But seriously, remove hunger

[bel]

Yes, but as I said, it cuts both ways. If you reward scumming, you essentially punish the people who don't scum.

[Bodrick]

New version: In addition to having no food, this now turns all random monster spawns into durable summons (0XP and no drops). Monsters will never stop spawning on floors now either.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8fedxqq5kv9v ... 1.zip?dl=0

I definitely prefer this version to the first one - OOD spawns were far enough apart as a MiBe that it was basically trivial to farm them and get a huge XP boost in the early game. I was XL9 with 14 M&F by the end of D3 after killing a deep troll and a couple of phantasmal warriors (OODs only start spawning in earnest from D3 onwards). There's much more of an incentive to move on in the new version.

[mps]

Get that shit on CBRO, imo.

[yesno]

Crawl food, currently, attempts to regulate two completely different activities that should not be connected in this way. Because food is attempting to regulate both tactical actions (spellcasting etc.) and attempting to act as an incentive for active exploration, it automatically fails to regulate either of those things (see previous post for explanation). This situation is unfixable, except by disconnecting the two different types of "food".

what about a global tension system, which increases with time and decreases with exploration? it can be dramatically increased by ability activation and spell use depending on spc. spawn rate and ood spawns increase as tension increases (exp falls?)... high tension makes tough monsters likely to spawn near the player. very high levels mark the player. preserves simplicity of hunger as a single counter, provides pressure to move forward for all characters, and limits tactical practicality of spells and abilities. or does this fall into the same trap, "automatically fails to regulate either" because it wants to regulate both?

[gammafunk]

Mod note: Moved discussion about death cobs to a CYC thread (which can go to GDD later if people are serious). Please keep this thread on-topic about modifying/removing the hunger system as a whole.

[Siegurt]

There is just no need for sticks in games. You can do better.

I would argue that roguelikes in general are all about sticks, perma death being a big giant stick that roguelikes hit people with repeatedly. I would further argue that if you don't like bad things happening to you when you play badly, that perhaps roguelikes aren't your cup of tea, generally speaking.

Part of the idea (if not the implementation) of hunger is to make "sitting around and not doing things" into bad play. You can argue that the mechanic is broken, that the implementation is poor, or even that making "sitting around and not doing things" into bad play isn't a good goal (I've seen all three argued in this thread) But arguing that there should be no consequences for bad play (Whatever that's defined as being for a given game) means you're arguing for a fundamentally different kind of game altogether, one i would usually label as a "casual play" sort of game, there are examples of good games in that realm, but I wouldn't put any of them, even broadly into a roguelike category.

(As an example of what I would call a "good" game with little to no consequences, I would point at the Lego video games, they're fun, all about exploration and nook-and-crannyism, and are injected with a fun sense of humor, but there's almost no negative consequence at all for pretty much *any* action you might take, even death has the mildest of all consequences, plenty of carrot)

Arguing that all punishments that exist in all games is bad game design is a bit ridiculous IMHO.

[reaver]

New version: In addition to having no food, this now turns all random monster spawns into durable summons (0XP and no drops). Monsters will never stop spawning on floors now either.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8fedxqq5kv9v ... 1.zip?dl=0

I definitely prefer this version to the first one - OOD spawns were far enough apart as a MiBe that it was basically trivial to farm them and get a huge XP boost in the early game. I was XL9 with 14 M&F by the end of D3 after killing a deep troll and a couple of phantasmal warriors (OODs only start spawning in earnest from D3 onwards). There's much more of an incentive to move on in the new version.

Can you post this as a patch?

[gammafunk]

I'm definitely against making all post-level-generation monsters spawns as durable summons. If we dislike the concept of spawning awake monsters on the level over short periods of time (i.e. pre-OOD spawns), then we should simply increase the placement of monsters on each level a bit and remove this form of monster spawning. Fighting a bunch of random summons with no summoner to target in the course of normal level progression really isn't much fun (shadow traps, but worse?)

