An adjustment to Lair branch pairing

[tabstorm]

Inspired by the runelock thread in CYC I would like to suggest the following:

Instead of the current situation with Lair branches, all four will spawn in a given game.
However, the branches are paired in the following way:

-Swamp and Spider are paired
-Snake and Shoals are paired

When you enter one branch, the entry to the branch it is paired with disappears.

This accomplishes a number of positive things:

1. The game is considerably harder when you get Shoals/Snake together, and considerably easier when you get Swamp/Spider together. This change will lead to a more reasonable difficulty curve, so you get an easy branch and a harder branch. Let's be honest here: Shoals and Snake are a lot more dangerous than Spider or Swamp.
2. If you don't find rPois, you need not deal with 2 poison branches and the ensuing resting off of 50hp of poison damage every fight.
3. You have more choice in each game, so if you really loathe a particular branch you don't need to do it.

If there is concern about not exposing the player to poison enough, recall that Swamp is basically a poison branch anyway. Having rPois won't even make Spider/Snake the optimal choices (mostly because Swamp is that easy compared to the other three and Snake can still kill you with rPois easily enough).

[duvessa]

I think snake/spider/swamp are really close in difficulty. I mean really what does snake have on a normal speed character, just shock serpents and anacondas, both of which are overrated due to people not knowing how shock serpent aura and constriction work, respectively.

[tabstorm]

Greater nagas/naga mages have haste anyway. Salamander mystics caste haste on guys. Naga sharpshooters do a lot of damage and never seem to miss. You have guardian serpents with blink-encircling and slowing. Shock serpents do a lot of damage. Unless you know of some way to not take damage from shock serpents that dosen't involve ranged or wands that I don't...

I definitely think Spider is a lot easier than Shoals or Snake. Only thing I'm ever concerned about there is chain confusion (I wish there was a cooldown on this it is pretty irritating) and maybe entropy weavers (I still don't fully understand how their mechanic works). Shoals has a lot of enemies that end up moving fast due to the water everywhere, hard to get good positions due to fairly open levels + polearms on everything + water, lots of enemies have ranged, you can get stuck due to mesmerize or barbs, etc.

Spider just has a lot of fast melee-only enemies that don't do a ton of damage. Nothing concerns me at all in Swamp except thorn hunters playing keep-away.

[duvessa]

Oh yeah, shoals is way more dangerous. It's just snake I disagree on. Shock serpents you use ranged on, yes. Luring nagas to stairs is no problem, even the haste ones, imo.

[chequers]

What is/was the rationale for spawning Swamp/Spider or Snake/Shoals, rather than a random pair?

[tedric]

Offering a mutually exclusive choice between branches seems "spoilery" in the sense that a new player doesn't really have a basis for making the decision. Granted, currently they don't get to make any decision at all; but presenting a decision implies that there's a "right" (or at least "better") choice to make -- how are they supposed to evaluate it, or even to evaluate whether it makes any kind of difference for the character they're playing? (I suspect that in most cases, the answer is: It doesn't. That's all the more reason not to make a player think there's something at stake by presenting a choice.)

[tedric]

What is/was the rationale for spawning Swamp/Spider or Snake/Shoals, rather than a random pair?

I believe it's actually Swamp/Shoals or Snake/Spider, and rationale is that you'll have one "water" branch and one "poison" branch in every game (though in practice, they all have a fair amount of poison)

[le_nerd]

Strongly support it. I loathe spider/swamp combination so much that I will do depth, elf, abyss rune etc before entering one of these first.

[tabstorm]

Offering a mutually exclusive choice between branches seems "spoilery" in the sense that a new player doesn't really have a basis for making the decision. Granted, currently they don't get to make any decision at all; but presenting a decision implies that there's a "right" (or at least "better") choice to make -- how are they supposed to evaluate it, or even to evaluate whether it makes any kind of difference for the character they're playing? (I suspect that in most cases, the answer is: It doesn't. That's all the more reason not to make a player think there's something at stake by presenting a choice.)

You will find out over a few games as you play the different branches. How is it that different from the current situation, or e.g. learning whether you should do Vaults or Slime for your 3rd rune, or deciding to do vaults before your 2nd Lair rune? Besides, it is basically implicit in the game that new players learn how different mechanics work over time by dying to them.

[tedric]

I'm talking more about the psychology of the choice itself. It seems like it would trigger a combination of Loss Aversion, Opportunity Cost, and the Trolley Problem: If you know that you are giving up one entire branch by choosing the other one, but you don't know what that branch contains in terms of loot/challenge/etc., I can imagine it feeling unfair that you are asked to "give up" one branch sight-unseen. That's especially true for new players, but those quirks of our thinking would affect veterans too. It doesn't take much experience to learn that the difficulty of any given branch varies significantly from game to game depending on layouts, stair placement, unique spawns, etc. -- so there's an illogical but hard-to-avoid sense that you could be screwing yourself by choosing the branch that spawned a harder version of itself that game.

The status quo is functionally equivalent -- you only get to do one branch because the other didn't generate -- but because you didn't play a causal role in the outcome it doesn't feel any weirder than anything else the RNG happens to do to you. Good design has to take these fallible parts of human nature into account.

