Species Proposal: Plutonians

[File200]

Plutonians are radioactive humanoids. They don't hunger, due to their inner reserves of power. Instead, any action that would cause them to lose nutrition (spells, attacking) gives them glow (Yes, I know this is like Crawl Light). Plutonians gain additional hp and mp regeneration the higher their glow is. If a plutonian reaches critical glow, instead of malmutating he will meltdown, dealing damage to himself and all enemies in LoS, and rotting some max hp. The damage done to enemies is greater than the damage done to self, so this can be used offensively. Glow is always increasing, and you have 1 level of device heal malus, so most of your combat healing comes from keeping your glow up. Your glow goes down when you kill enemies or use healing/curing from a potion or device. The latter condition is because I want to have some way to reduce glow out of combat, so you don't have to desperately scrabble from enemy to enemy. If you always had to be killing enemies to avoid rot, then plutonians would just become magical ghouls. This produces a nice balance, I think: you're encouraged to go from enemy to enemy and your regeneration gives the capacity to do so. At the same time, you can stop your glow with certain limited resources so travelling between stashes doesn't become a major risk.

As they are always magically contaminated, they are ineligible to worship zin. Due to the meltdown mechanic, they cannot easily abuse Trog's rage or Elyvilon's healing.

Plutonians have good elemental magic and have +1 in all elemental schools. Their other magic aptitudes are somewhat weak. They have flat fighting aptitudes.

The purpose of this species is to create a balanced race that interacts with the food clock in a new and interesting way. They are similar in concept to the now-defunct djinn species, but have systems in place to prevent them from abusing the lack of food.

Playtesting: I will update this section as I playtest the species. The coding is about 50% done. All that remains is to implement the meltdown mechanic in a non-game crashing way.

[Lasty]

This idea sounds like it has potential. I'd be interested to try it, though it does seem like it'll take quite a bit of tweaking to find the right balance.

I think these are the most interesting aspects of the proposal:
* Interesting new take on clock and on using contamination.
* A player-controlled tension mechanic that requires some thought.
* A relatively flat-apt race.

I have a few concerns:
* Increased regeneration causes hunger. Hunger causes contamination. Increased contamination causes increased regeneration. Will this cause a feedback loop that causes glow to increase rapidly, or will glow-regeneration not increase hunger?
* Glow-on-travel might be a problem.
* The level of contamination management may turn out to be fiddly enough to be irritating rather than interesting.

[and into]

Yes, I agree this has potential.

One point that I think is important: I'd say that critical glow needs to be something that you just want to avoid, like how other species want to avoid starvation. Thus meltdown should be mostly dangerous for the player, not (potentially) useful for killing enemies. Otherwise stuff like putting on an evocable and switching it on and off, just to quickly increase hunger/glow and meltdown-explode your enemies, is encouraged. Vampires' "sometimes you want more hunger" can be really bad too but what keeps it sane is that for Vp basically have different "gears" you switch to and for the most part you can treat that as a strategic decision, and it won't dominate your game play. (Even with that fairly laid back approach, Vp hunger clock still can be annoying.) Blowing up the area around you and taking some self damage to kill enemies is much more tactical though, and would thus encourage more intentional spamming of stuff just to incur the hunger/glow cost.

Alternatively: You have an ability to very quickly (if not instantly) increase your hunger/glow to critical.

In either case, think carefully about what game play certain hunger-food relationships might encourage.

[DracheReborn]

and into: Agreed. Actually, meltdown does have a strategic cost in the proposal currently (rotted maxhp), so it's not something you want to spam at enemies, more of a last ditch thing to save your life.

File200 did say he wants to add an ability to deliberately increase glow, presumably to avoid the scenario of deliberately hungering yourself to trigger meltdown.

The way I imagine gameplay is that you would try to find a playing pace (i.e. of fighting and resting) that's a sweet spot for increased regen while avoiding meltdown. Like the standard food clock though, it still discourages scumming by attaching a strategic cost to starvation.

* Increased regeneration causes hunger. Hunger causes contamination. Increased contamination causes increased regeneration. Will this cause a feedback loop that causes glow to increase rapidly, or will glow-regeneration not increase hunger?

It does seem to me that glow-regen shouldn't increase hunger rate. Not sure how it's currently implemented.

[File200]

Just to address some concerns: increased regen does not currently cause increased hunger. I WILL be adding an ability that increases glow on-demand.

