The Tavern

Currently we display AC/EV/MR as bar in monster description.
What about HP bar? It can help to make decisions whether new player should use some consumables to buff, use wand of fireball, escape immediately etc.
Many monsters have pretty close AC/EV but amount of HP makes them really different from each other. For example,
Boggart (AC 0, EV 12, average HP 20), Tentacled Monstrosity (AC 5, EV 5, average HP 144), Deep Elf Master Archer (AC 0, EV 15, average HP 75), Electric Golem (AC 5, EV 20, average HP 135).

Too much variance, you will have to display pretty much every earlygame monster as # since Anta has like a hundred times more HP.

Unless you make a reeeeeeeeeaaaaaally long bar.

Sar wrote:Too much variance, you will have to display pretty much every earlygame monster as # since Anta has like a hundred times more HP.

Unless you make a reeeeeeeeeaaaaaally long bar.

It can be a non-linear bar. Something like 10-, 20, 40, 80, 160+. If we can have more than 5 characters, it could be more fine-grained.

I can see that increasing confusion, not reducing it.

Sar wrote:I can see that increasing confusion, not reducing it.

Why? I have no idea if AC/EV/MR bar is linear or not but I find it useful in my games. It really helps to decide whether I should use LRD/Fireball/Mass Confusion etc.

Nothing confusing it it is percentage-based, and explicitly declared to be so.

Code:: Tarantella HP: #####*****

The Tarantella has 100% of it's HP left.
You punch a Tarantella.
The Tarantella has 50% of it's HP left.
How many HP?
No idea, but your last punch reduced it to 50%.

I think Sandman was talking about displaying a bar for maxHP, not current HP.

Sar wrote:I think Sandman was talking about displaying a bar for maxHP, not current HP.

Yes.

Why not just say "This monster can have from X to Y hp" just like the wiki. So I can just X-V, or right click, rather than alt-tab, open my browser, look up the monster, etc...

The game has gotten much better at not requiring newer players to have a reference open while playing, but there are still some areas that could use improvement. This is one.

Another item sorely lacking from the interface is spell damage. I can look it up on the wiki, so the info is available, so why hide it? The spell power bar means less than nothing to me, for a long time I thought if the power bars were the same, the spells did the same damage. Nothing in the interface says otherwise, and with the huge damage variance, and monster HP variance, it's almost impossible to figure out ingame which of two spells does more damage.

Having options is meaningless if there's no way to intelligently select between those options. Oh, I could cast IMB or throw icicle at this enemy. Well I know IMB does ?? to ??? damage, and throw icicle does ???? to ????? damage....

On the other hand, I've never had trouble deciding whether a +0 long sword or a +0 scimitar was better. Because the game just gives me that information.

dowan wrote:Why not just say "This monster can have from X to Y hp" just like the wiki. So I can just X-V, or right click, rather than alt-tab, open my browser, look up the monster, etc...

It contradicts to crawl philosophy - number should be extremely important if it is shown as number. Notice that AC/EV/MR are displayed as bar.

Crawl philosophy is drunk and should go home. In a killstuff game like crawl, the two most important pieces of information are: How much does it take to kill this thing, and How much killing do I do with this thing?

Hiding this information just makes us try to find it in other ways, either through lots of experience, or by just looking up the numbers. Experience gives the wrong answer half the time, so looking up the numbers is what most people end up doing. So hiding it in the game is just making people do something other than play the game to find out how best to play the game.

How can I make an 'interesting' decision, if I don't have any information? I might as well flip a coin.

dowan wrote:Crawl philosophy is drunk and should go home.

Yep.

dowan wrote:Hiding this information just makes us try to find it in other ways, either through lots of experience, or by just looking up the numbers. Experience gives the wrong answer half the time, so looking up the numbers is what most people end up doing..

Nope.

So this is a slightly different version of what you're saying, but imagine something like take max hp for a given monster type to be a full bar and monsters usually start with only a fraction of the bar corresponding to the max hp rolled for that particular instance of the monster type. Then hp above the average number for that monster type would be represented by a different color pound sign/whatever the bar is made with in tiles, say dark green. If you see dark green in the hp bar, you know it's "bigger" than average and you can gauge by how much. Otherwise the same color mechanics for degree of injury.

