The Tavern

Noted today in trunk that we seem to have lost the ability to ctrl-attack while confused, it wants us to use actual directional attacks complete with the stumble risk.

Encountered this first in Orc right next to a deep water tile. Quite approved to be honest, de-trivialised the confusion. Remains to be seen how it affects the way I run branches like Spider, I've rather relied on ctrl-swings to stand and flail when confused lately. More to think about is always good, it was a little dull to just switch from tab to ctrl-swing spam and back as tarantellas hit me.

Since we just brought back confused cleave this is probably a good counter-weight, nice work whoever dropped that one in.

That was MarvinPA, for the record.

While the game prompts you to make sure you don't kill yourself, is "confusion + deep water = likely death on move" really all that desirable for any reason other than monster/player symmetry? I don't have a strong feeling either way, just curious.

The reasoning for it wasn't anything to do with drowning in particular, as described in the commit message it was about making it less easy to repeatedly try to attack things while confused (the enabling of cleaving while confused drew attention to this since it's particularly problematic in that instance). When the change was being discussed in -dev I think it was suggested to just waste a turn and do nothing if confusion would make you drown, that's probably a thing that would be pushed if a patch was made for it.

Yeah, confusion-stumble-near-water-or-lava should just act like walls, realistically, if I'm confused near deep water, with a critter nearby, and I can't cure the confusion, the only thing I can do now is hit . and wait to die or for the confusion to end (At least with control+direction you could make blind swings to try to hit the creature in question)

Perhaps a softer penalty than taking away control-attack while confused altogether would be:

1. If you move-attack it works as it does presently.
2. If you control-attack while confused you have a 1:8 chance of attacking in the direction you meant to attack, if that fails, you waste an attack-worth of AUT entirely (As in, no cleave, no hitting other random creatures which might happen to be nearby but in a different direction)

This encourages move-attack, while preserving control-attack as a last-ditch effort when want to do something that's safe, that has at least a chance of being productive.

It might require some alteration of the existing messages to convey that more clearly.

As somebody who plays a lot of mummy I do not really understand the reasoning, that is why you want to make confusion more deadly. I always tought that less binary hexes (like slow or corona) work much better than the save or die versions. Maybe I missed something in the recent developments tough.

I agree, confusion was already usually 'drink curing or die', now it's just even more that way. Having a 1 in 8 chance to target the correct square was already pretty bad, now on top of that I might accidentally walk around? Why?

Shortly after answering my question, MarvinPA actually just did what he talked about instead of waiting for a patch from someone else. Confused players treat lava/deep water as if they were walls now, and you just lose a turn instead of dying.

Maybe give a penalty to accuracy while confused? Preferably a cruel penalty like setting accuracy to min(25%, original_accuracy).

Why?

I was trying to address "as described in the commit message it was about making it less easy to repeatedly try to attack things while confused"