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http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 35293002dd

New "Cyno" species (humanoids with the heads of dogs). They have +2 in every aptitude but cannot exceed skill level 14 in any skill.

Note: This is atm only a pull request so it is even more experimental than trunk.

Stats:

-1 XP, normal HP and MP, 3 MR per level
5/5/5 base stats
+2 aptitudes across the board
Intrinsic: Limited potential You have limited potential (max skill of 14).

Code:: Cynos Cynos are humanoids with the head of a dog, with origins from the eastern deserts. Cynos are unusually attracted to the dungeon, with mentions of the Orb often generating blank stares, tilted heads, and involuntary drooling. Cynos are quick to learn, picking up the basics of any skill within a short period of time. However, this incredible flexibility comes at the cost of being unable to learn anything about a skill past the basics, requiring them to take advantage of every option available to find an advantage against foes of greater ability.

Tip for commit diggers: the really spicy stuff is usually hidden in the "heads", not in the "shortlog".

Edit: Removed parts that have been clarified by the creator.

Why would you play a species with high apt and -1XP?

Why would you play a species with high apt in EVERYTHING but such terrible stats that they can't hybrid?

There is no point in playing this species over a Mf, Mi or a De because it can't actually do the jack of all trades well unless you are trying to be EV/SH based and you can get enough skills to do that well enough. The only way they can achieve their stated goal is by being Chei. We can't even substitute Zin in there because invo will be too low to get adequate stats.

What they apparently embody is "try to do everything and then fail when the actual game mechanics prevent you from doing them all at once in any effective manner". If you want versatility a human will kill this, if you want something that can be hybrid armor/melee/casters, this species sucks at it; you need more than high apt for that.

They should at least get Fangs 1, right?

removeelyvilon wrote:5/5/5 base stats (note: this seems very low, perhaps the numbers are placeholders or Cyno is meant to have the lowest base stat distribution in the game)

This is intentional for the moment, explained below.

severen wrote:Why would you play a species with high apt and -1XP?

Why would you play a species with high apt in EVERYTHING but such terrible stats that they can't hybrid?

There is no point in playing this species over a Mf, Mi or a De because it can't actually do the jack of all trades well unless you are trying to be EV/SH based and you can get enough skills to do that well enough. The only way they can achieve their stated goal is by being Chei. We can't even substitute Zin in there because invo will be too low to get adequate stats.

What they apparently embody is "try to do everything and then fail when the actual game mechanics prevent you from doing them all at once in any effective manner". If you want versatility a human will kill this, if you want something that can be hybrid armor/melee/casters, this species sucks at it; you need more than high apt for that.

The goal of this species isn't aimed at being a "jack of all trades", as I feel that belongs more to humans or demigods. The goal is actually to try to achieve an "easy early game, difficult late game" through a forced skill cap, but compensate it by allowing the player to transition quickly to whatever can give them an advantage. Yes, a DE/Mf/Mi will be able to do any of their specific roles much better, and a Hu/Dg/Ds will do much better at being flexible in the long term solely due to better stats and a lack of skill cap, but I'm not intentionally trying to compete with either of those.

The initial commit of this species had a stat distrubtion of 8/8/8, followed by 7/7/10 shortly after that. It also had a 0 XP attribute and +3 in all skills. The consequences revealed in playtesting was a species who were so easy to play in the early and mid game, that they never had to spend any consumables. This led to having such a large surplus to spend at their leisure at the part of the game that was 'supposed' to be difficult for them. The current iteration in the pull request is an attempt to combat that with a much lower base stat line (5/5/5), lowering the flat aptitude to +2, and a slightly lower XP attribute to try to force the point of difficulty to occur sooner, draining consumables so that there isn't as large of a stockpile for the late game. Personal playtesting showed that the high skill aptitudes were more than adequate to compensate for low stats in the early game, so I don't feel that they were too heavily nerfed. However, if this iteration proves either too difficult or still too easy, I'll be trying another approach of raising the stats up to something reasonable again (probably 7/7/7) and maybe bringing the XP modifier back up to 0, but bringing the skill cap down to 10 (this was at the suggestion of Lasty). I'll give a bunch of shots at modifying the species to attempt to achieve the stated goal, but I fully accept that this species may be flawed in concept and probably won't be added in the end.

MainiacJoe wrote:They should at least get Fangs 1, right?

