remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Slime Squisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
2. Mummies and vampires can now spend a virtually unlimited amount of time to ensure that they have killed all the monsters on a level. Since monsters can move, there is no guarantee that fully exploring the level has found all the monsters. Therefore, you want to continue wandering the level after "finishing" it to make sure you've killed every single monster, in order to get the most XP and items.
3. Mummies and vampires can now spend a virtually unlimited amount of time waiting on one level for monsters on another level to stop tracking them ("mummystabbing", although they at least do not fall asleep anymore).
Piety decay does not solve this since you don't always have a god. (And even if you do it's probably Gozag because Gozag is brokenly overpowered, and Gozag doesn't have piety decay lol)
You could mostly fix 2. by removing XP rewards and item drops from monsters, but that wouldn't help with the other problems.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Slime Squisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Issue 3 could be solved by giving monsters a Brogue-like ability to traverse stairs (i.e. they can traverse stairs completely on their own), something Crawl should probably have anyway.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
"I was thinking about playing mummy but i didn't want to wait for tens of thousands of turns on each floor."
or
"I'm super excited to play mummy because I want to wait for tens of thousands of turns on each floor! I made a macro to help me do it!"
Edit:
I'm of the opinion that such behavior is appropriately contained by the score penalty for waiting tens of thousands of turns. In other words, this is not a real problem appropriately contained by showing the problem a picture of a penalty.
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Ziggurat Zagger
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
edgefigaro wrote:Do people do this? Do people want to do this? Is this actually a problem that needs solving?
I do it a lot in doomrl, it's absolutely the biggest problem with that game (it's probably a bigger problem than everything else wrong with doomrl combined). It would not be quite as extreme in crawl because crawl is not doomrl, but it would definitely be beneficial.
I don't enjoy waiting for thousands of turns in doomrl for monsters to come to me, but it is such a huge advantage that not doing so is a serious handicap.
Giving the player an advantage for waiting on the stairs for thousands of turns directly contradicts the anti-grinding philosophy in the crawl manual.
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Vaults Vanquisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
The point that you derive some advantage from re-exploring or waiting around a mostly cleared level to pick off stragglers is important and would be so even without recent spawn changes. The old spawn system made it worse really and I have never seen convincing evidence that waiting is better than reexploring for this purpose. Reexploring is fast and reliable enough that food presents no barrier to doing it. It is also quite safe to do. There are various ways to deal with the straggler problem. One would be to introduce a dungeon feature that allows the player to teleport randomly toward monsters, like teleportitis, and inform the player if the teleport attempt fails, indicating the level is clear. Another would be to show the player where monsters are after the level has been sufficiently cleared. Monsters on cleared floors are essentially free kills, so neither of these have significant balance issues. edit: The latter would certainly be more player-friendly and it could be made to work with autoexplore -- when you reach the point that monsters are revealed to you, autoexplore can automatically chase them for you.
Something a little more radical to push the player out would be to upgrade monsters on level, e.g. polymorph with a HD bonus, and give the player a status equivalent to mark that expires on leaving the level after either a certain percentage of clearing has been achieved or after a certain number of turns on level. These polymorphed monsters can be revealed to be something weaker on kill and give the usual amount of experience, so that it is clear what has happened and that the player is not going to get an advantage by waiting out any timers.
In any case, this is an issue in hellcrawl and something should be done about it.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Bad players should not be worried about some obscure and unfun way to gain a marginal advantage. They should work on threat assessment, tactics, etc. Good players will not want to do boring things to win because they can win without waiting 10k turns by the stairs.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
sometimes it can make them less dangerous, even(because they can pick up slower weapons)
Cocytus Succeeder
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Of course, one could take the position that score doesn't matter. But one could turn the argument around to say that winrate doesn't matter.
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Crypt Cleanser
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Doesnt wrote:It means you're giving the monsters more time to pick crap up off the floor and potentially use it against you.
Monsters stopped picking up stuff some versions ago.
Ziggurat Zagger
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Majang wrote:Doesnt wrote:It means you're giving the monsters more time to pick crap up off the floor and potentially use it against you.
