[proclick] new fork, hellcrawl


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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 06:49

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The experience debt proposal will be a failure. Durable summon spawns would fail for the same reason that normal OOD spawns failed. The odds of producing a situation a camping character is unprepared for by just randomly spawning things is essentially zero.

It is good to get pushed off a level. The only criticism I could see is that some branch ends do not let you bail on the level without getting into a position to get the rune. That could be fixed. As long as the player has the option of bailing prematurely, I don't see any reason to go with a softer solution than spawning stuff on top of the player. It is good for slow play to be penalized. High turncount tactics are a huge problem in crawl and if antiscumming solutions dip into that stuff too, that's great.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 07:08

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:The experience debt proposal will be a failure. Durable summon spawns would fail for the same reason that normal OOD spawns failed. The odds of producing a situation a camping character is unprepared for by just randomly spawning things is essentially zero.


Could you elaborate please? Do you think people will stay on the floor without a reason just to spend a consumable vs monsters who don't give XP/items?

It is good to get pushed off a level.


It is good to allow players decide what they do, please don't make zig sprint out of normal crawl

It is good for slow play to be penalized. High turncount tactics are a huge problem in crawl and if antiscumming solutions dip into that stuff too, that's great.


It is good that slow play exists, player has choice - play more carefully losing piety and risking to encounter durable summons or rush forward at low HP/MP like you are suggesting
I think there are better ways to deal with scumming, for instance, we can disable manual exploration and exclusion points, PC automatically starts autoexploring when at full HP/MP. Of course no spells can be cast without monsters in view.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 07:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:The experience debt proposal will be a failure. Durable summon spawns would fail for the same reason that normal OOD spawns failed. The odds of producing a situation a camping character is unprepared for by just randomly spawning things is essentially zero.


Could you elaborate please? Do you think people will stay on the floor without a reason just to spend a consumable vs monsters who don't give XP/items?


We know for an absolute fact that this not what happens when you spawn monsters that are supposed to own the camping player at some point in the distant future. We know this because it has been tried, tried for many years. It is a fact that randomly spawning things does not do what you say it does.

It is good to get pushed off a level.


It is good to allow players decide what they do, please don't make zig sprint out of normal crawl


It is not good to allow the player unconstrained choice. That is what this whole discussion about. The player may very well choose to scum. Taken in the context it's offered, your comment says that's okay.

This is playerthink. "I want to be able to do whatever I want. I want to continue to do what I've always done."

It is good for slow play to be penalized. High turncount tactics are a huge problem in crawl and if antiscumming solutions dip into that stuff too, that's great.


It is good that slow play exists, player has choice - play more carefully losing piety and risking to encounter durable summons or rush forward at low HP/MP like you are suggesting
I think there are better ways to deal with scumming, for instance, we can disable manual exploration and exclusion points, PC automatically starts autoexploring when at full HP/MP. Of course no spells can be cast without monsters in view.


It is not good for slow play to exist if it is not penalized. If the way to win is to wait a thousand turns for monsters to wander into fireball range and lure all 50 monsters in a level into 1-on-1 encounters, then the game sucks. I don't care if some players take particular pride in their exceptionally scrupulous overuse of luring and kiting tactics, if the game is to improve, at some point the interests of such players and the game's best interest will come into conflict.

The durable summon proposal does not create risk in doing these goofy tactics. Durable summons will only slow down an already slow and ridiculous way of playing.
Last edited by watertreatmentRL on Friday, 22nd September 2017, 07:51, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 07:45

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:The durable summon proposal does not create risk in doing these goofy tactics. Durable summons will only slow down an already slow and ridiculous way of playing.


I believe we have quite different understanding of what durable summons are. Simple example: a player is scumming and gets 2 Fire Dragons on D:1 after 3k turns, those dragons don't provide any piety/XP/hides.
Now let me repeat my comments again:

Do you think people will stay on the floor without a reason just to spend a consumable (read scroll of blinking) vs monsters who don't give XP/items?
It is good to allow players decide what they do, please don't make zig sprint out of normal crawl. If players want to die to those dragons while waiting for last HP to regenerate before exploring, that's fine.
It is good that slow play exists, player has choice - play more carefully losing piety and risking to encounter durable summons or rush forward at low HP/MP like you are suggesting
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 08:00

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I don't see how putting a fire dragon somewhere on d:1 after 3000 turns is better than putting four centaurs on top of the player after 3000 turns. Maybe the fire dragon spawns on top of the player or wanders to the player on turn 3002. Maybe the player never sees the dragon. Why leave this to chance?

