So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game


Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.

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Post Sunday, 21st May 2017, 20:36

So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

I recently started playing (a little bit of) crawl again, and I've encountered a number of interesting trends among novice players - these aren't true beginners but players who can get far in the game and maybe even win. These players still have a lot of weaknesses in their play, of course, and they often get stuck in a mid/late game that's 'too hard' because of character choices they've made. I think this is a sign that these players have reached a stage where they should be asking themselves what things in the game actually do and how those things affect their character.

Almost invariably, I see a novice playing something like mifi and using a one handed weapon (often a morningstar or some other subpar mace) and a shield. Sometimes they're advised to use a two handed weapon on characters like that, and they say something like, "Well, maybe that's good for advanced players, but I expect to make a lot of mistakes, so a shield helps me survive that." Does it really? Let's roughly examine how these things work.

Wearing a shield provides the SH stat in exchange for some disadvantages. SH is sort of like evasion except it mostly just has a chance to avoid damage against the first attack made against you on that turn, and it doesn't work against as many things. So while SH has its uses, it's by far the least reliable of the three defensive stats. Shields also have two major disadvantages. The first is that it costs experience to use shields without slowing your melee attacks and worsening your melee accuracy and spell success. So in other words, to use shields, you have to make your character weaker in every other way because of opportunity cost; this is true for all skill choices, of course.

The second disadvantage is precluding the use of two-handed weapons. This is really important because of another mechanic we should examine a bit of: melee damage. Melee damage is one of the only ways a character in crawl can have 'multiplicative scaling'. Unlike for spells or evocables or whatever, the relevant stats, weapon skill and fighting, act as multipliers for the base damage of your weapon. At maxed skills, they roughly double the weapon's base damage, so that a weapon like a great mace will be doing 1d34 damage and a weapon like a morningstar will be doing 1d20 (both before AC, which means the great mace will also be getting through AC more often). So a character like a typical mifi almost always will want to use a two-handed weapon because it relies on its weapon for most of its damage.

From this brief examination, the reader might also figure out which types of characters *should* use shields. Shields are better on characters that don't rely on weapons to do the majority of their damage, aren't as negatively impacted by their experience cost, and may be lacking in one or both of the other two defensive stats. A troll is commonly a good shield/large shield user because it's typically unarmed and has poor defenses, and trolls require fewer skill levels to remove shield penalties. A character casting high level spells probably wants a buckler and in a few cases a shield. But to figure out examples like this, we need to develop a basic understanding of the game mechanics we're interacting with, many of which are different from those in other games.
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:03

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

I agree that shields are bad for novice players yet I disagree with your conclusion that shields are bad in general. When I am playing seriously as pure melee, I do the following things:
1) lure monsters to fight one on one. Having extra 50%+ chance to complete block monster attack makes 1d20 strictly better than 1d34
2) speaking about 1d20, I think we should talk about evenigstar or demon whip here where it becomes much better than this.
3) shield is more useful when in heavy armour which is typical for pure melee. MiFi is not that bad because due to good aptitudes in Dodging and high Str/Dex it can have decent EV even in GDA but for HuFi going plate armour+ shield can be better than plate armour + 2h weapon.
4) several gods encourage using shields. Qaz and TSO are obvious examples. Oka allows to kill everything twice as fast due to finesse while also buffing SH with heroism. Ash is bad for pure melee yet it makes buckler almost free for typical Ash users and you can easily switch to 2h if needed. Chei allows to have great AC/EV/SH
My approach is "if I found a good 1h weapon like electro morningstar and decent shield like one of rF+, I don't treat going this way as a mistake for most characters".
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:33

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

VeryAngryFelid wrote:My approach is "if I found a good 1h weapon like electro morningstar and decent shield like one of rF+, I don't treat going this way as a mistake for most characters".

An elec morningstar is an insane weapon, finding it early is like winning a lottery. If you also find an rF shield early, that's like winning two lotteries on the same week.

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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:40

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Magipi wrote:An elec morningstar is an insane weapon, finding it early is like winning a lottery. If you also find an rF shield early, that's like winning two lotteries on the same week.


I am not sure if you agree or not. According to OP using those late game (or even training shields!) would be a mistake because greatmace deals more damage. At least this is my understanding of OP.

