What in Crawl isn't fun?

[evilmike]

Decrease the chance of finding a cursed butchery weapon on D:1.

I think the portal vault timers are still a bit too agressive. ... As far as missing them entirely, a prominent message when you enter the level would be nice to alert you that a sewer, spider's nest, bailey, etc is on the level. We do it for labyrinths, why not other types of vaults?

Seconded and seconded.

Agreed.

I like timed portal vaults. It's frustrating when you miss one, but that usually doesn't happen. I'd say I catch more than 50% of them, which is enough.

Also, before portal vaults, I would often practice "stair dipping", that is, going up and down every stair I found on a level. This used to be optimal play since you'd know where all the upstairs are on the next level (arguably, it still is optimal). Now that entering a level for the first time starts the portal timer, I no longer do this.

[cyborgemu]

The timer mechanic has been changed (for the non-announced vaults): now there is a slow counter until you see the vault, then a fast one.

There are no messages for all types of timed portal vaults because we don't want to turn all those levels into races for the portal. The non-announced vaults usually have larger entries, to make it easier to find them.

Seems like a good compromise. How much slower is the slow counter; that is, how much does this practically extend the portal vault's presence on a level?

[szanth]

I lol'd.

[jackalKnight]

Playing spriggan if the Hive is elimiated would go from a viable, if difficult hunger formula to a NetHack "constant random danger of starvation" forumla of difficulty. And I play this game because of its differences from NetHack, not its similarities...

[galehar]

offtopic, but hunger in nethack is exactly like in crawl for a normal race. A bit harsh in the beginning, but plentiful from the midgame.

[mageykun]

What's this nonsense about starving in nethack? Nethack lets everyone play like Crawl's kolbods. Just gorge yourself on the freshest corpse every time you fall below satiated. By midgame you don't even need permafood. Heck, I actually carry around the tinning kit so I don't miss resistance giving corpses when I'm too full to 'et em.

I do agree that spriggans minus the hive would be very difficult. I've had SpEn's starve on the way there.

Why not do a roulette with the hive, like with swamp / snake / shoals? It could randomly be the bee hive, ant hill, or the spider's nest. That way you still get a midgame poison dependent branch with food, but with less predictability.

[szanth]

What's this nonsense about starving in nethack? Nethack lets everyone play like Crawl's kolbods. Just gorge yourself on the freshest corpse every time you fall below satiated. By midgame you don't even need permafood. Heck, I actually carry around the tinning kit so I don't miss resistance giving corpses when I'm too full to 'et em.

I do agree that spriggans minus the hive would be very difficult. I've had SpEn's starve on the way there.

Why not do a roulette with the hive, like with swamp / snake / shoals? It could randomly be the bee hive, ant hill, or the spider's nest. That way you still get a midgame poison dependent branch with food, but with less predictability.

The... tinning kit? Vas is das?

[mageykun]

Well, then we'd either need an easier version of spider, or folks will just have to get used to the rng throwing you a header branch sometimes. Like you said, happens with the shoals already.

The... tinning kit? Vas is das?

A tool in nethack. Let's you convert corpses into tins of permafood meat. Great for collecting intrinsics, and another reason why you should not be starving in that game. Honestly, getting used to a hunger system that actually impacted the game was one of the hardest things to get used to when I started crawl.

But that's getting off topic. ...I really should stop jumping in everytime someone makes a crazy comparison to 'hack, but I can't help it. :p

[MrMisterMonkey]

jackalknight: provided careful usage of hungerful spells/abilities, I doubt spriggans would have it too bad; currently, there's quite more than enough food for them, even if they aren't extremely careful about it.

mageykun: perhaps instead of having an easier version of spider, make hive harder, eh? Currently it's a pushover, especially if you wait until you need the food (usually post-endgame unless you're paranoid or careless)

[szanth]

It's not exactly a pushover. It's a stepping-stone, and a much-needed one at that.

[jackalKnight]

Hive's location makes it great for a stash, and its hellish you're trying to do it with a low AC character with no poison res. I remember when I lost a TrBe down there...ugh. The killer bees are the first "horde" enemy that it feels like a great accomplishment to vanquish on the way to building a strong character.

[MrMisterMonkey]

Lair is earlier and a better stash. You shouldn't do Hive that early unless you really need the food (you shouldn't even need the food if you're half-careful). It doesn't feel good; it's tedious and mindless for any character late enough to need it. I personally like the thing about making Hive into a timed portal vault so players would have to do it when they find it, but that's probably not going in for a while.