OOD spawns without XP might work instead of permafood to create a forward-progression requirement, but as crate mentioned in his post the current OOD system is not up to this task. The per-branch monster lists are more geared around making interesting vault monsters (the 9 and 8 "out of depth monster" glyphs used in defining some vaults). To really push the player forward you'd need appropriate lists of monsters that are very serious threats and probably make them no-XP to avoid the fact that some builds can much more easily kill a given monster than others.

You might be able to make/select generic and powerful enough monsters (possibly using more or less the same set for every branch), but permafood is already pretty nice for doing this forward-progression clock. It's a simple aut-based counter that we can apply in a straightforward way to every character, assuming we have no other nutrition costs in the game. The downside is collecting food, it taking up inventory, and occasionally hitting e. You could probably keep permafood and remove the OOD timer altogether when chunks are gone.

[Bodrick]

New version: In addition to having no food, this now turns all random monster spawns into durable summons (0XP and no drops). Monsters will never stop spawning on floors now either.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8fedxqq5kv9v ... 1.zip?dl=0

I definitely prefer this version to the first one - OOD spawns were far enough apart as a MiBe that it was basically trivial to farm them and get a huge XP boost in the early game. I was XL9 with 14 M&F by the end of D3 after killing a deep troll and a couple of phantasmal warriors (OODs only start spawning in earnest from D3 onwards). There's much more of an incentive to move on in the new version.

Can you post this as a patch?

Here you go: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=SH2U5uwD (it's still very hacked together)

[tabstorm]

I'm definitely against making all post-level-generation monsters spawns as durable summons. If we dislike the concept of spawning awake monsters on the level over short periods of time (i.e. pre-OOD spawns), then we should simply increase the placement of monsters on each level a bit and remove this form of monster spawning. Fighting a bunch of random summons with no summoner to target in the course of normal level progression really isn't much fun (shadow traps, but worse?)

OOD spawns without XP might work instead of permafood to create a forward-progression requirement, but as crate mentioned in his post the current OOD system is not up to this task. The per-branch monster lists are more geared around making interesting vault monsters (the 9 and 8 "out of depth monster" glyphs used in defining some vaults). To really push the player forward you'd need appropriate lists of monsters that are very serious threats and probably make them no-XP to avoid the fact that some builds can much more easily kill a given monster than others.

You might be able to make/select generic and powerful enough monsters (possibly using more or less the same set for every branch), but permafood is already pretty nice for doing this forward-progression clock. It's a simple aut-based counter that we can apply in a straightforward way to every character, assuming we have no other nutrition costs in the game. The downside is collecting food, it taking up inventory, and occasionally hitting e. You could probably keep permafood and remove the OOD timer altogether when chunks are gone.

How is durably summoned any different from experience-less in a foodless game? As long as they're set to start spawning sufficiently far into one's time on the floor, I don't think you will really be slogging through monsters for no experience. Something like 3k turns should be long enough to prevent a hypothetical optimal player from using "wait forever at a desired location for monsters to come to me" as a strategy.
You could always just HD-boost the durable summons instead of using OODs and mark them as such, as an alternative to using monsters from a pre-defined OOD set that are unsuitable.

[archaeo]

Gamma, the problem as I see it is that, while removing hunger costs and moving to a permafood-only system would be a big improvement over the status quo, the downsides you mention are problematic. I have a hard time seeing how it won't result in food becoming an invisible process as the food types are consolidated/goldified and automated eating is introduced, at which point there's no real reason to call it "food" and "hunger" at all.

As for durable summons, while I don't really have an issue with 0 XP spawns, what about removing monster spawning and replacing it with something like Spelunky's ghosts? Imagine that, when a timer runs out on a level, an Orb Sentinel spawns near the player, initially slowed. It has a melee attack that does damage equal to 25% of the player's max HP, and if the player leaves its LOS, it teleports next to the player. It can't use stairs and disappears when the player leaves the level, but after an Orb Sentinel has generated on a level, its timer becomes much shorter.

[tedric]

if the goal is to force the player to move on, how about you just shaft them

[bel]

Gamma, the problem as I see it is that, while removing hunger costs and moving to a permafood-only system would be a big improvement over the status quo, the downsides you mention are problematic. I have a hard time seeing how it won't result in food becoming an invisible process as the food types are consolidated/goldified and automated eating is introduced, at which point there's no real reason to call it "food" and "hunger" at all.

