Robot - new hard species


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Slime Squisher

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2018, 12:43

Re: Robot - new hard species

Also, since I've posted here, here's how you make mainline Crawl interesting again:

1) Get rid of upstairs.
2) Get rid of hunger.
3) Get rid of rest-to-heal.
4) Get rid of luring. Numerous approaches have been discussed here and I still think the one with the most promise is reveal-black-to-heal with a passive HP leak. It's elegant, it works, but it turns the game into something very different than what DCSS has been. (Real life interfered the last time I was coding this and I never got around to picking the project up again, but the prototype code and design docs still exist and anyone interested in reviving this can feel free to shoot me a PM.)
5) Decrease the experience return from late-earlygame and midgame. This can be achieved a bunch of different ways; compressing dungeon layout is one, decreasing experience return from the monster tables on the relevant floors is another.
Oh, yeah, also while we're on this step,
5b) Go through the monster spawn tables meticulously to get rid of dead weight spawns. This has received some attention in mainline already, I think (haven't played recently enough to say how well this has gone), but it needs to be done across the entirety of the game if your goal is to make the game always-on challenging. Note that doing this would come at the expense of gameplay lulls that might otherwise *improve* pacing by providing some interspersed calculated downtime. The proper approach here is probably not as simple as cutting trash everywhere, but rather cutting it where it's too common.
6) Rework available item generation to make inventory choices meaningful. This means cutting and merging item types. It also means cutting available inventory space.


I probably haven't mentioned everything necessary to fix the game here. You'll notice that a lot of this stuff has already been addressed in Hellcrawl. This is no coincidence. Hellmonk is a good player who understands how broken mainline Crawl's combat systems are, and we discussed this at length early in Hellcrawl's development process. I think the result was the best bit of Crawl development to happen since DCSS first got tiles.


Unfortunately, you can't fix the game with a set of species apts and preexisting mutation conducts. DCSS has more fundamental problems than can be addressed that way, unless you want to go write all the code necessary to rework the base game into something not-broken and then wrap it inside of a species check for some insane reason.

edit: Also unfortunately, if you follow this line of design through to its conclusion you can easily come to the decision that fixing the game requires enough of an overhaul of the way things work that you'd be better off just putting together a spiritual sequel in Unity or something. This doesn't seem very compatible with the existing dev process, but it would probably result in a fun game.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2018, 13:28

Re: Robot - new hard species

I liked how circus animals fork implemented "no rest to heal", it just healed you instantly if there were no monsters 9-13 (not sure about specific number) tiles away. Healing by exploring would kill DCSS for me because it would kill autoexplore.
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Slime Squisher

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Joined: Thursday, 11th April 2013, 21:07

Post Tuesday, 28th August 2018, 13:39

Re: Robot - new hard species

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I liked how circus animals fork implemented "no rest to heal", it just healed you instantly if there were no monsters 9-13 (not sure about specific number) tiles away. Healing by exploring would kill DCSS for me because it would kill autoexplore.

Yeah, minification of floor layouts is a requisite step (~66% or so as a rough initial target) if you go down that path.

There are obviously alternate approaches than the ones listed above, and several more problems not touched upon.

But, y'know, the point relevant to this thread is that introducing another severely gimped species to mainline Crawl really wouldn't fix anything, and, as with the MuMo challenge, would instead serve more to highlight just how fundamentally *broken* the game's systems are, for anyone who first passes the shibboleth of understanding the game well enough to win it.

For this message the author Implojin has received thanks:
VeryAngryFelid

Dungeon Dilettante

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 14:25

Re: Robot - new hard species

I think Golem instead of Robot would fit to the general "lore" of Stone Soup better.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 15:39

Re: Robot - new hard species

Actually, really old versions of Linley's Dungeon Crawl had robot monsters in Zot IIRC.
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 20:45

Re: Robot - new hard species

chequers wrote:Mummy has the "terrible species" gimmick already, so don't say that. And even mummy has some cool unique benefits.


Mummy, while certainly a bad race, isn't as utterly dreadful as the skill apts make it seem.

It doesn't have a HP penalty like other bad races. It's not slow. It has every item slot available, same a human. It overall has better-than-human resistances, especially the rPois which is great early game.

I would take it over felid or octopode 10 times out of 10.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 21:33

Re: Robot - new hard species

Rast wrote:I would take it over felid or octopode 10 times out of 10.
those species aren't even weaker than human let alone weaker than mummy

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 23:48

Re: Robot - new hard species

duvessa wrote:
Rast wrote:I would take it over felid or octopode 10 times out of 10.
those species aren't even weaker than human let alone weaker than mummy


OK, I understand the felid > human meme: the move speed and extra lives supposedly make up for the trash HP and AC and lack of armor and weapon slots.

But why octopode?

@Berder, if you're reading this, apparently some tavern memes are still alive.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Sunday, 5th May 2013, 08:25

Post Thursday, 30th August 2018, 00:21

Re: Robot - new hard species

Rast wrote:But why octopode?
a lot of people place Op above (or at the same place as) human because of its huge melee damage

Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Friday, 8th May 2015, 17:51

Post Thursday, 30th August 2018, 05:08

Re: Robot - new hard species

Several years ago we had a long discussion with Berder about Op vs Mu and now I believe there are no very hard species in crawl. We need robots :)
Underestimated: cleaving, Deep Elf, Formicid, Vehumet, EV
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