My concerns are currently focused on behind-the-scenes stuff, and a little bit on user interface.

Regeneration rate is equal to roughly maxhp/3, and any points above 20 are divided by 2. I need to find a balance of regeneration that will be noticeable in the late game but not overwhelming in the early game. Currently, I'm giving plutonians a bonus regen of contamination/500, but this needs more testing.

There are 6 discrete levels of contamination that determine what is said on the character screen. These go:
0, 5000, 15000, 25000, 40000, 60000
5000 is where you normally start to see a risk of malmutating.
As you can see, the difference between level 1 glow (1-5000) and level 3 glow (15000-25000) is huge. I want there to be more feedback on your current regen level specifically for Plutonians, but don't know if I should put it on the status block, the ability screen, or the status screen. Thoughts?

[and into]

Putting it in the place where Regen appears from the spell would be fine. I'd try to link glow level and +regen into one status display with a spectrum of colors to show roughly what level of current intensity you have. Should be easy to reference, but not too obtrusive. You can also have it say something like "You are giving off energy and healing at an average/above average/high/very high/extraordinary rate!" on the little read out when you hit @ and in your big-A menu; that won't be used much in all likelihood but it would keep consistency.

[Klown]

very cool

[WalrusMcFishSr]

Should get a bonus when using Plutonium Sword

[spudwalt]

Should get a bonus when using Plutonium Sword

Wouldn't outside sources of contamination boost their regen rate, too? So, in a sense, they 'do' get a bonus when using the Plutonium Sword (and any other radioactive artifact): they can take it off to heal faster.

[File200]

After some playtesting, I've found that plutonian berserkers and healers are VERY strong, and the contam system is a bit fiddly. This might just require just tweaking some numbers, but it's hard to keep melee plutonians balanced with spellcasting plutonians due to the vastly different hunger rates. Maybe I need to special-case spell hunger, or differentiate ability hunger from other kinds of hunger. One thing is certain: the rot on meltdown is going to stay as long as the hunger system is in place. Sorry, Thundamoo!

I've been toying around with the idea of reversing the contamination benefits: you regenerate more at LESS contamination instead of more. That would make it a no-brainer to kill enemies as quickly as possible (though it already sort of is) and use healing as you get it, but at the same time it would discourage using high-hunger abilities ad infitum. Thoughts?

[khalil]

I kinda liked the idea of high contam being a double edged sword where you got HP regen at the cost of going sterile and reducing your lifespan by several years, but I can see the problem with encouraging usage of high hunger powers, and I think a change would probably be an improvement.

[reaver]

File200: It's kinda hard to tell what to do when we're hearing about this second hand. If you put a patch up on mantis I can push it to a branch and at least people will be able to pull and compile locally, and might even be able to get an experimental branch set up on the servers. This would also allow people to look over the technical changes to look for improvements / concerns that might might keep them from being merge with Trunk. I think this species sounds interesting, but I would need to see it in action to be sure. The contaim == good thing should be kept if possible because it differentiates the species, but it's quite possible for balance/nonscumminess concerns to overrule this if the mechanic encourages bad play.

[File200]

@ Reaver: got it. I'll post the files to mantis tomorrow around 8:00 p.m. mountain time. In the meantime, I'd like to do more testing of the "Device healing for contamination reduction" conduct.

I also decided on an effect for the self-contamination ability: it deals 1d(20% of max hp) damage to everything in a three-tile radius and gives you ~3000 contamination.

EDIT: Is it alright if the files contain other species that I've been testing (e.g. yeeks and moon trolls)?

[reaver]

I have updated File200's work to Trunk and pushed it to a branch, plutonians. Like with new_nemelex, you can compile locally with the command:

  Code:

git checkout -b plutonians origin/plutonians

from master and compile. Play testing feedback is welcome!

[Wahaha]

Glow being good and then suddenly becoming bad means there is an incentive to try to balance it close to the breakpoint, which sounds tedious.

[File200]

Glow being good and then suddenly becoming bad means there is an incentive to try to balance it close to the breakpoint, which sounds tedious.

From my experience playing, it's far less tedious than the ordinary food clock. When contamination reaches critical levels, you're given a visual indication (contam turns dark red on the status block), and at that point you quaff a healing pot or two and remember to keep your nutrition-cost abilities in check.

To anyone playtesting now, keep in mind that all numbers are subject to change based on feedback.


