Display monster AC as range

[Lasty]

@Hurkyl: It sounds like you already have chosen your interpretation of what I'm trying to say, so there's no point in us trying to communicate.

[VeryAngryFelid]

@Hurkyl: It sounds like you already have chosen your interpretation of what I'm trying to say, so there's no point in us trying to communicate.

I am not sure what you mean. You can see 3 last posts on previous page from 3 different players, we sincerely don't understand why you don't show numbers. We listed many reasons why displaying numbers would be good
1. Save time comparing to querying beem
2. Up to date if playing trunk/stable/old version
3. Easily available to casual players who know nothing about beem or just don't have internet connection
4. Customizable (players can choose to hide the numbers)
5. Less "unavoidable" deaths (like dying to a monster because you didn't expect it can deal so much damage)
6. More clear decision-making

Maybe you should try listing reasons why numbers should be hidden? So far I remember these:
1. Numbers are bad for new players (easy to solve, hide the numbers before first win, after first win turn them on automatically with option to hide)
2. Numbers are bad for everyone (this is wrong, there are players who want numbers).
3. Numbers don't change much (this is wrong, see my example with flying Tengu and Titan's airstrike)
4. Numbers change difficulty (this is true, just show them by default unless it is a new player for which they are hidden by default)
5. Showing numbers is bad because of dogma, historical reasons, crawl philosophy section etc. (this is just ridiculous, we are not talking about religion or something).
6. Experienced players will tell new players to turn the option on (it can already be replaced with "query beem" advice, also it is not a bad thing, I've seen many times new players being grateful for advice like "you can see monster damage in wiki/knowledge bots" after death to unknown monster with unexpectedly high damage)

[Psieye]

These situations happen. One or more sides cannot comprehend the other side. Due to insufficient social finesse, patience is depleted on one or more sides.

VAF, regardless of whether you are right or wrong, you have failed to maintain the conversation. It's an easy mistake to make. So what will you do now? Given past performance, I am highly doubtful this conversation can be meaningfully rekindled. From the number of posts you've made, I presume this is an important issue to you. If you're just going to walk away and do nothing, then my presumption was wrong and this wasn't important. Note the word "do", not "say".

[VeryAngryFelid]

These situations happen. One or more sides cannot comprehend the other side. Due to insufficient social finesse, patience is depleted on one or more sides.

VAF, regardless of whether you are right or wrong, you have failed to maintain the conversation. It's an easy mistake to make. So what will you do now? Given past performance, I am highly doubtful this conversation can be meaningfully rekindled. From the number of posts you've made, I presume this is an important issue to you. If you're just going to walk away and do nothing, then my presumption was wrong and this wasn't important.

I am not sure what you mean. Do you think I should commit seppuku or something?

This is not first time when we have this conversion, and not even second one. What am I going to do? Well, I can create a VeryStupidFelid account after this one reaches 11111 posts too )
At least I am happy devs added average HP, this is what I suggested long time ago. I am just a bit disappointed it takes so much time.

[sanka]

VeryAngryFelid: I think you missed dpeg's argument about the cognitive load of numbers.

Of course I personally do not understand it either in the context of damage. For me it's surely much more cognitive load to remember and use the weapon damage formula or remember the individual damage of monsters. And dpeg's argument sounds as these things simply should not be available to the player, which sounds like some games where HP really is just a bar, and I honestly do not understand what is his argument of showing the player hp as a number, or showing base damage / enchantment for weapons. I think crawl would be perfectly playable without these numbers and some randomization so spoilers would not help, but it would be a quite different game indeed, and I would stop wonder why the game does not display damage numbers. But half-hearted in both worlds simply does not work well.

[Psieye]

I am not sure what you mean.

At least I am happy devs added average HP, this is what I suggested long time ago. I am just a bit disappointed it takes so much time.

Simply put: don't wait for devs. To quote my post earlier:

The devs don't want that option in official crawl. There's nothing stopping people from putting that in an 'underground branch' that always pulls from trunk. Heck, with enough willpower, they could then build that branch and run a 'not-official-crawl' server somewhere so players aren't blocked by a technical know-how wall.

I'm pretty sure the same devs will be much more willing to teach you how to make your own branch with your desired changes. Provided it's made clear it's not official crawl, this branch could then be hosted somewhere else. If unwilling to do this yourself, find (and persuade - with money if need be) someone else to do it for you.

[duvessa]

VeryAngryFelid: I think you missed dpeg's argument about the cognitive load of numbers.

