Tuesday, 13th September 2016, 14:28 by JFunk
These weak monsters already give insignificant amounts of exp, and if you're obsessed with killing them for that "optimal" exp, it's only your own obsessions that are betraying you. The gain is not significant enough to affect your game at all, and you're just wasting turns that will ultimately lower your score (so much for "optimal"). If you spend any meaningful amount of time intentionally searching this experience, the scum timer will kick in ruthlessly quick. I regularly generate Deep Trolls in early dungeon not by intentional scumming, but simply by following Tavern orthodoxy when playing one of the so-called "best species" -- centaurs. Even if you aggressively try to farm monsters (and I have, on certain tougher, exp-impoverished builds, when trying to rush an ability), your efforts will barely move the needle. A handful of extra yak packs does virtually nothing for a PC's progress and imposes real costs in terms of piety, and yes, even food. (You will burn through food FAST when scumming as the rate of monster generation slows down and you have to chow a ration or two between each pack that generates.)
As has correctly been pointed out, imposing an arbitrary "no more exp" cutoff or gradient just arbitrarily penalizes the player. Removing the monsters from the map based on the assumptions of some algorithm that knows nothing about how you play the game would be even worse.
There is no such thing as a trivial monster. Weaker monsters become threatening in groups, which is what most dangerous situations in crawl involve. Monsters ranked "easy" by the game still kill players all the time. The "war of attrition" is a well-known way to die from weaker monsters. I know your characters only die when they get shafted 3 floors on their first move off the staircase on D1 and dropped immediately adjacent to an ogre with a spiked club, but try getting back in touch with reality again and scroll down that big meaty non-winning section of the high score list to see what's actually killing players.
Plus, weaker monsters make advanced tactics possible, like using weaker or slower hostile monsters to block fire or detain stronger monsters. (This is one of the reasons that it's also generally a bad idea to remove slow monsters from the game simply because "you can just walk away from them" or "they are just free exp." In fact, those monsters can be used creatively by the player, and if the player walks away from them, they run the risk of being sandwiched later on when luring another monster on the same level.) Even the truly "trivial" can provide food, blood, or be confused, paralyzed, or enslaved to block a hallway. Hordes of monsters are integral to a Necromancer's typical approach. (Although it seems that Necromancy is currently in the process of being watered down from its former state as one of the best computer game implementations of Necromancy that exists, so maybe this nerf would be considered desirable.)
It seems like this is one of those things where anything that interrupts a berserker's TabTabTab, or even theoretically provides a slight benefit to a strategy that diverges from TabTabTab is considered "tedious" and therefore a "problem."
- For this message the author JFunk has received thanks: 2
- pedritolo, Seven Deadly Sins