Proposal: Give limited damage estimates for weapons

[gerbias]

Although I have played this game for over four years, determining which weapon will do the most damage is something that I find very difficult. The general intention seems to be that players will be able to determine which weapon to use based on trying them out in battle. I do not believe that this is an effective metric for several reasons.

1. Combat in Crawl is extremely 'swingy'; poor performance with a weapon may simply be due to bad luck over that time period
2. Its hard to tell how much damage you are actually inflicting to an enemy
3. Weapons with brands may be hard to properly evaluate due to the need to know what percentage of the damage is resistible
4. There are a huge variety of factors that affect combat performance, and it is very hard to actually tell how much damage a +6 ring of strength gives

I propose that a display be added to inventory description of weapons giving a limited selection of damage estimates; these are based off of several monsters with various combinations of high/low EV/AC. The amount of resistible damage for the weapon is specified separately, if applicable. This would be calculated similarly to how fight-sim behaves now.

Examples of the interface are here:
https://github.com/smitnich/crawl/blob/ ... ample1.png
https://github.com/smitnich/crawl/blob/ ... ample2.png


Advantages:
1. This will allow the player to test items such as a +6 ring of dexterity in a vacuum, in order to get a better idea of the value of such effects
2. This easily communicates to players that raising weapon skills above min-delay has hugely diminishing returns.
3. It allows the player to actually make a somewhat informed decision when choosing between two different weapons

I feel like the most controversial portion of this proposal will be the display of actual numbers; I found a previous proposal on the forum for a similar feature which instead utilized bars similar to the current spell-power display. I am not a fan of that implementation for a few reasons:

1. The display should be able to differentiate between both dagger vs short sword at 0 skill and berserk dragon-form vs berserk blade hands at max skills. This would require a massive range of values
2. Unlike spell power, average effective damage has a direct mapping to a visible value; 10 hp is 10 hp. 90 power on Shatter does not mean it does 90 damage.
3. A logarithmic display would quite possibly confuse players who train up to use a stronger weapon and see only 1 bar of improvement (or potentially even 0)
4. Numbers such as base damage and base accuracy are already displayed; these numbers however have little context (Players may guess that a weapon with six base damage does twice the damage of one with three, or three more.)

Currently I have a mostly working setup with a few issues that need to be worked out, but I feel like it is at the point where I am confident in the feasibility of the implementation. I feel like my last suggestion got a lot of very good feedback and improvements, so I would like to hear feedback on this proposal as well. Here are a few issues that I'm not sure how to solve as well:
1. There is currently no method of using this for unarmed combat due to the lack of an inventory item for hands
2. The display will probably need to be made smaller for console players, or moved out of the description window entirely due to a lack of space.

Summary: Provide basic fight-sim styled damage estimates for weapons

[Sar]

This would be calculated similarly to how fight-sim behaves now.

I imagine running fsim every time somebody decides to compare some weapons online would be pretty hard on servers.

[jejorda2]

Once upon a time, someone proposed creating a screen for the wield command that was kind of like the memorize command for spells. There was lots of general support for the idea, but not much consensus over exactly what info should be included.

I certainly like the idea of a list that compares the effectiveness of each weapon in my inventory for my current character. But I don't have great ideas on how to best represent effectiveness.

[gerbias]

This would be calculated similarly to how fight-sim behaves now.

I imagine running fsim every time somebody decides to compare some weapons online would be pretty hard on servers.

The damage estimation code is quite a bit simpler than full-fledged fight sim and runs way less iterations; I don't think it will be that bad. Potentially someone who is more familiar with the melee code could write it to deterministicly calculate average damage once.