How can I see how much damage I do?

[onomastikon]

I'm very new to Stone Soup, and am used to seeing some indication of how much damage I do with current equipment / buffs etc. somewhere on my character sheet. When I hit "%," I do get a lot of salient information, and with "m" I can see the level of my skills, but nowhere can I figure out if I am doing more damage when I utilize X or when I utilize Y. While I realize some of this ambiguity is intentional (so that I have to figure out which is better by trial and error), I am getting frustrated in trying to make informed decisions. For example, I would dearly like to know (before getting killed trying) if it is "worth it" or "makes sense" to free up spell slots to use (and frequently fail using) Blade Hands on my Troll Transmuter, or if equipping a weapon is useful, or if using spell Q to deal damage comes even halfway close to my unarmed damage output. I have not found a target dummy and cannot experiment forever without dying. Any tips? Thank you in advance

[sanka]

This is one of the biggest issue with the user interface of crawl. While more in-game information is available nowadays than it used to be, I still need to mostly rely on spoilers and out-of-game tools.

1. FSim: in wizard mode (offline available by pressing &) you can measure average damage you would do in a given fight. This is the only somewhat reliable method to compare weapon/unarmed combat damage, and there are still some cases when it does not work well, for example, with poision and draining brands.

2. The learndb http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots and the wiki http://crawl.chaosforge.org/ contains many formulas. While in general be suspicious about information in these sources as they tend to be outdated (crawl changes relatively quickly) and advices were usually bad even at the time of writing, the actual formulas are often correct, so you can calculate the damage.

Yes, this is not good. It is really common to see new players using some very suboptimal weapon or spell, not realizing the damage differences between options. Many "correct choice" spread by better players are simply comes from the knowledge of the damage formulas. How should I know that tree form gives you huge unarmed bonus, for example (thanks duvessa)?

[stormdragon]

sanka mentioned some very useful resources. Additionally, in game, you can press i for inventory and then press the letter corresponding to a weapon to see its base damage, delay, and accuracy (although accuracy is inconsequential compared to the other two factors). Another handy resource is...us! You can post your specific questions here (probably more appropriately in the CiP forum) and get some possibly helpful answers.

For your question about troll transmuter: Normal unarmed base damage is 3 + UC skill. Troll claws increases unarmed base damage by 6. Blade Hands increases unarmed base damage by 19, but it "melds" the claws and doesn't stack, so for a troll it effectively only increases base damage by 13. That is a huge increase, but it will cost a lot of experience to get that castable, since it's a level 5 spell and the troll transmutations aptitude is -3. Before blade hands, beastly appendage is worth casting. Sticks-to-snakes is powerful when the failure rate is low (ideally low single digit). Equipping weapons is generally not useful for trolls because the claws bonus is so strong.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Simple answer is developers believe the game is better when players don't see how much damage they deal so if you follow the above examples you are playing the game not in the way it is intended to. Sad but true. If you enjoy making Informed decisions you better play other games.

[onomastikon]

Thank you very much for these helpful replies so far.
Since I am horrible at formulae / math (and am far too old to learn it), I feel a bit left out, but so be it.
@stormdragon: Sorry, the CiP forum would be...? I can only see 4 subforums, and none of them seem to be that. Can you clarify?
My troll died in the meantime. I was so excited to get Ice Form, but turns out that claws and ice fists don't stack, and I misjudged my MP and got surprised, etc.
Currently trying again with a magic-user (have a draconian conjurer going, so far not dead, just found "Lair" and going slow), but still having the same problem. Some spells look great, but don't seem to be doing what I had expected based on the information I can glean in-game. I will try this "&" command and see if I can get it to work.
(On a side note, the magic user seems more "fun" than the more straightforward fighter classes recommended to beginners like me, because unlike almost any other hack-n-slash I know, including the roguelike ToME, there are no inherent special ability trees to classes/backgrounds, in other words: tactical choices are reserved only to where I move to and whom I hit, no special buttons to push with cooldowns or MP costs etc. So be it, but it makes a Fighter seem a bit dull so far.)

[sanka]

stormdragon meant the "YASD! YAVP! and characters in progress too" forum. "CiP" is the shorthand for "Characters in progress" (YASD = Yet another stupid death, YAVP= Yet another victory post, if I am right).

In that forum you can simply post the character dump of your current game, ask for some advice, as sometimes somebody with some knowledge will answer. Although I am not sure about the quality of those answers, as many of them seems really strange to me, so beware.

[Siegurt]

Thank you very much for these helpful replies so far.
Since I am horrible at formulae / math (and am far too old to learn it), I feel a bit left out, but so be it.
@stormdragon: Sorry, the CiP forum would be...? I can only see 4 subforums, and none of them seem to be that. Can you clarify?
My troll died in the meantime. I was so excited to get Ice Form, but turns out that claws and ice fists don't stack, and I misjudged my MP and got surprised, etc.
Currently trying again with a magic-user (have a draconian conjurer going, so far not dead, just found "Lair" and going slow), but still having the same problem. Some spells look great, but don't seem to be doing what I had expected based on the information I can glean in-game. I will try this "&" command and see if I can get it to work.
(On a side note, the magic user seems more "fun" than the more straightforward fighter classes recommended to beginners like me, because unlike almost any other hack-n-slash I know, including the roguelike ToME, there are no inherent special ability trees to classes/backgrounds, in other words: tactical choices are reserved only to where I move to and whom I hit, no special buttons to push with cooldowns or MP costs etc. So be it, but it makes a Fighter seem a bit dull so far.)