Edit. To clarify, those weapons are not required for me to go shield-way. Shield of protection and a +0 plain morningstar are good enough for me too.
Last edited by VeryAngryFelid on Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:42, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:42

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

I appreciate Mikee's point that to a novice (and for a long time, to me) having a shield was giving a false sense of security. Probably it came from visualizing some kind of Roman soldier behind his impenetrable shield. They won their battles with their shields, and boy, in Crawl I definitely wanted to have one, too. So the game mechanics of shields do not quite live up to that concept, and it would be good if novices can understand that better. I don't find the wiki pages dealing with shields particularly helpful on that.

I give my casters bucklers when I find good ones with extra resistances, or even well enchanted artefacts. The 4 skill levels for that are quickly accumulated. Any actual blocks happening from these bucklers are entirely unexpected, but welcome extras.
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:45

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

What I'm saying: finding an early elec morningstar is very rare, and also the decision is obvious. (You should use it, of course).

In the vast majority of games, when you need to decide between one- and 2-handers, the decision is between a +0 morningstar and +0 shield vs +0 great mace (all unbranded).

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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:46

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Majang wrote:I give my casters bucklers when I find good ones with extra resistances, or even well enchanted artefacts.


Why well enchanted? A +0 buckler with rF+ and rPois is a no go? Basically I don't care about enchantment of artifact bucklers because it still gives quite low SH (comparing to typical EV of casters)
Last edited by VeryAngryFelid on Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:48, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 06:48

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Magipi wrote:What I'm saying: finding an early elec morningstar is very rare, and also the decision is obvious. (You should use it, of course).


It is not obvious how to use it: should you ignore shields and continue training M&F for greatmace when facing monsters with rElec?
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 07:35

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Shields provide additional protection from damage swings. It's like GDR, "it doesn't matter" until it does. You get an additional evasion roll against a lot of things, thus you're safer from extremities at the cost of lower damage.

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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 09:00

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Majang wrote:I give my casters bucklers when I find good ones with extra resistances, or even well enchanted artefacts.


Why well enchanted? A +0 buckler with rF+ and rPois is a no go? Basically I don't care about enchantment of artifact bucklers because it still gives quite low SH (comparing to typical EV of casters)

Sorry, I was not clear - with 'well enchanted' I meant things like +Int or SInv, not any addition to the Sh value.
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 20:48

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Since character species is a good stand-in for whether you're likely to want to use a shield or not, it might provide a good point of comparison.

Let's look at a breakdown of relevant games*, by species, of players' likelihood of ascending a 3-rune game, _after they have already picked up their third rune_, with and without 15+ Shields skill.

*Excluding known bots, quits, leaves, wizmode games, and since mikee was talking about less-experienced players, also excluding greatplayers+.

Here are the queries:

With 15+ Shields skill:
!lg * recent name!=@bot name!=@greatplayers !boring playable:race urune=3 fifteenskills~~Shields s=crace / won o:-. -graph
https://shalott.org/graphs/7e5a9543639f ... 1e272.html

Without 15+ Shields skill:
!lg * recent name!=@bot name!=@greatplayers !boring playable:race urune=3 fifteenskills!~~Shields s=crace / won o:-. -graph
https://shalott.org/graphs/80bc47ce7e35 ... f7fc3.html
(The y-axis on this second graph is misleading, I don't know how to make it scale to 100%)

Species whose chance of going on to ascend after having picked up their third rune is higher, with 15+ Shields:
Deep Dwarf, Deep Elf, Demigod, Demonspawn, Gnoll, Halfling, Human, Kobold, Merfolk, Mummy, Naga, Octopode, Spriggan, Troll

Species whose chance of going on to ascend after having picked up their third rune is higher, without 15+ Shields:
Barachian, Centaur, Draconian, (Felid), Formicid, Gargoyle, Ghoul, Hill Orc, Minotaur, Ogre, Tengu, Vampire, Vine Stalker

Now, these queries aren't perfect. They don't take into account characters that were wearing shields, but didn't train Shields skill to >=15. (Those characters are being lumped in with the no-shield group above.) For characters that want to wear shields, I suspect it's often a better idea for much of the game to equip a shield but only train the skill to around 8 to 12, but the !lg fields are limited in what they can search here and are unable to provide this level of breakdown (to my knowledge).