Monsters stopped picking up stuff some versions ago.
Actually monsters stopped picking up *seen* items, so if you don't explore the level first critters could pick up unseen items and potentially use them against you. Not that that's important or a big deal.
Here's the (first) relevant commit:
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/7 ... 7116e69670
Abyss Ambulator
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
edgefigaro wrote:Do people do this? Do people want to do this? Is this actually a problem that needs solving?
When has that ever mattered
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Siegurt wrote:Actually monsters stopped picking up *seen* items, so if you don't explore the level first critters could pick up unseen items and potentially use them against you. Not that that's important or a big deal.
Unless you kill them over deep water or lava, I guess
Vaults Vanquisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
edit: A bit of experimentation reveals that you get one monster this way every five or so floors. I don't know why I'm surprised that this instance of handwringing about scumming turns out to be mostly about nothing.
Mines Malingerer
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
duvessa wrote:Gozag doesn't have piety decay lol)
Feature request: Implement Gozag piety decay. Every n turns, Gozag taxes one of your gold pieces. Failure to pay counts as abandonment. Increase gold drop rate to compensate.
Slime Squisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
edgefigaro wrote:Do people do this? Do people want to do this? Is this actually a problem that needs solving?
"I was thinking about playing mummy but i didn't want to wait for tens of thousands of turns on each floor."
or
"I'm super excited to play mummy because I want to wait for tens of thousands of turns on each floor! I made a macro to help me do it!"
Edit:
I'm of the opinion that such behavior is appropriately contained by the score penalty for waiting tens of thousands of turns. In other words, this is not a real problem appropriately contained by showing the problem a picture of a penalty.
bel wrote:Waiting for thousands of turns will kill your score.
Of course, one could take the position that score doesn't matter. But one could turn the argument around to say that winrate doesn't matter.
I hate this line of thinking because I don't play for score. Playing for score sucks in crawl. You have to breadswing, swap into troll armor to heal, abandon a majority of your games, explore in such a way that minimizes backtracking, and make a greater # of trivial cost-benefit-analyses than you would have to in a typical game of crawl (do i walk 12 tiles to pick up some javelins i might not use etc). Even if you enjoy 'playing for score,' why would you want to make 'playing to win' less fun?
Re. edgefigaro, how about: "well I guess I'll never play mummy because when I start a game my goal is winning and I know that if I play mummy I have to stand on a staircase and wait for a billion turns if I want to do the thing that most likely leads to the achievement of my goal?"
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Slime Squisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
I'm of the opinion that if your one and only fixation above all other things including entertainment and sanity is to win such that you will resort to "degenerate" and "unfun" behavior to even slightly increase your chances of doing so, that is your problem and not Crawl's.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Barkeep
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Blomdor wrote:Just remove food. For God's sake.
I'm of the opinion that if your one and only fixation above all other things including entertainment and sanity is to win such that you will resort to "degenerate" and "unfun" behavior to even slightly increase your chances of doing so, that is your problem and not Crawl's.
To be fair, while I think removing food is a wonderful idea, it wouldn't actually solve any of these Hypothetically Optimal Behaviors. As far as I can tell, there are exactly three kinds of fixes:
1) Remove upstairs, which would satisfy the demands of most of the Hypothetically Optimal Players anyway and would eliminate most of these problems; it would no longer be strictly safe to stand around and wait for thousands of turns as there would be no method of escape except downward. It might still be optimal to wait endlessly after grabbing a bunch of scrolls and potions, however. Part of me honestly feels like I'll see a version of DCSS without upstairs before I see the game without food.
2) Add a new form of non-food timer, like Spelunky's ghosts, or a shaft timer, or a short trip to the abyss, or something. I personally favor timers that last for a single level as opposed to timers, like food, that last the whole game.
3) Change monster AI behavior to prevent players from benefitting from standing still. Perhaps after X number of turns since the last kill, monsters will no longer willingly enter your LOS, and the longer you spend off the level, the likelier it is that the game will place a large number of monsters around the stairs you come in on as an ambush. This is the most technically complex solution and therefore the least likely to be implemented.