[tabstorm]

We already don't display damage or explain certain combat mechanics to new players because they're going to be paralyzed by analysis, so I don't see how someone feeling bad over maybe choosing the "wrong" branch should stop the addition of an (imo) otherwise positive feature. I am sure if I was new I'd be a lot more upset over my first experience with af:cold or energy randomization than with choosing the "wrong" branch in this hypothetical scenario. It's not really that different from choosing a god, since it effectively locks you out from other ones until you can survive wrath, but no one complains about that. It is not forever, but I hope you see the point. Anyway I don't think this aspect of player psychology is important at all.

[tasonir]

Strongly support it. I loathe spider/swamp combination so much that I will do depth, elf, abyss rune etc before entering one of these first.

Odd, those two are my first choices. Overall I'd support this change and letting people pick their branches, however, I do think it would have one downside - people would very rarely go to shoals. IMHO there's no reason to want to go to shoals over the other branches, the risks outweigh the reward. And really the only consistent/unique reward is javelins, so unless you're going to use throwing, I'd advise people to never enter shoals.

[tabstorm]

Shoals should probably be toned down a bit, anyway. On a not-speedrun I would take my chances in Vaults:1-4 over Shoals:1-4.

[edgefigaro]

This proposal also makes shoals a never traveled to branch. Snake is always easier. I'd shoals only on a broken strong character specifically hunting for javelins.

[Siegurt]

This proposal also makes shoals a never traveled to branch. Snake is always easier. I'd shoals only on a broken strong character specifically hunting for javelins.

I think you may have posted this in the wrong thread.

mod note: which is why I moved it to the right one, thanks!

[Bart]

[Offtopic] Am I the only one who finds snakes on par with shoals (or even worse thinking of stabbers / hex users)? Anacondas, shock serpents, even hasted nagas are faster than player. Guardian serpents are faster than players, too, and their blink encircle has a good chance to cut out an escape path. Constriction might prevent from using staircase with multiple constrictors lowering the chances terribly. Naga warriors on top are real diesels in melee. Overall, Snake Pit is perfectly capable of killing if one does not have several spare teleport sources for naga commando squads. [/Offtopic]

[Offtopic2]I asked Sequel about recent deaths in lair sub-branches: once of characters with no rune yet, second time of characters with one rune.It seems that people keep shoals for second rune and still likely die there; Snake Pit has more deaths in total, though.

  Code:

No rune (!lg * recent s=br xl>10 nrune=0): 3858x Snake, 3655x Swamp, 3390x Spider, 2955x Shoals
One rune (!lg * recent s=br xl>10 nrune=1): 1226x Shoals, 806x Snake, 615x Swamp, 565x Spider

[/Offtopic2]

Back to the topic, the proposal doesn't appeal to me. I think that spawning all four branches would have a negative impact on variability, as players would tend to choose the same branches all the time. There are more cases where a character has hard time because of poor findings (e.g. no MR+ item in vaults or no dragon armour for ogre before depths). If you streamline everything, replayability will be gone. Aren't you ever excited about which denizens you will fight this time... Unprepared?

[bel]

A possible solution to the worry about people never entering Shoals: generate 3 out of 4 random branches, if you enter one, one of the remaining 2 closes. Of course in an ideal world, Shoals would be toned down, but that is more work.

Spoiler: show

(Somehow reminded me of Monty Hall problem, but adding a "game show" host asking whether you want to switch would be too much I guess.)

Offtopic:I never had problems with hexers in snake. In old versions you could enslave half the nagas and let them kill each other. In new version Tukima is great because all nagas carry weapons. Shock serpents/anacondas/guardian serpents have mediocre MR as well. The only ones who cause trouble are sharpshooters and greater nagas.

(Edit:moved offtopic stuff to spoiler)

[archaeo]

While I don't know that Bart is right that this would be "streamlining" in any significant way, he's otherwise correct; Crawl is fundamentally about reacting to a random environment and this would reduce that for no real reason, especially since the choice is pretty obvious with the current branches. Ideally, we'd have even more Lair branch possibilities, but that's obviously a lot to ask.

[tedric]

Am I the only one who finds snakes on par with shoals?

I put them on about equal footing, but I don't think there's as much spread in difficulty between the Lair branches as folks here make it seem. I especially don't understand the view that Shoals is that much harder than the rest; if you have a few uses of Invisibility (ideally with Flight so the water doesn't give you away) you can dive to the bottom and ninja the rune (and/or neutralize most of the merfolk bands you meet on the way).

Regarding the "nobody would ever do X branch" thing, I agree that it's another good reason not to implement the proposal. I would always avoid Snake because the rune vault is always so much more annoying to clear (all permutations are significantly larger than those of the other branches, and Invis doesn't work on Nagas...)

[Pollen_Golem]

the current situation, or e.g. learning whether you should do Vaults or Slime for your 3rd rune, or deciding to do vaults before your 2nd Lair rune? Besides, it is basically implicit in the game that new players learn how different mechanics work over time by dying to them.

this is really bad though, and doesn't justify trying to make the game even worse... at least entering Slime doesn't lock you out of Vaults or vice versa