I start a new game), but I'm fairly confident it does a better job of allocating XP than the average new and unspoiled player.
Honestly, the worst thing about skills for a new player is that the concept of a weapon's minimum delay afaik is not mentioned in the manual (and tbh, even if it was it would likely go unnoticed by 99% of the people who even bother to read the manual), yet it's a crucial aspect of efficient skill training (someone has to explain it EVERY SINGLE TIME a new player asks for advice).

You can auto set training to manual by putting this in your init:

default_manual_training = true

[Sar]

I don't know any "skill breakpoints" apart from min delay, I just train things that I want when it does make sense, like I want more AC and I have good amount of base AC and I don't have a lot of Armour skill so I train Armour, or I want a spell so I train the relevant schools.

[Igxfl]

Getting an important spell online generally leads to a breakpoint in spell schools. The payoff for early Conj/Fire plateaus out pretty hard after getting Fireball online, for example. There are also the "no penalty" breakpoints at 5/15/25 Shields. I'm not sure I'd rely on the autotrainer for that sort of thing.

[crate]

There are no magic numbers for spells (except spellcasting for spell levels). Power is smooth, success rate is smooth*. Miscast severity chance, as far as I know, is also smooth, but the failure chance colouring defines some arbitrary milestones that don't have any significance other than someone chose them. Well, I suppose if you actually get to 0% failure then that's a breakpoint of sorts, but getting there on any spell that's not very low level basically never happens.

You can obviously decide that fireball at 10% failure is ok, but you may also decide that that is not ok and you'd like 6%, or 1%. So there aren't really any breakpoints there.

Weapon skill actually functions completely differently after you get to min delay. Additionally it is also weird because each level of weapon skill until you reach min delay is actually more beneficial than the previous level, whereas every other skill is either flat or becomes less useful per level at higher levels (because of various stepdowns). This is why you'd call min delay a breakpoint--it fundamentally changes how additional skill levels benefit your character.

*success chance is actually not smooth but this is probably a bug. You can clearly see that it jumps at certain values of spell skills.

---

Anyway, auto skill training is good enough and certainly is what I would recommend new players use, at least for a while.

[pickled_heretic]

My games went much smoother once I turned auto skilling off. The faster you swap over to manual, the better.

[dpeg]

In case someone is talking about different things: automode does by no means imply that you're not turning off (or focusing some skills). You could even do that (and that's a testament to *automated* skilling) but reacting to new spells or weapons is fine and expected.

[battaile]

In case someone is talking about different things: automode does by no means imply that you're not turning off (or focusing some skills). You could even do that (and that's a testament to *automated* skilling) but reacting to new spells or weapons is fine and expected.

Yeah, this always confuses me when someone freaks out about how horrible it is to use automatic skilling, and then recommends going to manual skilling and having exactly one skill training at all times. If you have one skill training, auto and manual work exactly the same.

[Sar]

IIRC that's not true, "grey" skills will still get some XP if you use them. Am I wrong?

[battaile]

IIRC that's not true, "grey" skills will still get some XP if you use them. Am I wrong?

I think that was just how it worked in the old system. I've never noticed skills rising when I have them turned off in auto. (also the way the percentages are displayed indicate that there is no xp going to skills which are turned off)

[Sprucery]

The exception is of course having drawn Sage from a deck. But that's a special case anyway.

[battaile]

The exception is of course having drawn Sage from a deck. But that's a special case anyway.

Sage is handled the same in manual and auto, and isn't really relevant to the question.