Remove cloud ownership


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Slime Squisher

Posts: 386

Joined: Thursday, 26th March 2015, 01:22

Post Sunday, 2nd April 2017, 15:48

Remove cloud ownership

I don't think that player clouds and monster clouds should follow different rules because cloud ownership is unintuitive and there is often no way to distinguish cloud owners w/o taking an action. Relatively recently player clouds were changed to vanish when the player breaks LOS w/ them to (I assume) discourage out of LOS kiting/killhole tactics. This seems like a sensible change. However, monster clouds do not vanish, meaning that sometimes the player is still encouraged to use enemy clouds to prevent out of los enemies from approaching, which is not only tedious but confusing if, i.e., a conjure-flame caster encounters a fire crab in lair and doesn't know which clouds will instantly vanish the moment the player retreats.

Is a forest fire started by lightning bolt a player cloud? I have no idea!

Another issue w/ cloud ownership is qaz's elemental force ability, which has different effects depending on the owner of the cloud, which makes no sense. Just let all clouds become elementals--I don't think that would 'break' qazlal. I guess this could maybe lead to abuse of cloud vaults or something. Idk. Remove cloud vaults? Also vault cloud placement in general would be disrupted by this change, but it still seems like it would overall be a good thing if clouds behaved consistently.

edit: A way to keep cloud vaults intact would be to let clouds remain while they aren't in los, but prevent them from dealing damage to a monster unless the player can see the monster. Cloud ownership should still be removed in this case.

bel

Cocytus Succeeder

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Post Sunday, 2nd April 2017, 15:59

Re: Remove cloud ownership

Since there are lots of special cases of unfriendly or neutral clouds (Ice Cave is another case, as is Volcano), a simpler change than removing ownership is to indicate ownership somehow. In 95% of the cases, the cloud owner is clear. I would say that the x-v screen is enough to handle the remaining cases (if one doesn't want to clutter up the display).

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amaril

Slime Squisher

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Post Sunday, 2nd April 2017, 16:09

Re: Remove cloud ownership

yeah, lol, that would be easier, so long as the differences between (edit. The ways player/monster/ambiant clouds behave) cloud types are specified as well. In a similar vein, there should be a way for players to figure out the owners of summons.
Last edited by amaril on Monday, 3rd April 2017, 19:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Abyss Ambulator

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Post Sunday, 2nd April 2017, 20:25

Re: Remove cloud ownership

Wait, if I own a forest fire caused by a lightning bolt, can I just shut a door and quit earning penance from Dith?

Also, now that clouds act this way and PCloud is gone, my favorite way to clear 90+% of Vaults is defunct.

Mines Malingerer

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Post Monday, 3rd April 2017, 11:31

Re: Remove cloud ownership

Yeah dissipation of clouds is pretty unintuitive and unfun, but I don't have a better idea to prevent degeneracy. One thing I'd be wary of is if we want to distinguish ownership of clouds, let's try to make it a method which works in console as well.

Tomb Titivator

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Post Tuesday, 4th April 2017, 20:32

Re: Remove cloud ownership

You can't like, own a cloud man.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06

Post Tuesday, 4th April 2017, 21:01

Re: Remove cloud ownership

johlstei wrote:You can't like, own a cloud man.

https://owncloud.org
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floatboth

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 5th April 2017, 01:25

Re: Remove cloud ownership

I always thought the "set damage to 0 if the monster is out of LOS" fix was the best way to go. I even had high hopes that it could be done for Singularity to save that spell from being axed, but as far as I know, it wasn't ever tested that way. To be fair, even with that change, it might still have been too strong of a spell, but I liked it :)

I thought it was changed so clouds dissipate faster when out of LOS; is it actually that they dissipate immediately? Do they always expire that turn?
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Dungeon Master

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Post Wednesday, 5th April 2017, 08:11

Re: Remove cloud ownership

If you remove ownership of clouds, then either Freezing Cloud doesn't grant XP; or monsters wandering into vault clouds (or other monsters' clouds) grant free XP, possibly before the player even knows they exist.

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amaril

Spider Stomper

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Post Wednesday, 5th April 2017, 10:15

Re: Remove cloud ownership

tasonir wrote:I thought it was changed so clouds dissipate faster when out of LOS; is it actually that they dissipate immediately? Do they always expire that turn?