If the issue is you want 3000 turns instead of 2500 turns, I think you should just say that. I can see that perspective, though I do like that the limit is tight enough that you can run into it occasionally in normal play. If you want to argue that there should be a nontrivial chance that the antiscumming measures have no effect at all, i.e. the player never meets the dragon, that's totally silly and it's already been tried.

Incidentally, it's totally possible to escape these spawns once you've gotten to mid dungeon or so. You just need to blink and then either teleport or blink again depending on the setup. And you're given ample warning. I genuinely don't understand how you can know about this mechanic and the gravity of the situations it produces, but find yourself unable to act on that knowledge in practical hellcrawl situations. You just have to bail on the level or accept substantial consumable losses.

edit: One more thing: Many of the spawns you get from the antiscumming timer are not dangerous if they're encountered at the edge of line of sight. It is critical that they are summoned in such a way that they are close to the player and surround the player. This is a huge part of the reason OOD spawns didn't and durable summon spawns won't work.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 08:32

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Sorry, I am lost here. I don't understand why you keep saying that durable summons won't work while you are suggesting durable summons too. I don't care if those will be 2 dragons, 4 centaurs or anything else, I care that those monsters:
1) should give no XP
2) should give no piety
3) should give no items/corpses/hides.
4) should be dangerous enough to kill PC easily
Then player will quickly realize that waiting any number of turns to fireball a monster is a bad idea.
What are you trying to prove exactly?
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 09:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Again, if a monster is encountered at the edge of line of sight that is fundamentally different from having summons on top of the player. It is easy and almost always free to escape a monster at the edge of line of sight. The durable summon proposal is not to put durable summons on top of the player as hellcrawl does. It is to spawn them at random positions on the level, as dcss used to do with spawns.

With this in mind, again, I have argued that the durable summon proposal is fundamentally different from the hellcrawl antiscumming clock and that it is substantially similar to old dcss spawns. In particular, I have argued that they will not produce the intended effect of discouraging doomRL-style scumming or extremely turncount intensive luring and kiting tactics. We know this is true because dcss OOD spawns did not have this effect. It is immaterial whether you get experience for killing the proposed durable summon spawns because they will be killed or evaded by the player without loss of resources other than patience.

You are now attempting to change the conversation to something that hasn't been proposed: Extreme out of depth durable summons, well beyond anything that has ever been remotely likely in dcss. Again, I have said this is inferior to the existing hellcrawl clock because the player may never meet those summons and if the player and summons meet, it will likely be in a position favorable to the player.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 09:50

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I see, my bad, sorry, I got confused by sentence that durable summons cannot help. I agree with you, it's better to put those summons right adjacent to player, this will make it clear that they are unusual monsters, kind of penalty for slow play.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 19:55

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:The only time I've run into the timer naturally was on vaults:3, so I just cleared out before fully clearing it (this strikes me as a good side effect). You really spent 2500 turns on d:15 without seeing any exits?


I have no idea how many turns I spent on the level, the only thing I do that takes extra time is resting to recover HP. I won that game with 39k turns having grabbed Swamp rune and skipped v3 entirely. An hour after that win I had it trigger again on D3 or d4 level with that large gnoll fort. I was mostly done clearing it and then it summoned for Orc wizards on top of me which of course killed me.

Perhaps its bugged and its not really 2500 turns. I don't really care, the whole feature is a stupid waste of space IMO.

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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 20:03

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The number of turns on various floors can be obtained from the notes in your morgue file.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 22:19

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I think the warnings could be tightened up so there are two levels of warning. And the second level is force mored. But it's a nice departure from vanilla crawl that you can't always clear every level. It will take a while for player thinking to adapt to this, and for a fork that's ok.

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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 22:38

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The gnoll castle is notoriously turncount intensive. I'm not surprised that attempting a full clear of it sometimes puts you over the limit.

