Tuesday, 21st January 2014, 02:04 by and into
{Hunger} is tedious, Brendan, but it is also the tip of the ice burg. — {Hunger} being tedious is just an exceptionally bad case of hunger being tedious. So I'm going to respond to what I think is the deeper problem (and I beg your pardon in advance if this isn't where you wanted the thread to end up).
It would be a good idea, I think, for the developers to have a serious discussion about what food and hunger currently accomplish in Crawl, and what they should accomplish. Satiation only matters perhaps 5% of the time in any given game, but you have this mechanism that is a constant bother 100% of the time. This seems to indicate clunky design—I think most of the devs feel this way, but think that the hunger/satiation "minigame" in Crawl is too deeply ingrained. Perhaps—but my suspicion is that satiation (like victory dancing) is actually fixable, and that it seems much more important for balance than it actually is.
I see, broadly, two general approaches to making hunger less tedious:
For either approach, keep corpse, hide, and chunk generation as it is now. But make hides auto-drop W% of the time from applicable enemies because avoiding spoilers and streamlining interface are (rightly) design goals of DCSS.
1.) Remove chunk eating for satiation purposes from all but the five weird species—see below—and amulet of gourmand. Everything else remains equal. Increase spawn rate, or else the amount of nutrition provided, or both, for all permafood. Probably both. An increase in the "elasticity" and range of nutrition here would keep balance while reducing tedium. In other words, expand the "capacity" off everyone's belly and expand the edges of "Engorged -- Very Full --" etc. down the line.
2.) Automate as much as possible. Make all food costs draw directly from the food stores that you have in your inventory already based on nutritional cost. The interface "Engorged -- very full -- full ------ hungry -- very hungry -- near starving -- starving" would in this system only indicate how much edible (for your species) food one has in inventory. Chunks and butchering corpses remains a mechanism important for satiation purposes. Keep all the different fruit tiles and flavor, but upon pick up those bananas and strawberries go to "fruit: XXXX" nutrition counter, displayed at bottom of your (i)nventory screen. Your fruit nutrition counter, plus bread rations and chokos and the like make up your "non-meat: YYYY" nutrition counter. Beef jerky and the like add to your "meat: ZZZZ" stock. Remove all weight considerations from food because that is perhaps the silliest thing about them. Fedhas diminishes a portion of nutrition from your fruit stock based upon what abilities you are using. Spriggans only draw nutrition from the "non-meat" counter. And so on.
In both cases food can be made an entirely strategic decision. Given a certain level of the stat intelligence, when you choose to train spellcasting to a certain level, you have a good sense of how frequently you can cast some set of spells in a manner that is sustainable. You have all the same breaks to abusive stuff like stacking wizardry to cast high level spells early on or spamming pacification at *everything*, but the tedium is reduced to a minimum by taking the uninteresting decisions out of players hands. Which is what Crawl should strive to do for everything that is not interesting.
A few species with a very different relationship to the satiation clock (Trolls, Ghouls, Vampires, Kobolds, Felids). These species should, and could, maintain their special relationship to food in either approach outlined above. You could still keep in groumand even, and have it give you Troll-like eating abilities but without the faster metabolism; this could actually serve (as an added bonus) to make gourmand more distinctive as an option, as its benefits could be tweaked and amplified in either approach. (Or you can just remove gourmand, there's always that, it won't really affect the game much.)
- For this message the author and into has received thanks: 2
- brendan, Sar