Aut scoring


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bel

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Post Saturday, 4th February 2017, 20:08

Aut scoring

I found this old post while looking for something:

MarvinPA wrote:
tasonir wrote:The reason we don't just switch to aut scoring is that would completely destroy many types of speed running characters from ever being competitive again. Casters as a whole would be nerfed (10 aut casting speed vs 7 aut 2h melee weapons), no one could speed run with Chei anymore (Chei is the #1 god in terms of species high scores, a good enough proxy for "best speedrun god"). It would be extremely problematic and still vulnerable to being gamed in other ways - characters who find that early wand of hasting and then learn the haste spell are suddenly far superior to anyone who didn't...

Haste spell is the only thing there that's anything close to being an actual problem for aut scoring. Aut scoring has been discussed plenty in the past (to resolve the problem of there being two different types of turncount instead of one), as far as I'm aware it could quite feasibly become a thing especially if haste spell should ever have some kind of accident.

Now that haste spell (and wand of hasting) are removed, perhaps one can move to aut scoring? Chei could probably be tweaked so that it halves the "effective auts" for scoring purposes (or something like that).

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Post Sunday, 5th February 2017, 00:04

Re: Aut scoring

bel wrote:Chei could probably be tweaked so that it halves the "effective auts" for scoring purposes


Why?

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bel

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Post Sunday, 5th February 2017, 00:27

Re: Aut scoring

I would want to maintain scoring as close as possible to the current version. Also, it doesn't make sense to me if Chei characters (or Nagas for that matter) are penalized for their slow movement.

A factor of two isn't ideal (because only movement is slowed, not actions generally - and pre-worship movement is normal), but I think some kind of scaling factor should be used. Edge cases like players worshipping Chei on the orbrun should also be considered if such scaling is done.

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Post Sunday, 5th February 2017, 02:27

Re: Aut scoring

Breaking parity with current scores wouldn't be a problem - obviously it'd be nice to keep the numbers similar for average games, but high-scoring games clearly wouldn't really be comparable. When it's been discussed previously, there were plans to apply an overall species modifier for slow/fast races, but Cheibriados likely wouldn't be taken into account since a fixed modifier would be abusable, and one that changed depending on your actual time spent worshipping/piety level during worship would be ridiculously complicated (and there's nothing wrong with the slow god coincidentally being bad for speedrun purposes).

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bel

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Post Sunday, 5th February 2017, 05:59

Re: Aut scoring

It's not about speedrunning to me; non-speedrun scores would also be affected. If the score is to mean something, then arbitrarily penalizing Chei characters doesn't make sense to me. It's not like Chei is super-strong that it needs a "nerf".

Would a scaling factor really be complicated to implement? The game already notes when you become a worshipper and when/if you abandon Chei. I had in mind something like just taking the difference of the times and scaling it by some factor. Chei already does weird things like reducing monster spawning during orbrun.
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Post Sunday, 5th February 2017, 12:20

Re: Aut scoring

MarvinPA wrote:Breaking parity with current scores wouldn't be a problem - obviously it'd be nice to keep the numbers similar for average games, but high-scoring games clearly wouldn't really be comparable. When it's been discussed previously, there were plans to apply an overall species modifier for slow/fast races, but Cheibriados likely wouldn't be taken into account since a fixed modifier would be abusable, and one that changed depending on your actual time spent worshipping/piety level during worship would be ridiculously complicated (and there's nothing wrong with the slow god coincidentally being bad for speedrun purposes).


Not to mention that the incoming changes to extended will totally mess up the current high scores.
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Post Monday, 6th February 2017, 23:55

Re: Aut scoring

MarvinPA wrote:(and there's nothing wrong with the slow god coincidentally being bad for speedrun purposes).