Not sure what this means. Even if food consumption is automated, it is just an interface thing. You still would need to find food to survive, which will put a check on scumming.

[bel]

You could always just HD-boost the durable summons instead of using OODs and mark them as such, as an alternative to using monsters from a pre-defined OOD set that are unsuitable.

If a rat reaches 27 HD, it will be renamed as R.O.U.S.

[Rast]

Edit: I suppose I should plug my hunger replacement again: make the OoD monsters that spawn include the dangerous abyssal monsters with increasing severity and percentage as the scumming goes on. It's direct, immediately reveals itself to a scumming player, and doesn't directly kill them for scumming; it just makes it dangerous.

Which should the game punish you more for:
(A) spending 3000 turns per floor from D1-10
or (B) spending 1000 turns per floor from D1-9, then sitting on D:10 for 23000 turns
?

[archaeo]

Not sure what this means. Even if food consumption is automated, it is just an interface thing. You still would need to find food to survive, which will put a check on scumming.

Well, that's the thing. Permafood-only Crawl without hunger costs is a massive improvement, but it retains the annoyance of the inventory space permafood takes up and the requirement to eat to keep playing. The only way to solve those problems would be to eliminate all player interaction with food except picking it up, and even that won't be too common, since autoexplore and autopickup both exist. At that point, the entire idea of "eating food to keep from staving" is so abstracted that it's more or less erased. It provides a convenient narrative "hook" for the reason there's a timer, but it's not an elegant or interesting hook, especially after it's minimized through automation. The perfect timer is one that a) keeps the player moving and b) feels grounded in the setting; I'd say Majora's Mask offers the best example of a timer like that.

All that said, permafood-only-no-hunger-costs Crawl is far easier to implement than removing all food and the current monster spawner, rebalancing monster generation to account for the lack of spawns, and writing a new generator that can push the player forward. That's a huge point in its favor.

Which should the game punish you more for:
(A) spending 3000 turns per floor from D1-10
or (B) spending 1000 turns per floor from D1-9, then sitting on D:10 for 23000 turns
?

I'm not really sure what your point is here, Rast.

[acvar]

Although I think durable summons will be sufficient, I do think it has a few warts. I think it would ultimately just be better to make it so no monsters give experience. Turn monstsers into pure obstacles, and never goals. Just tie experience to something else like treasure. This would even open up other avenues of play.

[Berder]

I should point out that spending 3-4k turns on a single floor in d1-10 is in many cases entirely reasonable and no indication of scumming, e.g. if it's the gnoll castle.

[mps]

Ha, oh, I see what he did there. Now we're talking about eating "automatically." Some clarification is in order:

1. People don't like pressing buttons to eat food.
2. People don't like being told they have to eat.
3. People don't like to carry 10 kinds of food.
4. People don't like crafting food from corpses.
5. People don't like shuffling the 45th-50th worst items in their inventories around to accommodate food items.

People don't like any of these things, which they must do often hundreds of times per game, and their presence does not achieve any useful design goal. Remove food. Entirely.

[mps]

Sry for the double post, but..

if the goal is to force the player to move on, how about you just shaft them

This is a pretty good idea, imo. This makes waiting around to clear levels pretty clearly a bad idea, much more than spawns do. (Even though I've never seen any evidence that waiting around in a given location to clear levels is a smart thing to do anyway.)

About OOD spawns being durable summons, I too think it's a bad idea. OODs shouldn't look like ordinary monsters. It should be obvious something weird's going on when the player sees them. I suggest a souped up version of a worldbinder as the spawn, which gives moderate-to-low xp on a kill, and which summons so much there's no way you'll have a profitable engagement with one.

[Siegurt]

Ha, oh, I see what he did there. Now we're talking about eating "automatically." Some clarification is in order:

1. People don't like pressing buttons to eat food.
2. People don't like being told they have to eat.
3. People don't like to carry 10 kinds of food.
4. People don't like crafting food from corpses.
5. People don't like shuffling the 45th-50th worst items in their inventories around to accommodate food items.

People don't like any of these things, which they must do often hundreds of times per game, and their presence does not achieve any useful design goal. Remove food. Entirely.

