The Tavern

Because having a labyrinth, ice cave and volcano all on Orc:2 is kind of unfun. Freak accident, for sure, but two portals at the same level at this stage of the game are not too uncommon. They are already timed...

I've finished one portal and then made it in time to enter the second before it also expired. It is hard, but possible to do depending on the map you get.

Even if we suppose it is never possible to do more than one portal on the same level, why is it better that I only get to do one portal than to do one portal of my choice? If the devteam adds a specific block on generating more than one portal per level, it isn't like they'll add even more code to force another one to generate on the next level to make up for it. With two active timed portals at once, I can consider the risk/reward offered by both, and also factor in the chance that I'll beat each choice in time to get both.

I'm curious, what exactly is 'unfun' about it? Is it the sense of missing out on something?

I see what the OP is saying, but I am extremely indifferent about this.

When I first got 2 on the same level, my exact thought was: "Cool, guess I'll go with ice caves!"

I don't know what ichbins' objection is, but I dislike timed portals with short timers for several reasons.
1. They rule out autoexplore, unless you want to lose tons of free loot and xp. This is pretty awful as a player, and I'm surprised I haven't seen more complaints about it.
2. Extreme power spiral; characters strong enough to reach the portal get even stronger, characters that can't reach the portal safely get nothing.
3. Reaching the portal is not even interesting, it's almost always a matter of pure luck.
The long timers were fine for preventing people from clearing extra levels before doing the portal, which was the actual good purpose of the timer. When the portals were announced and the silly "timer gets shorter when you see the portal square" mechanic was removed, the long timer should have just been left alone. But instead because some dev thought they could make manual exploration interesting (they couldn't) they made every portal as bad as labyrinths.

Placing multiple portals on one level exacerbates all 3 of these problems, and obviously limiting portals to 1 per level wouldn't solve them but it would make portal vaults slightly less dominatingly bad. Allowing the player to choose between portal vaults also introduces a big spoiler advantage that wouldn't be there otherwise: you want to go for the portal vault that has better rewards, but you don't know which one that is unless you've looked at the destination vaults in a text editor or have played most of the destination vaults multiple times.

I disagree entirely with duvessa.

Though I've complained about multiple portal vaults on same level before, the fact is it's a lot of fun and risk to try to get more than one. The one change I would make now is to increase the timer for the second vault.

Hey, now. The power spiral issue and the spoiler issue are both completely legitimate.

Not really on board with autoexplore as a sacred cow, though. Autoexplore is worse than manual exploration on every level.

By autoexploring on levels without a portal vault you lose no xp (barring vaults that kill monsters with clouds), few items (jellies), and a small amount of piety. The strategic penalty for autoexploring on those levels is very small. The penalty for missing a portal is orders of magnitude larger, to the point that almost everybody autoexplores portalless levels, and almost nobody skips non-labyrinth portal vaults on purpose.

Well it's fun to sometimes explore by hand.

the only interesting thing about multiple portals on the same level is that ive died more than few times trying to reach and clear both of them

Yes, to clarify: I find it unfun to have virtually no chance to do the portals, because the timers are optimized for there being one of them at a time. I've done two of them on the same level before, I've rushed this time as well and while I needed less than 1000 turns for the first two the ice cave was already closed then.

I also don't see much decision making there - ice caves are usually far longer than the other ones so if you are not in dire need for something specific that is more likely to be generated in an ice cave do it last.

Increased timers for more portals on one level are also a good idea!

Would simply multiplying the timer length by the number of portals on the floor ease this problem?

Who the heck cares about spoilers? Every new player become spoiled after 2-3 wins or less. Crawl is a cybersport-like game now.

why, what would happen if portals weren't announced and there was no timer at all?

You'd find the portal and say "oh, I don't know if I'm strong enough to get the loot in this ice cave, I'll wait until I'm sure I can crush it and come back" which is really the correct choice to any threat in Crawl. It's nice in principle if you can't do that.

FWIW, I might suggest portals work like Pan runes:

* All portals are announced on level entry.
* There is no timer.
* Leaving the level via stairs or hatches closes the portals. Entering portals or unintentionally leaving the level (shafts, banishment) does not close the portals. Yes, you can be a jackass and self-banish to get around this if you want to explore the abyss or something. Lucy gives you a free pass, because gods.
* You get a warning if you're going to close portals by leaving the level.

This way, you don't get screwed by autoexploring; on the flip side, if you'd normally stairdance something, maybe you'd rather use consumables to deal with the threat instead.

The downside is that the old "hide the labyrinth with .crawlrc" trick would probably have a leak.

Remove portal timers, make them instantly time out when player leaves current level (portals don't count for that purpose so you can still visit several portals on the same level), call it stairdancing nerf.

Edit. Don't forget to display warning like "Are you sure you want to leave the level, that would time out portals?"

I'd prefer it if portal sounds would tell me a direction. To this day I have not been able to work out how far 'distant' and other such descriptors actually are.

On balance I'd prefer a slower timer. I'm not convinced about portals closing on level leaving. There are some cases where leaving the level helps the player find (or get to with mapping) the portal. For example, if the stairs on the level above are close together, and the stairs on the portal level are spread out.

The portal timer is currently 600-800 turns. I think tripling that would allow almost every character to access the portal (negating concerns about "win more" power spiral) while not giving appreciable time for people to farm more than the current level.

Allowing every player to reach the portal doesn't get rid of the power spiral problem. Just because you can reach the portal doesn't mean you can beat it. (For example, early bailey or that ice cave with the portals and ice beast mob welcome party). So weaker characters still miss out on items and experience.

otherwise known as "very distant: on the level somewhere; distant: two steps away; nearby: you can straight up just see it".

My algorithm for finding portals: place an exclusion for "very distant" and move far away, place a dot exclusion (ee) for "distant" and move in what should be an obvious direction based on previous exclusions (look at your map), and for any other message just search the immediate area since it is probably just out of LOS.

If that's not randomized or anything, you can precisely deduce all the tiles which could possibly contain the portal, narrowing down that set every time you hear the 'distant' descriptor. Might as well just place the portal's location on the map - you still have to figure out how to get there. Or, give the direction of the portal instead of the distance - 1 of N/S/W/E - because that's equally fun but less hidden and finnicky.

Correct, it's not randomized and you can do that. It's bad.

Well it would be cool if every time you hear the portal message, all possible remaining locations for the portal would be somehow indicated on the map.

Given the size of levels >30 really does not seem 'very distant'. And >15 definitely does not seem 'distant' at all. I'm fine with nearby.