Yes, there absolutely is. Also, Cheibriados is the god of TIME, and the god of TIME should be excellent at speedruns :)'

Also, the original post doesn't list a rationale for why aut scoring would be superior to action count scoring. The main reason why it would be a large step backwards is it kills off spellcaster and chei runs entirely, and as a more minor issue further increases the reasons to focus on weapon skill as your attack delay is now costing you points. You'd see people train nothing but weapon skill to min delay in an attempt to shave off auts, which may be interesting in that it will make your character weaker. But skilling your character to abuse the score formula rather than actual in game effectiveness seems like the kind of scummy behavior we'd rather avoid introducing.

I don't really think there is any flaw with the action count system that aut is fixing. I suppose that action count and turn count being two different measures of time could confuse someone who doesn't know the differences, but action count is far superior for scoring and should be preserved.

TL;DR: aut/turncount scoring would heavily skew speedruns towards berserkers/melee and basically remove casters/chei characters from consideration, greatly reducing build diversity and turning speedrunning into a monotonous "who plays berserkers/DD of Makhleb best" contest.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 05:01

Re: Aut scoring

tasonir wrote:But skilling your character to abuse the score formula rather than actual in game effectiveness seems like the kind of scummy behavior we'd rather avoid introducing.
You mean like swinging slow weapons instead of resting because it lets you use fewer actions? Like making your character weaker by taking a specific weak god on over a third of all recent <50,000 turn 15-rune wins, just because you can use that god's penalty to exploit the scoring system?

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 05:42

Re: Aut scoring

Shallow water = reduced score?
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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 05:47

Re: Aut scoring

Score should involve multiplying realtime seconds, in-game auts and player actions together.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 06:37

Re: Aut scoring

bel wrote:Would a scaling factor really be complicated to implement? The game already notes when you become a worshipper and when/if you abandon Chei. I had in mind something like just taking the difference of the times and scaling it by some factor. Chei already does weird things like reducing monster spawning during orbrun.


Chei's speed penalty is dependent on your piety, though. For the factor to be "fair", it would have to consider how many turns were spent at each piety break point, not just how many turns were spent worshipping Chei.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 12:23

Re: Aut scoring

Maybe just don't make the god whose whole purpose is to make you slower secretly make you faster with regard to scoring.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 12:55

Re: Aut scoring

To eliminate confusions and irrelevancies, my argument does not have much to do with comparison between versions (though it is one factor), but comparisons in the same version between different characters. It also does not have anything to do with speedruns.

Firstly, we have to ask: what exactly is the score meant to represent? It is not a perfect measure by any means, but it incentivizes getting as many runes as you can and winning the game as quickly as possible. For winning the game, you have to do, at the minimum, D and three rune branches. For doing these areas, you have to explore them. This is a significant fraction of the game turns.

If the score is to mean anything, does it makes sense to arbitrarily penalize Nagas (and Frogs I guess) and Chei characters simply because they have slow movement, so they take alpha times other characters to explore the dungeon? This would make scores of Nagas and Chei incomparable with other gods and races even within the same version. We could make the same kind of arguments for Sp, Fe and Ce. Now, if one thinks that this is totally ok, by all means, make no tweaks.

Assuming that we want to avoid outcomes like the one I mentioned above (which I consider self-evidently silly), we have to look at tweaks. It's true that a simple scaling (by what factor?) doesn't give an accurate picture of the movement costs involved, let alone the contribution to the score. Most of my Chei games involve being at mostly 5* or 6*, with occasional dipping into 4*. You want to use your piety, but you also want to keep it as high as possible for the stat boosts and access to step from time. Therefore we can approximate the movement delay by the delay somewhere in the middle of 5*. It's not a perfect approximation, but it's likely to be much better than simply evading the issue.

Another way is to look at how many tiles the player has explored in the game and directly adjust them for movement. The code would certainly not be difficult; exploration piety exists and I myself made a DD heal patch a couple of years ago which tracked how many tiles the player uncovered.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 13:28

Re: Aut scoring

Can you make picking up gold on the floor not take a turn so i can speedrun gozag though?

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 16:42

Re: Aut scoring

Gozigzag wrote:Can you make picking up gold on the floor not take a turn so i can speedrun gozag though?