Initial playtesting impressions:

-I've mainly been playing elementalists of various flavours. I haven't gotten much farther than lair branches, but so far they play a lot like regenerating humans. That is not necessarily a good thing or bad thing, but they could definitely use some more traits to distinguish them.

-Meltdowns currently don't occur often enough to make a huge gameplay difference -- they should definitely occur more frequently, and probably at lower levels of contamination.

-The mp regen bonus makes a big difference in extended conflicts, especially since the meltdown system encourages you to use your low-cost spells to avoid excess hunger.

-The overload ability is great for taking out orc wizards that are hiding behind other orcs, but it probably gives more contamination than it's worth.

-When I've gotten more feedback, I'll make an official naming thread.

[godzilla]

Why do plutonians have such a low Necromancy aptitude? It doesn't seem to make much sense; there aren't many spells in that school (except possibly Regen and Lichform) that would be OP for the species. Other than (maybe) flavor reasons I don't see any reason for this deviation from their otherwise mostly flat aptitudes.

[File200]

Why do plutonians have such a low Necromancy aptitude? It doesn't seem to make much sense; there aren't many spells in that school (except possibly Regen and Lichform) that would be OP for the species. Other than (maybe) flavor reasons I don't see any reason for this deviation from their otherwise mostly flat aptitudes.

The idea was to limit access to necromutation, which would change the dynamic of the species. The other reason is flavorful: They aren't entirely made of flesh, so they aren't great at necromancy.

[godzilla]

Why do plutonians have such a low Necromancy aptitude? It doesn't seem to make much sense; there aren't many spells in that school (except possibly Regen and Lichform) that would be OP for the species. Other than (maybe) flavor reasons I don't see any reason for this deviation from their otherwise mostly flat aptitudes.

The idea was to limit access to necromutation, which would change the dynamic of the species. The other reason is flavorful: They aren't entirely made of flesh, so they aren't great at necromancy.

That makes sense. Maybe instead of penalizing the whole school, it would be better to raise the aptitude but ban necromutation entirely. Lichform is, as far as I can tell, generally considered a bad spell, and wouldn't be a big loss.
Maybe if the flavour is really important it would make more sense to penalize Transmutations.

btw I really like Plutonians. I really enjoy the meltdown mechanic. Keep up the good work!

[duvessa]

I don't see why I would ever want to cast necromutation on this race even if it had +5 necromancy and +5 transmutations.

[reaver]

The idea was to limit access to necromutation, which would change the dynamic of the species.

I don't really follow your logic here, how do you think banning Necromutation would effect the species?

Either way, this isn't really the kind of balancing which should be done at this point. Just letting Necromutation be and just paying attention if somebody says there's a problem should be enough. The focus should be on making sure the contam/Overload abilities work.

[reaver]

An Experimental Plutonians branch has been set up on cbro. You can now play Plutonians on that server! (Webtiles: http://crawl.berotato.org/)

[godzilla]

The idea was to limit access to necromutation, which would change the dynamic of the species.

I don't really follow your logic here, how do you think banning Necromutation would effect the species?

Either way, this isn't really the kind of balancing which should be done at this point. Just letting Necromutation be and just paying attention if somebody says there's a problem should be enough. The focus should be on making sure the contam/Overload abilities work.

The issue was that I noticed they had a -2 Necro aptitude; this seems to penalize 1 school for little reason.

[reaver]

A couple immediate changes I would like to make, I thought about them before and talking with somebody playing the experimental made me more sure about them:

* Remove all levels of no device heal, it doesn't really work on this species.

* Make the plutonian safe level 2 for contam (File200 said I could do this before pushing the branch, I didn't)

I don't know if File200 is working on top of the current version so I don't want to make those changes without him knowing.

The issue was that I noticed they had a -2 Necro aptitude; this seems to penalize 1 school for little reason.

That doesn't answer my question.

[File200]

A couple immediate changes I would like to make, I thought about them before and talking with somebody playing the experimental made me more sure about them:

* Remove all levels of no device heal, it doesn't really work on this species.

* Make the plutonian safe level 2 for contam (File200 said I could do this before pushing the branch, I didn't)

I don't know if File200 is working on top of the current version so I don't want to make those changes without him knowing.

The issue was that I noticed they had a -2 Necro aptitude; this seems to penalize 1 school for little reason.

