Food stores

[tazoz]

In all the years of playing I've never bought a single item from such a store, there is always a thrill when checking out a new store except the boring food stores that never have anything of interest. This has become more serious of a problem, recently, as stores have replaced loot as the rewards for vault 8 and are guaranteed on orc 4. Imagine how disappointing it is to take out vault 8 and and get a setup of 6 stores and some gold when 4 are food stores and two potion stores, as a mummy.

There are two possibilities, remove the stores or add interesting new food that actually do something, how about taking royal jellies as an example and adding more food that have potion like effects and make them exclusive to the food store.

[absolutego]

unrelated, but i've always wanted to say that wand stores could have rods on occasion too (and keep forgetting).
(if they do, i've never seen any.)

[dolphin]

I'd definitely put a limit on the stores of consumables in branch ends. In most cases, it was permanent items that mostly populated the branch end rewards, with a few consumables. I don't know how common it is to get a bunch of wand/scroll/food/potion shops, though . . .

I also like the idea of selling rods. However rods can be pretty powerful, even with no skill, so it might just be OP to let them spawn in shops that could show up on D:5. A staff-and-rod shop might be pretty cool as a branch end shop, though, and would serve to hint at the staff/rod connection in a scroll of acquirement.

[KoboldLord]

I could definitely see splitting shops into two tiers. Getting two food shops, a potion shop, and a scroll shop for your Orc 4 mall is annoying, but on the other hand getting a mall level on D6 with three jewelry shops and two book shops makes the mid-game much easier than is appropriate for a single random event.

There are some planned changes to the food clock that I think will help food shops be a bit more useful in the future, most notably nerfing gourmand. If more special food than royal jellies and ambrosia are added, that would help too.

[Kate]

One of the harder orc ends is guaranteed to have good shops, and most of the Vault quadrants with shops are either guaranteed to have good shops or have loot, too, so I'm not sure there's really a problem there as such. And if you play a mummy, then many consumables are useless to you, that's part of the deal.

There are some ideas for more interesting food items here, though!

[KoboldLord]

For Vaults 8, there is one version that's guaranteed to have a multiple shops, some of which are guaranteed to be the better types. Another has one shop, which can be any kind, even kinds that are never useful. And another has only consumable shops.

As far as Orc 4 goes, there is a grand total of one version that specifies the types of shops, and in that version three of the four shops are always the same types and the fourth is randomly one of two shop types.

Currently, getting a D6 book shop is kind of like getting to worship Sif Muna for free on top of your actual deity. This could reasonably be argued to be a problem with Sif Muna, as well, but there are other shop types that are just too good to be sitting around the shallow Dungeon levels for anybody to get into.

[dpeg]

In a random-driven game like Crawl, there is always the question whether variance should somehow be kept in check. Another example: some time ago, some players campaigned for a "more just shop distribution", i.e. chances for shops increase if you've seen none yet. I don't like explicit variance reduction in general. We have increased shop generation in certain branches (Orc, Vaults, for example), which is noticeable, and you get a chance at four shops in Orc:4.
Having bad/good luck with shops is similar to all other kinds of luck you can have: it may happen that the only jewellery item you find for 14 levels is a ring of hunger -- so what?
If you get an early book shop, this may affect your god choice as a caster. If you get food shops, perhaps Fedhas is a good bet? You see, the gods are guaranteed, nothing else really is.

[evilmike]

One of the harder orc ends is guaranteed to have good shops, and most of the Vault quadrants with shops are either guaranteed to have good shops or have loot, too, so I'm not sure there's really a problem there as such. And if you play a mummy, then many consumables are useless to you, that's part of the deal.

There are some ideas for more interesting food items here, though!

Are you sure good shops are guaranteed in vaults? Last time I visited there I had a quadarant that had 5 potion stores and 2 food shops.

[dpeg]

evilmike: I made a mall quadrant for Vaults:8. Just looked at the map again: you get two guaranteed shops of type jewellery, wand or antique armour (I'd classify that as good) and perhaps other shops (general, book, scroll, antique weapon, potion). The distribution you described cannot occur in my mall quadrant. But note that it is possible that shops are randomly generated in Vaults:8 (of course at most 5, as always).

[KoboldLord]

He's talking about vault8_dpeg_shops2, which has multiple shops that will never be of any kind other than scroll, potion, and food. There's a small amount of loot, too, but I've never run into anything useful in this particular vault. Of course, that could be partially due to luck, too, since bad loot rolls happen in every subvault variant and I could just be on a streak.

Some random variance is a good thing, but in the end I'd rather win based on skill rather than the RNG dropping a bunch of great stuff on my character when the game is barely started.

[dpeg]

You see, there are two types of quadrants: normal ones, and prize quadrants. The normal all have fewer loot, shops2 with the nine consumable shops is of this type. The other mall quadrant is of the prize variety. I don't see what's wrong with scroll and potion shops either.

The point of randomness is that it's the really good players who will prevail agains seriously bad rolls. This is exactly the input of player skill we want. If we would equalize matters (especially on a strategical level, like asked for here), then we would _reduce_ the amount of skill needed. It is true, and absolutely not a problem, that a weak player can win given enough luck. That's fine, we don't mind players winning! But it is also true that some, poor games serve to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[smock]

One hard thing about being a bad Crawl player is that it's very hard for a bad player to win, because there are so many die rolls and opportunities to get make a bad decision! Bad players can win a few rounds of poker. That's why there are so many bad poker players. But bad poker plays don't win tournaments. The randomness doesn't really matter, though -- it the number of decisions to be made. Bad chess players cannot beat good chess players.

