Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.


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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 02:04

Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

So, I trew this Idea I had a while ago on the other thread, and respectable people liked it, so I will make a serious proposal.

Proposal:
remove chunk eating. instead, give an certain amount of nutrition when killing chunk-producing monsters.

reason:
keep most, if not all, the functions of hunger and eating, but removing the meaningless task of butchering corpses, managing inventory, and eating. this should reduce the number of keypresses, without any impact on actual gameplay.

as And Into said, even the specific species mechanics could be kept: Spriggans do not get nutrition on kills, Trolls get more nutrition and can hold a greater amount of nutrition on themselves, Mummies do not need to kill, ETC. the only mechanic that would probably need a revamp is Vampires (pun not intended), as getting nutrition is not always desirable for them. but those are simple changes, overall, and will turn the game into a much more enjoyable one.

if anyone with more voice than myself on game design sees this, feel free to put on the wiki under your name, or something.

EDIT: an alternative, in case this feels too strange, is to give nutrition by stepping on corpes when there are no monsters in LOS.
Last edited by Hirsch I on Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 18:39, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 02:55

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I actually thought that some sort of chunk removal, permafood only solution was the most elegant solution to the food grind, but this is even simpler and I expect it will be even easier to balance. I'm all for it, personally. Really good idea, Hirsch I.

There may be a minor problem, which Amnesiac pointed out in the other thread, in terms of how to spin this flavor-wise. Not sure if others would like it, but maybe just throw in something about how you automatically forage for food and eat it as you are exploring the dungeon. Something like

"You automatically forage for food as you fight and defeat living enemies. Unfortunately, demons, undead, and some other creatures neither carry nor provide small edible foodstuffs. Note that some species have unique food relationships, however, and this may alter whether and how much they can successfully forage."

You probably don't need to concern players with the finer details of how it works under the hood, just so long as they know that most non-undead, non-demonic enemies will provide a small amount of nutrition automatically upon being killed. In a few branches, permafood is your only food; in most of them it is needed only for when your killing doesn't keep up with your metabolism. That is really exactly how it is now anyway, but with this you don't have to worry about juggling chunks and butchering, unless you are actually using the chunks for some other purpose. Sounds ideal to me.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 03:58

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

If this ever actually goes through, please increase the actual # of food units that you have at 'Hungry' significantly, to compensate for the time I might have spent carrying a chunk with me and not eating it.

The way I see it, this is going to make eating similar to the activity of a vampire pre-"bottle blood". As much as butchery is annoying and tedious, having the ability to carry 2-3 chunks with me lets me use high level spells *without* having to rely on a corpse dropping in order to keep my food up higher. This change as proposed would categorically be a nerf to player power, even as it tries to make an already heavily-automated process slightly 'easier' to do.



tl;dr -- How will you answer the issue of not carrying chunks with you as a source of refuelling? I recommend raising the 'hungry' cutoff by however much satiation 2 chunks typically gives.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 04:03

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

and into wrote:There may be a minor problem, which Amnesiac pointed out in the other thread, in terms of how to spin this flavor-wise. Not sure if others would like it, but maybe just throw in something about how you automatically forage for food and eat it as you are exploring the dungeon.


Call it something else entirely, like Stamina, Vigor, Will, etc., and say that the excitement of killing enemies helps restore your energy/drive/Wille zur Macht/etc.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 04:07

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

nicolae wrote:
and into wrote:There may be a minor problem, which Amnesiac pointed out in the other thread, in terms of how to spin this flavor-wise. Not sure if others would like it, but maybe just throw in something about how you automatically forage for food and eat it as you are exploring the dungeon.


Call it something else entirely, like Stamina, Vigor, Will, etc., and say that the excitement of killing enemies helps restore your energy/drive/Wille zur Macht/etc.


But permafood would still be in game and restore the same thing, plus some species (Trolls, Ghouls, etc.) will continue relying on chunks for satiation. At least that was the idea I think, as floated in the other thread—it isn't such a radical change as removing all food, just one way to get rid of but(c)hering and chunk juggling. Maybe food could eventually be entirely removed by pushing this further but at least initially I think getting rid of chunks would be a good experiment, and Hirsch I's idea would be one practical, simple way to experiment with that. So in that case, calling it something other than hunger would invite more confusion than it answers.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 04:29

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

and into wrote:But permafood would still be in game and restore the same thing, plus some species (Trolls, Ghouls, etc.) will continue relying on chunks for satiation. At least that was the idea I think, as floated in the other thread—it isn't such a radical change as removing all food, just one way to get rid of but(c)hering and chunk juggling. Maybe food could eventually be entirely removed by pushing this further but at least initially I think getting rid of chunks would be a good experiment, and Hirsch I's idea would be one practical, simple way to experiment with that. So in that case, calling it something other than hunger would invite more confusion than it answers.