"Humanoid with the head of a dog" is currently just because that is the extent of my creative imagination and I wanted to make a dog joke in the species description. If the species somehow actually ends up in a place where it feels like it could be added, and still retains the current flavor, I'll try to find some small flavor mutation to throw their way (Fangs 1 or maybe the sense invis that other dogs/wolves currently have).

How do i play this on webtiles

Great, finally we can have specialized race for Ash/Chei.

Can you exceed skill level 14 with ash/heroism?

lethediver wrote:How do i play this on webtiles

I've talked with johnstein, and he said he was willing to host it and will try to get around to putting it up on an experimental branch on CBRO sometime this weekend.

removeelyvilon wrote:Can you exceed skill level 14 with ash/heroism?

No, Ash and Heroism skill boosting stop at the species skill cap of 14. I did this because they also stop at the skill cap of 27 for any other species, so it makes more logical sense that they would stop at the lower cap for this species. This also stops this species from exclusively picking Oka/Ash every game. Oka might still be a useful pick with Finesse and god gifts, as well as Heroism at the beginning of the game, but Ash picking might suffer unless you desperately want clarity/SInv/scrying.

So as an exercise in revisiting my understanding what each skill does, I put together this list of what the ramifications of max skill 14 does:

Fgt: Base HP maxes out at 29.5 + 6.5 * XL
SBl: all can reach mindelay
LBl: DblSw can get to speed 8, GrSw 9, TripSw 12
Axe: WarAx 8, BrAx 9, BatAx 10, ExAx 13
M&F: MStar 8, EStar 8, GrMc 10
Pla: Halb 8, Scy 13, Glai 10, Bard 13
Stv: all can reach mindelay
Thr: Jav 8
Slg: all can reach mindelay
Bow: LBow 10
Cbw: Arb 12, TrCB 16

Arm: AC multiplier maxes out at 1.64
Ddg: EV bonus maxes out at 0.35*(1 + 2 * Dex)
Shd: Best EV penalty for shield 0.2, for large shield 2.2
Sth: base stealth maxes out at 3 * Dex + 14

Spc: max MP 44; max spell slots 55. Max spell hunger abatement 14*Int
Spell Skills: At max Spc and max spell skill(s), the best base spell power/success factor is 3.5 * Int.
Evo: under 0.19 rules, max wand spellpower 50--but I don't know what it is in trunk. max MP from Evo 34
Inv: max MP from Inv 34

Half-baked observations:

Slings and especially Staves shine.
Shields are attractive, even though the penalties cannot be removed completely, because the top-tier two-handed weapons suffer more from the skill caps in terms of weapon speed.
Attributes become more important than usual because the skill multipliers are capped.
Mutations and items that boost spell power are more useful.

MainiacJoe wrote:So as an exercise in revisiting my understanding what each skill does, I put together this list of what the ramifications of max skill 14 does:

Fgt: Base HP maxes out at 29.5 + 6.5 * XL
SBl: all can reach mindelay
LBl: DblSw can get to speed 8, GrSw 9, TripSw 12
Axe: WarAx 8, BrAx 9, BatAx 10, ExAx 13
M&F: MStar 8, EStar 8, GrMc 10
Pla: Halb 8, Scy 13, Glai 10, Bard 13
Stv: all can reach mindelay
Thr: Jav 8
Slg: all can reach mindelay
Bow: LBow 10
Cbw: Arb 12, TrCB 16

Arm: AC multiplier maxes out at 1.64
Ddg: EV bonus maxes out at 0.35*(1 + 2 * Dex)
Shd: Best EV penalty for shield 0.2, for large shield 2.2
Sth: base stealth maxes out at 3 * Dex + 14

Spc: max MP 44; max spell slots 55. Max spell hunger abatement 14*Int
Spell Skills: At max Spc and max spell skill(s), the best base spell power/success factor is 3.5 * Int.
Evo: under 0.19 rules, max wand spellpower 50--but I don't know what it is in trunk. max MP from Evo 34
Inv: max MP from Inv 34

Half-baked observations:
Slings and especially Staves shine.
Shields are attractive, even though the penalties cannot be removed completely, because the top-tier two-handed weapons suffer more from the skill caps in terms of weapon speed.
Attributes become more important than usual because the skill multipliers are capped.
Mutations and items that boost spell power are more useful.

