Harder enemies earlier now?

[espais]

I've been playing the trunk version and have been noticing that there are...erm...harder enemies spawning far earlier than they used to.
Honestly it seems too early now. For instance, my current run just ran across a tengu warrior on D10, and my last game I ran into this mess (no runed door, didn't blast open a wall, nothing at all). Just a normal room that I opened up:

[Sar]

It's not a "normal room", normal rooms in dungeon don't have metal walls. It's a vault, a very hard vault.

[Psieye]

You were in a vault, i.e. something clearly not randomly generated. Those things sometimes place OOD (out of depth) monsters.

[espais]

Don't these types of rooms generally require...additional reasoning to go inside? I was simply auto-exploring and came across it. I'd have expected it to be behind a runed door or glass wall..

[Laraso]

I feel like vaults that have OOD monsters should have runed doors to stop autotravel from waltzing straight into the heart of it.

Edit: espais posted the same exact message I did at the same exact time apparently

[TwoLeggedMammal]

I was thinking that those are in line with what you'd find in Vaults, but why as a Troll do you only have 100hp? Oh, this isnt' Vaults, it's D:9. That does seem dangerous, how did you do with it?

[espais]

Edit: espais posted the same exact message I did at the same exact time apparently

hi5

I was thinking that those are in line with what you'd find in Vaults, but why as a Troll do you only have 100hp? Oh, this isnt' Vaults, it's D:9. That does seem dangerous, how did you do with it?

Ended up skipping it and died to something else. Relatively new to the TrMo combo so still feeling my way around it. If that char was still alive I'd probably have just dove and come back later.

[duvessa]

The footsteps, bloodstains and items in your screenshot show that autoexplore didn't take you from outside of the vault to that location. You know it is a vault as soon as you see metal walls; that's when you place the travel exclusion and/or look at the des. Don't wait until you find ood monsters.

[Rokirem]

In the most stable release of DC:SS (0.18) I think everything is pretty normal, the Trunk version (0.19) is a completely different story, however. I ended up finding a centaur on D:1 after a couple hundred turns, and a troll on D:4. Who knows, maybe I am just unlucky. They are reducing amount of floors in the Lair from 8 to 6 (This is subject to change) though, so there is that. I have been finding Death Yak on L:2 in it.

[Shard1697]

You are just unlucky.

[Sprucery]

...and it happens with every new version...

[chequers]

A vault placing those monsters on d:9 should probably be considered a bug. Does anyone know which vault this is?

[KoboldLord]

A vault placing those monsters on d:9 should probably be considered a bug. Does anyone know which vault this is?

Those monsters weren't wandering around randomly. The OP cut through three rooms full of increasingly difficult monsters to get to those four, and in the next room after this one there will probably be an even harder cluster of monsters. The OP is just very stubborn and chose not to take the hint.

It could be argued that vaults should never include severely out-of-depth monsters, but the option to design a vault that does so was included intentionally so it can hardly be considered a bug if somebody writes a vault that actually uses the feature. Personally, I think there's a reasonable place in the game for vaults that need to be skipped when first encountered, as long as it is reasonably clear what they are. That does appear to be the case here.

[Sar]

I have been finding Death Yak on L:2 in it.

There's a Lair entrance vault that can place death yaks...

[espais]

Those monsters weren't wandering around randomly. The OP cut through three rooms full of increasingly difficult monsters to get to those four, and in the next room after this one there will probably be an even harder cluster of monsters. The OP is just very stubborn and chose not to take the hint.

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea. I auto-explored into that room. I fought nothing to get there. The footsteps show that I autoexplored into there.

[sanka]

He meant the vault, not just the room. The whole metal walled area is the vault. As duvessa has pointed out, you have not autoexplored from outside of the vault to the room with the dangerous monsters.

Of course knowing that metal walls sign a vault is somewhat spoilery.

[KoboldLord]

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea. I auto-explored into that room. I fought nothing to get there. The footsteps show that I autoexplored into there.

The footsteps show that you autoexplored through that one single room inside the vault, after a large patch of bloodstains show that you killed the contents of that room at that door. And on the other side of that door, there is another trail of bloodstains and a pile of dropped items that show that you killed another group of monsters at the door before that. And if we look at the very edge of the screen, there's another set of bloodstains at the start of the preceding room that showed that you killed another set of monsters when you opened that room up.

Of course there were going to be more monsters in the fourth room. That's just pattern recognition. You can't really blame autoexplore when it took you a grand total of seven steps from the last ambush almost exactly like this one. At worst, you can say it took you one tile out of the way and put you in the wrong tile in front of the door before opening it.

[Sandman25]

I assume OP didn't have any problems with previous rooms, why should they stop exploring if there is no runed door?