I think the idea of force more on one of the warning messages is alright. Maybe it's just because I watch commits that this mechanic never took me off guard. I think the message is a bit vague too. A new player may not realize what is meant by moving along or what will happen if they don't figure it out. Something a little more on the nose might be called for as the last warning.
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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 02:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:The gnoll castle is notoriously turncount intensive. I'm not surprised that attempting a full clear of it sometimes puts you over the limit.

I think the idea of force more on one of the warning messages is alright. Maybe it's just because I watch commits that this mechanic never took me off guard. I think the message is a bit vague too. A new player may not realize what is meant by moving along or what will happen if they don't figure it out. Something a little more on the nose might be called for as the last warning.



Fuck that, there is no good reason to prevent me from clearing the level if that is what I want to do and I am playing "normally".

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 02:12

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Did a Branchless run and recovered the hell rune on a pure strength OpFi who eventually went dragonpode. I didn't find Dragon Form until I cleared Elf which I did with UC melee with a buckler and Summon Ice Beast I was banished twice while doing this. The "I am going to kill you because killing stuff in a game about killing stuff is counterproductive to killing stuff" feature triggered right as I cleared the first lung of Zot5 and was at orb so I could not clear the other Lung and I just ran into hell with it. What a great feature. That was sarcasm.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 04:36

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Well played. Clearing zot is bad, so again I have to say this feature is doing God's work in ways I hadn't thought of.

Also, good job winning a branchless game.
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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:08

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:It is easy and almost always free to escape a monster at the edge of line of sight.

How?

If one takes this statement literally, there would be no point to monsters at all, unless their sole purpose is to serve as bags of XP. Somehow, I don't think that is the intended design.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:14

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

If an anti scumming measure is needed to force players to progress, why not just shaft the player? Any measure that doesn't immediately eject the player from the level allows for edge-case abuse, and the 'problems' with shafting the player (lost items) are also present in the 'dump titans on the player' approach. Give sufficient warnings first, of course.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:22

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Also, in a current game I found myself unable to 'turn off' excruciating wounds, except by unwielding my weapon. Were charms changed to be non-toggleable?

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:22

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

amaril wrote:If an anti scumming measure is needed to force players to progress, why not just shaft the player? Any measure that doesn't immediately eject the player from the level allows for edge-case abuse, and the 'problems' with shafting the player (lost items) are also present in the 'dump titans on the player' approach. Give sufficient warnings first, of course.

Azure Dreams did this, and it worked quite well.

You'd obviously also want to fix the shaft depth to 1 level (instead of the 1 to 3 levels that it used to be in DCSS, no idea what it is currently), and you might want to couple this with a reduction in floor generator area (-30%?), to reduce players feeling like they can't explore as much as they'd like.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:31

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

@bel: I hesitate to speculate on the intended design. The explanation given to me recently in another context that early crawl was deeply simulationist probably goes a long way toward explaining the basic deficiencies of the vast majority of crawl combat situations. That crawl can work as a tactical combat game may be nothing more than coincidence.

That said, I think it is literally true that there is no point in the vast majority of monsters encountered in a typical game of crawl outside of acting as bags of XP. That should not be a controversial point. It is easy to see that you encounter an awful lot of monsters in a winning game, thousands in fact. It's also a fact that a lot of those encounters are resolved more or less automatically.

So you can see I'm not worried about falling into some reductio ad absurdum here. It seems totally obvious to me that encounters that occur at the edge of line of sight are simply not dangerous in almost all cases because of the power distance gives the player in controlling how the encounter develops. That is why OOD spawns didn't work in dcss and that is why nothing like old dcss spawns will work in hellcrawl.

late addition: y u no shaft player? I would prefer to see the scumming player die, for one. Also, it is not clear how shafts would work in some cases, for example in branch ends. If people are pissed off they got forced off a level by summons on top of them, imagine their fury when they get shafted out of pan orc into slime or something. I really can't get my brain wrapped around the complaints about the clock. I understand the complaints that the clock actually does something: This is the longstanding dcss position that there should be no real clock. I don't understand the "clock doesn't do the right thing" kind of complaint.
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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:47

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Also, it is not clear how shafts would work in some cases, for example in branch ends. If people are pissed off they got forced off a level by summons on top of them, imagine their fury when they get shafted out of pan orc into slime or something.

