Can't really figure out encumberance ratings impact

[adozu]

so let's say i learned crawl in before the new "encumberance rating" value got added to armors, could anyone give me a short brief on how much str/armorskill you'd need to negate the impact on spellcasting from a 11 encumberance armor approximatively?

[morik]

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Encumbrance_rating

Your spell failure with 11 encumbrance would be adjusted by:
(25*(2 * 11^2 * (45-armour)/(225*(str+3))) - 20)/100

With 20 strength & 27 armour, that is about 1% extra to your failure chance.

With, say, 10 strength and 10 armour, that is 52% extra failure chance. So probably you don't want 11 enc armour unless you are a very strong, very well trained armour user.

[XuaXua]

It should not require external documentation.

[morik]

It should not require external documentation.

My understanding is that encumbrance rating can be roughly thought of as "if you don't have at least this much strength, you're going to have a bad time".
Not sure if there is any intuitive way to figure out rough spell success models off of encumbrance rating. I think the dumbed down version would be "don't wear anything higher than enc 7 if you want to cast spells decently. Enc 4 if you don't have much armour training".

[adozu]

well, the very first item i found in my DgCj for the challenge is an ice dragon armor... i'm still unsure wheater the dungeon is trying to favor me or subtly killing me but i figured Dg can get nice str so i might as well take the dungeon up to challenge.

ty for your answers.

[crate]

My understanding is that encumbrance rating can be roughly thought of as "if you don't have at least this much strength, you're going to have a bad time".

This isn't really true, other than as a rough guideline. But there is no armour in the game for which suggesting to stop at 11 str is better than suggesting to stop at 10 str or 12 str. Every point of str makes encumbrance effect spell success less, in a smooth (but nonlinear) fashion. Going from 10 str to 11 str has a slightly bigger effect than going from 11 to 12, etc.

Not sure if there is any intuitive way to figure out rough spell success models off of encumbrance rating. I think the dumbed down version would be "don't wear anything higher than enc 7 if you want to cast spells decently. Enc 4 if you don't have much armour training".

You should try casting spells in heavy armour sometime. It's not really that bad, you just need a bit more spell skill (but then you'll get the increased spellpower from having higher skill, so this extra xp isn't wasted). Additionally there aren't really magic numbers like this; encumbrance has a smooth effect on your spell failure (except there is an oddity that spell success ignores a very small amount of encumbrance for no real reason, but you don't really need to know that).

could anyone give me a short brief on how much str/armorskill you'd need to negate the impact on spellcasting from a 11 encumberance armor approximatively?

45 armour skill, infinite str ... generally you should look at it instead as "I just need to get a bit more magic skill" instead of "I need to reduce these armour penalties".

[adozu]

well, there is a "magic" number for shield or at least was? 5 for bucklers 15 for shields (on normal sized chars)? i just assumed the same was true for armors unless that changed too.

[Siegurt]

Magic number for shields hasn't been changed, body armour was (I assume shields are just lower on the priority list) the old encumbrance penalty did have a magic number, which was removed when it was changed to a smooth curve.

Typically the rate of reduction of body armour penalty starts to get diminishing returns *around* the same str value as the encumbrance penalty, but there's no hard break point at all any more, an additional point of Str will always reduce the armour penalty to some degree (And the higher your strength, the smaller the reduction will be for gaining one more point)

I like to have between 1 less and 2 more points of str than the encumbrance penalty for the body armour I'm wearing, but that's very much my personal rule of thumb.

[daggaz]

"You should try casting in heavy armour some time.. it just requires more skill... but you get the extra power so the experience isnt really wasted."

Except I'd wager the vast majority of plate wearing characters who cast, are casting utility spells most of the time. Obviously haste lasting longer is nice, but not sure how much more oomph you need on flight or regeneration and the like..

[TheDefiniteArticle]

"You should try casting in heavy armour some time.. it just requires more skill... but you get the extra power so the experience isnt really wasted."

Except I'd wager the vast majority of plate wearing characters who cast, are casting utility spells most of the time. Obviously haste lasting longer is nice, but not sure how much more oomph you need on flight or regeneration and the like..

LRD in plate is as easy as Phase Shift or Haste. The only reason they are favoured is that they are OP as fuck while LRD is merely "very good".

Try a plate-wearing DDEE sometime. It is even more idiotically easy than a robe-wearing DDEE.

[and into]

"You should try casting in heavy armour some time.. it just requires more skill... but you get the extra power so the experience isnt really wasted."