Oddly I like all these things, perhaps I'm not a people.

[mps]

Well, sounds like you have a good idea for an iPhone game then.

[Hurkyl]

(Even though I've never seen any evidence that waiting around in a given location to clear levels is a smart thing to do anyway.)

I cleared Zot:5 once that way. Easiest clear ever.

(incidentally, I wasn't intending to clear Zot:5 that way, I was a mummy trying to rest off stat drain, and I figured standing on the stairs in an open area that overlooked the entrance to the orb vault was a more productive place to rest than the temple)

[acvar]

I have a proposal. What if every level had 1-3 timed vaults. The vaults would contain a single room with some small amount of treasure and perhpas a guard. You never know how many vaults are on the level. This would be a very effective way of getting players to not sit still without using a stick.

[Siegurt]

I have a proposal. What if every level had 1-3 timed vaults. The vaults would contain a single room with some small amount of treasure and perhpas a guard. You never know how many vaults are on the level. This would be a very effective way of getting players to not sit still without using a stick.

1. Why would I care if there's a timed portal with a vault? (Is the vault treasure somehow special? What about characters who don't care as much about treasure(felids, characters with a full equipment set))
2. Once you've cleared said vaults (or they've timed out) why do I not want to sit still?

[tedric]

(kind of ninja'd, but)

That's an interesting idea to play on the psychological phenomenon known as Loss Aversion, but in practice I don't think it would work.

If the vaults offer significant/valuable loot, then reaching them on every level becomes a priority -- which means greatly increasing the value of ?mapping, passive mapping mut, Ash, fast movement, etc. and creating all kinds of new balance issues.

If the vaults don't offer significant/valuable loot, then there's no reason to play any differently than if they didn't exist. Less experienced players would essentially be tricked into making poor decisions, while more experienced players will know not to care.

[bananaken]

I have a proposal. What if every level had 1-3 timed vaults. The vaults would contain a single room with some small amount of treasure and perhpas a guard. You never know how many vaults are on the level. This would be a very effective way of getting players to not sit still without using a stick.

So you want XCOM: Enemy Within meld canisters

I have a proposal. What if every level had 1-3 timed vaults. The vaults would contain a single room with some small amount of treasure and perhpas a guard. You never know how many vaults are on the level. This would be a very effective way of getting players to not sit still without using a stick.

1. Why would I care if there's a timed portal with a vault? (Is the vault treasure somehow special? What about characters who don't care as much about treasure(felids, characters with a full equipment set))
2. Once you've cleared said vaults (or they've timed out) why do I not want to sit still?

To answer 1 and 2, this kind of incentive to advance would work if over the long term the vaults provide you with loot that increases your odds of escaping with the orb, much more than waiting. XCOM does this by making meld a resource that's required for key upgrades like MEC troopers and gene mods which becomes a huge boost to your survivability and attack power late game. The catch is the biggest sources of meld are in canisters that expire after a couple turns during missions. It's not required but it's an effective carrot which makes you change up your strategy every now and then. Coincidentally, XCOM:EW suffers a similar issue of waiting excessively, sometimes for dozens of turns because triggering an enemy patrol in unfavorable circumstances can mean a teamwipe.

Special levels in crawl already kinda do this, but they're rare and the loot is generally more numerous and/or valuable.

Basically this addresses the scumming-through-waiting issue by making it readily apparent that advancing is favorable. Once there's no more "carrots" you can sit on your ass all you want so that'd still be an issue, but if the player always had an obvious "carrot" to chase it'd probably ameliorate the issue. Not the "sticks" like piety decay, or hunger, or OOD monsters, but the promise of something shiny and attractive.

[yesno]

what about a global tension system, which increases with time and decreases with exploration? it can be dramatically increased by ability activation and spell use depending on spc. spawn rate and ood spawns increase as tension increases (exp falls?)... high tension makes tough monsters likely to spawn near the player. very high levels mark the player. preserves simplicity of hunger as a single counter, provides pressure to move forward for all characters, and limits tactical practicality of spells and abilities. or does this fall into the same trap, "automatically fails to regulate either" because it wants to regulate both?

is there something unthinkable about this? it could eliminate hunger and food and provides mechanism for calibrating pressure throughout game progress. too vague? but if food is eliminated but its domain must still be regulated then a new system will be needed, right?