Funny thing, if you kill an enemy over deep water or lava, the gold will teleport into your pocket and save a turn. So for turn count it's slightly optimal to do that when you can, although it's probably rarely worth setting up.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 17:04

Re: Aut scoring

Spectrina wrote:
Gozigzag wrote:Can you make picking up gold on the floor not take a turn so i can speedrun gozag though?

Funny thing, if you kill an enemy over deep water or lava, the gold will teleport into your pocket and save a turn. So for turn count it's slightly optimal to do that when you can, although it's probably rarely worth setting up.

Yes, and thats the best thing ever. Floor gold was a mistake.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 19:20

Re: Aut scoring

Why are we so worried about nagas and Chei being bad for speedruns and fast species being good for speedruns? There's already a huge difference between good speedrunning species (like VS and DD) and bad speedrunning species (like Mu), good speedrunning gods (like Makhleb) and bad speedrunning gods (like Qazlal).
If it turns out spriggans and centaurs are winning the game way faster than other species then my inclination is to question the balance of spriggans and centaurs, not to design the scoring system to circumvent them.

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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 19:40

Re: Aut scoring

duvessa wrote:Why are we so worried about nagas and Chei being bad for speedruns and fast species being good for speedruns? There's already a huge difference between good speedrunning species (like VS and DD) and bad speedrunning species (like Mu), good speedrunning gods (like Makhleb) and bad speedrunning gods (like Qazlal).
If it turns out spriggans and centaurs are winning the game way faster than other species then my inclination is to question the balance of spriggans and centaurs, not to design the scoring system to circumvent them.


Well, the number of auts spent traveling back and forth between branches and exploring are mostly meaningless, that centaurs and spriggans can auto-travel and explore while spending less auts isn't really (in and of itself) a reflection of whether they are balanced.

I'm not sure if it could be done in a reasonable way, but if non-significant movement could be excluded from score, that would even up the races and Chei.

However defining "non significant movement" vs "significant movement" is nontrivial.
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Post Tuesday, 7th February 2017, 23:37

Re: Aut scoring

Gozigzag wrote:Can you make picking up gold on the floorand dropping items not take a turn

Fixed.

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Post Wednesday, 8th February 2017, 02:15

Re: Aut scoring

duvessa wrote:Why are we so worried about nagas and Chei being bad for speedruns and fast species being good for speedruns?


Because last time I checked several people were screaming at me that Luring and Kiting (and walking away) are currently the strongest mechanics of this game. Well it makes sense at some point because after all, not dying and ease of movement/positioning are better than a higher score in the end. Can't really get a higher score if you're dead now can we? I'm pretty sure Step From Time isn't almighty.

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Post Thursday, 16th February 2017, 19:30

Re: Aut scoring

On the topic of an multiplier to reduce the auts spent by nagas/chei characters, I'm not sure why you'd do a global constant when it's pretty trivial to track it directly. If you take a step which takes 14 auts (naga), just count it as 10. If you attack with a weapon, no change is applied. You'd have to track only one integer, the difference from current aut time, updated whenever you take a step. Simple.

Oh wait, that's basically just action counting! :)

Honestly, I still think the biggest flaw with this is that you're giving melee weapon users a 3 aut discount every time they swing their weapon (7 auts) vs spellcasters who are still paying the full 10 auts to attack. All spellcaster speedruns are gone. They're already a minority, don't kill them off.
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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 10:45

Re: Aut scoring

Why is that a flaw? Your argument is literally "X are good for speedrunning, therefore X should continue to be good for speedrunning." When changes happen, the old best strategy is going to get replaced by something new. Why is it bad if that happens to be a melee spriggan of Makh, or something? What about casters/Chei/nagas/whatever requires us to artificially make them stay in first place?

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 10:52

Re: Aut scoring

What's "artificial" about Chei or Nagas, or Spriggans or VS for that matter?

Or, to put it another way, what exactly is the score meant to measure? If one doesn't have any place one wants to get to, any direction one goes is fine.
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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 11:08

Re: Aut scoring

bel wrote:What's "artificial" about Chei or Nagas, or Spriggans or VS for that matter?