Also there will be some spells you can't cast at all, and some you will be only able to cast with wizardry/brilliance

The goal is actually to try to achieve an "easy early game, difficult late game" through a forced skill cap, but compensate it by allowing the player to transition quickly to whatever can give them an advantage. Yes, a DE/Mf/Mi will be able to do any of their specific roles much better, and a Hu/Dg/Ds will do much better at being flexible in the long term solely due to better stats and a lack of skill cap, but I'm not intentionally trying to compete with either of those.

Maybe I'm missing it... Could say a little bit more about the inspiration for this, or where the demand would come from? Unless you're running a challenge session to just demon speed the early game, why wouldn't people want that flexibility later? I think I'm fairly good about distributing skills to get through the Dungeon without maxing stuff. Maybe too good as it often burns me later. But I'm not sure I see the incentive exactly. Except maybe to be able to somehow pick up more speed throughout the whole Dungeon with less caution (because quick retooling)? Anyway, I just don't quite get it yet.

Perhaps it's just that the Dungeon isn't "bothering" me personally lately, so much as figuring out what to do after it. Or how to build characters that achieve depth without losing all the flexibility I can already manage.

Seems never viable for 15 runes without Statue form Chei.. and seems not that 'fun'.

stoneychips wrote:Maybe I'm missing it... Could say a little bit more about the inspiration for this, or where the demand would come from? Unless you're running a challenge session to just demon speed the early game, why wouldn't people want that flexibility later? I think I'm fairly good about distributing skills to get through the Dungeon without maxing stuff. Maybe too good as it often burns me later. But I'm not sure I see the incentive exactly. Except maybe to be able to somehow pick up more speed throughout the whole Dungeon with less caution (because quick retooling)? Anyway, I just don't quite get it yet.

Perhaps it's just that the Dungeon isn't "bothering" me personally lately, so much as figuring out what to do after it. Or how to build characters that achieve depth without losing all the flexibility I can already manage.

The inspiration was that I initially saw this thread and felt like the high aptitudes/lower skill cap was an interesting species idea to try, but it was bogged down with a lot of other gimmicks. I felt the species was closer to the idea of what I thought Ash would be when I first started playing the game: something that lets you move from one skill to the next and swap gear/spells as needed, when Ash is probably closer to picking a loadout and sticking with it unless you absolutely need to swap in order to get a large shortcut to using the bigger stuff. The follow on was that this shouldn't be the specific goal of the species, however, and that it should be designed around the "harder late game" aspect instead, or it would be indistinguishble from other flexible species (or strictly better).

papilio wrote:Seems never viable for 15 runes without Statue form Chei.. and seems not that 'fun'.

You could proably also do it with a eudemon whip + lots of other gods, getting a low attack delay distortion weapon, etc.

If you can do it with chei + statue, then you can also do it without them. Better.

stickyfingers wrote:If you can do it with chei + statue, then you can also do it without them. Better.

possibly. I do think statue form would be a necessity though. And statue combines nicely with chei. Chei might even be a necessity to get statue form online on a race this gimped.

I'd be interested in playing this, it seems a quite a bit better than barachian anyway.

Floodkiller wrote:I fully accept that this species may be flawed in concept and probably won't be added in the end.

It's a worthwhile experiment. Don't give up on it too fast, perhaps all it takes is another mechanic to achieve the stated goal after you exhaust the usual knobs. e.g. some ability/passive unlocked at an XL threshold.

Cynos are now up on CBRO experimental! Please provide any feedback you have in the GDD thread!

Sounds fun, I'll give it a try.

I like that it gives another route for inexperienced players to see more of the game before dieing, and perhaps more experiences along the lines of "that *almost* killed me, what could I have done better?"

lethediver wrote:
stickyfingers wrote:If you can do it with chei + statue, then you can also do it without them. Better.

possibly. I do think statue form would be a necessity though. And statue combines nicely with chei. Chei might even be a necessity to get statue form online on a race this gimped.

I have a 43% failure on my current character - DrVM, 23 IQ, 13.2 transmutations, 0 earth magic, 16.9 spellcasting. You should be fine for statue form with 14 earth and 14 spellcasting.

yeah I usually get statue going with roughly 12/12 trans/earth, on chei characters. So with chei it'll definitely be enough, and without chei 14/14 should be okay (with 14 spellcasting as well, maybe some +int equipment). But definitely enough room to play a chei statue, which I might try if I can find the time. This would be the only race in the game with +2 unarmed, after all.

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