The Tavern

Pan is too damn long. Supposedly an average game takes ~27 levels to generate all four unique panlords. That's already an unreasonable amount of floors, but since it's only an average there's a reasonably high chance of getting a 35-40 floor visit (or more!) which is just ridiculous. I'm aware that there are various extended rework proposals in the works that will probably address this if they ever get implemented. But it only takes one line of code to fix the problem now.

The chance of placing a unique panlord level is determined by one statement in dungeon.cc:

Change this formula to something that takes fewer floors. I suggest x_chance_in_y(1 + place_info.levels_seen, 20 + place_info.levels_seen). That ups the odds of getting a unique lord to 1/20 on the first floor and just over 1/3 per floor after 10 floors. This one line change suddenly makes Pan a more reasonable length, there's no commitment to any specific extended rework and you're not doing a lot of work that will have to be undone later. You don't even have to commit to stopping people from scumming Pan for experience. There's no need to wait for a comprehensive rework. Make Pan better today.

Having had it happen to me, I don't want anyone else to ever have to do 45 pan floors to get the runes again

Merged in this commit, thanks. This is obviously just a quick tweak and Pan needs more substantial work, which will likely include making the branch finite. Until then, at least people won't have to slog through so many levels (most of the time).

I have been waiting for this change since, like, 0.10.

Hellmonk, the saviour of Crawl~

Crosspost:


I really don't get it.

It is annoying to scum abyss to find unique lords' floors because because after surviving a dozen of its level it's probable a char can survive as many as he want, but it's reasonable and fun to made necessary to scum and clear a great number of floors after collecting all the runes?


I mean, ok, the difficulty after that may drastically increase if the runes were stolen due the Lords' chasing, but I still don't get it, it wasn't better to keep the slog reduced also after you actually finished with that place?

Heck, I'd love if an exit would be placed on the player title after he collect the 5th rune, but I fear that is a far dream!

How about just putting exits on every level of Pan? The "you're trapped here for a while" shtick was meaningful back when item destruction and item weight (shudder) were still things. Now it's just tedious.

Alternately, an idea that also accomplishes making the branch finite: once you have (or have generated) all the runes, all exits are rerouted back to the dungeon. Once you go back to the dungeon, Pan is sealed off forever. Before then, all exits just go to other levels of Pandemonium. This way, the branch is finite, and the player is forced to get (or forgo) all the Pan runes in one go. It's a cleaner, more linear design that would allow for the branch to be balanced more easily.

The way I understand it is you don't have to slog around too long. Exit to Abyss would be available at least on three out of four Pan levels by the time you collect the last rune.

Exit to abyss is 3:4 and exit directly back to the dungeon is 1:5, total chance of any exit 4:5.