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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 21:33

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Leszczynek wrote:Shields provide additional protection from damage swings. It's like GDR, "it doesn't matter" until it does. You get an additional evasion roll against a lot of things, thus you're safer from extremities at the cost of lower damage.
Even if this reasoning made GDR important, which it doesn't, it still wouldn't apply to SH because SH, unlike GDR, isn't guaranteed to do anything at all. You can miss your block roll just as you can miss your dodge roll, and take full damage.

I can't help but think these advice threads don't really help anyone. Let's say a new player finds this thread, or pretty much any other advice thread on Tavern. They'll see advice immediately followed by contradictory advice, both with flagrant misinformation about game mechanics (but our hypothetical reader won't know it's misinformation because they're even less informed than the people giving the advice, so they might end up worse off than before they read it), and then after a few posts of that back-and-forth someone always shows up with some completely useless Sequell queries. The process is fun, but ultimately purposeless aside from that.

(Portraying melee damage as 1dX, really?)

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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 21:44

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

What do you propose to use Dungeon Crawl Advice subforum for if advice threads aren't helpful?

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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 21:51

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Leszczynek wrote:What do you propose to use Dungeon Crawl Advice subforum for if advice threads aren't helpful?

Perhaps the forums should be solely devoted to critiques of existing advice? :)
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Post Monday, 22nd May 2017, 22:15

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Leszczynek wrote:What do you propose to use Dungeon Crawl Advice subforum for if advice threads aren't helpful?
It's still useful as a place to move GDD threads to
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 00:56

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

I used to think shields (esp. large shields) were bad, but I reversed my position on them after watching dynast streak 19 NaWn's mostly with axes shields and 0 dodging or dex investment, ever. It seems to work. I suppose you could argue that it worked in spite of suboptimal play because of the quality of the pilot, but arguing over these situations amounts to splitting hairs when we consider how trivially easy crawl's mid-late game is. This is why I think it's hard to argue definitively about what's optimal for a new player - you can ask two different players, who are both very good, about whether medium - large shields are good or not, and receive two different answers, and it can be hard to prove one player is right since crawl's mid-late game is so easy that you can't disentangle player quality from slightly suboptimal play.

I think there is definitely less reason to concern yourself with spell success as of 0.20-a, as almost all support spells have been removed except spectral weapon, swiftness, and translocations, but Passage was quasi-nerfed in 0.19 and +blink is found on many artefacts. Regarding swiftness, I think the intersection of (depths at which I want to retreat upstairs from enemies) and (depths as which I entertain casting swiftness in heavy-ish armor) is basically empty. You can also use a large shield with only ~18 skill for a penalty of about 0.05 delay, which is quite small for up to 30 SH for a decent shield with a source of reflection. If you're a bad player, I think having more defense is preferable to having more offense, since you will probably make some bad decisions, and having more defense will allow you to get out of them with a higher probability.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 02:54

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Yeah, I don't think this thread has turned out to be very useful. I was mostly trying to use the topics I mentioned to demonstrate a practical method of thinking and decision making. I was a bit surprised to see people wanting to use it as some opportunity to have a debate about the goodness of shields, but I guess a lot of my post was about shields so...

duvessa wrote:(Portraying melee damage as 1dX, really?)

How far off is that?
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 06:11

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

duvessa wrote:I can't help but think these advice threads don't really help anyone. Let's say a new player finds this thread, or pretty much any other advice thread on Tavern. They'll see advice immediately followed by contradictory advice


It is intended IMHO. I wouldn't start a thread like "shields are a trap for new players" nor "shields rule", it depends on specific game. Sometimes it is optimal to use shields, sometimes it is a mistake, sometimes there is no significant difference.

You are right about GDR giving GDR :) yet there is much common between GDR and shield: they significantly reduce average incoming damage in fsim.

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Also I forgot to include Yred, Kiku and Beogh in the list of gods who encourage to use a shield because much damage comes from allies.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 06:20

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

mikee wrote:I was mostly trying to use the topics I mentioned to demonstrate a practical method of thinking and decision making. I was a bit surprised to see people wanting to use it as some opportunity to have a debate about the goodness of shields, but I guess a lot of my post was about shields so...