The current system has some flaws. A system without those flaws has been suggested -- that's the place we want to go, a place where breadswinging doesn't exist. The opposition to that new system is that it "would completely destroy many types of speed running characters from ever being competitive again." So? Why do those characters in particular need to be competitive, instead of the other characters that will inevitably replace them? It's like complaining that banning steroids ruins the viability of your steroid-based build; of course it does. Should we give bonus points to former steroid-users to make sure they still win all the time? And more to the point: should we continue allowing steroids specifically because banning them would put an end to steroid-based victories?

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 12:26

Re: Aut scoring

ontoclasm wrote:
bel wrote:What's "artificial" about Chei or Nagas, or Spriggans or VS for that matter?

The current system has some flaws. A system without those flaws has been suggested -- that's the place we want to go, a place where breadswinging doesn't exist. The opposition to that new system is that it "would completely destroy many types of speed running characters from ever being competitive again." So? Why do those characters in particular need to be competitive, instead of the other characters that will inevitably replace them? It's like complaining that banning steroids ruins the viability of your steroid-based build; of course it does. Should we give bonus points to former steroid-users to make sure they still win all the time? And more to the point: should we continue allowing steroids specifically because banning them would put an end to steroid-based victories?

I have still not found an answer to the question: "what is score supposed to measure?". When you're comparing Nagas or Chei to steroids, it is simply begging the question.

As I said above, suppose we agree that score incentivizes getting as many runes as possible as quickly as possible, which corresponds to taking more risks (I am trying to reverse-engineer the meaning of score). Then penalizing a character for simply exploring the dungeon at different movement speeds makes little sense. A Naga/Chei character which dives through through the whole dungeon could have a lower score than a human who explored the dungeon relatively thoroughly - is this a sensible outcome? This argument has nothing to do with whether Spriggans or Nagas ought to come out at the top.

Breadswinging exists in current crawl, which can marginally affect your score. In aut scoring, there is a flaw in the other direction, which can massively affect your score. The latter problem is being simply ignored for reasons which aren't clear to me.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 12:27

Re: Aut scoring

Nvm

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 13:40

Re: Aut scoring

ontoclasm wrote:that's the place we want to go, a place where breadswinging doesn't exist


Cutting a weak problem to sprout tons of other bigger problems is a terrible idea. Score penalties against slower movement speed (this includes getting slowed and moving on shallow water) and action time does not make sense.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 13:46

Re: Aut scoring

Crawl keeps score?

Seriously, this thread strikes me as first world problems. I'm still noob enough to be happy to finish Lair, and two of my last three trips to Zot:5 ended up with me dying there. I do not need score at all, to thoroughly enjoy this game.
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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 19:36

Re: Aut scoring

Speed, it's speed, score measures speed. To get a high score you go fast. That's it. Currently, however, you actually want to go as slowly as possible. If you could have an orc wizard follow you around the whole game and cast slow on you constantly you would. If anything, that's what doesn't make sense. But in reality, "making sense" is also irrelevant. The scoring system should do three things:

a) be consistent,
b) be clear, and
c) not encourage dumb, tedious, or unfun things.

Both the existing system and aut scoring fulfill 1). But the existing system encourages some non-obvious and extremely tedious behavior. I've yet to hear an objection to the change that can't be paraphrased as "I like playing X, therefore a system where X isn't the best must be flawed." Yes, a naga who dives might get a worse score than a human who explores thoroughly... but they'll both be beaten by a human who dives. The second doesn't matter: the key is, why are we favoring the first over the third?

