Blades Runner
Posts: 616
Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19
Inventory Management Overview
Assuming all items can be useful for different situations (if not they shouldn't exist..), I believe it can safely be said that picking up most all item types, especially early on has advantages. There might be a slight drain of food clock (I don't find an issue at all currently) or a slight drain of god piety for the extra turns to pick up more items - but they don't amount to all that much as a penalty. When collecting an assortment of items, at least until mid-game and sometimes even later on, you don't know precisely what you might need later on and what you need also depends on what you find along the way.
Examples:
* You grab ammo early, then you come across a rocking ranged weapon.. you don't have to go all the way back up the dungeon running around with "stash tracker" to pick everything up. Yes, you can use search commands to find things you want, but I would find this to be the most tedious of all forms of "evaluating what you have to work with and compare".
* You grab multiple armour pieces, you're not sure if you're going to need light, medium or heavy armour until you see what spellbooks, weapons or other gear along the way.
* You grab items you mostly know you won't have any use for until much later on or for specific areas of the dungeon.
I think of items in two categories:
1) Combat set
This includes your best weapons, your worn armour with possibly a swap or two, the most critical scrolls such as (blink, teleport, recharging, etc.), potions such as (curing, heal wounds, haste, agility (maybe), might (maybe), berserker rage (maybe), magic (maybe).. etc. For wands, I generally only slot space for heal wounds, disintegration, digging (secondly), haste and maybe invisibility. Wands of fire, cold and lightning come in handy early for hydras or perhaps later on for element specific hell branch bosses. To make a longer story shorter, basically after I "trim" my inventory, I'm usually holding between 28-32 items in inventory. This leaves me about 20ish spaces free to pick up loot.
2) Utility items
Stuff you generally want to hang onto but that does not usually (or nearly as probably) affect your immediate chances of survival. This includes things like potions of cure mutation, mutation, all the excess piles of food (pizza, jerky, fruit, and the lesser of bread or meat rations), remove curse, identify (borderline combat set item), ammo if you think you might want to use it later, staffs if you might want them later, *spell books*... omg, who really wants to figure out what set of spells to memorize by typing in search each individual spell name to see if you have it available one at time..... Armour you want to keep but aren't ready for yet, enchant scrolls you want to save but not use yet, rings, amulets, any artefact which may mix and match better later on, etc. etc. etc. There really is *no* way all this stuff could fit in inventory with your combat set.
The issue:
So, I hate the 52 slot limit, but I understand that it would be too overpowered to have every item you ever found handy to use immediately or with a turn or so to swap to the perfect weapon type+brand per monster (and that's not really what I'd like to do normally anyhow.) On the other hand, I realize how much more effective my games are when I collect a more diverse set of loot and organize it. "The stash", as it would be referred to.... this is the solution. I can choose to not have a stash, and play sub-optimally but for me much of the game is chewing over what I've found and comparing it with my stats, skills, character type, race, and overall development. So, I usually make a stash in lair, then later move it to the hell vestibule. The interface is really clunky though, although you can select all of a certain type of item, you cannot view only a certain type of item on a single tile. So, rather than paging through tons of crap to find/compare what I have available (still better than individual manual searches), I make multiple piles on the ground by general mass pickup/drop type categories.
What bothers me is, I am forced to choose between either what I consider sub-optimal play (I usually go for 15 rune games with all bosses dead) to ignore items and leave them scattered all over the place where I cannot easily see/compare what I have and switch up my gear at strategic points (clearing a different branch for example) OR I've got to make these stashes. The stash also provides clear advantages when conserving scrolls of remove curse, because you can try stuff on in all equipment slots at once and go for removing multiple curses at a time, and in a safer location. I've found it's not generally smart to don heavy armour as-you-go... then a spawn in a still dangerous area catches you with your "pants down".
The problem with making the stashes are:
* If you want to keep your probability of success always high, you're always working with a buffer of about 20 slots of free space to pick up what are a lot more than 20 possible item/types. So you dive into a branch, and then blam.. you're full and you have to return to the stash to "unload". This is a constant break in what I consider the action of diving into a branch. I would much prefer to start a branch and be able to go start to finish without interruptions of "hauling crap back to stash".
* You can only drop all of a certain type (like all potions), but you cannot define without a lot of tedious inscribing to drop all except X,Y and Z (combat set items). So clearing those 20 items out of inventory at the stash becomes mostly a manual one at a time operation. To make matters worse (see above), it also requires moving around to the correct pile. This last issue could be solved fairly easily by adding a filter to the "get" command that screens out all items but of a certain type (not just select options.)
