Monsters using their turns

[Sphara]

I finally died during the orbrun after 6 1/2 years playing this game

I do have a question, though.

What determines which monster gets the first action? Is it the one who is the closest to the player? Or is it random?

Got double-teamed by Brimstone Fiend and glaciate-spamming panlord. The panlord actually killed the BFiend with the finishing blow when in fact it was certainly the faster one of those two.

http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/Sphara/morgue-Sphara-20170829-143611.txt

[Sprucery]

Check this thread. Hope it helps.

But I just wanted to say welcome to the club! Funny thing is that whenever someone is killed by a Pan lord during orb run, it is always glaciate (or ice storm before that)...

[watertreatmentRL]

Wow, that's bizarre. I always assumed there was a priority queue/scheduler type thing.

[Sphara]

Sprucery: thank you for the link but it never did answer my question.

[njvack]

I think it does? If I understand that thread correctly, the first monster to act is the first monster to be in some global list of monsters (maybe sorted by monster creation time) who has the needed energy to act. It's not super clear to me if monsters choose an action based on how much energy they have (and do nothing if there are no possible actions to take), or if they decide on an action and do nothing if they don't have enough energy to do it.

So! Basically, if two monsters both have enough energy to do something, it's basically impossible to know which one will act first. However, that order is well-defined and stable -- so two rats attacking you will always do so in the same order.

I have no idea how much energy various monster actions require, and whether and how monster flags and HD and gear affects it.