Ah, yeah, in the context of having some food still exist it might make less sense.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 04:48

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

BountyHunterSAx wrote:This change as proposed would categorically be a nerf to player power, even as it tries to make an already heavily-automated process slightly 'easier' to do.

this was not tought as a way to make the game easier in any way. just as a way to reduce button pressing and inventory management. if this makes the game a little harder in order to make it more fun, so be it. flavour is also not a big price to pay for that.
but your idea of rising the amount of nourishment the player can carry is probably a good one, and the flavour can also be worked in some way, so I dont think we will actually need to trade anything.
and into wrote:"You automatically forage for food as you fight and defeat living enemies. Unfortunately, demons, undead, and some other creatures neither carry nor provide small edible foodstuffs. Note that some species have unique food relationships, however, and this may alter whether and how much they can successfully forage."

cant get much clearer than that.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 06:17

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I've never objected to the current chunk system, but I've never been particularly attached to it, either. Plus, this proposal sounds like it would still have chunks available for Sublimation of Blood or Simulacrum as well as permafood for when you're not fighting anything edible.

Would the quality of corpses still affect things (i.e. if they're contaminated/poisoned/mutagenic)? If we do away with that mechanic, how would we tell what Ignite Poison would work on?

I'd try this out if somebody put together an experimental branch.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 12:39

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

spudwalt wrote:I've never objected to the current chunk system, but I've never been particularly attached to it, either. Plus, this proposal sounds like it would still have chunks available for Sublimation of Blood or Simulacrum as well as permafood for when you're not fighting anything edible.

Would the quality of corpses still affect things (i.e. if they're contaminated/poisoned/mutagenic)? If we do away with that mechanic, how would we tell what Ignite Poison would work on?

I'd try this out if somebody put together an experimental branch.



So this means there'd still be chunks, just NOT for eating. Chunks for sublimation of blood, for simulacrum, butchering for hides... just "please sir, no eating of the chunks"

Sorry guys but this makes little sense, at least in my book.

If this were to make any sense, chunks would have to be removed entirely, which would lead to revamping other stuff, and above all else: greatly detract to the survival inside a dungeon element. I know most of you probably don't care about this, I do.

It also removes a lot of control from the player about when does the character eat. I wouldn't be able to hoard an entire gnoll pack worth of chunks to gorge myself on it OR eat a few now and some later. Also, this auto-fooding on kill makes zero sense in the middle of a combat:

"Hey hostile orc, buddy, please give me a couple of auts *OM* while I shove your beloved priest down my throat, *NOM* we'll be back to the killing business *NOM* real soon, I promise! *NOM*"

A game without chunks, or corpse eating, or just without a food clock is perfectly okay. But this sounds like dumbing down rather than streamlining.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 15:30

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I imagine the nutrition you get as the food you carry, not the food you necessarely eat.
chunks could be reworked as "body parts", if that is so much of a problem. I cant imagine you wanting to eat a "gnoll arm" or "rat guts"
as for removing control from when the player eats, well, yeah, I know, this can make things harder, but boredom is truly worth a little easier game?
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 17:03

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Hirsch I wrote:I imagine the nutrition you get as the food you carry, not the food you necessarely eat.

We all are free to picture things in our heads in whatever way we like, you don't die of not carrying food on you (I sure am not carrying any food on my person at the moment and I'm not starving), you die of not having had anything to eat in a long while.
chunks could be reworked as "body parts", if that is so much of a problem. I cant imagine you wanting to eat a "gnoll arm" or "rat guts"

It would sure beat dying of starvation. And no, it doesn't faze me in the slightest: Prepared yak eye, finely minced cave crawler spleen.
as for removing control from when the player eats, well, yeah, I know, this can make things harder, but boredom is truly worth a little easier game?

You didn't address how little sense your proposal makes when in the middle of a combat. Also, chunking enemies doesn't bore me. I don't really get this necessity of hyper-optimizing every aspect of the game until it resembles Progress Quest. And it is not easier. Right now, you can screw up a bit if you're inattentive and... well.. forget to eat, and spend too much nutrition on casting / abilities. And you have to make choices on corpses.

I ENJOY MAKING MY CHARACTERS EAT ELF CHUNKS. I go "Mmmm, elf meat" every time. Oh, I also enjoy draining uniques' corpses as a vampire - even when I don't need it, or when I plan to wait until bloodless afterwards. It just feels good to drink the blood of Dowan and Duvessa, one right after the other.

If you want to remove chunk eating altogether, just remove chunk eating or butchering altogether, no weird nutrition on kill, and up the permafood generation rate. It's the nutrition on kill what bothers me the most. That sounds like a racial or god ability rather than a game-wide mechanic. It sounds like HP on kill, MP on kill and vampire's nutrition on biting.

I don't want to sound less than respectful, but I don't think you've really thought over ALL the consequences of this...