ONIchinchin wrote:Cutting a weak problem to sprout tons of other bigger problems is a terrible idea. Score penalties against slower movement speed (this includes getting slowed and moving on shallow water) and action time does not make sense.

there is a flaw in the other direction, which can massively affect your score. The latter problem is being simply ignored for reasons which aren't clear to me

What problem? What tedious, repetitive thing are you going to be doing to boost your score under aut scoring? There may well be some, but I can't think of any; normally you want to act as quickly as possible, so any dumb repetitive things you can do to go faster tend to get nixed. "Constantly recasting haste/swiftness" certainly counted, but they're both gone. Is there some weird macro I don't know about that you can press every turn to make your actions take less aut? And how does it not make sense that getting slowed harms your ability to go fast? That's exactly what I would expect it to do. Really, the question is: why should you get a score bonus for getting slowed? Because that's the current state of things.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 19:48

Re: Aut scoring

MainiacJoe wrote:Crawl keeps score?

Seriously, this thread strikes me as first world problems. I'm still noob enough to be happy to finish Lair, and two of my last three trips to Zot:5 ended up with me dying there. I do not need score at all, to thoroughly enjoy this game.
Good thing you came here to point out the much more urgent 0.001st world problem: people discussing a mechanic that you don't care about. How horrible for you.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 20:01

Re: Aut scoring

ontoclasm wrote:Speed, it's speed, score measures speed. To get a high score you go fast. That's it. Currently, however, you actually want to go as slowly as possible. If you could have an orc wizard follow you around the whole game and cast slow on you constantly you would. If anything, that's what doesn't make sense. But in reality, "making sense" is also irrelevant. The scoring system should do three things:

a) be consistent,
b) be clear, and
c) not encourage dumb, tedious, or unfun things.

Both the existing system and aut scoring fulfill 1). But the existing system encourages some non-obvious and extremely tedious behavior. I've yet to hear an objection to the change that can't be paraphrased as "I like playing X, therefore a system where X isn't the best must be flawed." Yes, a naga who dives might get a worse score than a human who explores thoroughly... but they'll both be beaten by a human who dives. The second doesn't matter: the key is, why are we favoring the first over the third?

The three criteria are necessary but not sufficient. For instance, a score which is constantly zero would satisfy all three, but this is not a good score mechanism. For score to mean something, it has to achieve an objective. What is that objective? I suggested above that score should incentivize riskier play (which generally corresponds to skipping content, less resting and perhaps choosing a "suboptimal" god).

I find it strange that you are fine with accepting the (bolded) illogical outcome which is far more common and far more consequent (it affects not only Nagas and Chei characters, but Fe, Ce and Sp as well) than this contrived example of an keeping an orc wizard alive so it can slow you. There are many speedruns attempted; I haven't seen many of them dragging along an orc wizard to slow them throughout the game. This might be a clue that this supposed secret tech isn't really a secret tech. Moreover, even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that you have the option of being slowed unavoidably the whole game. It's not clear that you would not do it for speedruns; being slowed in combat is a major disadvantage - you would not want to be slowed and underleveled against an OOF, for instance. If you constantly play with this risk, it's fine if you get a higher score, according to the objective I gave above.

Chei is also not a problem using the criteria I gave above, because Chei is not an "optimal" god. If you take more risks to get a higher score, what's the problem with it?

I am not clear how a Naga that dives is favoured in the turn-based scoring over a human that dives, so I don't understand your last sentence.

One last point: Spider form suppresses Naga's slow mutation and Felid's fast mutation so it would be optimal (in aut scoring) to repeatedly cast Spider Form while exploring for Nagas and end transformation for Felids while exploring. I actually have no idea why the movement mutations are supressed. This should be fixed independently of whether aut scoring is implemented.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 20:29

Re: Aut scoring

If breadswinging is the problem, you can just limit regeneration to 10 aut - it used to be that way for walking, and then walking was changed to use the full time instead. This would hurt the healing of nagas/chei characters, but I'd rather have that than removing the viability of them to speedrun entirely. You're basically nuking a third of the game's speedrun content just because you're annoyed someone might try to heal faster...

bel wrote:I am not clear how a Naga that dives is favoured in the turn-based scoring over a human that dives.

