Weapon pickups and auto-training

[starhawk]

Is there a way to stop a skill from beginning to be trained when I pick up a weapon in that group?

I splat an enormous number of characters and it is super annoying to have to open the skills menu every time I pick up a backup weapon that isn't in my main skill group.


edit: to clarify, i am on manual training and grind my teeth when i pick up a glowing whip and have to go turn off Maces&Flails...again.

[damiac]

Uhh.. well are you sure you're on manual training? Because if you're already opening the skills menu when you start the game, and set the skills you want to train, it shouldn't turn on some other skill when you pick up a weapon that uses it.

[Jeremiah]

Are you sure you're not just seeing the "free" skill levels you get from cross training?

[damiac]

Yeah, it might help if you could provide a screen shot or something, so we know what you're talking about. Because in manual skill training, crawl won't turn a skill on when you pick up a weapon for it, unless you previously had that skill turned on, then dropped that type of weapon. Even in auto training I'm pretty sure it won't turn a skill on unless you actually use the weapon.

[starhawk]

Soooooooooooooo my understanding from skimming forum bantering was that if you go in and select/turn off/emphasize skills you are in manual mode. Your responses in this thread led me to question this and AHA, it appears that I was not. Actually. Ugh. This game's opacity continues to make me crazy.

I guess this explains why skill XP percentages were weighted strangely even when I manually selected skills on/off.

Just to clarify what I was originally talking about, my usual game setup was like so:

1. Create a character, start game
2. Immediately open skills menu, turn everything off except one skill (say, Long Blades)
3. Upon picking up a weapon from another group (say, Polearms) that skill was turned on and I had to go turn it off by hand

Super annoying when you are ROFLcoptering through dozens of characters a week.

ANYWAY - if anyone else finds this thread in the future, be aware that picking skills by hand still doesn't mean you are in "manual mode".

[starhawk]

So, followup question - how do I make my skills start in manual mode, with everything turned off?

[Magipi]

Soooooooooooooo my understanding from skimming forum bantering was that if you go in and select/turn off/emphasize skills you are in manual mode. Your responses in this thread led me to question this and AHA, it appears that I was not. Actually. Ugh. This game's opacity continues to make me crazy.

I completely agree. The "auto-training" or what-is-it-called mode should have been removed ages ago. It is terrible, and also terribly confusing.

So, followup question - how do I make my skills start in manual mode, with everything turned off?

What?
On the skills screen, you press / and you are in manual mode.

[crate]

Autotraining does what it is supposed to do just fine, and personally I would suggest to new-to-crawl players to use auto training and not even look at the skill screen, so imo it should be the default (and it is).

default_manual_training = true
starts you in manual training mode

[Magipi]

Autotraining does what it is supposed to do just fine

Well, in this sense the beginners method of "turn on every skill" works fine as well.

And for most spellcasting characters autotraining is much-much worse than this.

[dpeg]

Soooooooooooooo my understanding from skimming forum bantering was that if you go in and select/turn off/emphasize skills you are in manual mode. Your responses in this thread led me to question this and AHA, it appears that I was not. Actually. Ugh. This game's opacity continues to make me crazy.

I completely agree. The "auto-training" or what-is-it-called mode should have been removed ages ago. It is terrible, and also terribly confusing.

This is wrong in a number of ways, and I will not bother to argue against "should have been removed ages ago". I'll just say that automatic skilling will stay (and as default) for the time to come. It is not perfect (if you can think of ways how to improve, tell us!), but there is no way we will force new players to tinker with the m-screen when they are concerned with completely different things.

To the OP: the skill screen's bottom rows and help (m?) would have answered your question just as well. This is not at all a case of opaque interface.

[Magipi]

there is no way we will force new players to tinker with the m-screen when they are concerned with completely different things.

I will start with this. It is almost umimaginable that any beginner completely disregards the skills screen, and leaves it as it is. A vast majority will tinker with it, mostly using the "turn everything on" method, spiced up by emphasising some.

if you can think of ways how to improve, tell us!)

