duvessa wrote:This is all covered in the thread linked to from the first post, and the thread linked to from that one.
Siegurt wrote:I'm honestly not sure what problem people are trying to solve here, "Pillar dancing is boring" is not solved by removing energy randomization.
If you want to melee a speed 10 monster then energy randomization makes it optimal to wait (or do whatever) until it's 1 square away, then move away from it until randomized energy moves it next to you. This way, you get the most favourable melee combat with it. Removing energy randomization would get rid of this tedious behaviour.
Yes, it's theoretically optimal to do so (knowing that it might never happen, if the odds run that way, it may just stay one square from you forever.)
This is roughly as powerful as it would be to be able to 'wait 1 AUT until the critter steps next to you' (You can get close to this and take many short duration actions instead, with much less tediousness, but less accuracy)
However this is really only a net benefit for combats that take a short duration, the longer the combat is, the more the rounding makes this initial "I get to go first" rounding problem irrelevant. It's also only optimal if one considers only the combat itself, and not the additional detriment that dragging around a critter until energy randomization manages to kick it over into a double move towards you has on your game (piety bleed, food, likelihood of attracting random creatures, ultimately OOD spawns etc.) I'm *really* not convinced that the advantage gained here is worth the cost (particularly since there are other ways of getting at least a significant part of this advantage already, which aren't tedious and don't take dragging critters all over the level)
It's also less of a benefit the faster your attacks are, the faster your attack speed, the more quickly the rounding causes the number of your attacks per monster attacks to equal the theoretical average (Which is what you're exploiting here, knowing that if you get 10 attacks for every 11 of the monster's, you can make that 11th attack happen at the end of the cycle instead of somewhere in the middle or beginning, giving you 1:1 attacks for the first 10)
I have yet to encounter anyone who considers this to be optimal strategy and uses it to any advantage, but I *have* encountered people who get unluckly or make a bad decision about whether to engage a creature and will keep pace with a creature indefinitely regenerating hps or mana until they have enough to re-engage, with no energy randomization, that stalemate can go on forever, and the player can and should tediously run around in a circle forever on each and every combat that doesn't go well. Energy randomization breaks up this pattern by sometimes letting the player break off and get away, and sometimes lets the monster get a whack on the player while they're fleeing, This situation without energy randomization is in fact a *more* tedious situation than the one you describe with it (since it is deterministic, and works for as long as the player wants to do it) more common, and gives the player a larger benefit.
So yes, removing energy randomization would remove that one tedious thing you said, and replace it with something more tedious and more optimal. So while certainly not the greatest solution in the world, in the absence of a better solution, it's better than the alternative.
Some suggestions to remove the tediousness of 'use energy randomization to get the critter next to you with the least possible energy' that don't make 'run away from a creature who moves the same speed as you' a never-ending stalemate include:
1. Make '.' wait "for as many aut as it will take for the next creature in LOS to get a move" (There was a failed implementation of this at one point, the way it worked was to wait 1 aut and see if anything happened and do that over and over again, this was too much CPU load, but I suspect just scanning everything in LOS to see how much energy they have until they get an action then waiting that long would be fine.)
2. Make every monster get a random amount of starting energy after a double-move from positive energy randomization (This is a bit tricky, since lots of things get double moves just because they are fast, and it might be prone to some icky special casing, nevertheless, it would remove the optimial-ness of using energy randomization to get a critter next to you)
I'm sure there's other solutions as well. I'm also sure that there's other solutions to the "stalemate" problem, I just haven't heard one yet that doesn't make something else worse (Not to say we shouldn't keep trying)