Remove launcher ammo


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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Thursday, 6th February 2020, 14:25

Remove launcher ammo

With the farewell of branded arrows'n bolts, launcher ammo is kinda pointless especially because arrows are common early while bolts not, which makes crossbow starts unfunny difficult. This is also a beef to centaurs & friends, they will never run out of ammo (which they almost always don't in my experience before I deal with them anyway.)

Also, less floor junk.
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Snake Sneak

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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2020, 19:01

Re: Remove launcher ammo

Some characters are resistant to arrows, for example anyone wearing a large shield, especially with a scarf of repulsion. You can literally just stand there and let yaktaurs shoot you.

In principle, I think it would be a nice change, but it would slightly affect monster behavior.

Finite ammo only matters if it affects your tactics. Ammo you can retrieve doesn't affect your tactics except when your quiver is very very small.

Slime Squisher

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Post Monday, 11th January 2021, 02:07

Re: Remove launcher ammo

There has never been a better time for this change, now that Deep Elf aptitude for Bows has been improved. Deep Elf's aptitudes make Arcane Marksman look like a viable choice, but it's still terrible because of it's low damage per arrow meaning they burn through arrows too quickly and typically run out at some point, even if using tedious tactics to delay that outcome. When a ranged kiting character needs to first be built like a standard melee dude to have a decent chance of succeeding, it's rather frustrating and unsatisfying, I mean, when a player choosing something called an "Arcane Marksman", they'd ideally like to be able to play it as a character that uses magic to facilitate ranged attacks rather than just a crappy fighter who can eventually learn to use a bow if they're lucky and patient enough, without being frequently punished by the RNG mulching ammo faster than generating it. I mean, that's assuming the goal isn't to create a miserable experience to scare off new players, otherwise the current design is fine.

Zot Zealot

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Post Monday, 11th January 2021, 08:15

Re: Remove launcher ammo

Could we maybe just give the AM 1000 arrows?
I agree AM is currently a miserable experience. You're practically forced to go Oka / TSO, which doesn't help with replay value either.

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andrew

Shoals Surfer

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Post Monday, 11th January 2021, 14:54

Re: Remove launcher ammo

Are there people out there who don't find it a miserable experience? Anyone? (Fortunately, it's "recommended" for so few species that new players are unlikely to play it.)
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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Monday, 11th January 2021, 21:52

Re: Remove launcher ammo

I believe the big reason for launcher ammo dropped off when item weight was removed from the game. Before that it was somewhat of a tactical decision how many arrows/bolts/bullets you carry around, but now you just pack all that you have. Not really much interesting decision making here.
One could still make special cases for large rocks or other especially brutal missiles - those could still be counted and mulched.
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Shoals Surfer

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Post Tuesday, 12th January 2021, 00:38

Re: Remove launcher ammo

I agree that ammo for throwing is rare enough to matter. OTOH, it's also rare enough to be annoying; micromanaging my quiver is annoying, to the point that if I have just one silver javelin I usually won't use it just to avoid the UI screw.

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Tomb Titivator

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Post Friday, 15th January 2021, 05:25

Re: Remove launcher ammo

Me and many, many other players been suggesting this for YEARS AND YEARS and no one's ever listened. Just to show how bad it is, ranged combat has some of the strongest builds in the game, but no one ever bothers with it because it's annoying to keep switching your weapons because of finite ammo. It just makes the game not fun, to the point where players will actively avoid the strongest playstyles because of how unfun they are because of finite ammo.

Abyss Ambulator

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Post Friday, 15th January 2021, 10:41

Re: Remove launcher ammo

Yeah, the current situation is bad: balancing by tedium. But I think nobody has any idea what exactly to do, so they kept procrastinating doing anything with it.

If there were no ammo, ranged combad were so much superior to melee that almost nobody would do any melee anymore. Bows would be better than anything else: why bother with training melee? (Of course, as you have pointed out, this is the situation right now, just ammo makes it annoying enough so that players rarely use it.)

So what to do? There were some ideas:
1.) Reduce ranged damage
2.) Make it even stronger, but make ammo very very limited
3.) Make it impossible to use if someone is next to you

But all of these are problematic, I guess the devs did not like either.