Sorry, I failed to see that in OP. It didn't include anything like "Analyze why you are dying. Is it because you deal too little damage? Or maybe you don't lure dangerous monsters to fight them one on one and fight an unique along with 3 plain orcs making your shield almost useless? Or maybe you rely on berserking too much and it stops working in Vaults? Or maybe you forget to train Dodging and put all stats into Str while wearing chain mail along with a regular shield and bad weapon hording scrolls of enchant armour/weapon for end-game gear?"
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 06:28

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Good question! Here's the formula for player melee/missile damage, as far as I can tell, excluding auxes because there are too many of them. random2(X) is the same thing as (1dX-1). This has a mean of X/2-0.5.

Start with the base damage of your weapon or unarmed.
Multiply that by a randomized number depending on your strength. If your strength is above 10, this number is (39+random2(Strength-9)*2). If your strength is below 10, it is (39-random2(11-Strength)*3). Then divide the result by 39 and truncate it to an integer.
Now set the result to random2([Result]+1).
Now multiply the result by 2500+random2([Weapon skill]*100+1), and then divide it by 2500. (Skip this step if it's an unarmed or aux attack.)
Now multiply the result by 3000+random2([Fighting skill]*100+1), and then divide it by 3000. Exception: If it is an aux attack, use 4000 in place of both 3000s in this formula.
If it is a melee attack and you are berserk or mighted, add 1d10.
If it is a melee attack and you are starving or worse, and not a vampire, subtract random2(5). Note that while vampires don't get a damage penalty at bloodless, they do get an accuracy penalty.
Now add random2(1+[enchantment]) or subtract random2(1-[enchantment]) depending on whether [enchantment] is positive or negative. The value of [enchantment] is the enchantment of whatever weapon the attack is using (if any), plus any applicable slaying and corrosion.
Now apply the stabbing bonus. I won't go into how to calculate it here, as it's not really relevant; most attacks aren't stabs so there is no stabbing bonus.
If it is a melee attack, and is a non-direct cleave hit made by any weapon other than Gyre and Gimble, multiply the result by 7/10 and randomly round it to an integer (the mean result of this randomized rounding is the same as the non-rounded value).
If it is a martial attack made during Serpent's Lash, multiply the result by 1.5 and randomly round it to an integer.
If it is a lunge, multiply the result by 1.3 and randomly round it. If the monster you're attacking is distracted it gets multiplied by 1.6 instead.
If it is a melee attack made in statue form, multiply the result by 1.5 and randomly round it.
Divide the result by 2 if you're in shadow form and randomly round it.
Multiply the result by 3/4 if you have the Weak status and randomly round it.
If it's an unarmed melee attack made during Confusing Touch, set the result to 0.
Now apply the monster's AC.
Now do the damage to the monster, possibly killing it.
Now if the monster is still alive, apply the brand.

So the form is almost never "random number up to X with a uniform distribution" (i.e. 1dX), which looks like this:
  Code:
more likely
            |
            |
            |
            |--------------
            |
            |
            |______________
less likely
             0            X
I'll use r(X) as shorthand for "random number between 0 and X with a uniform distribution". Melee damage generally looks like this, then:
r(X*(1+r(Y)))*(1+r(Z))*(1+r(W))+r(V)

Here 1+r(Y), 1+r(Z), 1+r(W) represent the influence of your strength, weapon skill, and fighting skill, and r(V) the influence of enchantment/slaying. More random terms appear if you are mighted, starving, or stabbing. (And the random rounding is random, if you want to be really anal about it, but the influence of that is too small to care about).
If we ignore enchantment, might, AC, etc. for the moment, the distribution looks somewhat like this:
  Code:
more likely
            |
            |
            |
            |        _,._
            |----""""    `-._
            |                `-._
            |____________________""""----....____
less likely
             0            X                  X*Y*Z*W
(sorry, erica's a better ASCII artist but she's busy)
The main takeaway from this is that if you have strength and skill, hitting for anywhere near maximum damage is extremely rare. The mean is the same as you would get if you used X/2-0.5 in place of random2(X), but the median is lower. Think about d5*d5*d5: the mean is 3*3*3, 27, but 64% of your results are under 27.
This "long tail" effect is further exaggerated by AC, enchantment, and most brands. If someone can get nested dice to work in anydice, they could provide a pretty graph for a specific weapon, strength, and skills. I couldn't.