It would be nice if people would spell out what they're actually arguing over, so hey...The "issue" here is healing - people try to regenerate as quickly as possible between fights. A significant portion of any game is spent healing off damage, and so reducing it is meaningful. Your regeneration is based on your regeneration rate, multiplied by the auts (time) that your last action took. Usually a standard action is 10 auts, but there are several things which are slower than 10 auts, so you heal more if you do one of those actions rather than just resting. So you should probably never press '5' during a speed run. Swinging bread takes 15 auts, and chei characters (who aren't nagas or statues) take 20 auts to walk, doubling their healing per action. It didn't used to be this way - it was capped at 10 auts of healing for walking actions only - breadswinging always existed.

How about we just fix breadswinging? Swinging bread (or any heavy weapon you have no skill in) only applies 10 auts of regeneration; it still takes whatever amount of time it normally would (We don't want to give people with 0 skill 10 aut executioner axe swings). For bread (aka, non-weapons) itself, you could change the actual time to 10 auts.
Last edited by tasonir on Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 21:31, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 20:39

Re: Aut scoring

I don't care about score but I'd like to mention that some species are better than others and serve as difficulty level, including for speedrunning purposes. So there is nothing wrong with Na (or Sp) having higher score than human.
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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 20:48

Re: Aut scoring

tasonir wrote:
I am not clear how a Naga that dives is favoured in the turn-based scoring over a human that dives.

It would be nice if people would spell out what they're actually arguing over, so hey...The "issue" here is healing - people try to regenerate as quickly as possible between fights. A significant portion of any game is spent healing off damage, and so reducing it is meaningful. Your regeneration is based on your regeneration rate, multiplied by the auts (time) that your last action took. Usually a standard action is 10 auts, but there are several things which are slower than 10 auts, so you heal more if you do one of those actions rather than just resting. So you should probably never press '5' during a speed run. Swinging bread takes 15 auts, and chei characters (who aren't nagas or statues) take 20 auts to walk, doubling their healing per action. It didn't used to be this way - it was capped at 10 auts of healing for walking actions only - breadswinging always existed.

Badwiki strikes again for this portion.
badwiki wrote:If your last action didn't last 10 auts, the amount of regeneration points you gain is scaled with the amount of time taken. But, there is an exception to this rule: walking with delay greater than 10 auts is treated as if it only was 10 auts.


Strike this part of the post then. The rest of the points remain the same.

Edit: This seems to be the commit which changed it. Not sure why it was made.

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 20:51

Re: Aut scoring

bel wrote:The three criteria are necessary but not sufficient. For instance, a score which is constantly zero would satisfy all three

actually such a scoring method encourages hypothetical optimal play, which currently violates clause c

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Post Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, 20:55

Re: Aut scoring

CanOfWorms wrote:
bel wrote:The three criteria are necessary but not sufficient. For instance, a score which is constantly zero would satisfy all three

actually such a scoring method encourages hypothetical optimal play, which currently violates clause c

How?

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Post Thursday, 23rd February 2017, 14:50

Re: Aut scoring

How about fixing "breadswinging" by simply having a single rest action take at least as many auts as the slowest action possible?

Only issue is that it means that separate "rest" and "stay in place" actions are needed to still allow fast tactical "stay in place" actions.

A possible variant is to instead have a single, fast, rest action but increase the action count differently when multiple consecutive fast rest actions are taken, e.g. increasing it only for the 1st, 4th, 7th, etc. rest action so that it's equivalent to 30aut rest actions if repeated, while still supporting 10aut rest if not repeated.

Tomb Titivator

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Post Friday, 24th February 2017, 13:30

Re: Aut scoring

disclaimer: I don't speedrun

like

at all

but wtf, chei is a good speedrun god? I understand why that's true conceptually under the current system, but breadswinging or whatever aside, that's gotta be one of the most counterintuitive things I've ever heard of

also if slowness is in fact like 1/3 of the speedrun meta, as has been asserted, it seems like maybe it's becoming a bit centralized

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Shoals Surfer

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Post Saturday, 25th February 2017, 01:44

Re: Aut scoring

ZipZipskins wrote:but wtf, chei is a good speedrun god? I understand why that's true conceptually under the current system, but breadswinging or whatever aside, that's gotta be one of the most counterintuitive things I've ever heard of


Besides chei's great active abilities, there's two factors that make him very strong on a speed run:
- You regenerate faster per action, up to x3 faster while moving in statue form. Speedrunning is all about reducing downtimes such as healing.
- Your greatly increased attributes allow you to cast sooner, hit harder and wear heavier armor sooner.