List of current stuff that would make much less sense with nutrition on kill:
    -Ghouls needing rotten meat. Meat that doesn't exist and is instantaneously, automatically eaten can't possibly rot.
    -Saprovore / carnivore / herbivore effects on nutrition would become much more opaque and spoilery.
    -Poison resistance effects on nutrition would become much more opaque and spoilery.
    -Food conducts effects on nutrition would become much more opaque and spoilery.
    -Either no eating mutagenic enemies, or COMPULSORILY doing so.
    -Using chunks for sublimation of blood or simulacrum but not for nutrition. Counterintuitive as hell.
    -No control over gorging yourself on fallen enemies for those species that can do so.
    -Much less control over gaining nutrition, short of implementing an autopickup-like switch or asking for confirmation (this last thing would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the proposal)
    --Even worse for stabcaster vampires. They'll not only be taking a sip when stabbing, which is manageable, they'd be automatically draining killed enemies. Goodbye, bloodless!
    -Not having nutrition problems if you enter a monster infested place, kill some and retreat (you actually have to be able to get to the corpses undisturbed to eat them now)
    -No choice between blood sacrifice and food (Sacrifice ALL the corpses! you have already gained nutrition from them!)
    -No choice between zombification and food (Same as above)
    -Corpse-rotting effects wouldn't have an impact in food sources.
    -No chance to be caught in the feeding act at a critical time.

List of consequences of nutrition on kill that would make no sense:
    -Gaining nutrition in the middle of a fight.
    -Gaining nutrition from something killed while out of LOS
    -Gaining a ton of nutrition at once from nuking a whole group of enemies with the same action. (also instant spell hunger refund)
    --On that matter, let's not even think for a second of Slouch...
    -Gaining nutrition from an enemy killed from afar.
    --Gaining nutrition from an unreachable enemy killed from afar, such as is possible in baileys and any sort of islands.
    ---Gaining nutrition from a deep-water enemy whose corpse you cannot recover.
    -Impossible to eat something that died thanks to any cause other than the player, such as traps, confusion, or other monsters. Again, really counterintuitive.

...and if you have indeed thought about all these consequences and more, I'd say you are guilty of at least a little bit of casual disregard for factors other than getting rid of a couple of keystrokes *cough* autobutchering options *cough* that irk you.

The need to stop and feed from corpses has an impact in the game because:
1) You can botch it via natural stupidity.
2) You can be deprived of it via artificial intelligence / meanness.
3) You need to dispatch nearby threats in order to do it.
4) You need to make choices between eating corpses and other uses for them, or run out of permafood.
5) Deviation from the standard gives some species their uniqueness.

(edited to correct formatting errors)
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 17:28

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Thank you Psiweapon. I came in here to try and figure out in what universe this is a good suggestion, and am glad someone else pointed it out. The hunger mechanic is something that separates certain species, and auto-eating removes a lot of choice (do i sacrifice this corpse to God, or eat it?).

If the keypresses are too much for someone, they can play a mummy or a bloodless Vp, I think.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 17:31

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I'm all for removing corpse saccing too, I think that "choice" is deceptively uninteresting. Is the choice ever more complicated than "Am I hungry? Eat the most nutritious thing and repeat, if not sacrifice"? It is something that is relatively simple to code in an rcfile already.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 17:34

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

while you arguments are good, I'd ask you to calm down. we are discussing a possibility, and I am trying my best to help this game to be a better one.
now, that said:
if this makes little sense on combat, we could make the nutrition be distributed after a while. the potential nutrition you get from a kill is added to a pool, that holds a limited amount, and given to you when there are no monsters in sight.

also, the reason to remove butchering is that way one can focus on the most interesting aspects of the game.
I'll try to fix my proposal, based on your feedback. thank you.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 17:39

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Without really commenting on the merits of this proposal, I don't think it's worthwhile to let "common sense" stuff get in the way of good game design. Any paradigm for satiation is necessarily going to be an abstraction, and we can come up with the rationalizations after we come up with something that's actually fun to play.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 18:16

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Well sorry if the part of Crawl that you really enjoy is hitting ceX and seeing the "This raw flesh tastes terrible" message and seeing the little yellow Hungry sign go away. At least people can keep butchering corpses needlessly if it makes you feel hardcore and you enjoy the game more that way. However with this change everyone who mostly plays Crawl because they enjoy the tactical and strategic considerations doesn't have to wear out the poor c and e keys on their keyboard so fast. Not quite a win-win, I suppose, but perhaps a win for nearly everyone and a draw for the tiny number of people who mainly play DCSS in order to role play that they are eating elves?

Now aside from that the only actual game play difference is the "no choice" between sacrificing corpses, eating them, and zombifying them. But as others have already pointed out this is an exceedingly uninteresting choice that in the insane overwhelming majority of cases has exactly 1 correct answer, and an answer that is pretty damn obvious: Eat the weakest corpse available when you are hungry. So it is not actually a choice. And aside from the tedium of butchering, this "choice" means that you now should take care not to butcher that hill giant carcass if a rat or quoka or something was also killed nearby. And it is even worse if the rat and hill giant died on the same blasted tile.