[espais]

I assume OP didn't have any problems with previous rooms, why should they stop exploring if there is no runed door?

Thanks, I was struggling with how to properly phrase my response. I don't exactly recall what was in that room, but I'm fairly certain it was pure popcorn at best.

[sanka]

I assume OP didn't have any problems with previous rooms, why should they stop exploring if there is no runed door?

Because vaults are spoilery and runed doors do not correspond very closely with danger. So if you see a vault, then either
0. Press autoexplore and accept the vaults+autoexplore can place you in really bad situations. (This is what happened here)
1. Explore further without autoexplore and accept that vaults can place you in unfair situations. But at least your position will be better than on the screenshot. (This is what I do actually.)
2. Exclude the vault from autoexplore, come back ~5 levels later. Accept that this will result in loss of xp + items compared to "playing optimally" for a while.
3. Look up the vault descriptor, and check whether you can clear it or not. This is optimal by far in my experience, altough I never do it since I am lazy.

Yes, vaults are dumb from this perspective, although I still like some of them.

[ydeve]

FR provide a ctr-o type screen that lists all the vaults generated on the level along with the vault file. Then everyone can do option 3 without too much tedium/spoileriness.

[Sandman25]

1. Explore further without autoexplore and accept that vaults can place you in unfair situations. But at least your position will be better than on the screenshot. (This is what I do actually.)

I believe it can be applied automatically. Autoexplore should just open doors from a diagonal, not standing directly in front of it.

[dowan]

I got murdered by a fire giant and tengu reaver combo on D10 recently. It was in fact trunk, although I assume it was just a due to a vault. But, just like the OP, I was just autoexploring and tabbing, and all the sudden I was facing depths level monsters after just having finished lair! If you're going to have wildly OOD monsters in a vault, it would be cool to put a rune door there. I never knew that only vaults could have metal walls either...

[njvack]

It's funny; I also had always wondered: do wall types just change as part of normal level generation sometimes, or only as part of a vault? Guess it's the latter.

[crate]

FR provide a ctr-o type screen that lists all the vaults generated on the level along with the vault file. Then everyone can do option 3 without too much tedium/spoileriness.

The devs don't want to do this because it's an info leak; you can find out what vaults generated on a floor without moving at all. This is also why vault information is only printed to morgues (finished characters) and not to character dumps.

If vaults are going to exist in crawl they are going to be spoilery, there is no real fix to that. The best solution is to create vaults that don't encourage players to look at the .des files, but unfortunately that's not common enough in crawl's current vault design (and thus even the ones that actually are harmless are problematic because there exist vaults that are not harmless).

[sanka]

You can make it so that the vault info only appears when you have already seen one tile. It means that vault tiles should be clearly different from normal tiles.

It may even have display a list of vaults that it could be until you reveal enough tiles.

[espais]

To add to this, this is a new game. Didn't open a door or go into a vault. This is wandering around the level at D10.



I didn't screencap it, but I killed a centaur warrior upon coming down the stairs to that level. Don't usually see those until closer to D14/15 (for me anyway)

[crate]

You'd have to have the game tell the player when the player sees the vault (otherwise the player "should" check the vault list screen after every step, which is unacceptable).

I'm not sure how much of an improvement that would be anyway, since looking through any sort of vault display is really not much fun, especially for the complicated vaults with lots of potential swaps and substitutions to the point where they're basically not human-readable. The devs have decided that reading through .des files isn't a thing crawl players should be doing while playing, and I think that's a pretty reasonable decision. Making it easier for players to find the information in the .des files while ingame isn't, therefore, really an improvement.

The only real solution is to not have bad vaults in crawl.

---

The post above is not particularly noteworthy; the most common place for people to die to centaur warriors is d:9 and the most common place for people to die to tengu conjurers or warriors is d:10. Obviously, that's not the same as the most common place for those monsters to generate, but it shows that d:9 centaur warriors or d:10 tengu conjurers are not particularly unusual, and nothing about monster generation makes them more common now than in recent-past versions.

[dowan]

Tengu conjurers are one thing. That reaver on D10 had to be from a vault, right? I certainly didn't trigger the OOD timer.

I would like it more if all vaults with hand placed monsters had rune doors, but if it's only a weird piece of terrain it doesn't need one. That's basically how Tome 4 does it, and while I don't think Tome 4 is a particularly great game, I do like how vaults are handled.

[espais]

Tengu conjurers are one thing. That reaver on D10 had to be from a vault, right? I certainly didn't trigger the OOD timer.

Nope, he was wandering around the main floor with his conjurer pal.

The post above is not particularly noteworthy; the most common place for people to die to centaur warriors is d:9 and the most common place for people to die to tengu conjurers or warriors is d:10.

