Lair Larrikin
Posts: 24
Joined: Monday, 8th October 2012, 23:35
Friday, 11th September 2015, 02:27
Remove permafood
Instead of removing food altogether, we could focus it to a stricter, smaller design goal than it currently fills.
(removing food altogether is discussed in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17281 -- note, removing food altogether is also a great solution to these issues)
There's been lots of exploration of chunkless crawl, so I'd like to explore permafoodless crawl -- it might be more fun than chunkless (and maybe more fun than foodless).
TLDR:
Food as a short-term limit (going from Satiated to Starving mid-combat) is annoying and cumbersome; let's fix it by removing most sources of hunger
Food as a medium-term limit (you need to kill a monster sometime between Engorged and Starving) is not too obnoxious and has some benefits and also some flavour; let's retain it if we can
Food as a long-term limit (try to get the orb before you run out of permafood) is so much less fun than other long-term strategic decisions such as skill training and potion/scroll management; let's get rid of that by removing permafood
Current purpose of food in Crawl
I believe this is a summary of the current problems that crawl food attempts to "solve":
1) Mid-combat concerns: don't cast Firestorm too many times in a single battle, or you'll need to eat mid-fight
2) Medium-term inventory: if you are doing a lot of Firestorms or Berserks, you need to manage your permafood stacks and your stacks of chunks. Also, hope that permafood appears while you're exploring.
3) Long-term strategic: improve Spellcasting and Int so you can cast more Firestorms per battle
4) Anti-scumming (small-scale): don't spend too much time dragging monsters back to the staircase where it's "safe" to fight, because you might starve while doing so
5) Anti-scumming (mummy-scale): don't wait thousands and thousands of turns for monsters to fall asleep; don't game the OOD timers for extra XP
6) (there are some other things like vampiric weapon wielding and evoking rods. The "remove hunger" thread is pretty comprehensive. I am just gonna focus on berserk and high-level spells though.)
(1) and (3) are arguably already solved by MP.
(2) is awful. Deciding whether to drop 3 jerkies or 5 cheeses is a problem that nobody should ever be asked to solve.
(4) isn't really solved, because food costs are still covered by chunks. (Food from the food clock makes such a minor impact vs food from spellcasting that this timer is just too slow to be effective.)
(5) isn't really solved, because food costs are generally still covered by permafood (until extreme cases)
And here's some flaws in the current system that I hope to address:
1) Characters that don't use Berserk or high-level spells in combat require very little food -- they can get by on chunks and almost never eat permafood. Because different characters require vastly different amounts of food, tuning it is very hard.
2) Amulet of the Gourmand is rarely the correct strategic option, but I wear it so often because I love not having to make the decision of whether to gamble by eating permafood, or gamble by not eating permafood. (I understand the chances of running out of permafood are low, but....)
The proposal:
1) Remove permafood.
2) Remove chunks. The 'e' key will eat the corpse the player is standing on -- like Vampires. Remove the 'c'hop command.
3) Corpses can be eaten until Engorged. Remove Amulet of the Gourmand.
4) Allow more of the "meaty" undead to drop corpses -- such as Zombies and Ghouls.
5) Poisonous and other harmful corpses can be eaten by all characters. They give a different message when eaten (purely for flavour -- "you choke down the rancid Zombie corpse.")
6) Rotten corpses still can't be eaten. (this doesn't change from current crawl -- trolls/ghouls/etc still can)
7) Mutagenic corpses still give mutation roulette.
8) Remove all sources of hunger except for the food clock. Use archaeo's "Remove Hunger" plans from the thread linked above to retain balance.
9) Speed the food clock up a bit.
10) Vampires and Mummies are unchanged.
11) Vegetarian 3 can no longer be received during gameplay.
I don't know what to do about the spriggan diet. Maybe they should spend 2 turns vomiting, 100-200 turns after they eat a chunk.
The intended effects of this proposal:
1) Keep the roleplaying flavour of killing & eating everything in the dungeon. Some of us like it
2) Number of inventory slots spent on food: zero!
3) Maximum number of turns between making a bad food decision, and dying, is drastically reduced.
4) The purpose of food becomes clearer: trying to avoid overly-cautious playstyles and to push the player into more combat. (Very similar to piety decay, but food can go from Full to Empty faster than piety can.)
5) Hunger rates are the same for all characters (but not all play styles); therefore, the food clock can be tuned a little tighter.
6) Keep the tension for Necromancers to decide which corpses to eat and which to raise.
Final flavour-related side-notes:
1) Between permafood and eating corpses/chunks, I feel like the latter has a flavour/atmosphere of desperation, while the former has much less flavour. Thoughts?
2) We could retain the hunger cost of berserking: most berserk characters don't need to do necromancy, and it feels "right" that a berserking character is driven to combat more often than a sane one.