That doesn't answer my question.

I just used git pull --rebase, so everything should be up-to-date.

Changing the safe level and removing no device heal are fine by me.

I have a few changes that I'd like to make to the species:

-Change overload so it takes a fixed amount of health from you (1/3 of max hp) and deals more consistent damage.

-Reduce the contamination of overload from 3000 to 1000.

-Change meltdown so it deals damage based on your max health.

-Change base stats to 9 in each category, but reduce xp to -1. (I have a long justification for this if anyone wants to hear it.)

-Alter the numbers for contamination gain/loss and regeneration a little bit.

-Change necromancy apt to -1. It's apparently suboptimal to use necromutation, so the whole point of restricting it is moot.

Thoughts?

Also, what are people saying about the species? Is it unique enough to have a future?

[reaver]

-Change base stats to 9 in each category, but reduce xp to -1. (I have a long justification for this if anyone wants to hear it.)

I would like to hear this long justification.

All other changes sound fine. I'll make the ones I suggested.

EDIT: Actually, I'll make the 1000 contam for overload change too.
EDIT: EDIT: Actually I'll see how many of those changes are easy to make and report back.

I've heard reasonably good things about the species, but it's hard to know for sure if a species will work until it completely works. (Dj and LO were in the game for months before being removed as "not working". Gr had a long period where they seemed similar to that until DracoOmega gave them their current AC - hp thing)

The possible problem with me working under you is that it could cause git pull --rebase to give an error message you have to do manual things to resolve. I'd gladly help you fix that.

[File200]

The gist of my proposal to give them 9 in every base stat and reducing their xp apt is so they have a different power curve than humans. In my experience, which may not apply to everyone, plutonians are very close to humans in terms of play strategy and power curve (setting aside overload for the moment, which needs fixing). Reducing their xp apt naturally reduces their average hp, mp and spell levels for most of the game, making their power curve lower overall. Stats are not particularly relevant in the early game, but become more important as you train skills that require them, like dodging, armour and spellcasting. The overall effect of the change is that plutonian power curve is more skewed towards the mid- and late-game. This could also be accomplished by keeping the base stats the same and making them gain stats faster, or even by giving them more abilities as they level up.

Of course, people might prefer if things stay the way they are. Good players seem to like humans, so maybe being close to them isn't such a bad thing?

Tell me when you push the changes to the experimental branch an I'll update my version to that one. I've made a few changes locally, but it's pretty much just whitespace fixes.

Also, two things I forgot to mention:

-Change their starting contamination to 7500 so they aren't so close to meltdown.

-Change meltdown to always rot the same amount of hp, probably 3 or 4.

Edit: I also need to change their autopickup script at some point.

[reaver]

-Change their starting contamination to 7500 so they aren't so close to meltdown.

-Change meltdown to always rot the same amount of hp, probably 3 or 4.

I'll do those. The other proposals I implemented where the necro apt change and the Overload contam change.

Hmm, I think power curves are worth discussing, but some variety is fine. Octopodes, for instance, are worse earlier game and get better as you fill out ring slots. Note that despite this all species have a harder early game than late game.

However, I'm not sure if it's something worth purposely changing. Note that most species have their power curves as a side effect of their designs, not because of them.

[duvessa]

Trolls ... become worse than other races late game.

This is a bit offtopic, but do you remember which CrawlWiki page told you this, and if so, can you pass it on to someone with edit rights?

Stats are not particularly relevant in the early game, but become more important as you train skills that require them, like dodging, armour and spellcasting. The overall effect of the change is that plutonian power curve is more skewed towards the mid- and late-game. This could also be accomplished by keeping the base stats the same and making them gain stats faster, or even by giving them more abilities as they level up.

I do not think this would be the actual effect. Stats are as relevant early-game as they are anywhere else (though not necessarily all at once for every background), and an experience aptitude only "catches up" after reaching XL27, when the game is not only effectively already over, but often already over in practice as well (20% of wins are below xl27, and 35% of 3-rune wins are below xl27). Decreasing experience aptitude is making the species weaker all game, it's just more noticeable in the early game because that's overwhelmingly the most difficult and important part. The same goes for base stats.
If you want to skew a species' power curve towards the later game you probably want to mess with stat gain instead of starting stats, since stat gain actually does nothing at XL1.