Of course I personally do not understand it either in the context of damage. For me it's surely much more cognitive load to remember and use the weapon damage formula or remember the individual damage of monsters. And dpeg's argument sounds as these things simply should not be available to the player, which sounds like some games where HP really is just a bar, and I honestly do not understand what is his argument of showing the player hp as a number, or showing base damage / enchantment for weapons. I think crawl would be perfectly playable without these numbers and some randomization so spoilers would not help, but it would be a quite different game indeed, and I would stop wonder why the game does not display damage numbers. But half-hearted in both worlds simply does not work well.

about once a week dpeg praises Brogue for not showing player HP as a number

[Lasty]

To be clear, that post was addressing hurkyl only, and only because he felt he knew the dev team's motivations better than members of that team do.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I'm pretty sure the same devs will be much more willing to teach you how to make your own branch with your desired changes. Provided it's made clear it's not official crawl, this branch could then be hosted somewhere else. If unwilling to do this yourself, find (and persuade - with money if need be) someone else to do it for you.

Are you kidding me? I have a few forks of my own (some of them display extra numbers including damage and AC), I have played circus animals fork which displays to-hit chance for all weapons and spells among other things but it does not work in the long run, people become tired of incorporating latest trunk changes into their own branches and nobody (including authors often) wants to play outdated version with item destruction etc. and without caustic shrikes and other cool things which devs add all the time. This is why I'd like to make mainstream crawl better instead of branching again and again.

[archaeo]

I'd just like to remind everybody of a GDD guideline:

Be constructive. Remember that everyone posting on GDD is trying to make Crawl a better game.

This is an exceptionally tricky question of game design, and I don't think there's an objectively "correct" answer. But it's pretty obvious to me that VAF and dpeg both feel strongly about this issue, given how many times over the years I've seen this argument play out.

I'd encourage everyone to come up with new ideas instead of rehashing this argument. There's a ton of unexplored middle ground here that might be satisfactory to both sides, whether that's a better and more clear system of pips, or a better explanation in the manual/tutorials of where players can find information, or a new panel in xv, or whatever. The point is that "better game" is nebulous and hard to figure out, but collaborative and constructive dialogue is the way to get there, as opposed to backing each other into the same corners.

[Psieye]

people become tired of incorporating latest trunk changes into their own branches

branching again and again.

Not how it should be done.

  Code:

git merge trunk

This makes git automatically incorporate the latest trunk changes to your branch. You resolve merge conflicts if necessary.

Alternatively:

  Code:

git rebase

This copies your commits onto the new trunk HEAD, effectively 'branching again' automatically.

Building the code again and again is what a Continuous Integration machine should be doing. That can be your own machine, or a VM in the cloud somewhere. So optionally you can set up a cron (or other scheduler) job to automatically grab the latest trunk changes and Continuous Integration makes sure you've always got the latest trunk with your changes. That way, your branch is always "the latest trunk minus an hour with my own changes" for minimum human effort.

I'd encourage everyone to come up with new ideas

Personally? Just have 3 pips for AC: 0-10, 10-30, 30+ and don't call it "AC" in xv. "Base sturdiness" or some such will do.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Sorry, you said nothing new to me here.
I am sure you know what "conflict resolution" means.

Edit. By the way just cron is a bad idea, we use automatic detection of changes also so devs don't need to manually press a button or wait for scheduled builds.

[stickyfingers]

Personally? Just have 3 pips for AC: 0-10, 10-30, 30+ and don't call it "AC" in xv. "Base sturdiness" or some such will do.

I agree that 3 classes would be enough, though since there are some effects that decrease sharply in effectiveness even against very low AC (infusion, sandblast), the ranges I'd like the most would be something like 0-2, 3-14, 15+.

[Siegurt]

A possibly-productive suggestion regarding AC:

I posit that monsters don't need as much variability in AC as they presently enjoy.

Therefore I suggest that:
1. Monsters get a set number of different possible AC values (I'm thinking like 5-7ish) and we represent them as pips, where the different levels of AC are something vaguely along the lines of: 0,4,9,15,21,28,36
* If the numbers of levels of monster AC are 5 or less, we could probably use words instead of pips to describe the levels of AC.
2. We make the real statistic in the monster data 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (or however many steps we use) and use the aforementioned values in the formula for determining the amount of damage reduction applied to attacks, rather than having to worry about hard coding an exact number into each monster that matches one of the above set.