Except I'd wager the vast majority of plate wearing characters who cast, are casting utility spells most of the time. Obviously haste lasting longer is nice, but not sure how much more oomph you need on flight or regeneration and the like..

Haste isn't really a "utility spell" and crate wasn't necessarily talking about (only) utility spells in the first place. Armour penalty just affects spell success and there are a few ways to offset that. Casting in heavier armors does require more skill investment usually, but for the most part you end up in a better place than some dude in a robe.

[dck]

Casting regen with crap power is so bad it should be illegal so you do want power for your regen.
Of course, casting in plate being reasonable and something a lot of characters should do shouldn't give anyone any reason to badmouth "dudes in robes" since these tend to have much better defenses than guys in plate and getting their spells up doesn't require nearly as much real time investment (so your fun spells become available faster and you can go do other fun things) nor annoying |wiz swapping.

[and into]

Casting regen with crap power is so bad it should be illegal so you do want power for your regen.
Of course, casting in plate being reasonable and something a lot of characters should do shouldn't give anyone any reason to badmouth "dudes in robes" since these tend to have much better defenses than guys in plate and getting their spells up doesn't require nearly as much real time investment (so your fun spells become available faster and you can go do other fun things) nor annoying |wiz swapping.

Didn't mean to badmouth dudes in robes, there's nothing wrong with wearing them, per se. The main point I would make is more that which armour you go with is going to shift around your priorities in certain ways, but guys who are casting spells can do just fine in stuff heavier than robes. Going with a robe is fine too of course, though in general I think you'll want to get some extra AC so you aren't overly reliant on just EV; that AC can come from a lot of different sources though, so it just depends on what you have available.

[crate]

since these [robe characters] tend to have much better defenses than guys in plate

I don't agree with this at all.

[dck]

Well it takes a lot less investment to have good EV in robes or leather and you can still get a lot of AC by enchanting aux slots and having a good body armour. Otoh wearing plate makes it a lot harder to get more EV while bumping your AC to around the numbers you could be expecting from EV in very light armour (with ?ea usage), so you have a character who can get a decent amount of AC and very good EV and a character who can get very good AC and then abysmal EV in around the same time of gameplay with more or less normal findings.

[duvessa]

The cool thing about AC is that getting more of it is better

[dck]

One could even say the same about EV!

[crate]

Well if you don't get better defenses from plate why would you ever wear it? That's all it does, is give you defenses (and penalties).

[some12fat2move]

Well, on a species with really skewed aptitudes and not great strength (merfolk, halfling, maybe others) you can quickly skill up a load of EV in a robe while your armour aptitude is so much worse that you can't skill up the AC very well and trying to will crap your EV. That's an unusual situation though. Alternatively, a really indirect explanation is: having spells earlier so you can bust the shit of things in ways you couldn't without those spells is a pretty good defense. Those are the reasons I can think of for dck's assertion.

[dck]

The only things you need to be able to get a lot of EV really fast is to be not troll sized and to have not ghoul dex.

[Implojin]

since these [robe characters] tend to have much better defenses than guys in plate

I don't agree with this at all.

I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I take it to have been dck's intent that "dudes in robes" meant "dudes that upgrade to leather and then MDA as soon as possible".

EV-focused characters have stealth levels that don't attract everything on the floor, on top of spellcasting penalties that allow them to get things like rmsl, regen, swiftness, haste, and any other useful spells that you happen to find online much earlier in the game than comparable AC-focused characters. EV-focused characters also tend to end the game in dragon armours like MDA or FDA, both of which provide more than enough AC to clear Zot, especially when coupled with aux armour slots.

Heavy armour characters are good to build if you want to use a shield and not cast many spells above second level for some reason, but they tend to have much less balanced defenses that leave you fighting more monsters from a weaker position than if you had better stealth and a lower spellcasting penalty. Encountering a sleeping unique and having it stay asleep for the turn it takes to place an exclude also seems much more common on leather characters than on plate characters, and 3 to 5 levels of Stealth seems to go a *long* way here.

To me it seems apparent that those EV characters (read: characters that usually equip leather, maybe a good randart light armour if it generates early) have a much stronger early to midgame than characters that equip plate as soon as it's available. Could you elaborate on why you think that plate characters are stronger? I just don't see it.