This isn't hard to define. Have shafts follow the canonical Hellcrawl branch order, whatever that ends up being. There would be no sense to dropping players through shortcuts involuntarily. The shaft code probably needs to be rewritten to handle shafting characters that it thinks are already at the bottom of a branch, but that's the case with everything Hellcrawl anyway.

People that complain about being shafted to dlvl+1 for moving slowly would be complaining about unfamiliar change no matter what.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 13:51

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I've played a lot of hellcrawl and I don't know the canonical hellcrawl branch order. This shafting stuff is like asking why when you hang around on a level in mario for 5 minutes, they don't just respawn you on the next level. What is so bad about trying to kill the player? If you screw around on a level without finding any stairs for 2400 turns, you should die, not advance to boardwalk.
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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 14:10

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:I don't understand the "clock doesn't do the right thing" kind of complaint.

watertreatmentRL wrote: I have argued that the durable summon proposal is fundamentally different from the hellcrawl antiscumming clock and that it is substantially similar to old dcss spawns. In particular, I have argued that they will not produce the intended effect of discouraging doomRL-style scumming or extremely turncount intensive luring and kiting tactics.

idk dude, it seems like you literally just complained that certain clocks don't effectively discourage scumming and therefore aren't effective progress clocks

Obviously it is harder to game the spawn-on-player clock but in certain circumstances (off the top of my head -- stat form char in killhole) it may be 'optimal' to continue to wait in perfectly safe terrain for the remaining xp on the lv to come to you. The messier your clock is, the more difficult it is to homogenize its effect. Killing the player is bad because it adds way too much weight to 'let's-kill-one-more-goblin'/'shit-forgot-some-arrows' type maximization. I would rather the player be punished by a consistent non-lethal mechanism. (Because regardless of the clock, assuming it is not gradual and all of its effects happen at once, the player is encouraged to wait on-level until the moment before the effects kick in assuming there is any incentive to remain) (The branch order issue w/ shafting seems like a non-issue: i.e. take the longest route, adjust warning message accordingly)

[re: bel's question] Monsters at the edge of sight can be dangerous, just not in an almost-entirely cleared level. Entering a new level in hellcrawl often creates situations in which threatening monsters are non-adjacent and optimal player response to these monsters is far from obvious. These situations are good: there is apparently no flowchart lame-play way to solve them. In the longstanding dcss no-clock position, every situation should be like this.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 14:22

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

No one has argued that the current hellcrawl clock does not discourage scumming as far as I can tell. They seem upset either that it does discourage scumming or that it doesn't do it in the right way. My complaint about old and current dcss anti-scumming measures is that they don't actually discourage scumming. Pretty big difference imo.

It is not punishment to shaft the player in hellcrawl. You have to enter the next level, die, or quit the game. When you enter the next level it's a lot like getting shafted in dcss. The only difference is that under this shafting proposal you didn't necessarily have to find any stairs to get shafted.

Now lets assume for a moment that doomRL scumming or some other form of scumming that depends on blowing a lot of turns without doing a lot of exploration is really advantageous. It seems to me then, you might be giving the player exactly what they want by letting them move to the next level without doing a lot of exploration. I feel a lot more confident that the game has not played into the hands of the player who is looking at a summary of how he was killed by an ancient lich summoned by the current mechanism than the player whose penalty is a new floor to scum on.

re: the possibility of gaming the exact time the current mechanism triggers, it is possible to randomize the timer (more?) to increase the risk of such behavior, but as I've said I don't care if players decide to do this. The only thing I think you can do to juice a level within the timer assuming you've explored it is to reexplore, which I think is bad and I have a proposal for -- perhaps I'll even write a patch at some point. I doubt that doomRL scumming brinksmanship will do anything for the player, since you at least need downstairs to do it at present and doomRL scumming takes a huge number of turns to depopulate a level.
Last edited by watertreatmentRL on Sunday, 24th September 2017, 14:34, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 14:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

bel wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:It is easy and almost always free to escape a monster at the edge of line of sight.

How?

If one takes this statement literally, there would be no point to monsters at all, unless their sole purpose is to serve as bags of XP. Somehow, I don't think that is the intended design.


watertreatmentRL wrote:@bel:
[...]
That said, I think it is literally true that there is no point in the vast majority of monsters encountered in a typical game of crawl outside of acting as bags of XP. That should not be a controversial point. It is easy to see that you encounter an awful lot of monsters in a winning game, thousands in fact. It's also a fact that a lot of those encounters are resolved more or less automatically.