A second suggestion (should the first one come to fruition):
I further suggest that armour-wearing monsters simply push the monster's AC up a number of steps on the scale, rather than add the value that players get for AC, and that the xv display for monsters show the adjusted AC. (Similarly protection ego items would push the monster up one "pip")

[Psieye]

Sorry, you said nothing new to me here.
I am sure you know what "conflict resolution" means.

Perhaps we have a different perspective of which takes more effort. From my view the effort you put into typing the words in this thread exceeds the effort in keeping a tiny UI-tweak branch up to date with trunk. Or were you instead thinking of a branch with huge sweeping changes?

I posit that monsters don't need as much variability in AC as they presently enjoy.

I further suggest that armour-wearing monsters simply push the monster's AC up a number of steps on the scale, rather than add the value that players get for AC, and that the xv display for monsters show the adjusted AC. (Similarly protection ego items would push the monster up one "pip")

Hmm, in other words lowering the granularity of monster AC, without changing formulae aside from armour/+AC effects. Could be worth investigating.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Perhaps we have a different perspective of which takes more effort. From my view the effort you put into typing the words in this thread exceeds the effort in keeping a tiny UI-tweak branch up to date with trunk. Or were you instead thinking of a branch with huge sweeping changes?

https://github.com/Sandman25DCSS/diffic ... ifficulty2

I rebased the branch about 3 times but then got tired to spend 15-20 minutes on manual conflict resolution.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Hmm, in other words lowering the granularity of monster AC, without changing formulae aside from armour/+AC effects. Could be worth investigating.

If difference between AC 15 and AC 19 is not large enough for displaying, maybe we should change all monsters to have AC 0, AC 10, AC 20 and AC 30?

[Psieye]

Or were you instead thinking of a branch with huge sweeping changes?

https://github.com/Sandman25DCSS/diffic ... ifficulty2

I rebased the branch about 3 times but then got tired to spend 15-20 minutes on manual conflict resolution.

Yep, huge sweeping changes - i.e. scope creep. Not what my post was about: a minimalistic branch.

If difference between AC 15 and AC 19 is not large enough for displaying, maybe we should change all monsters to have AC 0, AC 10, AC 20 and AC 30?

Yes, have monster AC be based on an enum with just 3~5 entries instead of an int.

[Siegurt]

Or were you instead thinking of a branch with huge sweeping changes?

https://github.com/Sandman25DCSS/diffic ... ifficulty2

I rebased the branch about 3 times but then got tired to spend 15-20 minutes on manual conflict resolution.

Yep, huge sweeping changes - i.e. scope creep. Not what my post was about: a minimalistic branch.

If difference between AC 15 and AC 19 is not large enough for displaying, maybe we should change all monsters to have AC 0, AC 10, AC 20 and AC 30?

Yes, have monster AC be based on an enum with just 3~5 entries instead of an int.

Yes, that is exactly what I am suggesting.

[dpeg]

Psieye, stickyfingers, Siegurt (hope I missed nobody): This sounds very useful. We have AC for both characters and monsters (after all, everything is represented by numbers). It makes some sense to display AC for characters, even though one could discuss the granularity. The reason is that you see your AC go up through the game, and that's satisfying. Monsters don't need this, and here the fine granularity leads to needless confusion, as we see. So making monster AC more coarse (and not just for the display) looks like the conceptual solution.

sanka: I've never said damage numbers are bad, and if you look closely to what I wrote (which admittedly is a lot), then you'll even see hints to the contrary. I don't think damage numbers should be discussed here, because it's the wrong thread. I said multiple times in this very thread that gameplay feedback should be discussed, and damage is clearly one of the most important aspects of that. (My tirade was, and will be, against the "full" solution: just display Sequell data, and think you'd be done with it.)

[VeryAngryFelid]

sanka: I've never said damage numbers are bad, and if you look closely to what I wrote (which admittedly is a lot), then you'll even see hints to the contrary. I don't think damage numbers should be discussed here, because it's the wrong thread. I said multiple times in this very thread that gameplay feedback should be discussed, and damage is clearly one of the most important aspects of that. (My tirade was, and will be, against the "full" solution: just display Sequell data, and think you'd be done with it.)

It is not a reply for me but as OP I don't mind discussing damage numbers in this thread. As far as I remember we have a consensus about optimal solution, something like Brogue with its "This monster can kill you in N turns". Unfortunately it cannot be adapted to crawl and it looks like there is some perfectionism here "if we cannot provide an optimal solution, we will not provide a partial solution". Yet everyone knows that "Perfect is the enemy of good ".