[Grimm]

On the other hand Hive is often the first branch that a new player can completely clear. The sense of accomplishment this creates is important for encouraging new players to come back. What experienced players find tedious new players find demanding. Crawl does a good job of catering to the needs of both groups and taking away the Hive might possibly change that.

[vladimirdx]

evilmike: D:9 centaur warrior isn't that bad... I've gotten a D:5 centaur warrior and a D:2 centaur before, and killed both, being a Wz. I'm sure if my MC didn't work instantly, though, I'd get destroyed in 1-2 turns.

You should identify spellbooks as soon as you pick them up. It doesn't take a turn to read or view the Memorize screen, and you ALWAYS ID them barring the three highlevel books, so this just saves keypresses. I don't know about IDing by type, though.

Sickness: I have a proposal to make sickness more interesting and dangerous: instead of just preventing *healing*, it also prevents negative status ailments from going away. It's dangerous because it makes other ailments more dangerous, like poison, rot, and slow. Sickness is a vulnerability, but one a skilled player could overcome. It'd make komodo dragons and, more, necrophages (they can give sickness AND rot, IIRC) more threatening, and making monsters sick would be much more useful.
This wouldn't apply to paralysis. That would be ridiculous.

[danr]

On the other hand Hive is often the first branch that a new player can completely clear. The sense of accomplishment this creates is important for encouraging new players to come back. What experienced players find tedious new players find demanding. Crawl does a good job of catering to the needs of both groups and taking away the Hive might possibly change that.

For me, the tedium of Hive comes from the following:
- if you have rPois, it is a lot more trivial (and boring)
- if you do have rPois, it is very slow to clear, with lots of resting for poison to clear your system and then healing up to full HP.
- the loot, apart from the food, is not really fantastic
- the monotony of monster types
- bees can be hard to hit and there are a lot of them, so it's a lot of pounding the arrow keys.
- once you clear it, food becomes an issue not of careful management but of running back and forth to your stash.
- Clearing that hive cluster where the queen is is exceedingly repetitious.

I think Hive could go or be dramatically scaled back. For Spriggans, either put more mini hives throughout the dungeon, increase veggie permafood, or create a way to produce veggie food (certain rare plants that can be harvested, let players eat toadstools from corpses, or provide a way to distill potions of porridge).

Just some ideas. I love the game as is though. I still do Hive, I just see why there are probably complaints about it.

[szanth]

Hm. Well if you could produce permafood, that would solve the Spriggan problem.

[szanth]

I dunno. I think it's good for the dungeon. I like how not every sub-dungeon -has- to have a rune.

[psyshvl]

I feel that the main two problems with Hive are that you can do it whenever you want, and that swarms of killer bees are boring enemies. If you see it when you lack rPois, then you just skip it and come back when you find rPois, and are likely too strong for bees to be a threat. The idea to make it a timed portal vault would alleviate that, but it still has the problem that bees are boring enemies, especially if you have rPois when the portal vault comes up. When Hive gets changed, a good idea might be to add some type of insect guardians whose sting negates rPois, or if you don't have rPois, makes poisonings even worse. That would make Hive nontrivial for rPois characters, while still giving them a slight edge for having rPois. Hive could also have a variable location (anywhere from D:10-27 for example,) and have different sets of insects (beetles, spider, worms, bees, wasps, etc) depending on its location.

[szanth]

I feel like 'boring' gets thrown around a lot on this forum. Rather unjustly. What makes bees 'boring'? If you're not careful, they -can- kill you (in swarms). They go faster than spriggans (if I remember correctly), and, well... what more do you want?

[danr]

I'd be in favour of it being eliminated in favour of something new. Preferably something that wasn't so one-dimensional (dependent on a single resistance and gives one major type of loot), esp. now that hive features show up in the rest of the dungeon as well. Making it a portal vault would be great, but yes, then replace it with a new branch appropriate to mid-level characters.

[Grimm]

I enjoy being able to lean mindlessly on the attack key against bee swarms as a break from all the other times when I have to be hypercareful about every move.

[evktalo]

The timer mechanic has been changed (for the non-announced vaults): now there is a slow counter until you see the vault, then a fast one.

There are no messages for all types of timed portal vaults because we don't want to turn all those levels into races for the portal. The non-announced vaults usually have larger entries, to make it easier to find them.