[tedric]

Thanks File200 and reaver for getting the experimental branch up! I've been playing poorly tonight, splatting lots of low-level Plutonians, and to be honest I'm still having trouble figuring things out. I know you're focused on mechanics first, but adding a little polish would help make sure test players are interpreting the species' unique features correctly. For instance, here's how I'm mentally filling in the currently empty 'A' screen:

  Code:

You accumulate magical contamination instead of hungering.
Your health and magic regenerate faster the more contaminated you are.
You can intentionally release a burst of energy that deals damage to yourself and enemies near you, at the cost of increased contamination.
Excess contamination will be uncontrollably discharged in a massive burst of energy that deals heavy damage to yourself and all enemies in sight, and rots some max HP.
Killing foes or healing yourself safely disposes of some contamination.
Your body cannot be mutated.
You are glowing.

Is this more-or-less accurate? It's a bit unclear what has and has not been changed from the description in the OP.

Other questions that may suggest polish ideas:

- Does increased Regen kick in only at a certain level of contam? I see references above to maybe adding a Regen status light, but haven't seen one in-game.

- Should the species have the ability to eat? It does currently, but there doesn't seem to be any point or effect (other than royal jellies and ambrosias, maybe, for their non-satiation effects?) or even a cap on how much you can eat at one time. Seems it would make sense to make all food inedible and exclude it from autopickup.

- Can glow ever be eliminated entirely, even for just a short time? Perma-glow means Invisibility is useless, which is a drawback that hasn't been mentioned yet.

[spudwalt]

Since Plutonians don't mutate, should they be able to cast self-transforming spells at all? The undead races can't cast those spells (well, vampires can, but only when they're in their "not-quite-undead" mode).

[File200]

I need to change some things in the op. Currently plutonians can mutate as any other species.

  Code:

You accumulate magical contamination instead of hungering.
Your health and magic regenerate faster the more contaminated you are.
You can intentionally release a burst of energy that deals damage to yourself and enemies near you, at the cost of increased contamination.
Excess contamination will be uncontrollably discharged in a massive burst of energy that deals heavy damage to yourself and all enemies in sight, and rots some max HP.
Killing foes or healing yourself safely disposes of some contamination.
Your body cannot be mutated.
You are glowing.

Is this more-or-less accurate? It's a bit unclear what has and has not been changed from the description in the OP.

That's accurate. Adding all those to the status screen will be done in the near future.

Does increased Regen kick in only at a certain level of contam? I see references above to maybe adding a Regen status light, but haven't seen one in-game.

Icreased regen does not occur at discrete steps. Plutonian hp regen bonus is (Your magic contamination)/400 + (your experience level). For comparison, the regen bonus of trog's hand is 100, and the regeneration mutation is 20 * mutation level.

Should the species have the ability to eat? It does currently, but there doesn't seem to be any point or effect (other than royal jellies and ambrosias, maybe, for their non-satiation effects?) or even a cap on how much you can eat at one time. Seems it would make sense to make all food inedible and exclude it from autopickup.

This will be changed in the future. I haven't changed autopickup yet because it seemed less important.

Can glow ever be eliminated entirely, even for just a short time? Perma-glow means Invisibility is useless, which is a drawback that hasn't been mentioned yet.

If you're very careful and keep your abilities in check. It's possible. You would get your glow back quickly, though.

[DracheReborn]

Some early feedback from me...

I tried out a plain PlFi and couldn't figure out how to get out of grey contam while playing more or less normally. The character started at yellow contam, but dropped to grey pretty soon after killing a few dudes, and nothing I've done has nudged it up since. (There was a point when I actually had no contam, but base hunger drove it back up to grey pretty quickly.)

I tried Overload a few times in an effort to get my contam up, using it about once every 3 fights or so even when not strictly needed, but I was still stuck at grey. Possibly because I was killing enemies quite efficiently with Overload at the same time.

Probably the next thing I would try is to just keep abusing Overload on an empty screen, and see how running at Yellow (or higher) contam plays like.

So I guess my main feedback point right now is that it seems possible to play a melee plutonian as basically a human that ignores hunger. My suggestion would be to increase the contam from Overload, and possibly the contam from base hunger as well. (EDIT: just saw that you cut the original contam cost of Overload to 1/3. IMO higher is better - right now it feels like a costless ability)

Other suggestions:
1. It would be nice if the blast radius of Overload is previewed (Fireball style), so you know which enemies are going to get hit.
2. Is it possible to kill yourself using Overload, i.e. if you're already at low HP? I'm thinking Overload should simply be disabled below some safe threshold of HP.
3. A minor thematic thing: let !mutation and !benemut add contam. Let !cure mut reduce contam (Assuming mutations do get removed from Pl)

- Can glow ever be eliminated entirely, even for just a short time? Perma-glow means Invisibility is useless, which is a drawback that hasn't been mentioned yet.