An experienced player won't be more than mildly inconvenienced with the slower movement speed, while reaping all of the above benefits.

ZipZipskins wrote:also if slowness is in fact like 1/3 of the speedrun meta, as has been asserted, it seems like maybe it's becoming a bit centralized


That's not quite so. I'm fairly confident that a Sp stabber could match or beat the current turncount scores.
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Vajrapani

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Post Saturday, 25th February 2017, 02:06

Re: Aut scoring

like I said, I understand it conceptually, but thanks

doesn't make it less counter intuitive

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 25th February 2017, 05:34

Re: Aut scoring

pedritolo wrote:An overpowered combo will be able to win with the slower movement speed


FTFY
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Halls Hopper

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Post Saturday, 25th February 2017, 12:06

Re: Aut scoring

I'm not sure which one I heard about first. Breadswinging, or chei being a good thing. One of them had me doubting that "speedruns" were going to be worth getting into, and the other was the nail in the coffin.
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Post Tuesday, 28th February 2017, 01:05

Re: Aut scoring

Chei is the god of time: it makes perfect sense that chei would enable you to do things as quickly as possible. You can alter the flow of time itself. For some reason, people mistake the control over time as being the "slow god" for some reason I'll never get. Chei gives you the perspective that haste makes waste; that rushing to do something isn't the most effective way to do it. Chei's listed abilities: Bend TIME, TEMPORAL distortion, Slouch, Step from TIME. Not quite sure what "slouch" is supposed to mean, but hey. I associate it with relaxing, and the theme of "take it easy"? His abilities aren't themed on slowness, even though bend time does that, but rather controlling time. If anyone can cheat the clock, the god of time would the #1 candidate.

In any case, as pedritolo said, I think it's primarily the second point which really matters:
- Your greatly increased attributes allow you to cast sooner, hit harder and wear heavier armor sooner.

This is why chei is great for speedruns - boosting your damage by 30-50% means 30-50% fewer attack actions per game, which is several thousands of turns. My 40133 turn 15 rune speedrun (VSMo of Chei) recorded a total of 8200 unarmed attacks. Assuming doing 40% less damage would mean 40% more attacks (hard to tell with overkill, but that should be roughly correct) that would add 3280 extra turns. And while my record of 40k leaves a lot of room for improvement, 3000+ turns is hugely significant. The VSMo record is 19225 turns - with 4785 unarmed attacks, so 25% of the game is melee attacks.

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Post Tuesday, 28th February 2017, 07:00

Re: Aut scoring

tasonir wrote:For some reason, people mistake the control over time as being the "slow god" for some reason I'll never get.
his altar is literally covered in snails jfc

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Factorialite, Shard1697

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Post Tuesday, 28th February 2017, 21:07

Re: Aut scoring

duvessa wrote:
tasonir wrote:For some reason, people mistake the control over time as being the "slow god" for some reason I'll never get.
his altar is literally covered in snails jfc

Its altar is literally an hourglass, jfc

Halls Hopper

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Post Wednesday, 1st March 2017, 02:26

Re: Aut scoring

ontoclasm wrote:What tedious, repetitive thing are you going to be doing to boost your score under aut scoring?

ontoclasm wrote:Really, the question is: why should you get a score bonus for getting slowed? Because that's the current state of things.

"ontoclasm wrote:If you could have an orc wizard follow you around the whole game and cast slow on you constantly you would.


There isn't one but that isn't the point.

a.) Winning the game requires both HP!=0 and taking the orb to D:1 upstairs and walking away happens to be greatest contributor that could help prevent the former from happening since fortunately, this game isn't so easy for you to just stand in a single tile and kill every monster by only pressing ctrl+direction. You would inevitably require to restore HP and MP regardless of the situation.

b.) Therefore (x>speed 10) > (speed 10) > (x<speed 10) in terms of survivability.