[archaeo]

mps, fwiw, I don't think anybody but me is really talking about "automation" right now. It's just where I think permafood-only crawl will end up, and while I love how the game's been streamlined since I started playing, it seems kind of silly to keep the "food" metaphor if it's just going to be an invisible clock. It's not a strong objection, but hey.

And yesno, I feel like that scheme does "fall into the same trap." It's superior to hunger and food, but there's no real reason for it to limit ability/spell usage, and if you remove that, you're just left with another monster spawning mechanic, more or less.

[Bodrick]

Another new version:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/19hop63pblnsw ... 2.zip?dl=0 (tiles only)
https://github.com/BodrickLight/crawl/tree/foodless

This makes monsters on other floors never forget you - so you can't just wait upstairs for them to wander off if things go pearshaped near the stairs.

At this point, the "game clock" element of food should have been removed (it's everything in the 'Hunger Clock' row of the spreadsheet at least) - there shouldn't be any benefit to spending excessive amounts of time on any floor as the random spawns can't be farmed, and basically nothing will change on a level that you aren't on.

There's some obvious tweaking that could be done here - maybe making random spawns for the first 1.5k turns on a level or so give full XP (so you don't run into so many 0XP monsters on your first run through a floor), or changing the spawn rate of monsters (at the moment the chance of generating a monster drops from 1/48 to 1/288 from 3000 to 12000 turns).

Feedback would be great if anyone gets a chance to try it out! I've had a brief chat with johnstein about getting an experimental version up on dbro - he's a bit busy at the moment unfortunately, but hopefully we should be able to get something sorted out in a week or so.

[acvar]

I have a proposal. What if every level had 1-3 timed vaults. The vaults would contain a single room with some small amount of treasure and perhpas a guard. You never know how many vaults are on the level. This would be a very effective way of getting players to not sit still without using a stick.

1. Why would I care if there's a timed portal with a vault? (Is the vault treasure somehow special? What about characters who don't care as much about treasure(felids, characters with a full equipment set))
2. Once you've cleared said vaults (or they've timed out) why do I not want to sit still?

Yep treasure light characters have less insentive. We could use a system similar to aquirement to make the treasure more suited to the character. Do felids ever get tired of potions of healing and haste?

You don't know how many vaults are on a level. It is random. So you really don't know when you have cleared them all until after you have mapped the whole level. Once you have mapped the whole level if new monster don't give experience there is no incentive to just sit still.

[yesno]

mps, fwiw, I don't think anybody but me is really talking about "automation" right now. It's just where I think permafood-only crawl will end up, and while I love how the game's been streamlined since I started playing, it seems kind of silly to keep the "food" metaphor if it's just going to be an invisible clock. It's not a strong objection, but hey.

And yesno, I feel like that scheme does "fall into the same trap." It's superior to hunger and food, but there's no real reason for it to limit ability/spell usage, and if you remove that, you're just left with another monster spawning mechanic, more or less.

I feel neutral about this kind of limitation on ability/spell usage, but I'm not a dev... I suggested this because crate's posts indicated it was an important mechanic to preserve. My thinking was that such a system could work the way food was supposed to: Adding pressure to explore while forcing the player to combine strategic and tactical decisions about ability usage (i.e., because of the tension system, i can use costly abilities a tactically relevant number of times in a single battle, and a strategically relevant number of times over a certain period of exploration). Values for actions can be tweaked until the right level of pressure is reached... For example, maybe the rate of tension gain rises exponentially with number of turns played, but the tension-decreasing value of exploration rises accordingly with dungeon depth. (It could have a tidy lore justification too, like: "The orb is becoming aware of your presence..." "Powerful magical energies draw the attention of the orb!") As for it being just another monster spawning mechanic, I hope that would be okay, because monster spawning mechanics are a big part of setting the pace of the game!