None of the other stuff listed by Psiweapon are precluded by the OP's recommendation. To be fair, Hirsch didn't go into those things very explicitly in the OP, but they were mentioned in the other thread and everyone (I think) was agreed that chunks would remain in game and that 1.) species with weird or special relationships to chunks would retain those relationships (ghoul troll kobold felid vampires etc.); and 2.) all the non-satiation purposes of chunks (mutagenic, sublimation of blood, etc.) would be retained. But even if those weren't brought up in the other thread from which this one spun off, there is nothing in the OP's recommendation that would prevent all those other things from staying in. So it is just nitpicking and basing one's criticisms off the assumption that this change would be implemented in the most idiotic way possible. Any idea executed poorly is going to suck, nothing new there.

Oh I guess there are the claims about "opaque and spoilery," but that is simply a matter of how well any new system is explained; one might as well call the new training system erected after victory dancing was removed "opaque and spoilery." Frankly I think at present it is much worse in terms of spoilers, based on how often newer (and sometimes not-so-new) players overreact to hunger. The current system is in fact already opaque in terms of game play (what matters most), and much worse, it is opaque in a way that leads to bad and tedious play because people actually think they need to manage their food costs really really carefully. "Opacity" in and of itself isn't bad; Crawl chooses to be opaque sometimes precisely in order to discourage people from concerning themselves with things they shouldn't worry about. I think that rationale should be extended to chunks usage; if it *can* be automated without removing any interesting choices, it should be.

It is a de facto "spoiler" at present that hunger almost never matters unless you are doing really weird things that you shouldn't be doing for a dozen other reasons that are more important than hunger. So let's remove that spoiler.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 19:18

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

@johlstei, @Hirsch I, @archaeo, @and into

johlstei wrote:I'm all for removing corpse saccing too, I think that "choice" is deceptively uninteresting. Is the choice ever more complicated than "Am I hungry? Eat the most nutritious thing and repeat, if not sacrifice"? It is something that is relatively simple to code in an rcfile already.

Or you could sacrifice the strongest monster to Okawaru and eat the popcorn; or rip the skeleton out of a dragon, eat a chunk and save the rest for simulacrum; chop up the biggest critter to get more food out of your kill and make the popcorn rot to have a lot of fodder for Fedhas' evolution; twisted resurrection requires that you forgo food sources in order to create more powerful and versatile undead servants; you can play a kobold of Fedhas and gorge yourself while at the same time saving all the food which is otherwise useless to you... etc.

Corpse-feeding in general isn't very interesting, corpse-feeding when coupled with granted abilities, necromancy and/or diets actually requires making compromises when balancing and min-maxing the different uses of a resource that is neither completely renewable nor strictly limited. This layer of thinking, moving, and acting before corpses become unusable for different purposes (at different stages: fresh/rotten/skeleton/gone) would be rendered completely or mostly moot, and also erase some comparative advantages and disadvantages that diets can bring.

Bottom line of my position:

1) Butchering can be legitimately considered a hassle, even if I personally like it.
2) Auto-eating on kill brings a lot of consequences that can be considered undesirable, unreasonable, or inconsistent.
3) The more streamlined the food minigame becomes, the less special "weird diet" races become, or go from special through problematic to straight special-cased. If most species had auto-nutrition, leaving ghouls with their current system would mean giving them an "impaired interface" of sorts even if it makes sense, but then - what about trolls, kobolds and felids? The most extreme example of this would be removing the food clock entirely, where all species would be mostly like mummies (mummies' thing would become disabled potions). The second most extreme would be removing all food save for permafood, where all species would be a lot closer to spriggans.

Hirsch I wrote:while you arguments are good, I'd ask you to calm down. we are discussing a possibility, and I am trying my best to help this game to be a better one.

My apologies, I tend to be rantful and long-winded. Considering it rationally, there is no reason whatsoever for anybody to put forth a suggestion that they consider would make the game worse.

Thanks for the acknowledgement, I think I have already acknowledged your suggestion, even if under a negative light, by taking the pains to argue against it in detail, I just happen to disagree deeply with your suggestion. I don't think it is a bad suggestion in account of it's quality, I think it's a good suggestion that risks axing for an aspect of the game that I actually enjoy and that I think it's too often disregarded as a mere hassle instead of legitimate middle-term resource management.

now, that said:
if this makes little sense on combat, we could make the nutrition be distributed after a while. the potential nutrition you get from a kill is added to a pool, that holds a limited amount, and given to you when there are no monsters in sight.

That would make more sense in-game than plain nutrition on kill, but substitutes a mechanic mostly in control of the player which also has visual feedback for a behind-the-curtains operation. How much nutrition did I gain from killing that porcupine? Will it last enough to reach my stash without needing another snack? At least now we know how many chunks we get, and have the added risk of a monster not leaving a corpse - which I also think is weird, if I had things my way, a corpse would always be produced for corpse-leaving monsters, but I rationalize it out thinking that the corpse doesn't mysteriously disappear, it's just too badly mangled to be used for anything useful.

With a system like the one you propose, permafood and walking food would also become wholly disparate.

also, the reason to remove butchering is that way one can focus on the most interesting aspects of the game.
I'll try to fix my proposal, based on your feedback. thank you.

