dck wrote:First of all since the game does not take place in a vacuum most if not all situations in which a sleeping monster is spotted will not be immediately followed by engaging said monster, certainly not if the circumstances actually make the encounter in any way relevant. At the very least there will be repositioning to see what else is in the neighborhood of the monster in question and to gain information on the terrain surrounding it; this is assuming that the player came to notice the monster from the perfect angle to engage it from, relative to his escape or fight routes that are explored.
...To shorten that somewhat, no proper gameplay situations that aren't of planetary alignment rarity will see themselves affected at all by this. This is because the intended impact of the change is that the player no longer has to reposition when spotting a sleeping monster in situations where attacking is the chosen route; but there are tens of features that go vehemently against that very notion, such as the ability to wake monsters up while they are out of your LoS, wandering monsters that may be on the level or why not levelgen itself not being particularly (thankfully) fond of huge empty spaces everywhere.
It takes very few turns to reposition, and spaces don't have to be particularly large for you to be able to reposition. When playing stabbers, I encounter situations in which it's clearly optimal to reposition very frequently; from comments I've seen others make (e.g. elliptic), my impression is that they do as well.
dck wrote:And this brings me to my next point which is autoexplore...
...crawl is not so brutal that one improper move will shatter all chances of winning? Should we not also realize that crawl has so much is going on that having sqlos allow to engage without repositioning in the rare chance autoexploring into a monster goes perfectly and having the monster stay asleep changes next to nothing of the actual game?
That doesn't even remotely follow. Most people use a feature that makes the game slightly harder, with the benefit of removing vast amounts of tedium; that's a crude patch over a fundamental design flaw in crawl, but that's neither here nor there. Because of this, we should keep in a feature that encourages weird, fiddly repositioning before attacking enemies, because the game offers you enough wiggle room to not bother...? That's not an argument!
dck wrote:Not only this, in fact, but stabbing as a whole will be a lot less interesting without circlelos allowing for diagonal shenanigans, because sqlos' diagonal moving makes the dangers of approaching at an angle several orders of magnitude greater and one cannot give any sort of stealth benefit to make up for the sheer amount of terrain being revealed or he'd replicating the perceived problems circlelos with stabbing at a different scale!
It's true that sqlos makes stealth worse than the 'optimal case' of diagonal-stabbing in circlelos. (Though, of course, if it's viable to stab by charging orthogonally at enemies in circlelos, it's even more viable to stab from the one-tile-closer edge of squarelos. And it orthogonal stabbing must be viable in circlelos, otherwise your claim that there's a reasonable decision between doing so and between backing off to stab diagonally would make no sense, right?)
But... how would adding a player stealth buff 'replicate the percieved problems [of] circlelos... stabbing'?
I'd also like to make an appeal for you to employ your inner editor and try to make your points in a more concise fashion. More people will read and engage with you if you do. You restated each of your points several times in your post, which bloated it remarkably; the missing punctuation, misused vocabulary, and run-on sentences made the situation worse. When I review my posts before hitting 'submit', I often find myself guilty of some of those sins; sometimes I even fix them
. It would make me a happier person if you made an effort toward that in future.