With normal melee + base hunger plus killing enemies it seems possible to stay at grey contam indefinitely. Of course Invis will add its own contam so maybe that's enough to push you into glowing.

[File200]

@ DracheReborn: A simpler solution to this is to increase the nutrition cost of melee attacks specifically for plutonians. Plutonians were mostly balanced around spellcasting and zealot backgrounds, so I guess the mechanics of melee were a little neglected.

Other stuff:

1. Overload always has a 3-tile radius. I don't see much point in adding an indicator for it.
2. You can kill yourself with overload. That's why it asks if you want to explode beforehand.
3. I've been thinking about how plutonians should interact with mutations a bit. Possibly make all mutations temporary for them?

[and into]

I like "all mutations temporary." That's more interesting than just having mutation resistance, at least, and it seems easy to fit with the theme.

It is a good idea to highlight radius for overload even if it is always the same (cf. the spell fireball). It just makes for a better interface and makes the ability easier to use the way you want to.

If glow is well balanced around spells and other hungering abilities, but not melee, then upping the hunger cost to melee to cause more glow would be reasonable. But, by the same reasoning, you should probably give plutonians the same amount of glow whenever they throw something or use a launcher.

[reaver]

I'm still not sure plutonians need a special interaction with mutations, particularly given all their other special interactions - right now the focus should be on removing bloat, not making them more complication.

If glow hunger works best with spells that you could just give plutonians higher spell apts than melee apts to encourage that. Alternatively change the glow formula to be nonlinear with the hunger cost. (ex. 1 point hunger cost would give you 1 glow point but 10 hunger cost would only give 2 glow points)

[File200]

After playing a few PlFi, I've come to the conclusion that their relatively flat aptitudes and low base HP make them somewhat unsuited for pure physical combat. No change to their aptitudes is really needed. I'll remove fighter from their list of recommended backgrounds in the next release. However, if people still want to play as a fighter, I think that making overload more enticing for high hp characters is enough to differentiate them from humans.

Speaking of overload, I almost never find a situation where I want to use it as a spellcasting character. It could definitely use a reform or overhaul.

Some ideas for improving overload:

-Make it deal fixed damage to you based on max HP instead of variable damage. I suggested this before, but didn't get feedback on it.

-Make its damage based on XL instead of max HP so high HP characters are at less risk when using it.

-Make it give temporary positive mutations, so it's more useful overall. This one's kind of out there, but it fits with the radioactivity theme.

-Make it cost mp scaling with XL instead of damaging you. Contamination should probably be increased if this one is used.

...

Other observations: the flat aptitudes give them a harder early game but make it easy to branch out, so I think they already have the power curve that I wanted. Also the bonus regen is super nice because you only ever have to press 5 once. It's going to be hard going back to playing other races.

...

Where is the file that determines what items are set for autopickup? Like, where does it say that mummies don't autopickup potions?

[Igxfl]

Note that HP is dependent almost entirely on race, XL, and Fighting.

Characters who aren't primarily melee still train decent Fighting to get decent HP, and primary melee characters won't necessarily focus Fighting to super-high levels, since after a certain point, they're much better off getting Charms or more Armour/Dodging.

Thus, I'm not certain primary melee types are likely to have significantly more HP than other well-built characters, race and XL being equal.

[File200]

Last Fall I got sucked into a black hole of college, research and family time, so I wasn't able to look at Crawl for a long time. My schedule eased up recently, so I'm getting back into the game.

Is there any interest in this species? I've become a lot better at this game, and I've tested some updates that differentiate Plutonians from existing species in the latest downloadable version.

[byrel]

Well, I was on a crawl break last time you were developing it, and just read through the description. It sounds like a lot of fun! I'm always interested in new hunger mechanics, since I find the default one tedious. (I think I'm picking Gozag more often than optimal just to opt out of corpse mini-game. But then my favorite species is Sp for a reason.)