If my feedback has served you to reflect on your suggestion, it's consequences and improve it, it has already been useful for something other than voicing my own opinion =D

archaeo wrote:Without really commenting on the merits of this proposal, I don't think it's worthwhile to let "common sense" stuff get in the way of good game design. Any paradigm for satiation is necessarily going to be an abstraction, and we can come up with the rationalizations after we come up with something that's actually fun to play.

Sorry but, my "common sense" as you call it has been substantiated into particular points of criticism. Common sense is a poorly defined concept as much as good game design. Any model for anything is going to be an abstraction, that's why it is a model: it mimicks and represents something else while simplifying it, but that doesn't mean we have to abstract everything to the point of full automation (go give Progress Quest a try, it's the embodiment of this particular slippery slope).

What is fun for any two given Crawl players probably doesn't overlap 100% even in the closest matches, so assuming that something in particular is unfun is just defending your view (which is legitimate) with pretensions of universality (which isn't legitimate) but it's not like I am, or anybody else is for that matter, completely innocent of that particular mistake.

Oh, and trumping established assumptions and expectations also gets in the way of good game design.

and into wrote:Well sorry if the part of Crawl that you really enjoy is hitting ceX and seeing the "This raw flesh tastes terrible" message and seeing the little yellow Hungry sign go away. At least people can keep butchering corpses needlessly if it makes you feel hardcore and you enjoy the game more that way. However with this change everyone who mostly plays Crawl because they enjoy the tactical and strategic considerations doesn't have to wear out the poor c and e keys on their keyboard so fast. Not quite a win-win, I suppose, but perhaps a win for nearly everyone and a draw for the tiny number of people who mainly play DCSS in order to role play that they are eating elves?

It's not THE part I really enjoy, it's a part that I really enjoy ALONG with the vast majority of everything else in crawl.

Consider your attempt at belittling and ridicule thoroughly ineffectual, Mr. Blue Name :roll:

Now aside from that the only actual game play difference is the "no choice" between sacrificing corpses, eating them, and zombifying them. But as others have already pointed out this is an exceedingly uninteresting choice that in the insane overwhelming majority of cases has exactly 1 correct answer, and an answer that is pretty damn obvious: Eat the weakest corpse available when you are hungry. So it is not actually a choice. And aside from the tedium of butchering, this "choice" means that you now should take care not to butcher that hill giant carcass if a rat or quoka or something was also killed nearby. And it is even worse if the rat and hill giant died on the same blasted tile.

See the first paragraph in this post for elaboration on why the choice of corpse use is greatly underrated... underrating which seems to grow more common as you go up in the pecking ladder of crawl players, which probably means that it is not required for successful play; but wich can also mean it stems from habits developed over the course of playing 300000 games instead of only 10000 (pulling the numbers out of my arse here, you get my drift) and probably related to the "need" of reaching Pan in X moves and minutes less.

None of the other stuff listed by Psiweapon are precluded by the OP's recommendation. To be fair, Hirsch didn't go into those things very explicitly in the OP, but they were mentioned in the other thread and everyone (I think) was agreed that chunks would remain in game and that 1.) species with weird or special relationships to chunks would retain those relationships (ghoul troll kobold felid vampires etc.); and 2.) all the non-satiation purposes of chunks (mutagenic, sublimation of blood, etc.) would be retained. But even if those weren't brought up in the other thread from which this one spun off, there is nothing in the OP's recommendation that would prevent all those other things from staying in. So it is just nitpicking and basing one's criticisms off the assumption that this change would be implemented in the most idiotic way possible. Any idea executed poorly is going to suck, nothing new there.

My points of criticism stem directly from the proposed "satiation on kill" mechanic, and how it would lead to uncomprehensible causation. Making weird diet races stay as they are would only make it even more jarring: A human only need to clobber a goblin to death to gain satiation, a felid has to actually eat said goblin. If the purpose of such a reform is streamlining the steps a player has to take to avoid starvation, players who choose to play weird diet races are still stuck with the same butchering hassle as always, thus giving them an unfair disadvantage and partially defeating the point of the reform (We'll streamline the corpse fooding minigame/hassle, but only for normal-diet races, which can now mystically gain satiation from the act of killing itself, everyone else still has to butcher and eat chunks the old-fashioned way)

I have stated before that I am NOT against butchering removal, I am against satiation on kill.

I am not assuming this change would be implemented in the most idiotic way possible, I'm working with what has been stated, and my pretty specific points of criticism can very well serve as a highlight for possible shortcomings of the proposed change, thus even allowing it to be improved upon.

As you can check for yourself, Hirsch I has much less against my criticism than you do, your approach here falls squarely into a case of being more papist than the Pope himself.

Oh I guess there are the claims about "opaque and spoilery," but that is simply a matter of how well any new system is explained; one might as well call the new training system erected after victory dancing was removed "opaque and spoilery." Frankly I think at present it is much worse in terms of spoilers, based on how often newer (and sometimes not-so-new) players overreact to hunger. The current system is in fact already opaque in terms of game play (what matters most), and much worse, it is opaque in a way that leads to bad and tedious play because people actually think they need to manage their food costs really really carefully. "Opacity" in and of itself isn't bad; Crawl chooses to be opaque sometimes precisely in order to discourage people from concerning themselves with things they shouldn't worry about. I think that rationale should be extended to chunks usage; if it *can* be automated without removing any interesting choices, it should be.

