Generation of pan lord rune levels

[Moose]

Hi, I'm in the midst of a game right now, and have been to 30 pan levels, and a unique lord (like Lom Lobon et al) has yet to generate. Dump is here: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/moose/moose.txt , though that link is transient.

What are the odds of a guaranteed rune-lord level generating? 30 levels without one seems ridiculously extreme, and makes me wonder if there shouldn't be a mechanism in place that keeps this from happening.

[Mattchew]

Last time I tried extended I went through maybe 25 levels without a rune level and gave up.

[le_nerd]

Just to be sure; it is annoying to have to go trough 25 levels, but you dont clear them completely, right? Just hop into the first portal that comes up. If you already have abyssal rune it can even be as fast to jump into an abyss portal.

[chequers]

From dungeon.cc:

  Code:

    // Unique pan lords become more common as you travel through pandemonium.
    // On average it takes 27 levels to see all four, and you're likely to see
    // your first one after about 10 levels.
    if (x_chance_in_y(1 + place_info.levels_seen, 65 + place_info.levels_seen * 2)
        && !all_demons_generated)
    {
        do
        {
            which_demon = random2(4);
        }
        while (you.uniq_map_tags.count(string("uniq_")
                                       + pandemon_level_names[which_demon]));
    }

EDIT: the chance of a level being a pan level is shown by this graph, where x is the number of pan levels visited.

[tabstorm]

Suggestion: Guarantee the generation of all 4 unique runes by at most 30 floors.

[bcadren]

Well if:

  Code:

y = (x+1)/(2x+65)

then

  Code:

x= (1-65y)/(2y-1) [y != 0.5] (0.5 is an asymptote).

Therefore Chance of next floor being a Unique Floor:

• 3% chance at 1 floor.
• 10% chance at 7 floors.
• 20% chance at 20 floors.
• 30% chance at 46 floors.
• 40% chance at 125 floors.
• 45% chance at 282 floors.
• Infinitely approaches 50% but never reaches it.

Integrating (piecemeal by floor); not true integration, as by floor is more correct here:

• 25% total chance at 5 floors.
• 52% total chance at 9 floors.
• 74% total chance at 13 floors.
• 95% total chance at 22 floors.
• 99.9% total chance at 35 floors.
• 99.99% total chance at 42 floors.
• 99.99999999% total chance at 78 floors. (Last floor where the odds can be expressed by a standard float value)
• Infinitely approaches 100% chance, but never reaches it (entirely plausible to go to 1000+ without one, just infinitesimally unlikely).

I can do the chance of multiple runes if you like, but I think these numbers suffice to show the good odds.

[chequers]

The average pan levels generated for a 15-rune game is, very approximately, 30-40.

After 30 levels your chance per-level is now 25% (and rising) giving an expected trip length of 30 + (4/0.25) = 46 levels.

So some games might feel like the RNG is being mean, but even very unlucky games like this (0.1% chance) are only ~15% "slower".

Anyway, if there's still a desire to change this so that the randomness is less variable, you could determine ahead of time the distance between pan lord levels. For example, on entry to Pan/a panlord level generate a "distance to next panlord level" between 6-12, which would give an average journey of 36 levels and min/max of 24-48.

[Rast]

For comparison, to get all 4 hell runes, you have to visit exactly 29 Hell floors (and that's too many also).

I suggest changing that pan lord level formula to:

  Code:

if (x_chance_in_y(1 + place_info.levels_seen, 30 + place_info.levels_seen)

[tasonir]

Here's the graph of that one: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=y+ ... om+0+to+50

Basically, it raises a bit more rapidly and after a while you get up to around 60% chance of a unique floor rather than 30% or so in the old formula. Average game would probably generate 10-15 less total floors (say about 20 instead of 35, on average).

[Becky]

I would prefer a solution where the unique floors aren't obligatory and prevented from ever turning up again if you leave them even without their rune, and instead using a distance (albeit with a lower range than 6-12 floors, like 0-7), but just higher chances would be fine too.

[duvessa]

Suggestion: Guarantee the generation of all 4 unique runes by at most 30 floors.

Suggestion: Guarantee the generation of all 4 unique runes by at most 4 floors.

[ion_frigate]

Suggestion: Make Pan finite.

Seriously, what reason is there for Pan to be infinite? "Difficult to escape from" is already covered in far more interesting manner by the Abyss. "Can't access your stash" became almost meaningless with the removal of item weight and item destruction. Pan basically just lets you exchange endless amounts of floor trash for tedium, something that really doesn't seem to fit with the design goals of the game.

The only purpose I can see for infinite Pan is Zig portals, but seriously, there has to be a better solution for that. For example, have a single Zig portal in Depths, with the portal to the next Zig (if you want to do the whole mega-Zig thing) at the bottom. Yes, this means that you get only one chance to chain Zigs, but I don't see a problem with that: it's supposed to be a challenge.

[Quazifuji]

I feel like it would be interesting to make an experimental branch on some server where Pan just has 5 floors and Slime and each of the Hells are 1 floor each. Remove all the floors that people just dive through. Find out whether it feels like anything meaningful is lost or not. It's a recurring debate whether the non-Boss floors of Pan, Hell, and Slime add anything meaningful to the game or just make extended more tedious than it needs to be, so why don't we see what the game's like without them?

I think most of the branches of extended should be more than just a single boss floor, so even if it turns out better this way I'd be in favor of finding a way to make the non-boss floors of those branches more interesting rather than removing them entirely, but seeing whether their current state really is meaningful or not seems like the first step in figuring out what to do with them.

[tasonir]

I would prefer a solution where the unique floors aren't obligatory and prevented from ever turning up again if you leave them even without their rune, and instead using a distance (albeit with a lower range than 6-12 floors, like 0-7), but just higher chances would be fine too.

This is already the case in Pan, and unless I missed it, I don't think anyone proposed allowing you to re-enter a unique level after you've already left it. They'd just show up faster, and you still only get one shot. If you leave, it won't respawn.

As for more drastic cuts to hell/pan, I wouldn't mind. Hell in particular always seems tedious to me, probably because of the lack of any loot. Not that the floor trash in pan is actually useful, but at least the game pretends you might earn something. In hell, you know there's zero point until you get to floor 7. Cutting down the number of floors of both would be fine by me.

In contrast, I'd really like slime to stay at 6 floors. The average slime floor is very, very tiny. You can see the stairs down right in your LOS a good 40% of the time, and the rest of the time it's only 1 or 2 LOS's over. Floors 1-5 each end up being "clear this one fight of slimes, stair dancing if you need to". It introduces you to non-boss slime fights, before you get to slime:6 and accidentally stumble into TRJ, which is something that newbies shouldn't just find on slime:1. If you had to make slime 4 or 5 floors, fine, but 1, 2 or 3 I'd be strongly against.