"Fighters" aka people who primarily bash things with weapons don't provide much in the way of flash or special abilities at the outset, generally speaking you 'add' those to your character with evokable items,(some) god worship and spells.

The reason Crawl calls their starting kits "backgrounds" instead of "classes" is that they really just provide a set of starting gear and some small amount of skills to match, for magic users that's a set of spells, for the more fighty-types that's a better set of equipment, but most effective characters end up with some smattering of abilities and gear cobbled together from what they find lying around, which may or may not end up remotely matching a conceptual arctype consistent with your starting kit (it frequently does, simply because it's pretty easy to keep bashing things with maces if you start with a mace, and already have the skills trained)

Similarly, it's a good idea when you start as a spellcaster to pick up relevant equipment and bash things with weapons to conserve on MP as appropriate.

If you get out of the mindset that your starting kit controls your character growth, you'll find that picking up spells or god abilities as a "fighter" (or weapons on a "mage") goes a long way towards making you more effective, just don't get too spread out in terms of skillset, being good at one thing is a significant advantage, and being kind of mediocre at everything is a good way to get behind on the power curve.

[TheMeInTeam]

^That's a popular opinion, but XP has diminishing marginal utility. It is *much* more expensive to go from 10 to 20 than it is from 0 to 10, but the utility doesn't match the extra cost in most cases. Instead the utility gain is mostly still linear (aka 10 to 20 is similarly valuable as 0 to 10, but costs more).

As such, you can make a case for training things that are immediately or very near future beneficial, even if you are training a number of things at once. In fact for training fewer things to win out you must have their immediate utility beat out the marginal cost of alternative (still cheap) XP investments.

You can make an exception for important break points, like "can I cast shatter at reasonable odds or not" for example. It might be worth shaving a little hp/dodging/armor for that, or similarly game-altering spells/abilities.

In practice, people usually die because they didn't recognize a threat or use a consumable, not because they put 4 points into a few spell schools and wound up with 2 less fighting skill in orc or 15 armor rather than 18 armor in Zot.

[Siegurt]

^That's a popular opinion, but XP has diminishing marginal utility. It is *much* more expensive to go from 10 to 20 than it is from 0 to 10, but the utility doesn't match the extra cost in most cases. Instead the utility gain is mostly still linear (aka 10 to 20 is similarly valuable as 0 to 10, but costs more).

As such, you can make a case for training things that are immediately or very near future beneficial, even if you are training a number of things at once. In fact for training fewer things to win out you must have their immediate utility beat out the marginal cost of alternative (still cheap) XP investments.

You can make an exception for important break points, like "can I cast shatter at reasonable odds or not" for example. It might be worth shaving a little hp/dodging/armor for that, or similarly game-altering spells/abilities.

In practice, people usually die because they didn't recognize a threat or use a consumable, not because they put 4 points into a few spell schools and wound up with 2 less fighting skill in orc or 15 armor rather than 18 armor in Zot.

Was that directed at my post? I'm confused what this is a reply to. (I didn't advocate training one skill over several at a time, or vise versa)

[TheMeInTeam]

It's in reference to "don't get too spread out in skillset" and how this interacts with the power curve. IMO this advice is misleading (not that long ago I was a newbie player myself, and likely would have taken it if I didn't at least observe UV4 ignoring it sometimes).

The issue with training skills isn't training too many, but rather training things that don't confer benefits now or very soon (next branch or two). Only late game where you could get by most of the rest of the game w/o further investments does it make sense to start going for long-term benefit training.

"Too spread out" only means something specific to players who are already knowledgeable. There isn't any clear detriment to training skills if they *will* have benefits soon, because utility:xp cost ratio is very favorable initially and versatility can often compete with (or even beat out) just pushing 4 skills or something until after orc.

[Siegurt]

It's in reference to "don't get too spread out in skillset" and how this interacts with the power curve. IMO this advice is misleading (not that long ago I was a newbie player myself, and likely would have taken it if I didn't at least observe UV4 ignoring it sometimes).

The issue with training skills isn't training too many, but rather training things that don't confer benefits now or very soon (next branch or two). Only late game where you could get by most of the rest of the game w/o further investments does it make sense to start going for long-term benefit training.

"Too spread out" only means something specific to players who are already knowledgeable. There isn't any clear detriment to training skills if they *will* have benefits soon, because utility:xp cost ratio is very favorable initially and versatility can often compete with (or even beat out) just pushing 4 skills or something until after orc.

You're correct that I wasn't specific enough in what I meant by 'too spread out' what I meant was "pick one or two kinds of offense and be good at it, don't try to simultaneously be a high level summoner, endgame melee, ranged and high level conjurer in multiple elemental schools all at the same time" in particular if it pushes off your ability to use your primary skillset until later (I wouldn't put off training to get fireball online when I was 90% of the way there to get a +1 greatsword to min delay from 0, as an example) This *seems* like a conclusion that most people would come to, but who knows.