I don't even attempt to manage hunger costs really carefully, I just do whatever I feel like doing, and then bring myself back to satiated or engorged if possible. I hit starving quite frequently as a result of ability or spell costs (heroism and vampiric draining make me particularly prone to that)

It is a de facto "spoiler" at present that hunger almost never matters unless you are doing really weird things that you shouldn't be doing for a dozen other reasons that are more important than hunger. So let's remove that spoiler.

Weird things? Such as using god abilities liberally in order not to die?


Whew! Almost as long as a char dump! :mrgreen:
Hirsch I wrote:Also,are you calling me a power-gamer? this is highly offensive! now excuse me, I have to go back to my GrBe game, that I savescummed until trog gave me a Vampiric +9 claymore.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 20:07

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I didn't read everything, but please don't do something weird. I would prefer hitting 'c' once in a while(the rest is up to init.txt) over bad flavour and gimickness.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 20:27

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I apologize if the first paragraph of my earlier post came off as demeaning, but typing so much about how you enjoy making your characters eat elf chunks (in all caps no less) makes it seem that (with respect to this topic at least) you are willing to subordinate core game play features to your own idiosyncratic enjoyment of basically incidental flavor messages. Of course people are free to enjoy Crawl however they like, including in idiosyncratic ways. Live and let live. But if you are going to talk about game design we should try to keep a wider perspective. Some people enjoyed (or at least "didn't mind") victory dancing, for example; they thought it was interesting that you had to go find a plant or cast stuff at walls. That's fine, and if you really enjoy that, you can still do it. It just isn't required.

So along similar lines I guess I'd be fine if eating chunks stayed in the game, but chunks provided no satiation in most circumstances; only certain species (like kobolds, Trolls, etc., dudes with =gourmand if you keep that amulet in game) actually get nutrition from chunks. Everyone else basically gets a slower food clock that is mediated by how many dudes you kill in combat, with a couple of caveats if you want to keep the same game play in "chunkless" branches.

Anyway, it is fine for specific species to have weird mechanics, including ones that are arguably more tedious (at least in some people's opinion) than more "normal" species. The difference is that with species choice you have opted in to that way of playing, rather than having it forced upon you. It is already the case currently that some of the species have strange hunger mechanics, some people like that others don't, since there are a lot of different species to choose from everyone can have a good time. Ditto with sacrifices, and ditto with using necromancy—although there are more trade-offs there and so sometimes having to take the good with the bad kind of sucks. But that's okay, because most players (and I think the devs too) are probably on board with making some kind of auto-sacrificing the default, if not removing it entirely. Also note that annoying interface with necromancy has been changed for the better (cf. how twisted resurrection used to work), although more work could be done here. (If some good way to streamline simulacrum and sub. of blood was patched I bet it would be added, but I suspect that coming up with a good interface there is trickier than it might at first seem.)

How to use corpses can be interesting but that has nothing to do with eating chunks. There are so many chunks throughout so much of the game, and you have permafood to fall back on, so the chance that any particular choice you make with regard to eating or not eating a chunk actually having an important consequence is infinitesimally small. It is fine if some decisions are not momentous, but when this nearly always trivial decision is being made hundreds and hundreds of times throughout the game, it seems to indicate something is wrong. There have been ways of trying to make chunk eating more meaningful (sickness + nausea, then just nausea) and, while I understand what those were going for, they had a terrible impact on game play, and were thus (rightly) removed.

So keep chunks, keep some important decisions in terms of how to use corpses for people who opt to use the tools that turn corpses into a resource, lose satiation gain from eating chunks for most species. The only question is how, and Hirsch I had an interesting and novel idea for how to do that.
Last edited by and into on Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 20:33, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 20:30

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Amnesiac wrote:I didn't read everything, but please don't do something weird. I would prefer hitting 'c' once in a while(the rest is up to init.txt) over bad flavour and gimickness.


In some branches, with some characters, chunk juggling purely for satiation can take up a non-negligible portion of your time, especially if you are playing webtiles that is terrible if it is laggy. It isn't "once in a while" and while you can do rc file stuff to automate it, if that leads to much better game play something should be done in game as a default because it clearly, openly, and obviously contradicts core principles of Crawl design.

As for flavor... "This raw flesh tastes terrible."