You might notice there is one case where player melee damage is a simple 1dX-1. It's when your weapon and fighting skill are both 0, your strength is 10, and you have no enchantment or slaying or status effects.

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 08:46

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

duvessa wrote:Good question! Here's the formula for player melee/missile damage, as far as I can tell...

I know you're just trying to be informative (or I think so)... But I gotta say something here. It's not going to be very lovable, but it's going to be honest.

This post is a most wonderful example of why many of us never "bother" to try and figure out the game mechanics in a way that we might actually make some more advanced decisions "of our own" about how to go forward. Cause it sure looks like many of us can't do didly on our own, unless we have advanced mathematics degrees. And a magnifying glass or maybe a scripted editor tool.

You start with around 20 line wall of text, no indentation, no serious paragraphing. Then it descends into a whole slew of parentheses, commas, and tightly packed askerisks. Given the default format of the forums in a web browser, I'd need to copy and extract the post, then magnify the whole thing, add spaces between the parentheses / numbers / askerisks, and maybe blow it all up on something larger than a single laptop to be able to see what's going on with any white space left to take notes in.

If what it takes to be good at Crawl is mainly to be a math whiz who loves fine print and wall of text, then there we have the answer to being good at the whole game. End of story according to this.

Otherwise, no where in all of this is there some less than 20 unindented-undivided lines, plainer English summary of what in the world people might make out of all of this for actual play styles. I suppose it's just "for your information," but I can't even read it. And this is where I stop trying to understand "finer" mechanics, when the math whizzes chime in with pages of formulas I can barely look at and there's no plain language explanation of what knowing all that might lead to one way or another for me to make a logical call about.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 09:37

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

It's 20 posts and still nobody pointed out that morningstars aren't 10 base damage?

duvessa wrote:Note that while vampires don't get a damage penalty at bloodless, they do get an accuracy penalty.
wat

stoneychips wrote:If what it takes to be good at Crawl is mainly to be a math whiz who loves fine print and wall of text, then there we have the answer to being good at the whole game. End of story according to this.
You don't need to know exact damage distribution, come on.

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 09:45

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

The game should just display the damage inflicted and let the player draw the conclusions.
  Code:
You hit the yak! (10)
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 10:08

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Sprucery wrote:The game should just display the damage inflicted and let the player draw the conclusions.
  Code:
You hit the yak! (10)


Some players don't want to see those numbers and as far as I know devs don't want to provide extra info based on options. It does not explain why they cannot show those numbers by default though. I am always excited to see good feedback in new games which I am still learning, it helps to learn faster/better.

Also it does not explain why devs show average max HP of monsters. Does not this info require damage numbers to be of any use?
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 10:50

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

I was about to write an extremely informative, well-reasoned and crystal clear post full of actually useful advice, but unfortunately I got sidetracked by the beautiful intracies of crawl melee damage calculations. Ahhh.

So instead I will quibble with Implojin about statistics. Sorry.

That shield vs no shield victory statistics analysis has several fundamental flaws, even excluding the known problem with selecting the correct data. I won't go into great detail.

Let me just ask some questions:
Are species and shield the only two factors that determine victory chance?
If not, how are all the other factors separated from the result?
Is the shield-training effect likely to be small, well-defined and significant?
Is it a coincidence that the data ended up 14 - 14?
Is it odd that the two species with the highest shield aptitide (Mi and Fo) do worse when they train shields?
Is it surprising that out of the seven species with the worst shield apptitudes (DE, Ko, Mu, Na, Tr, Ce, Sp), only one (Ce) appears to be harmed by training shields?

It is difficult to construct good statistical arguments. In my view it would be far more instructive to study the behaviour of a few select very skilled players. The Dynast example seems pertinent, for Na anyway.