The biggest problem is with primarily-caster characters: the auto method dumps almost all XP into the spellcasting skill (I don't know why), grossly undertraining all other skills. Turning everything on (in manual mode) would be much better.

Sandman made some experiments with leaving autotraining, as I recall, so he must know a lot more about this.

[crate]

Well, in this sense the beginners method of "turn on every skill" works fine as well.

And for most spellcasting characters autotraining is much-much worse than this.

um what
auto training for spellcasting characters is fine, and it's far far better than "turn everything on" in manual mode! (Turn-everything-on in auto mode is also ok, because the auto mode training protects players by not training skills they're not using.)

http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/autodefe/mo ... 051653.txt

Those skills look ok to me, certainly not the best but ridiculously better than turn-everything-on would be. I see lots of players in the CIP forum with worse training by using manual mode!

[Magipi]

http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/autodefe/morgue-autodefe-20130216-051653.txt

Those skills look ok to me, certainly not the best but ridiculously better than turn-everything-on would be. I see lots of players in the CIP forum with worse training by using manual mode!

Are you sure about this?

What I see here is this:

  Code:

 + Level 1.3 Fighting
 O Level 27 Spellcasting

This is exactly what I was talking about.

[crate]

Yeah, that's ok. If he had been hitting things with melee, fighting would be higher (and of course this would also give some melee skill). Like I said, not ideal, but everything else looks fine. (27 spellcasting, especially on DE, is perfectly fine and acceptable; I think tavern has actually swung in the direction of undervaluing spellcasting at this point.)

For reference, an automibe
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/crate ... 143401.txt

edit: Here's how xp distribution might look with turn-everything-on in manual mode:

  Code:

   Skills:
 + Level 11.2 Fighting
 + Level 14.1 Throwing
 + Level 11.2 Armour
 + Level 15.4 Dodging
 + Level 16.5 Stealth
 + Level 11.1 Unarmed Combat
 + Level 16.6 Spellcasting
 + Level 14.1 Conjurations
 + Level 14.4 Fire Magic

This is a lot worse than autotraining. (I started a DEFE and fed it some potions of xp in wizmode.)

[Magipi]

With MiBe (and any other no-caster) autotraining is not bad, it is quite acceptable. With a caster, it is horrible.

A clarification: by "turn-every-skill-on" I meant to turn on only the skills you use, not literally every skill. But I think the latter is impossible anyway, you cannot train a skill you do not have an item or a spell for.

[Magipi]

  Code:

   Skills:
 + Level 11.2 Fighting
 + Level 14.1 Throwing
 + Level 11.2 Armour
 + Level 15.4 Dodging
 + Level 16.5 Stealth
 + Level 11.1 Unarmed Combat
 + Level 16.6 Spellcasting
 + Level 14.1 Conjurations
 + Level 14.4 Fire Magic

This is a lot worse than autotraining. (I started a DEFE and fed it some potions of xp in wizmode.)

Curious. This looks to me a lot BETTER than autotraining. Would you explain why you think the opposite, please?

[crate]

DEFE doesn't use fighting though; it doesn't hit things. So new player ends up in the same place with respect to the particular complaint you have. The value of not inundating a new player (especially one who is new to roguelikes altogether) with things that must be customized is very important.

Curious. This looks to me a lot BETTER than autotraining. Would you explain why you think the opposite, please?

Well the big thing is that distributing xp as my test wizmode character did makes your offense really really pathetic as you level up (you're putting xp into fighting and dodging and maybe armour and stealth at a much higher rate than autodefe) and offensive skills scale much better with skill level than defensive skills (this is why you level them first). In the end, autodefe's magic skill training is pretty much ideal (as you add more magic skills the wizmode example looks worse and worse, btw) imo; the 27 spellcasting is actually pretty good for that character. It also ends up with a better split of xp between dodging/armour/stealth/magic skills.