[njvack]

The point of randomness is that it's the really good players who will prevail agains seriously bad rolls. This is exactly the input of player skill we want. If we would equalize matters (especially on a strategical level, like asked for here), then we would _reduce_ the amount of skill needed. It is true, and absolutely not a problem, that a weak player can win given enough luck. That's fine, we don't mind players winning! But it is also true that some, poor games serve to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Right -- but keep in mind, reducing randomness is a huge amount of what y'all do as game designers. Monster depth puts huge constraints on the random process of monster generation.

Ultimately, you're trying to maximize fun, not necessarily tweak win percentages or loot distributions or whatever. Since fun is subjective and different for different people, you need to do so with a clear vision of what's considered "fun" in the Crawl universe. Balance decisions all stem from that. This, IMO, is one of the things Crawl does really, really well.

FWIW, I don't think shops (or loot distribution in general) are particularly broken. Sometimes you find super sweet loot, sometimes not. But winning a game despite crap gear is fun, too.

[dpeg]

nvjack: of course we're putting hedges around pure randomness. But it is one thing to say "there will be shops, and they have such-and-such a chance and can be at most five", whereas it is quite another to say "there will be shops and if none came up in the first Foo levels, then you'll get one". The former provides a nice habitat for randomness, and over a large number of games, everything will nicely even out, even if your particular only features a singular food shop on D:26 (and the number of chances to generate shops within a single game is large enough to expect shops). The latter tries to regulate and compensate and while such is sometimes necessary, I don't think it is necessary here. (We did, for example, restrict some portal vaults to just instance. This decreases variance but we had good reasons for that.)

[MoogleDan]

I dislike food shops.

I figured it'd be worth searching for existing articles before posting, and I came across this 2011 thread. I'm kind of surprised that the topic touched on food shops but then wandered off to discuss the validity of shops in general, but regardless, it seems as though there was some intent years ago to rebalance food in such a way that food shops would be relevant. I'm gonna guess that never really happened; they were barely relevant then, and with the new edible contaminated chunks system, they're even worse now.

I don't see what food shops really contribute to the overall Crawl experience. Every other shop potentially serves a purpose for every possible character (ignoring felids), but with the permafood situation being what it is (i.e. - arguably sufficient even without the presence of chunks), I don't see why we have to take one of the most exciting random features of the game you can stumble upon and add a version that is guaranteed to disappoint. Trolls might benefit from them more than most, but they are by no means necessary for a troll victory. Fedhas worshipers may like getting a couple extra sultana stacks, but given how rarely played Fedhas is (not gonna argue strength or fun of Fedhas here, but Fed's gotta be one of the least often selected gods numerically), that means you have a shop that lightly appeals only to a very small portion of players, and which even then is far from necessary. Besides, either of the characters I just described would still benefit equally from the other shop types.

Could we do away with food shops and just slightly up the chances for all other shops to fill the void? Alternatively, could we forbid food shops from generating in any branch ending? They're more disappointing than individual bad artifacts (a sandwich is much less exciting and fun than even a WORTHLESS artifact ring, and about as tactically important), and the slight buff to shops that would result wouldn't exactly break the game balance-wise. Heck, if you wanted to defend the spriggans and other dietarily unusual characters, just make every distillery stock a potion of porridge or two; they'd serve the same purpose as food shops without wasting the place. Any thoughts?

[BlackSheep]

I find food shops no more disappointing than any other shop. As you pointed out, there are several circumstances in which a food shop can be quite relevant. It just doesn't bother me that those circumstances don't manifest in every single game, the same way finding a barding doesn't bother me when I'm not playing a centaur or naga. When I do find myself in those circumstances, suddenly finding a food shop is a magical coincidence providing great relief or some useful consumables. Rather than throwing them out, I'd rather see more permafood with interesting effects (and make food stores more likely to stock said items).

[MoogleDan]

That's not QUITE what I said; I was arguing that they "lightly appeal" to two special cases. While it's true that other shops are often disappointing as well, none of them make me angry at autoexplore for wasting my time visiting a food shop at all. I don't think it's just my play experience that has food being entirely too commonplace for food shops to provide much in the way of "great relief." I think adding fancy foods would be an acceptable alternative, however, so long as they don't step on the toes of potions too much.

[BlackSheep]

You can add healers to your list of characters that make use of food shops. As well, a Fedhas worshiper finding a stack of fruit in a shop is suddenly loaded for bear. As a spriggan, I'd rather see a food shop with some light-weight fruit to carry around than yet another armor shop containing nothing I can use.

There was discussion about moving potions with strategic effects (rather than tactical ones) to food. I'd like to see some new effects as well. Now that we've got effects that expire based on XP gain, there's design space for similar positive effects and for remedies for the negative ones.

[MoogleDan]

But healers can find food at general stores too, as well as distilleries if porridge were added to the menu! And like I said earlier, 0.12 gave everyone semi-gourmand; edible chunks are suddenly everywhere. As for your spriggan, he could always be praying for a nice artifact cloak or hat of the alchemist; it's less likely to have anything he needs, but by no means impossible, and when it does, it can be massively helpful. Anyway, do you have a link to that strategic foods discussion? I'd like to take a look at that.

[MoogleDan]

For the records, this thread got me to try my hand at a few healers. I'm currently rending and mending my way through the mid-game with a troll healer.

I respectfully retract my bitching about food shops.