Of course, there's also option 4, where you make mummies and vampires subject to the food clock. I think this is objectively the worst solution, but it's also the easiest by far, and therefore the most likely to be implemented if the devs really feel that this Hypothetical Optimal Tactic is a problem that must be solved.
e: oh, I forgot one more, which is that you could bring back OOD spawns but make them durable summons which give no XP or items. Given that said OOD spawns were just removed, tho, I figured it was unlikely.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Siegurt wrote:Actually monsters stopped picking up *seen* items, so if you don't explore the level first critters could pick up unseen items and potentially use them against you. Not that that's important or a big deal.
Maybe monsters should start waking up and go around randomly picking up stuff and destroying them after X turns after first visiting the level.
Vaults Vanquisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
chequers wrote:Archaeo, you may not be aware that hellcrawl implements your suggestions #1 & #3, as well as removing food. If you wanted to test those changes.
Do you mean 1 and 2? I am not aware of any change to prevent monsters walking into the camping player's LoS, but I would feel somewhat vindicated by such a move.
Anyway, yeah, once you get rid of upstairs, you can just put a clock on each level and fuck the player up if they violate it. After a recent commit, hellcrawl just summons 3-6 monsters that are likely to kill or beat consumables out of the player if they stay around for more than about 2.5k turns and keeps doing it every so often thereafter. The player is appropriately warned as the moment of reckoning approaches.
A suggestion I've made for hellcrawl, which probably isn't of interest for dcss, is the idea of a stair-kill mechanic where after you've sufficiently explored a level, say 95% of walkable floor space, you can kill the remaining monsters by walking over a down staircase. I thought a variation on this where you have to kill all but something like twice the average number of monsters left unkilled on a normal first-pass level clear was a kind of clever way to deal with re-explore scumming, until I realized that the number of monsters that are left behind this way is like .2 or something on average. The exploration based version has the virtue of enabling a stealth-exploration playstyle though even if the scumming issue it solves is mostly imaginary.
Shoals Surfer
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
If losing superzigs is an issue, the time limit can be lifted (or raised to the current maximum) if the player manages to successfully exit Zig:27, which should be sufficient enough proof that they have no real need to wait scum at that point. If I'm an outlier and the average player is faster/slower than I am, the max turn limit could be raised or lowered to fit.
Edit: If it needs to be more granular, make the max time limit start much lower (around 50k) and get raised whenever a rune or a (new) zigfig is obtained.
Barkeep
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Arrhythmia wrote:what if Mu and Vp just got hunrgy like any other species?
I mean it might surprise you to learn that I'm not a big hunger fan, arrhy, so I'd like to prevent its spread.
chequers wrote:Archaeo, you may not be aware that hellcrawl implements your suggestions #1 & #3, as well as removing food. If you wanted to test those changes.
I personally like upstairs and the sense of scale and geography it provides to DCSS. I would prefer to see an actual implementation of #3 along with #2 (if, as WTRL says, there's no real change to monster behavior), as I think it would solve many of the problems with upstairs and save a part of the game I think is worth saving. For the purposes of hellcrawl, removing upstairs is def. a good idea, but I would miss them in vanilla crawl.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
amaril wrote:I hate this line of thinking because I don't play for score. Playing for score sucks in crawl. You have to breadswing, swap into troll armor to heal, abandon a majority of your games, explore in such a way that minimizes backtracking, and make a greater # of trivial cost-benefit-analyses than you would have to in a typical game of crawl (do i walk 12 tiles to pick up some javelins i might not use etc). Even if you enjoy 'playing for score,' why would you want to make 'playing to win' less fun?
This is a misunderstanding. "Playing for score" need not mean "playing for your highest score": that is speedrunning. A winrate is an average, so the corresponding measure would be to take an average of your score over, say, 10 or 20 games. In particular, "abandon[ing] a majority of your games" will not give you a high average score. Besides, winning gives you a large boost to score, so a strategy designed to maximize expected score would likely lead to a high winrate anyway.
