cap melee noise by monster hp


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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 02:01

cap melee noise by monster hp

If you hit a monster in melee you make noise = damage_dealt/4 with a cap of 12 (the noise level of a shout) at the location of the monster.

Making noise is the most dangerous thing most crawl monsters can do. Some of that noise, especially the part of it that originates closest to the player, is made getting beaten down by the player. It's pretty easy to hit 12 noise with a decent melee character but 9 or 10 noise is still bad. This is part of the reason it is best practice to lure even trivial monsters several spaces back from where you first see them.

What if you got little or no advantage from luring a d:15 kobold five spaces back to kill it? I think that would be pretty good. The way I suggest to make this happen is to cap the damage dealt to monsters by melee attacks by the remaining hp of the monster. This way you are not doing 60 damage for max noise to a monster that has 12 hp. Hell, it might even make sense to carry a garbage weapon to deal with trash monsters more quietly the way things are now. What a sobering thought.

While this would be a player buff, the weakness it addresses can in turn be addressed easily by fairly degenerate, unfun, and unintuitive play.
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bel

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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 02:58

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

Seems to be a really edge case. Do Kobolds even spawn on D:15? I would guess that in > 95% of the cases, either:

  • The monster is capable of shouting.
  • It has enough HP for the limit to not matter.
Therefore, luring monsters to a cleared area would still be the best way to play.

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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 03:54

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

It is extremely common to fight trash monsters at all stages of a game of crawl. If you doubt the existence of d:15 kobolds, I'm sure you will remember fights with orcs at the depth. While many monsters will shout, usually not adjacent to you, there are plenty that don't. Many of these fit into the trash monster category, for example skeletons and zombies. A shout at a distance does not create as much of a noise problem as shout-level noise on top of you.

While many kinds of monsters can spawn with max hp greater than 47, fewer always do. This is beside the point though: Even if a monster starts with a lot of hp, if you can safely kill it with a garbage weapon that will never produce a large spike, you should because this guarantees you won't make much noise. So the current situation is worse than you make it out. It's not just that you should lure, you should also use a trash weapon for trash monsters.
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bel

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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 04:59

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

I do not get what this change is supposed to accomplish. If the aim of the change is to reduce luring, it will not achieve its aim, or the effect would be negligible. Luring remains optimal with or without this change.

With luring, carrying a trash weapon is redundant: it doesn't matter if you make noise in a cleared area. I have never carried a trash weapon to deal with popcorn, and I doubt this is some kind of secret tech which will make anyone famous.

If the problem is too many trash monsters, one should deal with it directly instead of polishing a turd.

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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 06:47

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

It is weird that player is punished for being more skillful with a weapon (and it is extremely spoilery, I didn't know about it before this thread) yet I agree with bel that the suggested change will not accomplish much, luring will still be optimal for every monster.
Probably we can try to:
1) make random amount of noise every turn if monster was hit at least once during previous turn. If you attack with a crossbow at skill 0, you make noise once for every attack. If you attack with quickblade at min delay, you make noise roughly once for every 3 attacks. In all cases the greater damage and the less attacks the better for you.
2) make that noise at your current location AND location of monster when it came into view. So luring will still allow you to split pack once but you won't be able to do it for every monster of the pack because it is very likely that you will be noticed by several monsters at once when you return to the area where you initially lured first monster from.
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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 07:06

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

@bel: It does matter how much you make noise in cleared areas.

@vaf: In retrospect, I should have focused more on the trash weapon issue in the OP. Normal players do not play a highly optimized game. Making normal tactics more similar to highly optimized tactics may not completely solve the underlying problem, but it reduces the pressure exerted by the game to go in that direction. I am pretty sure you would see a significant difference in the incentive to lure garbage monsters, but I am more sure that you have a lot less incentive to switch to whips of electrocution or whatever on d:15 yaks.
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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 07:19

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

Why not inverse the noise cap. Players should be rewarded for training a skill, not punished, and vice-versa. So using an untrained weapon gives you the greatest chance of attracting attention, and skill would gradually reduce this noise. You could tie that in to weapon delay even, if you wanted to further differentiate weapons, as well as puting in different minimum base noise for the weapon categories or specific weapon type. In this way you could make small blades more useful for stabby characters, and ensure that an ogre swinging a GSC is going to wake people up.
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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 08:47

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

@ crawlnoob: that makes sense in theory, but has the effect of making the early game harder and the late game easier, which would strengthen an already present problem.
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Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 11:20

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

To clarify, I don't think it's necessarily a problem that high damage melee makes more noise or that higher damage correlates with things like greater strength or skill. The problem comes from fights that should be uneventful based on the threat level posed by the monster having potential to create significant noise problems. This is fiddly, counter-intuitive, and can be addressed by the ridiculous method of carrying a low damage weapon to chip at trash monsters, some of which may have high hp.

It's definitely not a full solution to cap the noise from melee damage by the hp of the monster being hit, since some trash monsters have a lot of hp and can absorb an initial attack around 50 damage and come back for more. It would still be best to use junk weapons against them to at least whittle them down. On some level, the noise system is fundamentally broken in this way and there's a limit to what you can do to change it without making major changes to the dynamics of crawl combat. Nevertheless, the cap proposed will make normal, comfortable melee tactics much closer to highly optimized, highly degenerate melee tactics a large percentage of the time.
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Post Thursday, 19th October 2017, 19:10

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

Shtopit wrote:@ crawlnoob: that makes sense in theory, but has the effect of making the early game harder and the late game easier, which would strengthen an already present problem.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing, but then I prefer the early game. One fix there is to try to make monster behavior increasingly more intelligent. For example, increased and louder shouting/alarms, better group tracking, etc, increasing with monster difficulty. No matter what, players shouldn't be directly punished for being better at their skill, I think that problem should be addressed first in this case.

bel

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Post Friday, 20th October 2017, 01:05

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

wait. nvm

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 20th October 2017, 04:01

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

Melee could just make fixed noise like everything else. Missile weapons, bolt of fire, etc. don't make more noise when they do more damage.

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Post Friday, 20th October 2017, 04:15

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

That sounds reasonable.

Unrelatedly, I guess you can read off your melee damage now by looking at the noise meter. It's a nice linear scale, from 0 to 48. Yeah.

late edit: Both the change suggested in the OP and duvessa's less conservative variant are extremely simple to implement, less than one line of code each.
Last edited by watertreatmentRL on Friday, 20th October 2017, 07:02, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Friday, 20th October 2017, 05:17

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

duvessa wrote:Melee could just make fixed noise like everything else. Missile weapons, bolt of fire, etc. don't make more noise when they do more damage.

Short Blades could make zero noise.

Unless that just further incentivizes constant weapon swaps.

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Post Friday, 20th October 2017, 11:21

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

Rast wrote:Short Blades could make zero noise.

Unless that just further incentivizes constant weapon swaps.

Short Blades could make zero noise only when used for stabbing. You already have to swap weapons for stabbing so it wouldn't make things worse.

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Post Friday, 20th October 2017, 12:17

Re: cap melee noise by monster hp

Stabs already make no noise.
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