So you can see I'm not worried about falling into some reductio ad absurdum here. It seems totally obvious to me that encounters that occur at the edge of line of sight are simply not dangerous in almost all cases because of the power distance gives the player in controlling how the encounter develops. That is why OOD spawns didn't work in dcss and that is why nothing like old dcss spawns will work in hellcrawl.

When someone says "it's obvious", it usually isn't.

Firstly, there are no upstairs in Hellcrawl, so "<" is not a "get out of jail free" card. And ">" is not free. Incidentally, this feature also gets rid of the "interrupts autotravel" justification for spawn removal.

Secondly, invoking "almost all cases" doesn't lead to anything meaningful in a game with permadeath. It only takes one encounter to kill you. That's why there is only one of you and many of the monsters. Here is one typical situation: you are hurt and retreating from a monster, when a monster ambushes you from the back. This was one of the main justifications for monster spawns, which was basically ignored in the commit in mainline DCSS I have been whining about.

Lastly, if what you say is actually true (monsters are just bags of XP), then the DCSS framework is irredeemably rotten. In that case, there's no point in building a fork on such a shaky foundation. If it's only "mostly true", see paragraph above.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 14:54

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

This is one of those rare cases when someone says it's obvious because they're baffled someone in a position to know is saying it's not true. Escaping edge of line of sight encounters is like the most basic of basic crawl tactics.

A typical situation that the mechanic you're defending was supposed to prevent is: A character is sitting in a position where he cannot be readily attacked by a monster that wanders into his field of vision such that he can immediately begin attacking that monster and be reasonably certain of taking it down before it can do anything. This character is not going to be attacked from behind and he's not going to be hurt or running away from anything. It would take some freak alignment of the planets where somehow several out of depth monsters discover the player simultaneously to disrupt this gameplan. In this rare, highly unlikely event, the player may have to try his luck on a teleport.

Ah, but enter hellcrawl: What if that freak alignment of planets wasn't just a highly unlikely, once every 1,000,000 turns kind of event? What if it were an absolute certainty? What if the monsters not only appeared simultaneously for sure within a few thousand turns, but they were also positioned in a way that put the player at a major disadvantage such that even teleport may not be an adequate response? There's a lot more to be said for this approach than one that banks on beating the scummer by sheer luck.
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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 15:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote: Escaping edge of line of sight encounters is like the most basic of basic crawl tactics.

You have still not told me how this is possible in all cases (make it 999,999 out of 1,000,000 if you like), for free.

Here's a simple way to "settle" this. Play normal Crawl on some public server. Try to escape the first 50 monsters (say after you get to D:3 or whatever) which you encounter without using any consumables, and without using "<" or ">". Then post the ttyrec here. Can you do this? Or perhaps you are talking about something altogether different and I don't understand.

watertreatmentRL wrote: A typical situation that the mechanic you're defending was supposed to prevent is: A character is sitting in a position where he cannot be readily attacked by a monster that wanders into his field of vision such that he can immediately begin attacking that monster and be reasonably certain of taking it down before it can do anything. This character is not going to be attacked from behind and he's not going to be hurt or running away from anything. It would take some freak alignment of the planets where somehow several out of depth monsters discover the player simultaneously to disrupt this gameplan. In this rare, highly unlikely event, the player may have to try his luck on a teleport.

"Assume you have a can opener..." I think it's probably not fruitful to continue this line of discussion further. So this will my last reply on this point.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 16:48

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

For what it is worth, I watched part of severen's no branch run and he wasn't goofing around. His runner was often underpowered so he had to play more cautiously around packs. He was not just hiding in some kill hole mashing 5 hoping everything would come to him. That win is pretty impressive.

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Post Sunday, 24th September 2017, 22:41

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:Well played. Clearing zot is bad, so again I have to say this feature is doing God's work in ways I hadn't thought of.

Also, good job winning a branchless game.


I am sorry but this make zero sense. Why the hell would you care whether someone chose to clear Zot? You seriously want to force everyone to play the narrow way you approve of? Worst game design ever. I wasn't doing a speedrun and even if I was I may have some valid risk vs reward reason for clearing zot.