[File200]

The latest Plutonian variant accumulates glow equal to the square root of an actions hunger cost, but gains glow faster in general. Spellcasting and fighting are a bit more normalized now. I might overhaul the glow mechanics entirely such that you get maluses instead of bonuses from high glow, and you need to activate your meltdown ability to reduce glow when it gets too high.

[njvack]

... I assume meltdown wouldn't cost maxHP then?

[Pollen_Golem]

I guess I just don't see any exciting opportunities this race opens up.

There are various cooldown mechanics in Crawl: contam, hunger, MP, exhaustion, piety. Each of them is designed to work in a particular way to limit spamming certain things. So you take an existing cooldown mechanic and swap it with another. Ok. Maybe some interesting consequences do arise, but they're probably borne of actually playing the race, whereas other gimmick races like VS/Sp/Ce/Na instantly inspire interesting tactics and strategies.

I suppose you could try building this species around the Irradiate spell, but it didn't even exist in 0.15 which the Plutonian CBRO branch is based on.

If you get maluses from accumulating glow, that sounds a lot like Vampires who get maluses from losing blood.

[File200]

I guess I just don't see any exciting opportunities this race opens up.

There are various cooldown mechanics in Crawl: contam, hunger, MP, exhaustion, piety. Each of them is designed to work in a particular way to limit spamming certain things. So you take an existing cooldown mechanic and swap it with another. Ok. Maybe some interesting consequences do arise, but they're probably borne of actually playing the race, whereas other gimmick races like VS/Sp/Ce/Na instantly inspire interesting tactics and strategies.

I suppose you could try building this species around the Irradiate spell, but it didn't even exist in 0.15 which the Plutonian CBRO branch is based on.

If you get maluses from accumulating glow, that sounds a lot like Vampires who get maluses from losing blood.

There's plenty of design space for limiting factors in Crawl, and comparing one you haven't tested to the worst one that exists is really unfair. Incidentally, I have tested the glow malus idea on my own PC. New Plutonians play more like Vine Stalkers than Vampires, if you can imagine that. The big thing that differentiates them from other species is the "Self Explode" option, which I hadn't actually thought about much. You can save your consumables if you use it preemptively against fast, dodgy enemies. I never even had to deal with high-contam meltdown.

Like I said before, though, I'm going to drop the project if there's no interest. My last idea for the Species is just a mechanical revision: Instead of gaining hunger from spells and attacks, you gain Glow. Plutonians start with low HP and MP (-1 for both) but regenerate them faster than any other race. As your glow increases, your regeneration slows, until you can no longer recover either resource. Glow can be reduced in two ways: it dissipates normally under low tension (never in combat), or you can release it explosively. Exploding yourself removes half of your glow, and deals damage to you and all enemies in a three tile radius based on your max HP and your Glow level. There will be no more uncontrolled meltdowns or max HP rot. Hunger costs will be normalized (hopefully) by taking the square root of all hunger costs. Weapon hunger can be increased too.

This will be my last post on this topic. If you want to know more, PM me.

[Pollen_Golem]

But vampires play a lot like vine stalkers, though with a regen cooldown.

This will be my last post on this topic.

Why? Come back!

[tasonir]

I wouldn't worry terribly much about posts/lack of posts on the thread, develop it if you find it interesting, put it on an experimental branch, let people test it. I know this was on a branch before, but no idea if it's still there (I don't play on CBRO) or when it was updated. I might go there to try it out if it's been updated, but in general there's always plenty of lurkers or even crawl players who never read the tavern who might enjoy the race. See where it goes, don't silence yourself (Unless there's a few ancient liches standing next to you, then it's probably a net gain)!

[File200]

But vampires play a lot like vine stalkers, though with a regen cooldown.

This will be my last post on this topic.

Why? Come back!

No.

I wouldn't worry terribly much about posts/lack of posts on the thread, develop it if you find it interesting, put it on an experimental branch, let people test it. I know this was on a branch before, but no idea if it's still there (I don't play on CBRO) or when it was updated. I might go there to try it out if it's been updated, but in general there's always plenty of lurkers or even crawl players who never read the tavern who might enjoy the race. See where it goes, don't silence yourself (Unless there's a few ancient liches standing next to you, then it's probably a net gain)!

I don't silence myself for Liches, I just show 'em my spell list and they shut up real quick.

I'll try to post a branch on Friday. No promises, though. I'm liable to delete my code out of shame.