[dpeg]

VAF: Why, no! Several versions ago, xv showed nothing but the flavour blurb. We discussed monster information back then (for a while already), and it was not clear what to do. When it become clear that there's concensus about printing monster resistances, that happened. Since then, a lot more feedback has been added.

This discussion has a lot of similarities to "why don't you shorten the game already?" We're doing that, and providing more feedback, for a while now. I realise it's not as fast as you would like, but there are reasons for that. I think that showing monster AC/EV was something of a distraction (not the most helpful bit of information to show, and could be done better -- as has been indicated in this thread).

Brogue is extremely good about its feedback, but it has been designed with this objective from the start (few monsters, few damage dealing methods etc.) Damage is the most important bit, and we should indeed discuss how to explain that in a good way.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Yes, you are right if you look at it this way. I kind of abstracted out of xv and considered just monster damage as standalone feature. I love the trend indeed

[Hurkyl]

To be clear, that post was addressing hurkyl only, and only because he felt he knew the dev team's motivations better than members of that team do.

The motivations don't really matter so much to me, it's the actions. I don't think the the devs intend to be ideologues -- I think it's an emergent property of how the devs operate.

But as I said, the devs have dismissed people who have a bad user experience attributable to the obfuscation often enough with "Here are the benefits of obfuscation. We're designing primarily for ourselves and I speculate that more transparency would be less fun for me." that I view everything through that light.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Really, playing well has almost nothing to do with knowing any exact monster stats. It has a lot more to do with mastering basic tactics, being able to predict how a situation will develop, having an escape plan, and leveraging all your resources creatively as needed.

Isn't the ability to do these things contingent upon monster stats?

I'm also sure that it doesn't mean displaying every number a player might think to ask about

what should we make of your certainty - is it meant to compel? You yourself are not persuaded by confident players, and say it's not evidence for anything.

As for the giant frog/spiny frog thing, I'm not sure what to make of that.

1) giant frogs rolled high, spiny frogs rolled low, and 2) spiny frogs were encountered by stronger characters and felt like a downgraded version of giant frogs, making it hard to form "threat assessment skills" (which would be redundant if we could see numbers).

In real life, you make informed decisions all the time without knowing exact numbers (think about health, purchases, relationships etc.)

just because life can be crap doesn't mean Crawl has to. Besides, in those real life situations, you have information pouring into your senses by the truckload, which informs you on an intuitive level, even if you can't analytically process it. Crawl is based on arbitrary numbers that can be unexpected, like how sheep bite harder than wolves.

[tabstorm]

Won't trying to make tactical decisions with extremely incomplete information based on small sample sizes induce a much larger cognitive load than doing so with more known information? Let's pretend you are a player who has never used Sequell data or the wiki in your life.

For example, how are you supposed to guess how much HP a monster has from character to character if your damage varies wildly based on weapon type, stats, enchantment, brand, and pure chance? On top of that, you don't even know how much damage you're doing anyway! So you can't really estimate how much time it will take to kill a given monster. How are you supposed to guess how hard a given monster hits when the damage dealt by monsters can vary greatly depending on what armor you're wearing, what type of attack is being made, and the existence of af:*? If I fight an Azure Jelly and take a 150 or something I might assume it's one of the most powerful enemies in the game, except if I have my Wiki page open at all times and know that it can do huge amounts of damage in the event of a double turn without rC. Or, if I am fighting some kind of spellcaster that hits 100+s, I will have to learn that the hard way, and learn that apparently spellcasters can hit for 3/5 of my HP at any given time, possibly.

How does it make sense to have a game whose combat system fundamentally relies on long tails, while hiding it from the player and assuming they are simply too dumb to understand what dam: X or spd: X means? I just don't get it.

[Hurkyl]

Won't trying to make tactical decisions with extremely incomplete information based on small sample sizes induce a much larger cognitive load than doing so with more known information? Let's pretend you are a player who has never used Sequell data or the wiki in your life.

I think the point is supposed to be getting people not to make decisions.

E.g. one goal seems to be to have players just pick up a weapon and bash things with it, without worrying about whether they have a good weapon or not. Thus:

• If a piece of information prompts a player to think about whether or not they have a good weapon, that goes against the goal
• If the lack of information dissuades a player from pursuing the question about whether or not they have a good weapon, that supports the goal

Of course, this particular bit doesn't really work since the game doesn't really guide the player *at all* towards picking up good (or even just decent) weapons, and instead offers a bewildering array of candidates to choose from, often including things that are terrible but look awesome to the uninformed.