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 11:46

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

4Hooves2Appendages wrote:Are species and shield the only two factors that determine victory chance?
It's probably assumed that other factors are similar for the two sets.
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:Is it odd that the two species with the highest shield aptitide (Mi and Fo) do worse when they train shields?
Fo should be ignored, as they always have shields, and only train it to 15 if large.
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:Is it surprising that out of the seven species with the worst shield apptitudes (DE, Ko, Mu, Na, Tr, Ce, Sp), only one (Ce) appears to be harmed by training shields?
Shields disallow bows, which are the strongest centaur option. It's not nearly as clear with the others.
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:In my view it would be far more instructive to study the behaviour of a few select very skilled players. The Dynast example seems pertinent, for Na anyway.
I'd much rather study elliptic and the like. Dynast has personal preference to shields. Also, nagas are a special case.

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 15:15

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

stoneychips wrote:
duvessa wrote:Good question! Here's the formula for player melee/missile damage, as far as I can tell...

I know you're just trying to be informative (or I think so)... But I gotta say something here. It's not going to be very lovable, but it's going to be honest.

This post is a most wonderful example of why many of us never "bother" to try and figure out the game mechanics in a way that we might actually make some more advanced decisions "of our own" about how to go forward. Cause it sure looks like many of us can't do didly on our own, unless we have advanced mathematics degrees. And a magnifying glass or maybe a scripted editor tool.

You start with around 20 line wall of text, no indentation, no serious paragraphing. Then it descends into a whole slew of parentheses, commas, and tightly packed askerisks. Given the default format of the forums in a web browser, I'd need to copy and extract the post, then magnify the whole thing, add spaces between the parentheses / numbers / askerisks, and maybe blow it all up on something larger than a single laptop to be able to see what's going on with any white space left to take notes in.

If what it takes to be good at Crawl is mainly to be a math whiz who loves fine print and wall of text, then there we have the answer to being good at the whole game. End of story according to this.

Otherwise, no where in all of this is there some less than 20 unindented-undivided lines, plainer English summary of what in the world people might make out of all of this for actual play styles. I suppose it's just "for your information," but I can't even read it. And this is where I stop trying to understand "finer" mechanics, when the math whizzes chime in with pages of formulas I can barely look at and there's no plain language explanation of what knowing all that might lead to one way or another for me to make a logical call about.


FWIW I LOVE these sorts of posts. They do not inform my gameplay that much, but I AM a math nerd and I love tinkering with the numbers for the sheer enjoyment of that activity. I don't know how to source-dive, however, so I'm reliant on others to make posts like this.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 16:06

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

stoneychips wrote:If what it takes to be good at Crawl is mainly to be a math whiz who loves fine print and wall of text, then there we have the answer to being good at the whole game. End of story according to this.

No. The post is not saying that one needs to be good at math to be good at Crawl. This proposition would be like saying that since all politics is ultimately based on psychology, all psychology is ultimately based on biology, all biology is ultimately based on physics and all physics is ultimately based on math; one needs to be good at math to be good at politics.

The post is giving a detailed exposition of a certain point, in response to a request to do so. That's all. If you're not interested in it, you can just skip it.

What I got from the post is that Crawl's damage formulae are crazy. But you already knew that, didn't you?

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 16:15

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

stickyfingers wrote:
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:Are species and shield the only two factors that determine victory chance?
It's probably assumed that other factors are similar for the two sets.
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:Is it odd that the two species with the highest shield aptitide (Mi and Fo) do worse when they train shields?
Fo should be ignored, as they always have shields, and only train it to 15 if large.
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:Is it surprising that out of the seven species with the worst shield apptitudes (DE, Ko, Mu, Na, Tr, Ce, Sp), only one (Ce) appears to be harmed by training shields?
Shields disallow bows, which are the strongest centaur option. It's not nearly as clear with the others.
4Hooves2Appendages wrote:In my view it would be far more instructive to study the behaviour of a few select very skilled players. The Dynast example seems pertinent, for Na anyway.
I'd much rather study elliptic and the like. Dynast has personal preference to shields. Also, nagas are a special case.


Tr and Na also only require 9 skill to eliminate the penalties for a regular shield, I suspect that's the "normal" case for a troll/naga shield user (More comparable to the 15 skill mark for a normal race)
In a similar vein, it takes more skill for a sp to eliminate the penalties for a regular shield, so it's likely that comparing "at skill 15 or higher" results in a weird distribution.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 17:40

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Yes, quite. The fact that we are now arguing species separately and talking about unspecified 'normal' cases illustrates my point: The above analysis was at best uninformative, and at worst misleading.
Last edited by 4Hooves2Appendages on Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 21:01, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 20:39

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

Specific shield/2H points:
Yeah morningstars are 13 base damage, and since large mace got converted to 1d34, I'm assuming the morningstar should be listed as 1d26. And if you have an eveningstar, that's 1d30. Tell me how 1d30 and a shield is going to cripple the character who could be doing 1d34 instead! Certainly eveningstars are more rare, but even 1d26 isn't too terrible.