The only real complaint is no xp in fighting, but I don't even think that's that much of a problem; I think that tavern overvalues fighting on not-going-to-melee-anything characters anyway (though possibly I should change my opinion on it since I think it gives more HP than it used to).

Autotraining is also nice in that it at least suggests that the player should focus on controlling his character (rather than on building said character), and personally I think this is a good emphasis to make.

It's not perfect, there are ways to improve it (you can argue about how it treats fighting/spellcasting skills, if you have legit suggestions the devs are interested as dpeg noted!) but I think it's pretty good at its job.

[Magipi]

DEFE doesn't use fighting though; it doesn't hit things. So new player ends up in the same place with respect to the particular complaint you have. The value of not inundating a new player (especially one who is new to roguelikes altogether) with things that must be customized is very important.

Curious. This looks to me a lot BETTER than autotraining. Would you explain why you think the opposite, please?

Well the big thing is that distributing xp as my test wizmode character did makes your offense really really pathetic as you level up

This might easily be the case, but the wizmode character is not a good example for that. I quite like its skills, although obviously I'd prefer some weapon skill instead of unarmed, and throwing is also quite baffling (the game thinks that the starting spellbook is a throwable item, therefore trowing is turned on?). It can cast level 6 spells, along with reasonable EV, AC and HP.

[damiac]

DEFE doesn't use fighting though; it doesn't hit things.

What? Are you trolling newbies now? The primary reason for training fighting on a DEFE isn't to hit things better...

[crate]

And you knew that the first time you played crawl? I personally think if you're not going to hit things then like 8-10 fighting on DEFE is plenty anyway. If you are going to hit things, then auto training trains it and you're good.

(Turns out the only DEFE I have played online had 5.0 fighting when it died!)

[Magipi]

If you are going to hit things, then auto training trains it and you're good.

The point is that you're not. I said it before, autotraining overtrains spellcasting, and undertrains everything else.

I have found it, here are Sandman's painful adventures with autotraining:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12409

[Lasty]

OP, you might also like to know that holding shift and pressing a skill selection turns off all other skills at the same time. There's no easy way to start with no skills selected for training, but using the shift-select technique makes it equally fast to select your preferred skill alone for training.

[dpeg]

Lasty: good point. Of course, this is again something the skill screen help clearly states (it is m?? not just m? like I said before).

Now, I don't expect everyone to scrutinise the documentation from top to bottom, and the OP's question is certainly valid. However, I am really fed up with "This game's opacity continues to make me crazy." when the information is all there.

[Magipi]

Well, it happens that as a result of Sandman's experiments, autotraining has been improved recently:

http://git.develz.org/?p=crawl.git;a=co ... 19417972ca

As a result, it might not be as bad as I stated, based on older data.

[daggaz]

And you knew that the first time you played crawl? I personally think if you're not going to hit things then like 8-10 fighting on DEFE is plenty anyway. If you are going to hit things, then auto training trains it and you're good.

(Turns out the only DEFE I have played online had 5.0 fighting when it died!)

This is an argument for renaming/reworking the skill, not for why a newbie DEFE shouldnt or wouldnt turn it on (they definitely should, hitpoints are the primary commodity in this game).

[crate]

Should and would are different things; I was arguing that a new player would not beat auto training in this case, which was the original argument for "all players should turn off auto training". And like I said, looking at autodefe I don't see any other big problems with the skill training.

[Hurkyl]

deleted

[Octopode-monk-of-XOM]

how about just putting limits into the auto skill training, for example on a wizard stop training air magic / poison after skill X is reached, since it is useless to train more with the initial spellbook.

i dont know anything about coding, and which values are easy to catch, but for spells one could also catch the spell fail % and stop if it reaches 1%, for weapons min delay etc

i mean the word auto implies you dont have to mess with it at all, right now i agree with magipi it causes more trouble than the benefits are - it was the largest rock in my learning curve too (and looking at DsWz instead of DeFe might be more accurate btw). but the last version i tried it was 0.14 so not sure if i got the right impression and what got changed