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 22:17

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

What if we add autobutcher at hungry for rats, quokkas and such(give a lot of nutrition, don't give much piety). That would automate most of the dungeon eating.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 23:06

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

@psiweapon, please put your posts in code tags, thank you. :lol:
the point of it all is: my proposal still needs some smoothing and engraving, but the devs already want to remove chunk eating, see "The Other Thread". if they will try and do so, why not do so in a way that makes you not worry about minor and unimportant things that you cant leave alone because you will die if you do so? why having to press more keys, mindlessy, consume more time, just for a very minor design bonus? flavour is not a good answer, after we get used to it, you can swing halberds at killer bees, an titan can be unable pass over a rat... the game does not need to mimic reality, nor does it try to do so.
as for the point of "this would be spoilery" (bingo), please tell me: if you started playing the game right now, the chunk eating mechanic would be intuitive? you would immediately think that one needs to press 'c', over a chunk, to chop the edible parts, eat them when they get a hunger warning, except if you are a troll, a kobold, or a felid, carry the chunk until that happens, but drop it if it rots, except if you have the saprovore trait.... and even worse, would you think that to have an gaming experience that does not need all this annoying and useless work you would need to alter the init.txt, with some specific configurations, that will make your game slightly suboptimal?
I teached the game for some people (my roomate, my girlfriend and a friend), and the thing they had more trouble understanding was: how do I manage food, and how important is that? i did too, but nausea was a thing at the time.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 23:06

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Psiweapon wrote:See the first paragraph in this post for elaboration on why the choice of corpse use is greatly underrated... underrating which seems to grow more common as you go up in the pecking ladder of crawl players, which probably means that it is not required for successful play; but wich can also mean it stems from habits developed over the course of playing 300000 games instead of only 10000 (pulling the numbers out of my arse here, you get my drift) and probably related to the "need" of reaching Pan in X moves and minutes less.
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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 23:19

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

the forums are amusing.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 02:29

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Hirsch I wrote:@psiweapon, please put your posts in code tags, thank you. :lol:
the point of it all is: my proposal still needs some smoothing and engraving, but the devs already want to remove chunk eating, see "The Other Thread". if they will try and do so, why not do so in a way that makes you not worry about minor and unimportant things that you cant leave alone because you will die if you do so? why having to press more keys, mindlessy, consume more time, just for a very minor design bonus? flavour is not a good answer, after we get used to it, you can swing halberds at killer bees, an titan can be unable pass over a rat... the game does not need to mimic reality, nor does it try to do so.

I don't care about it precisely because I do it mindlessly, my muscle memory does it for me - to the point I even had to double-check it was the 'c' key (c, y, y, y, typical case of three jackals and a hobgoblin that died on the same spot - one of the jackals didn't leave a corpse) and not the 'b' key. Also to the point where on the odd occasion I roll a SpAK I still butcher the first two or three corpses until I remember I can't eat them and should be sacrificing them instead.

I'm seriously unable to care about the number of keypresses and the time they take, or at least not in the amounts we're talking about here, because I do use autoexplore unless I'm trying to explore a level following a certain pattern.


as for the point of "this would be spoilery" (bingo), please tell me: if you started playing the game right now, the chunk eating mechanic would be intuitive? you would immediately think that one needs to press 'c', over a chunk, to chop the edible parts, eat them when they get a hunger warning, except if you are a troll, a kobold, or a felid, carry the chunk until that happens, but drop it if it rots, except if you have the saprovore trait.... and even worse, would you think that to have an gaming experience that does not need all this annoying and useless work you would need to alter the init.txt, with some specific configurations, that will make your game slightly suboptimal?

This depends on the gaming background. Coming from other roguelikes, yes, I would expect a food clock to be present. What was weird back in the day was butchering itself, because I was used to eating corpses straight away in NetHack. It was also weird that it was called "butchering" but the command wasn't "b" but rather "c" for "chopping". I think I started playing Crawl with 0.5, since I remember the introduction of Cheibriados while I was already playing. For the record, my interest in playing online crawl came about with the 0.12 survey, and only materialized when Lantea appeared - I thought it was a good time to give online a try since a new server just popped up, in europe no less. After that, I just became hooked to trunk :) although I still download the newest stable version to most of the computers I have access to... just in case... :roll:

With no roguelike background, having to eat makes little sense, unless you've played some roguelite or roguelikelike before, such as happened to me with Ehrgeiz (the dungeon mode is an incredibly addictive mindless drone, the item customization is also pretty cool, but the ending is as godawful as a punch in the nuts)

As I have already said, in this particular case the annoyance of keypresses is beyond me; and striving for optimal gaming is beyond me in general. I guess I just have very very little of Spike in me.

I teached the game for some people (my roomate, my girlfriend and a friend), and the thing they had more trouble understanding was: how do I manage food, and how important is that? i did too, but nausea was a thing at the time.


I can understand that too, and I was glad that nausea was removed too, mostly because it could led to a starvation spiral of sorts. I was also glad that the need for butchering tools was gradually lessened up to outright removal.

duvessa wrote:
Psiweapon wrote:See the first paragraph in this post for elaboration on why the choice of corpse use is greatly underrated... underrating which seems to grow more common as you go up in the pecking ladder of crawl players, which probably means that it is not required for successful play; but wich can also mean it stems from habits developed over the course of playing 300000 games instead of only 10000 (pulling the numbers out of my arse here, you get my drift) and probably related to the "need" of reaching Pan in X moves and minutes less.
"All the best crawl players say I'm wrong. That must mean I'm better than them."