I'd have liked to see some consideration of unarmed + shield, other than just the troll case, because unarmed is a clear way to get very high base damage while also using a shield. It does, of course, come with the downside of requiring the most experience. But if you're playing a strong race like minotaur, having positive aptitudes for these things can go a long way towards helping that.

On the concept of learning opaque mechanics:
I do think crawl has gotten much more transparent over time, but it is still rather opaque in general. I support things like the mentioned "You hit the yak. (10)" but they have been rejected in the past, although I can't see why. We have recently simplified the formulas for things like spell success, perhaps there's a way to change the way melee damage is calculated that will provide similar enough distributions and provide clarity that will make it easier for "medium skill" players to learn the deeper systems.

While I am probably the wrong person to suggest an exact formula, it seems like we have a number of factors that we want to have raise damage, and would add them all up and then roll at the end. So you'd have a theoretical max damage consisting of something like weapon base damage + fighting skill + weapon skill + enchantments/slaying + strength bonus, and then if that comes out to be something like 90 damage, you roll 3d30 to have something of a bell curve with the average result being most likely. Right now we have a sort of bell curve but lower results are more common, so shifting those up towards average would be a bit of an increase, and would need to be tweaked.

In the end I do feel like the big picture strategic questions are pretty simple - you pick a weapon, some mix of defenses, and some mix of magic. People are more likely to be wrong about smaller things, like if this crystal plate is better than an ego plate armor with a better enchantment, or maybe not use a spell that they're unfamiliar with but would have been useful. But I don't think those make a huge difference in the long run, the way that completely not training dodging or fighting does because you think a mage doesn't need those skills.

TL;DR: Make combat show damage after hits! (13)

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 21:09

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

tasonir wrote:Specific shield/2H points:
Yeah morningstars are 13 base damage, and since large mace got converted to 1d34, I'm assuming the morningstar should be listed as 1d26. And if you have an eveningstar, that's 1d30. Tell me how 1d30 and a shield is going to cripple the character who could be doing 1d34 instead! Certainly eveningstars are more rare, but even 1d26 isn't too terrible.
It doesn't matter because none of those damage rolls can actually happen in the game.

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 21:29

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

duvessa wrote:
tasonir wrote:Specific shield/2H points:
Yeah morningstars are 13 base damage, and since large mace got converted to 1d34, I'm assuming the morningstar should be listed as 1d26. And if you have an eveningstar, that's 1d30. Tell me how 1d30 and a shield is going to cripple the character who could be doing 1d34 instead! Certainly eveningstars are more rare, but even 1d26 isn't too terrible.
It doesn't matter because none of those damage rolls can actually happen in the game.

True. From what I remember bloax had set up a dice roller that you could play with here: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=15669

I'm not sure how accurate it is these days, if someone wants to check the math feel free, but I'm just linking it without verification.

Edit: While I'm linking 2015 threads, I'm still super pissed about this one: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17226

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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 23:49

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

stickyfingers wrote:I'd much rather study elliptic and the like.

Didn't one of "the like" provide all of the qualitative information in the original post? Maybe not, I guess I haven't played significant amounts of crawl in ages.

Anyway, I wrote this post because I talk to a lot of webtiles players now and they're almost always playing mibe and they have like a flail and a large shield and they're like what should I do to improve my character? And when I tell them to try two handed weapons they go, but I thought I'm running a bruiser - if I'm not supposed to use shields, who is? If people want to discuss reasons why they think shields are great on their characters, that's fine but it wasn't the point and I'm personally not interested in it.
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Post Tuesday, 23rd May 2017, 23:53

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

duvessa wrote:It doesn't matter because none of those damage rolls can actually happen in the game.

