Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 11111
Joined: Friday, 8th February 2013, 12:00
Common crawl problems
1) Luring.
No matter what character you play you should always retreat before fighting, it is extremely
a) time consuming
b) boring
c) repetitive.
Is there any way how we can solve this issue? My suggestion is to temporarily decrease slaying and spell power when running away from monsters. The longer you run the worse your slaying and spell power become. This way you can still use running as escape tool but luring as tactics becomes inefficient. Of course the effect should not instantly disappear when you turn around a corner, it should gradually return back to normal when you are not retreating.
If shouting near a corner is a problem, shouting can trigger the same negative effect (equivalent of retreating 6-7 tiles with monster in LoS).
2) Popcorn fight with melee/launcher. Again time consuming, boring and repetitive. For instance, you can spend many turns killing Orcs in Mines without any danger. There should be a slowly increasing negative effect for fighting too long. Some ideas: regeneration slows and eventually stops, accuracy penalty, EV penalty, AC penalty. The effect increases every time you kill a harmless/weak monster and decreases after spending N consecutive turns without melee/launcher attacks (throwing counts as launcher attack here). Notice that it means that when fighting Orc Warlord and plain Orcs you should try to kill Orc Warlord first but it will not be that easy because you cannot retreat without a penalty (see first point above).
3) All tiles are the same, there are no tiles where you get +/- AC or +/- EV or +/- MR or even something as cardinal as +/-action speed or have a chance to waste a turn etc. It is boring and repetitive, you fight the same monsters again and again in the same circumstances. When you are caught in bad area you should not be able to just run and find a better place to fight like you do now, fortunately first point helps here too.
4) MP regeneration. Casters are the least fun characters, with rangers you at least can use autoexplore to pickup all missiles (or play "no mulch" branch). Casters retreat too much. I think they can benefit from Vehumet-like effect when you get some MP back for kills. It should not give as much MP as Vehumet gives but still can help to stay longer in the fight and retreat less. To fix problem with potentially too long fights like currently happens with melee/ranged, it can be a similar slowly increasing penalty for killing weak/harmless monsters. Natural MP regeneration can slow down and stop like I suggest for regeneration in second point.
5) Spells. You should not be able to have regeneration, repel missiles or statue form always active. It is boring, time consuming and repetitive again. Player should make decisions - do I want to have Repel Missiles vs that Draconian pack on Zot 5 or should I keep it inactive in order to activate it later vs Ancient Lich if I meet it? I suggest to make all those spells incur Draining or have cooldown before being able to activate it again (like Exh does for berserk). This solves old problem with "recast RMsl while autoexploring" from 0.12 without introducing "I always learn RMsl and have it active" problems of 0.16.
Main problem I see with crawl is that it has a few tactical decisions. Strategic decisions like what skill to train and what spell to learn are fine. If we remove luring from current game, we have nothing interesting left, basically it's "try to kill the monster and be ready to escape if it does not work". This is boring, we should have more decisions without unobvious answers: should I retreat to a better tile, should I cast the spell now, should I attack with the weapon? Basically we should have more XL 27 characters die to rat packs. Probably scrolls of teleportation/blinking etc. should be made more common to compensate for increased difficulty.
Full Windows 64 bit version can be downloaded at https://www.dropbox.com/s/7ufdv1a2qbn6b ... 9.zip?dl=0
I play offline.