Yup. To be fair, the slow/fast counter still needs work (and it's assigned to me, so I've been lazy about it). I've been thinking that there could be a message when the fast counter starts ticking - this happens when you see a square that belongs to the vault, so it's more of a reminder and an autoexplore stopper than anything else.

Another thing is that there are vaults which can have a square that is indistinguishable from an ordinary rock wall, and is situated e.g. like this:

  Code:

x = a rock wall
X = a rock wall belonging to the entry vault; seeing it starts the fast counter
O = the portal to the portal vault

xxxxxxx
..@....
xxxXXXx
xxxXOXx
xxxX.Xx
.......
xxxxxxx


So, the entrance is actually on the other side of the wall, but the fast counter starts ticking regardless. It probably needs a new KMASK thingy for marking squares in an entry vault to not start the fast counter.

I should post this somewhere in the wiki..

--Eino

[betamin]

IMO, Hive should either be a guaranteed vault so you could get the food, a branch with more variety of enemies (maybe like an "insect" branch) and a cool boss since the queen bee is a big dissapointment (maybe some unique spiderbee or something) or a shorter branch with less and harder enemies.

[evktalo]

Optional: we could make one Hive portal vault granted.

This bit from the Hive proposal in the wiki suggests that multiple hive portal vaults could be spawned during a game. I like that idea very much. Also, we should spawn harder hive maps deeper down in the dungeon. Hardness could be increased with rules, in addition to harder enemies (and architecture): larvae eat the food faster, cTele is disabled, ...


--Eino

[Robsoie]

I like Hive personnally and don't find it boring because it's a branch that serves as a good revenge against those bees, for all the time you met some of them or worse a nest and had too low level/bad items/bad health to be able to fight two or more without serious chance of being dead in the end

Queen bees and bees are extremely dangerous when you meet them in the dungeon, usually i see them when i'm never yet at a good enough level to resist or hit them decently, each time i thought i could take them, my character ended always on the wrong end of the stick.

For Hive it's a bit different, as you don't dive in Hive before your character is already better, so it feels easier (assuming you're not going there with a low health character with no healing potion and no poison resistance) than when meeting them in dungeon. And you're not rushing carelessly too, as getting surrounded can be deadly depending on your character situation of course.

The idea of a stronger queen bee is interesting, it could be a unique version of the queen bee monster, as usually at the level your character is when diving into Hive, unless you mismanaged something in term of equipment or are careless enough to be surrounded, the queen bee is neither impressive or more dangerous than an average bee.

With a unique queen bee monster it could make the Hive exploration more interesting.

[szanth]

It only just now occurs to me that bees are not the issue, poison is. Poison is either the cause of your death, the reason you have no healing potions, or nothing at all because you have rPois. Is it possible poison is unbalanced?

[mageykun]

Is it possible poison is unbalanced?

  Code:

             Succumbed to poison (poison gas)
             ... on Level 4 of the Realm of Zot on Jan 15, 2011.

I think not.

I think the reason a lot of people dislike the hive is that they wait way too late to do it. The suggestion to make it a portal fixes this- you're forced to do the Hive when the challenge is still relevant, or not all all. Alternatively: leave it as a full branch. But, if you wait too long to explore it, the bees back up their food and move on to greener pastures and something... nastier moves in to the abandoned nest.

A metamorphic branch seems entirely appropriate for the insect branch. Heck, it also solves the lair v hive stash debate- don't use the hive, because eventually something new moves in and it gets dangerous again!

[Moose]

Just wanted to add my +1 for eliminating the hive in favor of the already existing mini-hives scattered throughout the game, or having portal vaults with interesting mini-hive layouts.

Hive is so boring, I skip it in almost all of my games now, so it's really not bothering me, but I think there's a good opportunity here to improve this.

[ryak]

Theres plenty of ways to improve this without eliminating the hive. My personal favorite idea is to provide alternative branches to hive much like the alternatives that exist between swamp/snake/shoals.

[danr]

I always do the hive for two reasons:
- get a bunch of (good) food
- find a bit of loot - that hidden vault at the end of the pond is usually disappointing but I still think there's always a chance of a good item in there.

I just have to swat a lot of bees to do it, and that part is a bit monotonous.

[Grimm]

Making the Hive just a little bit smaller might decrease the tediousness that many feel.

[Zicher]

You don't have to do Hive at all.
In fact, I usually keep it intact as a source of late-game piety gain with gods appreciating kills and corpse sacrifices. It's usually enough to get your piety from **** to two gifts in a row.