I'm pretty sure that "playing to get a high expected winrate" is about as tedious as "playing to get a high expected score". Have you seen some of Berder's hints for streaking, for instance? In practice, people cut corners here and there to spare themselves the pain of playing "optimally".
The problem with score is that it is rather badly designed. But it can be improved, and can have much more granularity than winrate. Besides, Crawl is a single-player game. You can choose whatever metric you like which pleases you. The point I was making is that it is a choice, and a rather arbitrary one at that, to focus on winrate. Few or no people actually play the game that way.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
1. They can't traverse stairs
2. They spawn with and pick up no items
3. They can't be killed. I think this would require them to not surround the player which is weird but yeah.
Durable summons that you get no XP for would work as well I think?
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
My point about score only deals with the narrow case of "waiting for thousands of turns". Somewhat degenerate play would be increased for all characters with this change. The basic point is that you can allow monsters to come to you, instead of going to meet them. With the removal of the monster generation timer, this kind of behavior would only increase. One does not have to be a Mummy or Vampire to exploit this: there is plenty of food in the game.
As a related point: similar to Gozag's lack of piety decay, Uskayaw's piety decay mechanisms also cannot serve as a clock.
Vaults Vanquisher
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
There is really no reason not to just outright kill a player that is doing this doomRL style nonsense. What is needed is a mechanism that cleanly and conveniently wipes a level that's almost cleared, to prevent the reexplore silliness without punishing the player for not tracking down misbehaving monsters, so that it makes sense to talk about a "cleared level" without bringing in other kinds of scumming. I posted a suggestion for this upthread, but I'm sure other people can think of other ways to go. Then once a level is clear in this sense, you can turn off the kill-clock so that the player can engage in cherished dcss fun, like traveling through cleared levels to reach items, shops, and dungeon branches, without fear of reprisal.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
watertreatmentRL wrote:...feeding them additional experience...
There's an easy way to fix this problem. Since it has been mentioned about 100 times before, I won't do it here.
watertreatmentRL wrote:...serious externalities, for example interruptions to autotravel...
You and I probably differ about what is "serious".
More importantly, this is not the thread to discuss whether spawns should have been removed or not. There is already another thread for that.
About "outright killing" people based on whether they engage in "DoomRL nonsense": to outright kill people you need to identify such situations with high accuracy, and it would be a relatively discontinuous mechanism. In other words, it would introduce more "breakpoints", which people are always railing against here. What I suggested above is that such situations need not be extreme for them to be exploitable, so such kinds of breakpoints are neither desirable nor useful. Also, some floors are naturally harder, which makes a hard breakpoint bad. For instance, I looked at some of my morgues in Hellcrawl, and I spent almost 2500 turns on Snake:3 even when I was not "scumming". This is because Snake:3 often has layouts with huge vaults where one needs to lure monsters out to deal with them.
