devs can do what they want. If they want to remove mountain dwarves, they can remove mountain dwarves. If they want to keep food, they can keep food. (This is a good thing.) Why should that affect my position?
ontoclasm wrote:Detect Creatures, since you insist on ramming your head against the wall, currently exists in exactly two forms. A rare Xom effect, which is a joke, and via Ashenzari.
The Xom effect is equivalent to the old spell Detect Creatures -- it happens instantaneously, similar to magic mapping. You don't have to check every turn, because it only happens once. You look around once, as you do when using a mmap scroll. This is fine; the problem is when you have to do it every single turn.
That is absolutely untrue, AKA a bald-headed lie.
I don't know how the Xom effect works (as if Xom needs to be consistent) but the dowsing card
continuously updates the positions of monsters far beyond your LOS as long as you have the Emp status effect, and it can last a long time.
I did not have Ash in mind - I know he won't put item/threat symbols on your screen if you have nothing blocking or reducing your LOS. But since you brought Ash up, why leave out passive mapping? It reveals far-off tiles with almost every step. You can get away with sub-optimally not looking beyond your LOS, which renders most passive mapping moot, but the fact remains that
devs thought it would be a good idea to give players passive mapping.
You seem to enjoy having found a seeming shortcoming and latched on to it, painting it inexcusable, while the same thing has been going on under your nose for
versions.
And there has been nothing to cause alarm in the first place, at all. Like, when you first brought this up, you pictured an Ancient Lich coming around and sneaking up on you. By the way, if an ancient lich is a serious threat even after the damage reduction, you'd be already in big danger and checking the whole screen every turn, or more likely, escaping. Anyway, suppose lich walks into view. In console, as in tiles, you would still see it among the list of monsters on the right, below the statuses bar. If this is your first time ever seeing the lich, you'll also get the message that an ancient lich walks into view.
Now, there
are things that can fail to get your attention if you're not looking - silence/umbra/halo auras. They're not announced so you can skip turns while they enter your LOS. But this can already happen during the equivalent and much more common practice of tabbing and auto-exploring:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16071 In either case it can be avoided with a modicum of vigilance.
Don't even get me started on the
unpreventable deprivation of information Crawl enforces. Like when an invisible orc wizard or Sigmund throws flame at you, there's a brief streak across the screen telling you where the caster is. Missed it? Too bad! Unless the game froze at that exact moment and prompted you to press a key, in which case you can see the entire streak frozen in place. (Admittedly Crawl has been becoming better with this: it used to be that a monster wandering in and out of view would leave no trace. You wouldn't know where you saw it and you missed the opportunity to xv it. In later versions, as it leaves, the monster can leave an imprint of itself outside your LOS as a remembered monster.) From some of your earliest gameplay, Crawl is already telling you that such interface screws don't matter, and the game is to be enjoyed regardless.
Are we ready to stop pretending that "console users might need to scroll sometimes" is some kind of dealbreaker?