In my opinion the least you could do is to always destroy ammo upon fire (and balance it accordingly). That would remove the tedium of ammo retreiving. And maybe somebody already wrote some auto switching mechanism where if you "quiver" your second weapon (b slot) then "f" or whatever automatically switches to it and attacks, while "tab" automatically switches back. Or something like this, so that switching is automatic, you just has to press different keys to auto-attack. This still won't be very good, but better than the current situation.
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Tomb Titivator

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Post Friday, 15th January 2021, 15:26

Re: Remove launcher ammo

There are so many broken things the game at this point that I don't think balance should be an issue right now. Just remove ammo for launchers, keep ammo for throwing, and go from there. If you want to get technical, berserk is pretty broken, and you can't berserk with a bow, so just remove ammo already!!

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 15th January 2021, 20:41

Re: Remove launcher ammo

So to disambiguate, there are several problems, and a few related factors, which aren't the probem in and of themselves, but either cause directly or by proxy the problems in questions.

So we have these factors:
1. Ranged and melee attacks are functionally identical in stat and skill factors, except that ranged attacks may be done at any range, instead of just range 1 or 1&2
2. Ranged weapons have a top and bottom end (DPS-wise) which overlaps the melee weapon's usual viable range
3. Ammo is limited in total supply, which keeps "only use a ranged weapon" non-viable early and is difficult to reliably do late without god support.
4. Nonthreatening monsters can be safely killed throughout the game using any weapon, not just whatever you have trained the most, and there's a lot of nonthreatening monsters.
5. Using a ranged weapon creates overhead in the form of having to retrieve your used ammo, which can't be 100% automated with the current UI, as there's no way for the game to know if it would be safe to retrive your ammo.

And we have the following problems:
1. UI problems, weapon swapping: Incentivizing using one weapon at range and one for melee-range isn't really a problem in and of itself, as long as doing so causes minimal overhead, automating weapon-swapping is plausible, however since presently switching weapons costs a turn, there's a subset of people who will want direct control (There will always be situations when you'd prefer to make a different choice). The present weapon-swapping shortcut, if used properly (' to swap between a and b) works, but isn't a complete solution for people who would prefer more automation, a more complete weapon-swapping LUA script is likely possible, but would be sometimes suboptimal.
2. UI problems, Ammunition pickup: While you can auto-explore to pick up ammunition, auto-explore is frequently suboptimal, an 'autopickup' key that basically did 'autoexplore until there was nothing to left pick up' would probably help bridge the gap. As pointed out, removing ammunition would also remove this problem.
3. Balance problems: Presently ranged weapons are literally a superset of melee, they are just flat-out as good or better than melee *other than* ammunition, having ammunition requirements does contribute to tedium, but it doesn't *only* generate tedium, it also provides a backstop against ranged weapons being absolutely superior to melee ones, it's probably not strong enough in the balance aspect when compared to the tedium aspect (Although if you obviate the UI concerns the tedium goes down significantly).
4. Inventory Management problems: This was reduced somewhat when most ammunition lost branding (also when it lost enchantment) throwing is still a significant problem
5. You're incentivized to avoid firing in such a way as you might lose ammo: At least until your ammo supply is large, you have to pay attention to trivia like when you might miss and toss an arrow into lava/deep water, but you can't simply automate stop at first target always because it's also optimal to fire in such a way that your arrow will get chances to hit more things in corridors, particularly against stuff like bees in corridors. (Which means you cant effectively always choose one option or the other) this is a micro-optimization, in that it will have minimal effects on your success, but it still has a clearly superior choice, applying extra cognative overhead for something that's low-impact.

For the proposed solutions and some counterarguments:

1. Remove ammunition with no other changes: This basically just breaks melee weapons as a viable choice, it makes a subset of the game completely superior, which by definition reduces the flexibility of the game, if one path is inherently superior for all applications, then it trivializes player choice, it's pretty clear this isn't going to happen even if people are opinionated about the game not being very balanced to begin with.
2. Make ranged weapons very strong, but very limited: This pushes ranged weapons directly into evocable territory, while evocables are currently very strong, having an alternative which is "the same thing but trains a different skill" doesn't actually contribute to the game in any sort of interesting way.
3. Make it impossible to fire adjacent: While this does serve to distinguish ranged from melee, since there's few reliable ways to create gaps, you're even more strongly incentivized to have a melee swap. Additionally if you make monster and player weapon use the same, then ranged-weapon-using creatures can be completely neutered by standing next to them, if you don't then you have a weird discontinuity which is difficult to explain in an intuitive fashion.
4. Destroy all ammunition (and increase ammo generation to compensate): This addresses one UI concern, but there's no way to generate ammunition in a way that preserves the existing balance, either you generate too much early and have unlimited ranged weapons, or you generate to little early and effectively degenerate to weaker evocations. This was prodded at fairly seriously and in the end was thrown out.
5. Make ranged weapons do decreasing damage as you get closer: This is like a watered-down 3, with the same (if less strong) drawbacks.
6. Make ammunition not mulch, but be incredibly rare: this is similar to 2, but serves to distinguish ranged slightly from evocations. Unfortunately it does nothing to the UI problems, and actually excaberates the 'don't lose your ammo' problem. Also it makes it much harder to use, as you have to find at least two items (launcher+ammo) making it uncommon indeed that it'd be worth investing skill points into
7. Removed ranged weapons and ammunition and everything related: I mean I guess it does get rid of the problems :)

