Doesnt wrote:That said, food is a really bad clock at the moment; it's more of an annoying limiter on how much you can use high-end wizardry spells and hungering invocations/berserk.
Yeah, but the proper replacement for food is another clock, not just nothing at all. And the replacement doesn't need even need to be all that complicated.
Suppose gold gets changed like this: you start with 1000 gold. More gold generates on the ground than before. You lose 1 gold per turn, and if your gold reaches 0, you die. That's a simple, easily understandable clock, and the generation rates of gold can be adjusted per branch, or even per level, if needed. And it doesn't involve any inventory juggling.
Now go one step further, and replace "gold" in the above paragraph with "food". You have a food number, it goes down as you spend turns and goes up as you find new piles of food (by exploring new levels), and if it reaches 0 you die, and there's no inventory juggling. It works just like gold, so it shouldn't be tricky to learn, and you have a simple clock to prevent the sort of grinding I describe, and it's not tied to gods or shops or monsters or whatever, so it's easy to tune.
Berder wrote:Nobody does this as mummy. Nobody would do it as any race.
I've done it quite a bit as a mummy, mostly in 0.5. I guess I'd better get back to Penelope.