If huge variance is too much of an issue, apply some roll off/step down on the high end of the bar. At least then you know if you see a full bar with a lot of dark green, it's a substantially tougher than average monster.

PleasingFungus wrote:
dowan wrote:Hiding this information just makes us try to find it in other ways, either through lots of experience, or by just looking up the numbers. Experience gives the wrong answer half the time, so looking up the numbers is what most people end up doing..

Nope.

Yes, we know.

Code:: Games Played - Games Won (2852 players) - (620 players)

http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.16/wi ... kills.html

PleasingFungus wrote:
dowan wrote:Hiding this information just makes us try to find it in other ways, either through lots of experience, or by just looking up the numbers. Experience gives the wrong answer half the time, so looking up the numbers is what most people end up doing..

Nope.

I made 3 statements in that quote. Which are you 'nope'ing?

Obviously, I can only go by my own experiences, and that of other people who play this game, and of those people, most of them seem to have some idea of "Which spell is more damaging" which they found out through either experience or looking up the numbers. The people who think they know from experience seem to often be contradicted by people who have looked up the actual numbers.

dowan wrote:I made 3 statements in that quote. Which are you 'nope'ing?

Obviously, I can only go by my own experiences, and that of other people who play this game, and of those people, most of them seem to have some idea of "Which spell is more damaging" which they found out through either experience or looking up the numbers. The people who think they know from experience seem to often be contradicted by people who have looked up the actual numbers.

I'd disagree with both "experience gives the wrong answer half the time" and "looking up the numbers is what most people end up doing".

I'm also very confused about why you're talking about spell damage, since no one else in this conversation was.

Sandman25 wrote:Yes, we know.

Code:
Games Played - Games Won (2852 players) - (620 players)

http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.16/wi ... kills.html

I sincerely have no idea what point you're trying to make here.

PleasingFungus wrote:I sincerely have no idea what point you're trying to make here.

I meant that I agree with your opinion that "looking up the numbers is what most people end up doing" is wrong. Most players don't do it and most players cannot win even once. I bet some of them might win (or win much sooner) if crawl was not hiding some important numbers.

Crawl's difficulty is a myth (elliptic is winning 39th game in a streak at the moment), you have to be a very experienced player who essentially does not need "looking up the numbers" because the same task has been accomplished through experience (or you indeed "look up the numbers" like I am doing, I would not be able to have my streaks without "looking up the numbers")

Sandman25 wrote:Crawl's difficulty is a myth (elliptic is winning 39th game in a streak at the moment)

elliptic is also a gifted mathematician and a chess prodigy

Sar wrote:elliptic is also a gifted mathematician and a chess prodigy

Yes, I know. When I was spectating one of his games I was really surprised that he trained UC to 27 really early (about getting 1st rune), he basically rushed to it ignoring everything else. It is impossible to do without spoilers/experience because new player cannot know that UC 27 is about 2.5 times better than UC 18. Melee formula is not written in the manual, you know?

PS. I used to be a talented child (not genius as elliptic though), always was first in the whole school/university but at least I understand why the damage display can be mistakenly seen as "unnecessary" and "won't do" by those who can calculate it in their mind and by those who underestimate importance of decisions in crawl.

Edit. Now you probably can see why I don't mind arguing with anyone, I have multiple experience of situations where it was proved that I was right when everyone else was saying that I am wrong

I have no piety before elliptic or dev team as a whole or whatever. Everyone can be wrong. Yes, including me

*Edit after further thought*

A Max_HP bar in and of itself probably isn't so helpful to a new player without revealing more statistics. If your goal is to identify threats that the player would have to risk many turns to defeat in melee, why not add a Best/Worst/Average analysis a la brogue?

Example:
Worst: Defeat in 2 turns.
Average: Victory 4 turns.
Best: Victory in 2 turns.

That said given the randomness of damage in crawl this might also not be that useful.

Perhaps a better system would be a calculation that simply gives a probability of a monster killing you before you kill it (given your current HP / melee damage per turn). Then again, that's basically what the "Dangerous" message informs. It would also underestimate the lethality of casters.

What good is a max hp bar without damage numbers? So you can compare monsters relatively? That seems...misguided, especially if it's nonlinear. It seems like yet another ineffective way to compare monsters.

The Tavern

Display average HP as bar

Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar

Re: Display average HP as bar