All of the solutions I've seen so far have drawbacks and there's no clear consensus as to what's the thing that most needs fixing, particularly if the solution makes some other part of the problem worse.

I'll suggested the following, which probably has as many holes as the other suggestions, but at least it's another proposal:

8. Make ammunition virtual, launchers have "ammo" charges, but the max a launcher can hold depends on your current skill (so you could have up to 27 arrows in your bow at 27 skill) launchers regain ammo by resting (I'd flavor it as you actually creating the ammo yourself, but that's not really material), not with experience, and only while wielded. This doesn't really address throwing at all, I'm not really sure what to do about that.

Personally I don't care much about the weapon-swapping nor pickup issues, I don't like how many slots throwing takes up, and I don't really like that ranged is basically a jumped-up melee weapon once you get a reasonable ammo supply.
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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Friday, 15th January 2021, 22:35

Re: Remove launcher ammo

My personal preference is either to remove ammo and do a compensatory numbers nerf to launchers (ie make them range 7 melee) or automulch and do a compensatory numbers nerf to launchers. Ammo retrieval is pretty annoying to me, but having to manual fire around deep water and lure stuff out of it is the worst part of launcher play, in my opinion. Might also want to consider stopping non-penetrating shots at the first target even if they miss - this solves part of the manual targeting problem and nerfs ranged against groups of monsters, tho I guess is a bit weird mechanically.

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Slime Squisher

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Post Saturday, 16th January 2021, 00:28

Re: Remove launcher ammo

Even with infinite ammo, I would still prefer to train melee combat over ranged combat on most of my characters, for a variety of reasons. But, they can be broadly categorized as weapon type bonuses, wider variety of brands, god synergies, and damage. Although, to be fair, my perception that melee attacks have a higher damage cap is likely tainted by the fact that ranged combat is by far the least successful strategy I've tried in Crawl, and I'm a fan of melee octopodes even without stealth or transmutations. Although, now I think of it, I may try a wizard mode game where I give a level 1 ranged character the Assassin boots just for laughs. Still, there's an awful lot you can do in melee that you can't do at range, so I can't imagine infinite ammo would stop people from using melee combat.

I haven't seen anyone suggest shamelessly borrowing ToME's approach of having a limited capacity quiver that must be refilled when it runs out. Depending on how it's implemented, that could give melee combat an advantage in staying power... ranged combat characters would be forced to buy time if their quivers run dry. Maybe turn up the heat a bit and have reloading take several turns and be subject to interruption like spell memorization. This would force players to choose from a number of strategies to work around the limitation, and this paradigm would make Arcane Marksman's spell set more appealing in balance with their lower damage.

Abyss Ambulator

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Post Saturday, 16th January 2021, 10:55

Re: Remove launcher ammo

If I am not mistaken, Siegurt have just suggested your limited quiver idea two posts above (although it is hidden at the end of a very long post).

I personally do not like this limited and time-rechargable quiver because it makes ranged weapons too similar to spells with a different mp.

I think that various current "recharge" mechanics realively well cover the design space, and I am not sure a new recharge mechanic would solve range weapon's problems.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 16th January 2021, 23:58

Re: Remove launcher ammo

sanka wrote:If I am not mistaken, Siegurt have just suggested your limited quiver idea two posts above (although it is hidden at the end of a very long post).

I personally do not like this limited and time-rechargable quiver because it makes ranged weapons too similar to spells with a different mp.

I think that various current "recharge" mechanics realively well cover the design space, and I am not sure a new recharge mechanic would solve range weapon's problems.

It sounds very similar to my suggestion, yes.
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Tomb Titivator

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Post Thursday, 21st January 2021, 06:51

Re: Remove launcher ammo

You can't berserk with a bow. Saying melee would be useless is not fair. Shields are a thing too.

Make ranged weaker and remove ammo. Done.

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