I have no interest in playing a game designed under these terrible precepts. I will play it the way I feel like, herding me like some sheep is crap. Utter crap.

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Airwolf

Crypt Cleanser

Posts: 689

Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54

Post Monday, 25th September 2017, 02:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Mini update coming.
  • Antiscumming clock pushed back to 3000 turns, improved the messaging and it will force_more in the last couple hundred turns before spawns come.
  • New new kobolds based on a variant of the gnoll proposal: they start with their normal background-provided skills and get a fixed 0.5 skill levels in everything every time they level up (beginning at level 4), but can't gain skills normally. Their stats have been increased back to roughly normal values, weighted a bit toward int. They still evolve, as well.
  • Sif magic boost has been simplified to a passive heroism-style effect that depends on piety only, rather than a complex mix of piety, your skill level, and your aptitude. I think it's a slight nerf numerically for the characters that typically wanted sif before.
  • Sif piety is exploration based rather than kill + magic skilling based. Piety gain should be a bit smoother now.
  • All piety costs are fixed rather than having a very weird variable cost formula.
  • Merged an old commit to allow opening doors and quaffing while in batform.
  • Removed statzero, stats can't go below 1.
  • Ru sacrifices show the piety you'll gain numerically.

So the more I think about progress clocks the more I am convinced that the speedrunning camp is actually right and a roguelike built around score is the best solution. Unfortunately, DCSS has a lot of features that make playing for score not clean mechanically and the score system itself is not very good. So assuming that there needs to be some kind of secondary clock to prevent waitscumming nonsense, the goal imo is to eliminate as much scumming as possible while being minimally invasive for normal play. I think it's also important to question how much of a benefit waitscumming actually provides. If the benefit is low, then a minor impact to resources like experience debt or forced shafting + some bad effect on the next floor might be sufficient to make the behavior suboptimal. I chose a hard turncount clock with hostile spawns because it struck me as a relatively easy to understand and clearly dangerous enough to prevent the worst kinds of scumming. Apparently my initial turncount limit was too ambitious, and the messages were not clear enough. The new version will probably stick around at least a couple weeks until I get a better feel for how to improve it.

Congrats on the 1 rune branchless win severen.

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bel, chequers, Implojin, ker, watertreatmentRL

Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Monday, 25th September 2017, 08:49

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I suspect part of the issue here is personal preference. For example, to me getting forced out of vaults:3 before I've cleared the level or perhaps even found the rune is a new and interesting gameplay possibility and I've welcomed it when it's happened. I tend to gravitate toward low-completion games, so the nudge to go even lower completion strikes me as an interesting suggestion I ordinarily wouldn't think of.

I know others prefer to play what are thought to be harder combos, in which case the weakness of the character is compensated for by more scrupulous use of luring and kiting, more cautious resting and so on. You exchange turncount for low character quality. I would like to see traditionally weaker species somehow compensated so that their turncounts can stay more competitive with traditionally average to strong species.

A lot of the discussion of clocks lately focuses on doomRL waitscumming and similarly crazy behavior most players have little direct experience with. It's important to keep in mind that luring and kiting are much bigger problems in crawl (though hellcrawl has made some progress in addressing the worst of it) that can also be addressed through clocks. We should have more willingness to see these turncount intensive tactics dealt with head on via clocks, even if they intrude on what some people consider normal play. Part of what this is all about is that "normal play" can change. A future hellcrawl in which the kind of kiting, luring, and resting you do to streak bad dcss combos reliably results in dead characters would very likely be better than where we stand today.
*Lana Del Rey voice* , video games...

Slime Squisher

Posts: 368

Joined: Thursday, 11th April 2013, 21:07

Post Monday, 25th September 2017, 09:35

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Hellmonk wrote:[*]Sif piety is exploration based rather than kill + magic skilling based.

So the more I think about progress clocks the more I am convinced that the speedrunning camp is actually right

if you tease me like this you'd better go all the way bby

Snake Sneak

Posts: 94

Joined: Sunday, 26th April 2015, 22:16

Post Monday, 25th September 2017, 18:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The sprint maps don't seem to work anymore. The exit is now just an archway--perhaps due to the removal of upstairs? I can still win the Zig map since the exit spawns when I go through the last teleporter but 10 Runs, Fedhas, and Pits seem to be no long winnable. :(

Spider Stomper

Posts: 241

Joined: Saturday, 29th October 2016, 17:41

Post Monday, 25th September 2017, 19:48

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:I suspect part of the issue here is personal preference. For example, to me getting forced out of vaults:3 before I've cleared the level or perhaps even found the rune is a new and interesting gameplay possibility and I've welcomed it when it's happened. I tend to gravitate toward low-completion games, so the nudge to go even lower completion strikes me as an interesting suggestion I ordinarily wouldn't think of.