* Moving stashes from lair and also usually vaults to hell vestibule is just annoying. Even if you strip to the bone, if you have a hundred items (or more) you're looking at a few trips back and forth at least. Once stuff is in the hell vestibule, I don't mind the stash anymore because there are so many doors to it, and it's pretty central to all the end-game branches. The other factor which helps by late game is also of course that the number of items which become irrelevant to collect increases as your gear improves.
The problem even if you don't make a stash:
Your inventory fills up to 52 item types very easily. I recently tested this with a fighter, I set every spellbook, every staff, every item I consider mostly useless to no-pickup.. zero ammo, tossing out all wands but one or two and still, stuff I really wanted to save... nope, didn't fit. So what happens then... you manually try and figure out 2-5 items you can somehow get rid of or clear out, then that space fills up in no time at all. Because of the inventory sifting, manually dropping stuff - happening practically every minute or two, it just winds up annoying me even more than building a stash and dealing with the 20 item buffer and waypoint bounce-bounce every 5-10 minutes instead.
The proposals:
Once again I'd like to reiterate I think having every item you ever find always instantly available is too overpowered. I don't want to change the 52 items (instantly, or depending on type like wearing armour) available. This would also fall into the automatically rejected ideas pile, and I understand why. However, the tedium or forced sub optimal play style and decision making handicap of having a big mess all over the dungeon and the constant break in action to try to make room in inventory if only from auto-explore picking things up needs improvement from the standpoint that it would improve my game experience greatly, hugely.
1) Have two commands, "g" get, picks up an item (as normal) into the limited 52 space inventory as-is, normally. An alternate command "s" (or some key) for a "stash" command transfers the item to a larger bag. The difference would be that to either stash an item into the bag, or to take an item out of it would be that it takes more time to stash or retrieve an item out of the stash bag. This means, the stuff wouldn't be as easily available for critical combat situations. However, you could review all items in your stash bag (by type) to make longer term decisions without the tedium of making piles on the floor and making tons of round trips. I wouldn't change anything at all about leaving stuff on the ground, if it makes sense for someone for any reason, I would just add this new functionality. The super big bonus would be with the "\" command where you define what you want auto-explore to pickup or not, if it could toggle between auto-pickup or auto-stash by item type. Another alternate idea would be to have a new command where you define item types you want to push from your 52 space inventory into your stash bag with a "stash all" type of command. This would allow people to play as-is without a longer time delay stashing as they go with auto-explore, but let them get full.. try to find a nice safe hiding place, then press one button to take a longer period of time where you essentially button-push your inventory to split your "defined utility items" into stash bag (time based on quantity and/or type.)
2) If the above functionality is too good for everyone (being pessimistic about the response), how about a translocation spell which accomplishes roughly the same concept. A "magic chest", which resides in another dimension and you must cast to open the portal, it takes some magic and some time - again, not so easily combat-ready as your 52 space inventory. Let the character be vulnerable in the style of passwall or something while casting it for a minimum amount of time.
3) Abyss, Pandemonium and Zigs - they probably need to interfere with the concept to maintain balance. Just have it not operate in these locations.
Summary:
Some people might love playing a STR only character, holding one weapon and ignoring 80% or more of all items in the game if it doesn't fit into an extremely simple model. Fine, leave them alone, these changes don't have to affect them. For the rest of us who like the more complex dynamics and enjoy tinkering with hybrids and mixing and matching between larger sets of items, please give us a way to accomplish it in a less tedious manner, without removing the strategic aspect of needing to make decisions about what items are, or are not readily available at a moment's notice for use in an instant. I love dungeon crawl and I have a lot of experience playing it, thus why the lengthy and detailed post - because I very much would like to see my own greatest personal issue with the game improved.
If you read all this, I thank you for your time and consideration!
Best Regards,
-Svendre
Edit: I just recalled, there is a similar system in TOME, they call a transmog bag. It doesn't work exactly as my proposal, but it accomplishes roughly the same thing.. you can zoom through the game, then at the end of the branch - you pick out what you actually want to keep all at once and the rest gets discarded. Stuff in the transmog is not useable. Anyways, probably some of you at least have played TOME, it's a nice feature although I don't see that it makes perfect sense in Dungeon Crawl exactly as-is. It's not a bad point of reference for discussion on this subject however. I don't know any TOME players who do not simply love it. My guess is that it is liked from a memory/space conservation point of view as well, server-side.