Monday, 3rd February 2020, 18:18 by Hellmonk
Most of the supposed monster variety generated by item use is superficial, especially because monster default equipment is typically coded to choose between items that are similar to one another. There is not a significant difference between orc knight in chain mail and orc knight in plate; ditto for ancient champion with a great mace versus one with a great sword.
Excluding reaching (which is replicated by an existing attack flavor) and cleaving (which could easily be replicated by an attack flavor or monster flag), which aspects of monster item use generate variety? Armor and weapon base type basically stops mattering by Lair. Shields matter if your only spell is iron shot. Brands occasionally matter, most commonly in the form of distortion and early game elec and venom. Attack flavors that are close to these brands' properties already exist. Launchers and throwables matter, especially early on, but it's fairly simple to abstract that to an ability and put it on a different monster type. It's obviously better for game clarity to have "kobold assassins" with a curare dart ability instead of generating some small percentage of kobolds with curare dart stacks. Artifacts matter, very occasionally, so I guess you'd lose out on the random rF+++ Duvessa or +10 plate Edmund that happens once in 50 games. Consumable use matters, but is pretty infrequent and most relevant in the early game, where an acid wand centaur or haste potion Grinder can actually kill you. It's probably more frequently relevant as a form of item destruction.
Taken all together I would estimate that less than 50 monsters per game generate with items that change how you fight them, which is a pretty bad ratio for a game that will typically generate on the order of a couple thousand item using monsters. Most of the existing variation could be replaced with attack flavors, monster types, or abilities. The price of monster item use is that every game gets flooded with stacks of trash items that you autoexplore to and inspect, there's a ton of complicated and frankly ridiculous code governing how monsters evaluate floor items as better/worse than current equipment, modify attack delay based on weapon type, etc, and player item generation is inextricably tied up with the occasional good item that washes up from the tide of +0 robes and cursed -2 hand axes.
I do not expect mainline DCSS to do anything wrt monster item use in the near future, but I think conservatively you could remove ~75% of it without significant overhaul of other systems and I think it's worth seriously considering something more sweeping as a fork project.
- For this message the author Hellmonk has received thanks:
- duvessa