The former two are getting buffed while nerfing the already disadvantaged last one in terms of aut scoring so this introduces further imbalance. I really want to refrain from mentioning names of species here but seriously, are you going to further increase the already ridiculous value of Minotaurs? How about those stupid Spriggans? This clearly isn't a path Crawl should go.

You do not get a score bonus for getting slowed. Your turncount does not decrease when you get slowed but instead, your aut spent per turn is increased that also increases the actions of monsters around you that's why slowing yourself for extended periods of time was never optimal. You clearly do not know what you're talking about if you still wish to force these bizarre ideas.

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Post Thursday, 2nd March 2017, 07:01

Re: Aut scoring

Playing for maximizing chance of survival is the way I try to play, but...scoring doesn't really come into the picture there? Speedrunning is totally separate and has a vastly different set of incentives - you're embarking on the journey already having decided to lower your chance of survival in hopes of a higher score. I don't think it's bad to recognize that those are two separate goals, and treat balancing scoring as in service of the latter and not the former.

Halls Hopper

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Post Friday, 3rd March 2017, 05:11

Re: Aut scoring

johlstei wrote:but...scoring doesn't really come into the picture there?.


Regardless of the method of playing, a winning game always requires your HP to not drop to zero. Survival is always a factor and x<speed 10 is always disadvantaged to x>=speed 10 chars in terms of this. I don't think this is that hard to understand.

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Post Friday, 3rd March 2017, 18:52

Re: Aut scoring

ONIchinchin wrote:
johlstei wrote:but...scoring doesn't really come into the picture there?.


Regardless of the method of playing, a winning game always requires your HP to not drop to zero. Survival is always a factor and x<speed 10 is always disadvantaged to x>=speed 10 chars in terms of this. I don't think this is that hard to understand.

You're talking about buffing and nerfing things, which no one has proposed. No changes to how well a character can survive have been proposed here, all of that remains the same. The arbitrary number at the end of the game does change, but that's only a factor for speedrunning. The relative number of points you get for winning in some number of keystrokes is not an appropriate method of balancing a particular species being strong or weak - it's literally not a part of the game unless you make it so by choosing to speedrun.

Speed < 10 is an advantage for speedrunners, because speedrunning isn't about maximizing survival or winrate - in fact it's about compromising that for the sake of turncount. It's okay if you die because you just try again and when it finally does work, it's really fast. I'm not sure how else to explain this and I'm not sure what your complaint is - are you interested in score but not interested in speedruns?

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 3rd March 2017, 22:54

Re: Aut scoring

johlstei wrote:Speed < 10 is an advantage for speedrunners, because speedrunning isn't about maximizing survival or winrate - in fact it's about compromising that for the sake of turncount. It's okay if you die because you just try again and when it finally does work, it's really fast. I'm not sure how else to explain this and I'm not sure what your complaint is - are you interested in score but not interested in speedruns?

Speed < 10 is a disadvantage for speedrunners, but to demonstrate that, let's define it a bit more precisely. The original claim was that if you could have an orc wizard follow you around and cast slow on you, so this slow is an all-actions slow, not just slow movement. So you will be slowed while in combat, and take more damage from monsters. This is very bad, and will cause your run to take more actions, and thus have a lower score.

Theoretically, if you could control the exact time when this hypothetical wizard cast slow on you, such that you were only slowed while out of combat, then that could be an advantage. But this is entirely impractical to do with an orc wizard. The complaints about chei is that by slowing movespeed only, you are slowing only out-of-combat actions, which can be helpful. My counter to that is that you will end up moving during combat with chei, even if you try to minimize it, and thus the drawback does very much come into play, and increase the risk of the run. Of course, speedrunners love risk...

In short: Action speed being slowed (via the slow spell) is quite bad, move speed being slow is good out of combat, but bad during combat.
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