[crate]

lol nope

[crate]

lol nope

[Implojin]

To me it's holy fucking shit obvious that being able to cast spells sometime sooner than Vaults and not attracting the nearest third of the level's worth of monsters every time you do something is better for your character's practical defense than a slightly bigger number next to your AC, but thank you for your productive response that is sure to raise the level of discussion of this thread. (I also never said nor do I think that plate armour is never worth wearing, so you're pulling that from nowhere.)

Also obvious is that building any given character to its racial aptitudes and equipment that exists in its game tends to be a better plan than trying to force a character build around items that may not generate.

Let me rephrase:

EV characters are fucking overpowered in Crawl, and given a choice between equally enchanted M/F/SwDA and rF+ plate on a character with equal aptitudes for Armour/Dodging that also has all aux slots available, I would almost always pick the *DA because it lets me get other aspects of my character online with less experience investment for roughly similar raw defensive results. (Troll Armour can be good too.)

[crate]

lol nop[e

[crate]

actually you know what
i'm fixing this topic

dont wear plate it's bad, mda for life

[and into]

Well, I'll try to respond with something other than nope.

First, I don't know why shields and heavy armor were mentioned together, if I have high AC I generally want to leverage that by using the biggest weapon I can find, though if a superb one-hander drops (like demon whip of electrocution or something) then obviously I'll use that, and if I'm using that then naturally I will ask myself, "Why not wear a buckler?" to which I naturally answer, "Well, there is no reason not to, so I guess I will wear one."

Anyway, more to the main point: Frankly, having low AC is balls. You can still have good (or at least okay) AC while wearing robes, I should have been more careful not to conflate those two things in one of my earlier posts. But if you are wearing robes you should try to make up for the low base AC of your body armor as soon and as well as possible. That's doable, and is not necessarily that difficult even, but it does require making use of items and/or spells that not everyone is going to have access to, unlike various heavier-than-robe body armors that are readily available and which you can pick up and use easily, in every single game, provided you aren't an Ogre, Troll, Spriggan, or (obviously) Felid.

Mottled dragon armor is really good but you can usually pick up scale mail or ring mail with at least +2 enchantment about 12 floors and 14 char levels earlier than when you'll usually get MDA, and so long as you are not a really low strength species / background, those mails can give really great protection without hurting spell casting or EV *that* much. If you get a bit lucky with elven quality (still much more common than getting MDA early on), then it is even better. (Keep in mind that nearly any piece of MDA you get is, in effect, generated at -1 enchantment, whereas it isn't that uncommon to find various mails at +2 or +3 enchantment.)

Again, I grant that if you have very low strength and you are casting spells, then your options are much more limited, and "robe --> finding +3 leather armor, use all ?enchant armor on peripheral armor slots (which you hope to fill up ASAP)," may sometimes be the only reasonable way to go in those cases, barring some really great luck early on.

[and into]

I guess I should also say that there is a difference between what makes for good advice and what is best play. E.g., "train weapon skill to min delay first" can for some backgrounds be ok advice but it is very rarely best play for any background.

"If you aren't doing unarmed combat, always wear the armor that gives best combined total of AC and EV without screwing up your ability to cast" is good advice because it is very simple and will basically always direct you toward good play, even though it will not always yield the *best* equipment set up for a character, because the marginal value of AC and EV is actually a really complicated consideration. Similarly, "train dodging to at least ~12 by the time you reach D10; find a +3 leather armor and wear it; enchant your equipment in peripheral armor slots" is widely applicable advice for all backgrounds that start with a book, and it will seldom lead you astray.

Really, though, the marginal value of both EV and AC changes throughout the game and also depends on how much you already have, though in general the marginal value of AC is more stable than that of EV.

Beyond that, if you really wanted to approach the question somewhat scientifically (for some reason), what you'd probably want to do is figure out, based on average to-hit of the most dangerous enemies likely to spawn in a particular area (and only them), what the "minimal useful EV" rating is for all the various places in the game. The point of that index would be that, if you are below that EV, any increase in EV that doesn't put you over that hump is going to be almost worthless, practically.

Another approach would be using the above plus some other research to get an "average effective HP" function based on EV and AC, for various points in the game, along with a measure of variance or reliability (generally one's reliability will be lower the more you are reliant on only EV for defense, rather than being reliant entirely on AC or having a mixed defense).

GDR can probably be ignored except for nagas, worshipers of Chei, and Deep Dwarves, for whom it may matter enough to change one's consideration.


EDIT: I don't think any of the above is worth doing, by the way. But that is (part of) what you would have to take into account if you actually wanted to approach the question with a sufficiently general and sufficiently rigorous approach. Otherwise, give advice tailored to specific situations, and maybe at most you can generalize that to (very short) character guides that focus on early game, but even just that level of generalization can be really dicey and legitimately good, helpful character guides are very hard to write.