I read the formula a long time ago, but I've never been a math person so I hope you can understand that I was like, maybe this is a central limit theorem thing and it'll be easier to just pretend it's that.
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Post Wednesday, 24th May 2017, 00:10

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

The difference between 2-handed weapon melee and 1-handed weapon shield melee is insignificant. Weird advice thread.
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Post Wednesday, 24th May 2017, 14:15

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

mikee wrote:
stickyfingers wrote:I'd much rather study elliptic and the like.

Didn't one of "the like" provide all of the qualitative information in the original post? Maybe not, I guess I haven't played significant amounts of crawl in ages.

Yeah, but I meant "compared to Dynast", as in the post I quoted.

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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 03:12

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

So what I got is that anyone who is good at this game hates level 9 spells and shields for 3 rune games except some strange Dynast thing?, clan?, player?. Also when I hit a monster their health will go down by a number which has a concrete mathematical relationship, which I should probably figure out but I'm too lazy and gonna press tab.

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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 06:01

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

mikee wrote:Anyway, I wrote this post because I talk to a lot of webtiles players now and they're almost always playing mibe and they have like a flail and a large shield and they're like what should I do to improve my character? And when I tell them to try two handed weapons they go


Well, if a person is using a bad weapon, they should be told to use a better weapon IMHO no matter if it's 1h weapon or 2h weapon. I mean if someone is using bad 2h weapon like halberd or dire flail late in the game, I can tell them to use glaive/great mace, or eveningstar/demon whip/morningstar/demon trident along with a shield (of course unless they are a hybrid and have a better use for their XP).
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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 06:44

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

1158511 wrote:So what I got is that anyone who is good at this game hates level 9 spells and shields for 3 rune games except some strange Dynast thing?, clan?, player?. Also when I hit a monster their health will go down by a number which has a concrete mathematical relationship, which I should probably figure out but I'm too lazy and gonna press tab.


I think the broader point was that people make decisions about skilling based off generalities and assumptions about flavor, i.e. "I should train shields cause it's a melee-y skill and I'm playing a melee-y dude" that sound good in the abstract but don't hold up under scrutiny.
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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 06:48

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

In the case of MiFi which was mentioned in the OP, for me personally it's "I want to use a shield unless I find a really awesome 2h weapon, otherwise I would start MiGl to have more options open". Actually I am disappointed when I find a really awesome 2h weapon in that situation and switch with mental pain cursing crawl :)
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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 11:05

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
mikee wrote:Anyway, I wrote this post because I talk to a lot of webtiles players now and they're almost always playing mibe and they have like a flail and a large shield and they're like what should I do to improve my character? And when I tell them to try two handed weapons they go


Well, if a person is using a bad weapon, they should be told to use a better weapon IMHO no matter if it's 1h weapon or 2h weapon. I mean if someone is using bad 2h weapon like halberd or dire flail late in the game, I can tell them to use glaive/great mace, or eveningstar/demon whip/morningstar/demon trident along with a shield (of course unless they are a hybrid and have a better use for their XP).

JFYI dire flail is not a bad weapon. It's better than a morninstar and comparable/a little better than a glaive or an eveningstar for less investment. This gets more pronounced with slaying and auxes.

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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 11:11

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

stickyfingers wrote:JFYI dire flail is not a bad weapon. It's better than a morninstar and comparable/a little better than a glaive or an eveningstar for less investment. This gets more pronounced with slaying and auxes.


It is worse than mornigstar/evenigstar + shield due to lack of shield, it is worse than glaive due to lack of reaching. ITT we mostly ignore less investment because the new player asked OP for advice how to improve their character (MiFi).
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Post Thursday, 25th May 2017, 20:19

Re: So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game

1158511 wrote:So what I got is that anyone who is good at this game hates level 9 spells and shields for 3 rune games except some strange Dynast thing?, clan?, player?. Also when I hit a monster their health will go down by a number which has a concrete mathematical relationship, which I should probably figure out but I'm too lazy and gonna press tab.

I'd like to subscribe to your summaries of all tavern threads, this is an accurate summary.

I also found it funny that mikee says they aren't a math person and then references the central limit theorem which I had to look up to know what that was :P . In all honesty I think if you discount the very low chance of doing very high damage, the bottom 2/3 or so of crawl damage is roughly equal to a 1dX thing, although obviously not exactly equal to one.

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