Really? I don't think I've ever seen any type of tengu prior to D15. Granted I've only been playing trunk for a couple of months now, but I was on 0.18 for a while as well.

[Arrhythmia]

Tengu conjurers are one thing. That reaver on D10 had to be from a vault, right? I certainly didn't trigger the OOD timer.

Nope, he was wandering around the main floor with his conjurer pal.

Reaver, not warrior, and dowan was talking about his post.

[espais]

Tengu conjurers are one thing. That reaver on D10 had to be from a vault, right? I certainly didn't trigger the OOD timer.

Nope, he was wandering around the main floor with his conjurer pal.

Reaver, not warrior, and dowan was talking about his post.

whoops, my bad
carry on

[crate]

Of the 42 d:10 tengu reaver deaths, 37 were from vaults. These, also, are no more common than in old versions.

[Arrhythmia]

Of the 42 d:10 tengu reaver deaths, 37 were from vaults. These, also, are no more common than in old versions.

For context, how many deaths total have there been on D:10 (using the same restrictions that you used before)?

[dowan]

Not surprising that it's nothing to do with trunk, I just saw the thread and that tengu reaver immediately popped into my head. But from the looks of what Crate said, it is possible, although unlikely, to run into a non-vault reaver on D10.

[crate]

The non-vault reavers were likely people who spent a lot of time on the floor.

I just checked all tengu reaver deaths since they are reasonably recent. There are roughly 47000 total d:10 deaths since tengu reavers were added to crawl.

[dowan]

So... what you're saying is that it's a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top?!? I knew it! dpeg, gammafunk, tupac, harry truman, lizard people... I mean, come on sheeple! Wake up! The shadow lizards are killing us with tengus and autoexplore traps so they can harvest our brain waves for their nefarious purposes! Or should I say... nefarious porpoises! That's right! It goes all the way to the top of the animal kingdom too!

[removeelyvilon]

For what it's worth, I could swear that Death Knights show up scaringly early now, but I haven't found any hard facts that support this claim (because in today's world, nobody belives a thing if you don't wave a signed paper in front of their head).

[robbcorp]

For what it's worth, I could swear that Death Knights show up scaringly early now, but I haven't found any hard facts that support this claim (because in today's world, nobody belives a thing if you don't wave a signed paper in front of their head).

I've had to skip floors because of them. Oh well. For early enemies, extremely early Centaurs bug me the most. That is extremely uncommon though.

[Sar]

Death knights are now a semi-common late D spawn.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Death knights aren't exactly dangerous though. They have no ranged attack that can kill the player and their speed is 10. Just walk away. In my view they are significantly less dangerous than even ordinary centaurs. The biggest problem I can see is if they spawn with friends like phantasmal warriors.

[robbcorp]

They have Injury Mirror and if you aren't paying attention it'll do a good number on your HP. Plus they usually have a two handed polearm so reach action. I think they are just bad news if you are inexperienced.

[removeelyvilon]

Death knights aren't exactly dangerous though. They have no ranged attack that can kill the player and their speed is 10. Just walk away. In my view they are significantly less dangerous than even ordinary centaurs. The biggest problem I can see is if they spawn with friends like phantasmal warriors.

Yeah, yeah, I meant their entourage, too. The death knight itself is indeed not too bad. It's all good.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

They have Injury Mirror and if you aren't paying attention it'll do a good number on your HP. Plus they usually have a two handed polearm so reach action. I think they are just bad news if you are inexperienced.

I don't disagree. However, there are absolutely loads of things that can kill characters if the player isn't paying attention. Death knight injury mirror isn't something I would place high up on that list.

[dowan]

Hah, you say that, but have you ever cast agony on a death knight while injury mirror was on? I don't recommend it...

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I'm intrigued. What does happen?

I can imagine two possible outcomes:
1) the character suffers torment and loses 50% health (unmodified by negative energy resistance and other shenanigans, because pain mirror)
2) the character suffers the amount of damage that the death knight takes (something like 50 at the top end?)

I wouldn't be surprised if that's not how crawl works so. So, do tell!

[dowan]

I'm not sure exactly how the formula works, all I know is I had a lot of life before I cast and, and I died after I cast it. I took WAY more damage than I've ever taken from hitting an injury mirrored with a big melee weapon.

I'm guessing it reflected whatever actual damage the agony spell did, but even then I wouldn't think it should have done as much as it did. Maybe there's some bonus damage there? I guess it wouldn't be too hard to test in wiz mode.

I know for sure it killed me real good, but I'm fuzzy on the details beyond that point.

[Sandman25]

Wiki says it is amount of damage. Death knight can have 107 HP, that's 53 damage from agony

[ajon]

Does agony also affect you?

[Sandman25]

If death knight gets N damage, you get N damage too and all resists except DD damage shaving are ignored.