I know others prefer to play what are thought to be harder combos, in which case the weakness of the character is compensated for by more scrupulous use of luring and kiting, more cautious resting and so on. You exchange turncount for low character quality. I would like to see traditionally weaker species somehow compensated so that their turncounts can stay more competitive with traditionally average to strong species.

A lot of the discussion of clocks lately focuses on doomRL waitscumming and similarly crazy behavior most players have little direct experience with. It's important to keep in mind that luring and kiting are much bigger problems in crawl (though hellcrawl has made some progress in addressing the worst of it) that can also be addressed through clocks. We should have more willingness to see these turncount intensive tactics dealt with head on via clocks, even if they intrude on what some people consider normal play. Part of what this is all about is that "normal play" can change. A future hellcrawl in which the kind of kiting, luring, and resting you do to streak bad dcss combos reliably results in dead characters would very likely be better than where we stand today.


Luring and kiting are pretty important on a non-glaciate/firestorm run in Zot. The hellcrawl monster makeup of zot makes luring and kiting basically required or you will just plain die. If a subtractor snake teleport a whole pack of robins (of any sort) you are highly likely to die or (as happened to me on a promising branchless statuepode) mixes in a giant giant which constricts you and prevent teleport.

It seems to me you would need to change both monster make up AND available tactics (i.e. melee would need relialbe/damaging AOE or something) to actually solve luring and kiting as a problem. No amount of negative incentivizing on the other side will solve the problem because even if the dungeon is threatening to kill you or shaft you that will never be balanced out to the certain death of that subtractor snake + deadly surrounding mob. And in certain circumstances you have no other options, it is easily possible to not have a dig wand in Zot, its happened to me multiple times, and you can easily spawn in with no way to sneak around the mob and teleporting is a pure roulette.

Most people concede that luring and kiting are valid and even good tactics. The only real issue is excessive amounts of this. But but not luring and kiting in a Zot lung is pretty much stupid. There is a very good chance of having to fight multiple OOFs simultaneously if you don't and even when you do fighting multiple OOFs is pretty common. AND throw on top of that the tactics used to avoid the permanent mutations caused by OOFs work extremely poorly when there is more than one and the remedy for this is often extremely limited (I have had HC zot runs with literally 0 mutation pots and often only have 2). I have zoned into Zot5 via a hatch which put me into one of the lungs surrounded by 4 OOFs, a chaos clown and two orb guardians. I still won that game, hellmonk was watching it when this happened and called me "bold" but I was just being stupid and forgot about hatches being different. Anyway the point being that this is a concrete not uncommon example of how the game is made to require luring and kiting from any practical perspective, there were 4 OOFs all packed together within a 5 square "radius". I read a teleport scroll immediately of course. Even if I could have just RAWRed and killed them all (and i was an 1 rune(swamp) dragonpode so I might have been possible with good rolls but stupidly dangerous) staying there is just dumb just because of the completely uncounterable mutations and also because since it was a lung there is almost a certain guarantee of additional monsters coming at you, potentially a very large number.

Punishing the player will never resolve the luring/kiting problem. You will never be able to deincentivize the players from kiting because in many cases you are only giving them a choice between a quick death or slightly less quick death, that is the way the content in crawl is made. There are certain styles of playing that have less of a problem for this, like just blasting the fuck out of everything you see with FS/Glaciate and occasionally running, but not really kiting when things get dicey, but if the game is reduced to just this it will be a much worse game.
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Halls Hopper

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Post Tuesday, 26th September 2017, 05:13

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Casual mode was born for this, turn off clock of doom in casual, normal hellcrawl stays super intense.

Anti scumming mechanic is that no matter how much you scum you're still a casual.