Anyway, it will be hard to come up with a perfect system, but maybe it could be better than the current one, that's all. thanks for sharing your thoughts on it. i remember in other threads it was suggested that magic contamination could be altered to regulate usage of powerful spells too, which also sounds like a good idea to me, especially in combination with elimination of hunger and other changes to monster spawn, xp gain, etc.

edit: caps for readability

[archaeo]

i remember in other threads it was suggested that magic contamination could be altered to regulate usage of powerful spells too, which also sounds like a good idea to me, especially in combination with elimination of hunger and other changes to monster spawn, xp gain, etc.

The problem with contam as a limitation is that it's pretty coarse and you can wait it off. It does an okay job with haste, invis, and cblink, but even then, it's often easy to just retreat and wait it off before heading back into the fray. Naturally, it also stops mattering as the game goes on, since it's not hard to chug cancellation on the rare occasion you need to cast these spells enough to get yellow contam.

That's why I proposed int drain; it requires XP to recover stats now, it impacts continued use of spells directly, and is threatening enough to merit consideration. It's also totally unnecessary, mostly because we have a tactical limitation for spellcasting already with MP and strategic limitations via skill levels. Adjusting those two things is probably an easier way to balance casting tactically and strategically.

[yesno]

i remember in other threads it was suggested that magic contamination could be altered to regulate usage of powerful spells too, which also sounds like a good idea to me, especially in combination with elimination of hunger and other changes to monster spawn, xp gain, etc.

The problem with contam as a limitation is that it's pretty coarse and that you can wait it off. It does an okay job with haste, invis, and cblink, but even then, it's often easy to just retreat and wait it off before heading back into the fray. Naturally, it also stops mattering as the game goes on, since it's not hard to chug cancellation on the rare occasion you need to cast these spells enough to get yellow contam.

That's why I proposed int drain; it requires XP to recover stats now, it impacts continued use of spells directly, and is threatening enough to merit consideration. It's also totally unnecessary, mostly because we have a tactical limitation for spellcasting already with MP and strategic limitations via skill levels. Adjusting those two things is probably an easier way to balance casting tactically and strategically.

Like I said, I don't really have an opinion on whether these limits are necessary... The intention of the hunger mechanic (or its replacement) seems to be an additional limit placed on how a character can expend its pool of MP... If I have many MP, then I can safely cast my lower level spells a large number of times, and I can also cast higher level spells a number of times, but it may be dangerous to do so. Because food is so plentiful and it has been so easy to offset the hunger cost of spells (even if you become very hungry you can just eat after killing monsters with high hunger spells), hunger has not been an effective limitation on MP use for most characters, and MP has usually been the only relevant tactical limitation on overall spell use. But with another system, it could be different. I think the idea of INT drain is an interesting option too.

[kuniqs]

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/kuniq ... 140321.txt

Short version: get rid of chunk-eating for !Ghouls... now.

Long version: here we have a player with 12+ years of crawl experience starving to death because he valued his bread rations. If he ate one before instead of counting on corpses, he would had won.

Why on earth being better at crawl makes your life harder when it comes to food?

[Sandman25]

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/kuniqs/morgue-kuniqs-20150818-140321.txt

Short version: get rid of chunk-eating for !Ghouls... now.

Long version: here we have a player with 12+ years of crawl experience starving to death because he valued his bread rations. If he ate one before instead of counting on corpses, he would had won.

Why on earth being better at crawl makes your life harder when it comes to food?

I am not sure rations help that much. "Hungry" ends at 2600 satiation points, even if you are engorged (11,001 – 12,000 max), you will need to be hit just 3 times more (5200 - 1 hit, 10400 - 2 hits, 10400+ - 3 hits). Death cob has speed 25, that's potentially exactly 3 attacks, going from Engorged to Hungry in a single turn.

Edit. Assuming max satiation and every attack hits you, it's 12000 (engorged)-6000 (normal)-3000 (normal)-1500 (near starving)-750 (starving). 4 attacks to get starving from engorged, it can be 2 turns for non-hasted character.

[Bodrick]

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/kuniqs/morgue-kuniqs-20150818-140321.txt

Short version: get rid of chunk-eating for !Ghouls... now.

Long version: here we have a player with 12+ years of crawl experience starving to death because he valued his bread rations. If he ate one before instead of counting on corpses, he would had won.