[DemonOfWrath]

I'd like to add in something different that saps a lot of the fun out of parts of the game for me, shapeshifters and goddamn mimics, or rather, how exceedingly common they are once you pass about D:14 or so.

It's at that point that you start expecting to see more unusual stuff to the early part of the game, but it just quickly becomes tedious when you realise 95% of shops, portals, rare monsters, unusual features (fountains), and a fair whack of loot, are either mimics or shapeshifters, and honestly, after a few of them lose all excitement at finding any interesting dungeon features, because I KNOW it'll be a mimic. It's fine when occassionally you run into a mimic instead of something (gives a decent surprise), but the way it is at the moment it's the other way round.

[sanka]

On the ideas about the Hive - why not make a random level a hive level in the dungeon or in the lair? It may make some intresting moments. You must be able to deal with the bees to progress, or you may try to speed dive, but than it would be dangerous to came back. It may create a milestone, and break the monotonity of the dungeon. It may be a bad idea in main dungeon, because it's not so monoton as the branches, at least for me. So it may appear as a random level of the lair - swamp - shoals - snake - mines whatever.

On the current state - the food from the hive is usually not important for my characters, spriggan included. By the time I do it, I usually have a lot of permafood in my stash. Clearing the hive eliminates the importance of food (except casting a lot of firestrom with lov IQ spriggans maybe).

[danr]

That's a neat idea - just a special level, not a branch or vault. It would be tough if you found it too early and without rPois though.

[Cybermg]

For me, mid to late game inventory management can be pretty annoying. I tend to keep my inventory relatively full (just because I can), and it's annoying to have to constantly pick up and drop items so that autoexplore isn't directed to them. I don't like having to filter through every useless wand or irrelevant scroll my character happens to find.

I realize I can probably set autopickup exceptions in the init file, but it'd be nice if there were a clean, in-game interface for setting exceptions, since they'll tend to change as the game goes on. After a certain point, for example, a character won't really be interested in picking up any but a few types of wands.

[dpeg]

I realize I can probably set autopickup exceptions in the init file, but it'd be nice if there were a clean, in-game interface for setting exceptions, since they'll tend to change as the game goes on. After a certain point, for example, a character won't really be interested in picking up any but a few types of wands.

Devise such a system, and we'll use it.

[Kate]

Maybe the recognised items screen could be used to toggle on and off item types and specific items for autopickup (and start off with initial settings based on what's in your RC)?

[dpeg]

Maybe the recognised items screen could be used to toggle on and off item types and specific items for autopickup (and start off with initial settings based on what's in your RC)?

Sounds awesome.
I have been asking for the following functionality on this screen: press an item category shortcut letter (like ! or ? etc.) and display restricts to that group. This would help a lot for your idea, too.

[danr]

That's good. This would save having to drop every ring of sustain abilities etc. that my character picks up

Rings and wands IMO are the biggest issue in this regard. I wonder if even just not having these categories autopickup by default would be an improvement.

With wands and rings, another way would be to set a type to nonpickup when you drop a ring or non-empty or non-zapped wand of that type. The game could be smart enough to figure out that "Oh, the player has dropped the last ring of ice he found, I'm not going to autopickup any more rings of ice" or "Oh, the player dropped the last wand of random effects without zapping it once (or without emptying it), he probably is not interested in that type of wand."

[szanth]

Nah don't do it automatically. Sometimes I just drop stuff because it had a low wand charge or I was carrying too much crap, but if I find another one later I might want it and would be sad if the autopickup didn't detect it.

[dpeg]

No, not really: you want to pick up all wands for quite some time. I don't think we can sensibly decide on behalf of the player.... Being able to disable pickup in the \ screen will do fine, especially with the ' and . mode.

[dpeg]

It's easier for non-consumables. There we can track if one item (amulets, certain rings) or two items (other rings) are carried and/or stashed. In those case, we don't pick up additional ones (and this should already be the case).
For consumables, we can track the player's behaviour. Dropping an item immediately after it being auto-picked up (which should be easier with a new 'D' command) could trigger "[Foo] will not be picked up automatically anymore. Press \ if you want to change this."

[omndra]

Drowning.

Its the Only kind of death that will really Ticks me off.
I can get blasted to smithereens in Zot:5 right in front of the Orb, and be completely unfazed by it.
Then 10 minutes later I start yelling and throwing things because my Lv4 character drowned in the sewers after Miscalculating a Lev potion.