VeryAngryFelid wrote:That's true, probably you don't have enough details for starting a thread in GDD. It's more like "what's the idea of heavy armour?" and "let's braintstorm how to change it".
The point of the thread seems to be getting away from us so let me restate it.
Context: Crawl, as is, does a shit job of telling you the information you need to make an informed decision about all sorts of things. This is bad. The naive solution is to dump all of that information to the player. This would case analysis paralysis/information overload. This is bad. This is also too big of a problem to solve in one thread. So -
Problem: Crawl does a shit job of telling an unspoiled, new player the information they need to make an informed decision about what armour to wear.
Proposed Solution (as outlined in the second post): Print relevant stat changes when swapping armours (i.e. provide that information when it's relevant) and provide an opportunity to dive deeper and find out what those stats actually mean. Furthermore, (and this might have been too much for one thread) let's have a serious think about wherever all of those stats actually matter *in a practical sense*.
So to be clear - I am not looking for advice on how I should pick my armour. I am looking to discuss UI changes (possibly) backed by changes to the game rule-set to allow a nonspecific player to make more informed decisions.
Do you think I cannot create an example when you have similar situation on D:6 or where you decide to allow generating +0 plate armour?
To put my earlier question in a different way:
Let's say you found +X plate armour after finishing Lair. Is there a character that would say no to it because of the accuracy penalty as opposed to any other affects that encumbrance has? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm almost certainly playing sub-optimally, but I've never made a decision on wherever to put on a particular armour based on its affect on my accuracy outside maybe the early game (as you rightly pointed out). But even in the early game the decision isn't terribly interesting as I think it's essentially the same thing as spawning plate armour later on in the dungeon. *If* all that is true, then why not remove encumbrance rating affect on accuracy to streamline the UI and make the decision between armours clearer?
A better question would be "is anything gained by heavy armour characters losing access to spells" and the answer is "yes, they get less spiky damage".
Eh, this seems just wrong to me. The thing gained by heavy armour characters, in my experience, is a greater AC+EV total (i.e. more defences). Maybe I'm way off base here...
Anyway, all of that is besides the point because when I was talking about "gain" I meant gain in terms of depth to the game. I'm not sold that light armour characters getting spiked by damage is an interesting facet of the game. This is why I'm suggesting that something can be done to streamline the UI and make the armour decision clearer.
@goodcoolguy and ion_frigate:That's an interesting idea! Maybe the solution then isn't providing data but giving the player better tools to analyse the effect a decision has had? The morgue files already tell you how often you dodged/blocked/etc. What if that data was presented as an average somewhere on the armour description page?