Why on earth being better at crawl makes your life harder when it comes to food?

I am not sure rations help that much. "Hungry" ends at 2600 satiation points, even if you are engorged (11,001 – 12,000 max), you will need to be hit just 3 times more (5200 - 1 hit, 10400 - 2 hits, 10400+ - 3 hits). Death cob has speed 25, that's potentially exactly 3 attacks, going from Engorged to Hungry in a single turn.

Edit. Assuming max satiation and every attack hits you, it's 12000 (engorged)-6000 (normal)-3000 (normal)-1500 (near starving)-750 (starving). 4 attacks to get starving from engorged, it can be 2 turns for non-hasted character.

AF_HUNGER reduces your satiation by a quarter, not a half (I made that mistake yesterday)

[Sandman25]

AF_HUNGER reduces your satiation by a quarter, not a half (I made that mistake yesterday)

Ok. Hungry - 2600, 1950, 1462, 1096, 822 (starving), 616, 462, 347
Engorged - 12000, 9000, 6750, 5062, 3746, 2847, 2137... Being engorged allows to get about 5-6 extra hits. With Death cob's speed 25 and PC 0 EV it is 2-3 extra turns.
What I learned here is that you should have high EV and quaff agility if you insist on eating anything.

[kuniqs]

What if spells had additional delay equal to 0.1 for each spell level, and spellcasting reduced that by 0.1 every 3 levels?

[yesno]

i think that would just serve to make spell usage objectively worse in most tactical situations, rather than strategically limiting it...

[kuniqs]

Get rid of Spellcasting and make your best magic skill act as Spellcasting when calculating spell hunger.
Or maybe use the average of spellschools as Spellcasting equivalent and calculate spell hunger for every spell based on your skills. Somebody with lots of earth magic can cast earth spells without hunger, but hungers when casting air, for example.

[TeshiAlair]

Dear sweet jesus hungry ghosts make this game almost goddamn unbearable. I've never had to just save and quit and take a moment to calm down from sheer aggravation before.

This is literally the single worst change to the game I've encountered in the past 8 years of playing. It literally adds NOTHING but causing you to randomly burn consumables if you fight two enemies at once.

[Morokiane]

I've skimmed through the thread, so I don't know if a cooldown system like ToME/Dungeonmans has been suggested. I've been wanting hunger out of this game since I started playing, and I enjoy the hungerless games far more. Especially when you eat take two steps and are hungry again. It is just an annoying system.

[archaeo]

Get rid of Spellcasting and make your best magic skill act as Spellcasting when calculating spell hunger.
Or maybe use the average of spellschools as Spellcasting equivalent and calculate spell hunger for every spell based on your skills. Somebody with lots of earth magic can cast earth spells without hunger, but hungers when casting air, for example.

This doesn't really solve the problem so much as move it around a little, I think.

I've skimmed through the thread, so I don't know if a cooldown system like ToME/Dungeonmans has been suggested.

I'm not sure how these particular "cooldowns" work, but Crawl already basically has a mechanic that forces you to wait to cast more spells: MP. The more pertinent part of spell hunger, as I understand it, is that it's intended to keep the player from overusing high-level spells across multiple combats.

[yesno]

In ToME, abilities enter cooldown after use, and do not become available for further use until their cooldown is complete. Those abilities also cost stamina or mana when used. ToME characters generally have a pretty large number of active abilities and rely on cycling through them as they cool off and become available.

[acvar]

I'm not sure how these particular "cooldowns" work, but Crawl already basically has a mechanic that forces you to wait to cast more spells: MP. The more pertinent part of spell hunger, as I understand it, is that it's intended to keep the player from overusing high-level spells across multiple combats.

But is this even desirable? Do we expect long blade users to use their scimitar vs popcorn and only pull out their tripple sword for the real threats? If somebody has spent all the experience to get an ability why shouldn't they use it? Why is it "wrong" for them to spam it? Is the ability considered to strong for the investment? Then fix that by either reducing the power of the ability or increasing the investment don't add in yet another convoluted mechanic that basically says you can do this, but only every so often because this spell is too good.