3) The most depressing effect of this change is that it would destroy the "cheese and grapes" vault.
(removing food altogether is discussed in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17281 -- note, removing food altogether is also a great solution to these issues)
There's been lots of exploration of chunkless crawl, so I'd like to explore permafoodless crawl -- it might be more fun than chunkless (and maybe more fun than foodless).
TLDR:
Food as a short-term limit (going from Satiated to Starving mid-combat) is annoying and cumbersome; let's fix it by removing most sources of hunger
Food as a medium-term limit (you need to kill a monster sometime between Engorged and Starving) is not too obnoxious and has some benefits and also some flavour; let's retain it if we can
Food as a long-term limit (try to get the orb before you run out of permafood) is so much less fun than other long-term strategic decisions such as skill training and potion/scroll management; let's get rid of that by removing permafood
Current purpose of food in Crawl
I believe this is a summary of the current problems that crawl food attempts to "solve":
1) Mid-combat concerns: don't cast Firestorm too many times in a single battle, or you'll need to eat mid-fight
2) Medium-term inventory: if you are doing a lot of Firestorms or Berserks, you need to manage your permafood stacks and your stacks of chunks. Also, hope that permafood appears while you're exploring.
3) Long-term strategic: improve Spellcasting and Int so you can cast more Firestorms per battle
4) Anti-scumming (small-scale): don't spend too much time dragging monsters back to the staircase where it's "safe" to fight, because you might starve while doing so
5) Anti-scumming (mummy-scale): don't wait thousands and thousands of turns for monsters to fall asleep; don't game the OOD timers for extra XP
6) (there are some other things like vampiric weapon wielding and evoking rods. The "remove hunger" thread is pretty comprehensive. I am just gonna focus on berserk and high-level spells though.)
(1) and (3) are arguably already solved by MP.
(2) is awful. Deciding whether to drop 3 jerkies or 5 cheeses is a problem that nobody should ever be asked to solve.
(4) isn't really solved, because food costs are still covered by chunks. (Food from the food clock makes such a minor impact vs food from spellcasting that this timer is just too slow to be effective.)
(5) isn't really solved, because food costs are generally still covered by permafood (until extreme cases)
And here's some flaws in the current system that I hope to address:
1) Characters that don't use Berserk or high-level spells in combat require very little food -- they can get by on chunks and almost never eat permafood. Because different characters require vastly different amounts of food, tuning it is very hard.
2) Amulet of the Gourmand is rarely the correct strategic option, but I wear it so often because I love not having to make the decision of whether to gamble by eating permafood, or gamble by not eating permafood. (I understand the chances of running out of permafood are low, but....)
The proposal:
1) Remove permafood.
2) Remove chunks. The 'e' key will eat the corpse the player is standing on -- like Vampires. Remove the 'c'hop command.
3) Corpses can be eaten until Engorged. Remove Amulet of the Gourmand.
4) Allow more of the "meaty" undead to drop corpses -- such as Zombies and Ghouls.
5) Poisonous and other harmful corpses can be eaten by all characters. They give a different message when eaten (purely for flavour -- "you choke down the rancid Zombie corpse.")
6) Rotten corpses still can't be eaten. (this doesn't change from current crawl -- trolls/ghouls/etc still can)
7) Mutagenic corpses still give mutation roulette.
8) Remove all sources of hunger except for the food clock. Use archaeo's "Remove Hunger" plans from the thread linked above to retain balance.
9) Speed the food clock up a bit.
10) Vampires and Mummies are unchanged.
11) Vegetarian 3 can no longer be received during gameplay.
I don't know what to do about the spriggan diet. Maybe they should spend 2 turns vomiting, 100-200 turns after they eat a chunk.
The intended effects of this proposal:
1) Keep the roleplaying flavour of killing & eating everything in the dungeon. Some of us like it
2) Number of inventory slots spent on food: zero!
3) Maximum number of turns between making a bad food decision, and dying, is drastically reduced.
4) The purpose of food becomes clearer: trying to avoid overly-cautious playstyles and to push the player into more combat. (Very similar to piety decay, but food can go from Full to Empty faster than piety can.)
5) Hunger rates are the same for all characters (but not all play styles); therefore, the food clock can be tuned a little tighter.
6) Keep the tension for Necromancers to decide which corpses to eat and which to raise.
Final flavour-related side-notes:
1) Between permafood and eating corpses/chunks, I feel like the latter has a flavour/atmosphere of desperation, while the former has much less flavour. Thoughts?
2) We could retain the hunger cost of berserking: most berserk characters don't need to do necromancy, and it feels "right" that a berserking character is driven to combat more often than a sane one.
3) The most depressing effect of this change is that it would destroy the "cheese and grapes" vault.