Any given thing is supported by a self-important minority. That must mean it's best practice to oppose it by default.

Alternatively:

Any given thing is supported by a minority of people. From that doesn't follow that I have to agree, much less that I have to refrain for voicing my opinion.

For this particular case:

Any given troll has a higher post count, win rate or play antiquity than me. That doesn't mean I have to give a flying fuck about their snarky comebacks.

Nevermind that I actually gave detailed arguments to back my position. :roll:
Hirsch I wrote:Also,are you calling me a power-gamer? this is highly offensive! now excuse me, I have to go back to my GrBe game, that I savescummed until trog gave me a Vampiric +9 claymore.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 03:36

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

you are pretty caustic anyway, Psi. please, lets not turn this thread into a brawl with so much noise and venom no dev will actually pay attention to the proposal. that applies to And Into as well (even tough I think psi started the acidic spiral, but that is not the point.)

but you understand now? you play since the time of judas, when most new players where not even thinking of being alive. after THAT much time pressing c/y/y/y to get some chunks you do not care anymore. but that is not true for people like me, who played the game for a year or so. yes, we can train ourselves to not care, but we can hit our heads in the wall until we start enjoying it as well. and even people who played for quite some time get annoyed by this. is just pointless.

your arguments where pretty detailed, that does not mean they where good. as and into said, you based your entire post, (well, maybe half of it) on the presumption that the idea would be executed in one of the worst ways possible. the devs are pretty good at what they do, don't worry.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 03:59

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Hirsch, replying by PM so as not to derail this thread any further :)
Hirsch I wrote:Also,are you calling me a power-gamer? this is highly offensive! now excuse me, I have to go back to my GrBe game, that I savescummed until trog gave me a Vampiric +9 claymore.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 04:02

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

okay, dont kill yourselves.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 15:32

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Hirsch I wrote:as for the point of "this would be spoilery" (bingo), please tell me: if you started playing the game right now, the chunk eating mechanic would be intuitive? you would immediately think that one needs to press 'c', over a chunk, to chop the edible parts, eat them when they get a hunger warning, except if you are a troll, a kobold, or a felid, carry the chunk until that happens, but drop it if it rots, except if you have the saprovore trait.... and even worse, would you think that to have an gaming experience that does not need all this annoying and useless work you would need to alter the init.txt, with some specific configurations, that will make your game slightly suboptimal?
I teached the game for some people (my roomate, my girlfriend and a friend), and the thing they had more trouble understanding was: how do I manage food, and how important is that? i did too, but nausea was a thing at the time.



There's been a tutorial for a while now that explains hunger and food just fine, including what to press.
The above post is for entertainment purposes only. If you think anything I ever say is backed by fact, or if you cite things I've said in any argument ever, you are insane.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 16:43

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

so it can explain the new sistem as well. thats the point.
but the tutorial wont help newbies to understand hou important or not is food management, not how to alter the init file so it is not awful.
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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 17:34

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

What about the coaliton of good gods and their anti-fun policy (no cannibalism)?

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Post Wednesday, 19th February 2014, 17:39

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

You would just not gain any nutrition for killing monsters of your own race (or in the case of Zin, sentient monsters). It is very rarely a correct choice to lose piety just in order to get the nutrition from a forbidden chunk so this wouldn't change anything.
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Post Thursday, 20th February 2014, 12:34

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

Hirsch I wrote:the point of it all is: my proposal still needs some smoothing and engraving, but the devs already want to remove chunk eating, see "The Other Thread". if they will try and do so, why not do so in a way that makes you not worry about minor and unimportant things that you cant leave alone because you will die if you do so?

Yes, there is some momentum to remove chunk eating, but this isn't what this thread is about, is it? I don't really understand the second phrase I've quoted. Unless it refers to the chunk eating removal and not the nutrition from kills.
But so far, it seems the discussion is: "nutrition from kills is bad" vs "but it's better than butchering and eating chunks". I think you should focus your argument on how your proposal is better than simply removing chunk eating. IMO, the (presumed) upside is that it is easier to balance since we mostly keep the same available nutrition and also branch differentiation. The downside is that it is weird and unintuitive. I also think that the current nutrition balance is quite broken so I don't think there is any need to try to preserve it. It is much simpler to balance it by just increasing permafood, or even better permafood nutrition (eating less often).

tl;dr: I don't like this proposal. It introduces a weird and complicated mechanism to try to preserve a broken balance. Just remove chunk eating and balance the nutrition with permafood.
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Post Thursday, 20th February 2014, 13:11

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

I think this would be weird, too. But what I'm concerned about is how this would work with ghouls, vampires and gourmands. And if we just leave chunks/blood for them it would be not fair. Also, while saying that vampires would be easily changed he didn't say how...
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Post Thursday, 20th February 2014, 18:14

Re: Nutrition for kills as an alternative to chunks.

acually, this proposal was tought as a plan B, just in case the complete removal of chunks dont float. is easier to balance, needs less changes, and we are already pretty sure abou the outcome.
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