They dissipate immediately, if it's meant to discourage killing stuff from outside your LOS it's rather unfortunate, because there's enough sources of things that forcefully move you in Crawl that make you lose valuable clouds involuntarily. It also paves way for cloud micromanagement based on using the LOS rules which feels rather tedious (I'm aware this is a big buzzword but I can't find a better term for it).

For example: when applying wand of clouds/freezing cloud etc, once the clouds start disappearing naturally it's better to step out of sight and step back in to discard your remaining clouds then re-apply clouds on a large area, as opposed to trying to plug in small holes. This can get pretty annoying if there's other sources of clouds as well since you may waste turns trying to make a cloud disappear that isn't yours. Similarly the current cloud behavior encourages you to re-roll wand of clouds into desirable clouds by stepping in and out of LOS until you get something good. Sure it's a waste of charges but better to waste charges than to die.

Heck, even something simple like retreating with conjure flame becomes needlessly complex: if you want to retreat from an enemy that avoids running into clouds a long, straight corridor is better for placing a flame cloud than a corner, because you'll lose sight of your flame cloud sooner if you turn around a corner right after placing the cloud. I'm not sure the perceived pros of minimizing XP gain from indirect kills outweigh these kind of side effects.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 5th April 2017, 22:13

Re: Remove cloud ownership

neil wrote:If you remove ownership of clouds, then either Freezing Cloud doesn't grant XP; or monsters wandering into vault clouds (or other monsters' clouds) grant free XP, possibly before the player even knows they exist.
I would prefer that monsters always gave full XP and piety no matter how they died (or got banished). I don't like that it's optimal to keep monsters out of vault clouds, away from other monsters' fireballs and IOODs, kill Pikel's slaves after freeing them, etc. so that you get full xp and piety.

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bel

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Post Thursday, 6th April 2017, 04:09

Re: Remove cloud ownership

duvessa wrote:
neil wrote:If you remove ownership of clouds, then either Freezing Cloud doesn't grant XP; or monsters wandering into vault clouds (or other monsters' clouds) grant free XP, possibly before the player even knows they exist.
I would prefer that monsters always gave full XP and piety no matter how they died (or got banished). I don't like that it's optimal to keep monsters out of vault clouds, away from other monsters' fireballs and IOODs, kill Pikel's slaves after freeing them, etc. so that you get full xp and piety.

Kills by allies too?

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 6th April 2017, 04:22

Re: Remove cloud ownership

Yes. I do not think that reduced XP from monsters that take damage from allies is an effective way to balance allies. You could make any monster give 0 xp if it takes even 1 damage from allies and allies would only be slightly nerfed, because most of the XP in a game comes from trivial monsters that you can kill with 0 skill melee/launchers and you can just hold back your allies from those and only use allies against dangerous monsters.
There's a decent argument that allies stealing XP gives players more incentive to fight alongside allies, leading to less tedium overall, but I don't think that works in practice because there are so many monsters in the game; I find that it incentivizes me to keep my allies away from trivial monsters far more often than it incentivizes me to put myself at risk when fighting dangerous monsters. And with the current 50%-XP-for-ally-kills mechanic, due to the rapidly inflating skill/XL costs and monster XP value, you can kill everything with summons and take a 50% XP cut for the entire game and your actual skill levels will only be like 10% behind anyway so it doesn't even balance them in the most extreme case.

I think you could grant the player full XP and piety for every kill and the only commensurate change you'd need to make is to how monsters gain XP. Currently you sometimes want to feed kills to allies to level them up and with this change you'd always want to feed kills to allies since you get full reward for yourself either way. Since granting XP to allies for all kills doesn't really work (enslavement, off-level allies make it an implementation nightmare, etc.) you would probably have to remove monster levelups as a general mechanic altogether, and make Beogh the only source of monster upgrading.

This strikes me as essentially the same issue as cloud ownership since both cloud ownership and general damage ownership are often difficult to determine and often incentivize grindy behaviour.

edit: I should mention that I do think out-of-LOS player clouds should still be deleted, regardless of what happens to xp awards. I'm the person who suggested that change in the first place, in fact!

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