Hellcrawl got rid of OOD monsters(and spawns generally) and now introduced "super-OOD" monsters with an arbitrary breakpoint to prevent scumming. It doesn't make any sense to me.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
As for your talk about breakpoints, breakpoints are actually good, especially when they're well communicated to the player. What dcss shows abundantly is that passively needling the player consistently fails to produce results (see food, formerly spawns, piety decay). I know some people think breakpoints are bad in the abstract, but the argument I see more of and that I find more persuasive is that breakpoints that you have to look up or remember are a problem. I'd also say that systems in crawl that are supposed to avert hard breakpoints are complex as hell (for example spell failrates, formulas that govern the effects of skills like dodging, armor, etc.) or are at best not widely understood by players at the level of specifics (e.g. the effect of fighting on combat damage), so the cure is usually worse than the disease in the examples readily at hand. Hellcrawl tells you that you're about to get your ass handed to you if you don't clear out and it's not like you have to take the snake rune to win.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
About hard breakpoints, very few things in Crawl outright kill you. I assume this is by design. I think this is a sensible design, which doesn't say to the player "my way or the highway". The other point here, which I made above, is that to create a hard breakpoint, especially things which can "outright kill" you, the game needs to identify such situations with very high accuracy. And everything below that breakpoint is exploitable. I don't see how this is good design.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
bel: As long as you aren't willing to put your foot down on particular bad player options, those player options will remain viable and the game will suffer accordingly. I don't believe that there's much scope for doomRL style scumming in current hellcrawl and to the extent that people try it, they know they're playing with fire. This is good in my opinion. It's fine to allow a certain degree of brinksmanship. We are not trying to make the players into boy or girlscouts here. We are just making sure that certain well-known issues are addressed in a comprehensive way.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
VeryAngryFelid wrote:I'd like to note that if autotravel cannot be interrupted, it does not make any sense - just instantly teleport the character from Lair:6 to entrance to Orc:1 or that shop on D:3
I'm confused as to what you're getting at here. Yes, this is what autotravel does currently if there are no interruptions. It's nice when it works and I don't have to thoughtlessly fiddle with the ui a few times to get my teleport to work. Are you talking about the fact that it adds to your aut count still, keeping it as a measure of your conservation of movement than actual discrete moves?
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
Generally speaking, I do think that simply writing S and appearing in swamp would be a better experience. As would a different version of the current way in which you interact with stuff you left behind.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
The loss of information has further implications: without the intermediate communication, the player needs to remember the nearby areas or risk being thrown into confusion about their new surroundings. This rewards the player into manually searching for the area to "teleport-walk" to in the X screen, which is more tedious and circular with respect to the fundamental problem.
Regarding the OP: I agree entirely.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
crawlnoob wrote:I find the online experience of uninterrupted autotravel to be unnerving and too abrupt. It really is just a teleport, and this takes away from the "feel" of walking, which is an important game design aspect. For example, you want to communicate to your player that walking back to D2 to buy that scroll of blinking takes time and is impinging on the (hopefully useful) food clock.
Why can't we have the item cost X gold, Y piety and Z food then? The price even might be increasing over time (gold becomes less meaningful the deeper you are into the game).
I really dislike that optimal play consists in buying all useful items before entering Zot 5 because you can be forced to steal the orb and you don't know how many and which monsters you will meet during orb run.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
If you want the feel of walking, I suggest you go outside and walk. It's good and it's good for you.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
As for multi-resource costs, there's no reason you cant do this (and a lot of games do exactly that, for instance Heroes of Might and Magic 3), but you might trip on the flavor explanation, and actually balancing the sources and drains on those resources (including item cost), is far more difficult. But we do already have some hidden hunger+piety cost in crawl when it comes to large backtracking to buy an item you couldnt afford the gold on earlier, its just that for the most part, its ineffectual, especially concerning hunger.
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Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
crawlnoob wrote:I find the online experience of uninterrupted autotravel to be unnerving and too abrupt. It really is just a teleport, and this takes away from the "feel" of walking, which is an important game design aspect. For example, you want to communicate to your player that walking back to D2 to buy that scroll of blinking takes time and is impinging on the (hopefully useful) food clock.
The loss of information has further implications: without the intermediate communication, the player needs to remember the nearby areas or risk being thrown into confusion about their new surroundings. This rewards the player into manually searching for the area to "teleport-walk" to in the X screen, which is more tedious and circular with respect to the fundamental problem.
Regarding the OP: I agree entirely.
You can disable the teleporting and get back the walking by adding
to your rcfile
4 runes : DDFi^Makhleb
5 runes : GrEE^Vehumet
15 runes : MiFi^Ru, NaWz^Sif Muna, GrWz^Sif Muna
I mostly play offline or online on CXC
Swamp Slogger
Posts: 174
Joined: Saturday, 16th September 2017, 21:17
Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
The idea that a handful of random monsters still stuck on a level will be a good thing is lost to me -- let players kill them and get it over with. At the same time, have the Mark appear after an inordinate amount of time on a given level.
Swamp Slogger
Posts: 139
Joined: Friday, 13th March 2015, 13:33
Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)
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