[Sprucery]

I tried to ask this once but got no replies from devs:
If I have two or more weapons, how I am supposed to decide which one is the best?

The game gives some information (base damage, enchantment, delay, brand). Am I supposed to calculate something in my head, or am I supposed to just bash a hundred yaks with each weapon and count the average number of turns (+variance) for a kill? If the latter, why display base damage and enchantment etc. at all?

I hope the answer is not "If you can't tell the difference after a few hits then it doesn't matter".

I don't want to sound like I'm ranting. Crawl is still the greatest game but I firmly believe giving a bit more information in this regard would make it even better. And yes, there have been changes in that direction (hex chances, skill costs), so I really hope this change will also happen some day.

[dpeg]

I tried to ask this once but got no replies from devs:
If I have two or more weapons, how I am supposed to decide which one is the best?

I am snipping the quote here, but the whole thing sounds a lot like "disgruntled customer".

No, there isn't a good way to compare weapons right now. I'd be willing to discuss how to go about it, but not in this thread.

[Sprucery]

No, there isn't a good way to compare weapons right now. I'd be willing to discuss how to go about it, but not in this thread.

OK, fair enough. Trust me, I'm still a happy customer :)

[dowan]

Note how simply printing a bunch of numbers is the simplest (i.e. laziest) solution from both a coding and a design point of view. We have higher standards.

...simply printing a bunch of exclamation marks?

Yes. You make it sound like !!! is all of the feedback Crawl gives to players, so I'll not go along that route. But the exclamation marks themselves are a nifty tool: they are not intrusive, they indicate meaningful information, and they are flavourful. It suffices if the players parses them as "Whoa, lotsa damage!"

If nothing else, lets not pretend that more information leads to worse choices. There's a very good reason you do research before you make an important decision.

I don't think anyone is saying that. If you know what you're doing, more information will lead to better play and more wins.
I claim that more information is not more fun for everyone. Granted, more (even full) information is fun for some. For myself, it'd be less fun. Hence, someone has to decide where to draw the line. I hear you say, "then just print the numbers and you foolhardy ignoramuses can pretend they're not there". However, this is not true because I'll always assume that whatever feedback the game gives to me, it is relevant. I will try to parse and use it, thereby decreasing my fun.

About !!! which came up several times: I hope you guys realise that the exclamation marks were never intended to be disassembled by players. They are a very natural and convenient way to display overkill, and the additional messages do the same. They allow you to get a feeling about your current damage output. Feel free to count them, but rest assured that you're reading more into this than ever was intended.

So saying to print the numbers, and if you don't like them, ignore them, is ridiculous because people have to assume any information given is relevant and should be considered. But !!! shouldn't be counted or disassembled, because players should know it's not relevant and shouldn't be considered. Which is it?

EDIT: To be more clear, what I'm saying is, can't a player who isn't inclined to crunch numbers see a (60 damage) and say "Whoa, lotsa damage", while the more number crunching player can see (60 damage) and say "Well my other weapon only ever hit 57 damage, it looks like this one is better!" But with !!!!, the first guy might still say "Whoa, lotsa damage", but the second guy says "Well, I got !!!! with this weapon, and my other weapon sometimes did !!!! damage. Well I have no idea which is better, guess I'll run fsim!"

[HardboiledGargoyle]

I wanted to mention, "is it going to change my tactics against X" is not a good requisite for showing numbers. Even if you always apply the same tactics to everything, things like AC change the way in which damage is dealt and taken. (Otherwise, all monsters would have 0 AC, better HP/EV, right?) Knowing these things lets you understand why fights go the way they go, lets you evaluate encounters before engaging, and makes the game feel fair and crisp instead of vexing and nebulous - that's what transparency gives you.

And the "AC matters only when sandblasting dangerous monster in early D" is unfair. Pre-lair gargoyles are dangerous and hard to kill but really easy to disintegrate, and there are other examples. Not rocket science one way or the other, but still, much easier to figure out when you have their stats in front of you!

BTW

(My tirade was, and will be, against the "full" solution: just display Sequell data, and think you'd be done with it.)

what if we instead frame this solution as "incomplete", a stepping stone toward an ideal game? You seem happier with stepping stones!