P.S. This is not really adressed to you. I really want the developers to justify the current paradigm. Why do they think the more complex state of affairs is superior?

[yesno]

The more pertinent part of spell hunger, as I understand it, is that it's intended to keep the player from overusing high-level spells across multiple combats.

When the limit on use of a high level spell across multiple combats is lower than the total number of times that a character could potentially cast that spell from MP, then a strategic limit across multiple combats also becomes necessarily a hard limit on tactics within a single combat. This is especially relevant when a character has a source of MP recovery like Veh. And this is sometimes relevant even under the current hunger system for characters who, for example, have bonus MP and wizardry and want to use them, who rush their spell schools and memorize high level spells early, or who miss out on valuable mid-level spells and end up relying on high level ones. MP is good at what it does, but I don't think its existence precludes other limitations...

[Sandman25]

When the limit on use of a high level spell across multiple combats is lower than the total number of times that a character could potentially cast that spell from MP, then a strategic limit across multiple combats also becomes necessarily a hard limit on tactics within a single combat. This is especially relevant when a character has a source of MP recovery like Veh. And this is sometimes relevant even under the current hunger system for characters who, for example, have bonus MP and wizardry and want to use them, who rush their spell schools and memorize high level spells early, or who miss out on valuable mid-level spells and end up relying on high level ones. MP is good at what it does, but I don't think its existence precludes other limitations...

Isn't it similar to a melee character with a great weapon (vampiric), ring of slaying, ring of protection who can afford to train less Armour/Fighting/Weapon due to lucky drops? We even have Makhleb who does for melee characters exactly what Veh does for casters - recovery of the resource used to kill monsters after killing those monsters. Lucky melee character can fight non-stop from Lair onwards, no caster can do that.

[archaeo]

Why is it "wrong" for them to spam it? Is the ability considered to strong for the investment?

The only reasonable argument I've ever come up with is that being able to consistently cast high-level spells is overpowered until the extended branches, given that Shatter or Fire Storm sort of makes all other skills irrelevant for a long time.

Of course, the same is probably true of ranged combat, which has no hunger cost and an "ammo cost" that Oka and Trog both quickly trivialize. Shooting things with a bow and arrow isn't quite Fire Storm, but it's just as good at killing the majority of the 3-rune game outside of melee range.

P.S. This is not really adressed to you. I really want the developers to justify the current paradigm. Why do they think the more complex state of affairs is superior?

FWIW, Lasty and gammafunk have both told me/said on Tavern that spell/ability hunger isn't well-loved. I suppose another dev could disagree? gammafunk's also said that they'll think more about food reform in 0.18. They're both more than welcome to correct me if I'm mischaracterizing their opinion.

When the limit on use of a high level spell across multiple combats is lower than the total number of times that a character could potentially cast that spell from MP, then a strategic limit across multiple combats also becomes necessarily a hard limit on tactics within a single combat. This is especially relevant when a character has a source of MP recovery like Veh.

As Tabstorm demonstrated, it's relatively easy to rush to powerful spells and use them appropriately, meaning that the strategic hunger limitation only starves players who are spamming overpowered abilities when they're not necessary (the same is true of berserk). I'm skeptical of the tactical limit too; if you can cast spells that can starve you before you run out of MP, you can probably afford to spend a turn between casts to eat food. Literally every food item restores more satiation than one loses casting a single level 9 spell, assuming normal metabolism/diet.

MP is good at what it does, but I don't think its existence precludes other limitations...

Sure, as long as it's a limitation that doesn't have spell hunger's enormous flaws. Hopefully we can get Bodrick's patch in an experimental branch, because while I imagine it'll just reveal the toothlessness of hunger costs, if limitations are necessary, it'll be easier to see the problem in real play instead of hypothetical play.

[yesno]

Lucky melee character can fight non-stop from Lair onwards, no caster can do that.

because of MP, that remains true without regard to hunger though... it's dangerous to specialize too deeply in a limited resource. by the end of lair, a caster background should probably have diversified into some melee or ranged skills. there are no hard classes in crawl and magic and melee are resources available in varying degrees to all characters... the question is what role does that resource play in overall strategy?