[crate]

ok since apparently this wasn't clear

I was not talking at all about the best armour for a particular character to wear; I tend to stay away from advice like that since I much prefer to give players enough information to make their own decisions (see my post about str vs encumbrance, for instance). Someone telling you which armour is better for your character is like knowing the answer to a trivia question: useful in that specific circumstance but not something you can apply in the future. Much better to teach instead.

I was simply saying that plate armour typically gives your character better defenses than a robe. This says nothing about any other aspect of the decision to wear plate armour or to wear a robe; in fact, since robes are actually not useless (well I suppose that particular thing might not be obvious, but I will just assert it without proof), it should be obvious that this is not the only consideration.

I do believe that "heavy armour casters" are fine and in some cases it is the way to go but I leave it up to the player to make his own decision about when that is the case.

[ackack]

I think most people would agree that the answer to "AC or EV?" is "both." Personally, I usually side with the light armour crowd because I think on most characters it is a more reliable method to getting a good overall character in an xp efficient way. It also has the virtue of being more plannable. If you are putting stats into Dex and training dodging, you will almost always get good EV and will probably find enough decent pieces to get acceptable early-mid AC.

[dck]

Right so this thread has gotten a lot of sudden heat and I can't even check the actual conversation since crate deleted half of it but the only reason I brought up robes was because and into's post made them no justice whatsoever. Leaving all the other things robes allow you to have and focusing only on the AC/EV you get from both in a game with average drops as a hu with normal dex you will have a better AC/EV balance much more reliably than with plate.
Furthermore I'd say even with races that don't have great slots like Hu (or great dex at all) you still have a much easier time getting good AC/EV with robes than with plate.
I won't address and into's new ten pages dissertation about giving advice in general and uh... gdr, effective hp and whatnot because it seems wholly pointless and much too tangential to the topic at hand to have any bearing on it. As I said I only posted initially because I thought he was sending a really wrong message downtalking robes in a place where new people may in fact listen to him and make weird assumptions on the subject.

Of course it turns out what crate meant by disagreeing is "guys who are wearing plate are doing so because they get better defenses in plate than anything else", which is a pretty damn weird thing to say but it doesn't say anything about the very reduced amount of characters who actually have a better option in plate compared to robes, so it sparked an argument for no reason and we can all go home now.

[some12fat2move]

The only things you need to be able to get a lot of EV really fast is to be not troll sized and to have not ghoul dex.

I was curious about this so did a little wizard mode testing:
XL 6 HuGl who raised dex, wears leather armour, and has level 10 dodging has 4 ac, 18 ev, and takes AvEffDam 2.9 from a yak.
XL 6 HuGl who raised str, wears plate, and has level 10 armour has 15 ac, 5 ev, and takes AvEffDam 2.1 from a yak.
My characters do wear robes/leather more often than plate for various reasons, but defense-wise it appears plate is better. Since you mention drops, I guess you are saying enchanted robes/leather are more common than enchanted plate?

[dck]

As a Hu with helmet/gloves/boots/cloak slots it's really uncommon to hit the point where yaks start showing up without having picked up any of these, and it's also pretty uncommon to have found no ?ea whatsoever you can use on said helmet/gloves/boots/cloak.
Of course I'm not saying it can't happen, but it seems really unlikely to me and we're talking about a game with normal drops.
And yes, robesr are more common and there are even a lot of early game enemies who have a good shot at having good ones.

[and into]

As a Hu with helmet/gloves/boots/cloak slots it's really uncommon to hit the point where yaks start showing up without having picked up any of these, and it's also pretty uncommon to have found no ?ea whatsoever you can use on said helmet/gloves/boots/cloak.
Of course I'm not saying it can't happen, but it seems really unlikely to me and we're talking about a game with normal drops.
And yes, robesr are more common and there are even a lot of early game enemies who have a good shot at having good ones.

I don't disagree with any of the above, nor (as I said before) did I mean to be dismissive toward robes, as I clarified in the (short) post immediately afterward.

The point of the second of my long posts was in fact that a really rigorous investigation into a comparison of EV and AC would be pretty unnecessary and complicated for the (incredibly small) benefit it would give, and isn't really worth the effort. The thread had already gone pretty far away from the OP at that point so I didn't feel that posting some related (but tangentially so) stuff was really derailing anything at that point.