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Lair Larrikin

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Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 17:35

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

could someone please guide me in the way of compiling latest build into offline, tiles play? the last compiled release is lacking a lot of new stuff (like permabuffs)

Slime Squisher

Posts: 368

Joined: Thursday, 11th April 2013, 21:07

Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 18:29

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

despairbutalsodespair wrote:could someone please guide me in the way of compiling latest build into offline, tiles play? the last compiled release is lacking a lot of new stuff (like permabuffs)

In general, just follow https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/INSTALL.txt, but point it at the hellcrawl repo. ( https://github.com/Hellmonk/hellcrawl.git )


A shitty summary of INSTALL.txt follows:

Step 0: Ensure that your system has a dev environment with Crawl's dependencies installed. On linux this will probably already be done, on windows you may have to install cygwin or MSYS2. A list of the dependencies, and how to get them, can be found in INSTALL.txt .

After your environment is setup, here's what you need to run in a terminal to produce a binary:
  Code:
git clone https://github.com/Hellmonk/hellcrawl.git hellcrawl
cd hellcrawl
git submodule update --init
git checkout master
cd crawl-ref
cd source
make TILES=y PCH=y -j8
./crawl

Crypt Cleanser

Posts: 689

Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54

Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 18:33

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I'm trying to get a new download together but I'm pretty incompetent, it might be a while unless I can pawn it off on somebody else (don't do Windows, kids).

Lair Larrikin

Posts: 24

Joined: Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 17:34

Post Wednesday, 27th September 2017, 19:02

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Implojin wrote:
despairbutalsodespair wrote:could someone please guide me in the way of compiling latest build into offline, tiles play? the last compiled release is lacking a lot of new stuff (like permabuffs)

In general, just follow https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/INSTALL.txt, but point it at the hellcrawl repo. ( https://github.com/Hellmonk/hellcrawl.git )


A shitty summary of INSTALL.txt follows:

Step 0: Ensure that your system has a dev environment with Crawl's dependencies installed. On linux this will probably already be done, on windows you may have to install cygwin or MSYS2. A list of the dependencies, and how to get them, can be found in INSTALL.txt .

After your environment is setup, here's what you need to run in a terminal to produce a binary:
  Code:
git clone https://github.com/Hellmonk/hellcrawl.git hellcrawl
cd hellcrawl
git submodule update --init
git checkout master
cd crawl-ref
cd source
make TILES=y PCH=y -j8
./crawl


ive download msys2 but when i try to paste your code into it, it doesnt recognise what i am trying to do (uknown command). sorry if i am coming as lazy but would you mind compiling the latest build for me and other less tech savy people?

Spider Stomper

Posts: 241

Joined: Saturday, 29th October 2016, 17:41

Post Friday, 29th September 2017, 16:42

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

braveplatypus wrote:Casual mode was born for this, turn off clock of doom in casual, normal hellcrawl stays super intense.

Anti scumming mechanic is that no matter how much you scum you're still a casual.


Actually I think some of Hellmonks issues could be solved by making a few playstyle modes that change scoring, i.e. a "speedrun" mode that weight real time played more heavily, a "turncount" mode that weighted turns played more heavily, and a "normal" that is the basic branch. Remove the waitscum code entirely. People who care about waitscumming can play speedrun or turncount mode and the incentive to not waitscum is your score will be absolute shit. How much a rune should count for score is debatable (perhaps none.)

This wouldn't entirely solve how to make scoring be extremely close to the difficulty or your run (i.e winning with only the hell rune is probably the "hardest" run but getting 9 runes is radically more score). But that could also be handled via a game mode, (i.e. just put in a very simple "If statement" into the score to account for this). Hellcrawl itself actually has only a limited number of possiblilities for runes and you can infer the nature of the run by what runes they got to some extent or even just by what branches they entered. In other words you know for a fact that someone went depthless if they do not have the lair branch rune and never entered Pand.

But what is "harder" winning a lair+vault rune run with minimal turncount or winning with more turns (to reasonable degree)? I dunno and I doubt you can get a good answer on this.

IMO this is a clearly superior way to handle these sorts of things. The only problem would be the potential explosion of game modes with different scoring. I mean someone would eventually want a combination of turncount + depthless scoreing modes etc.

Personally I have no interest in playing for minimal turn count, but I can see how some people would find that challenge very interesting.

Swamp Slogger

Posts: 174

Joined: Saturday, 16th September 2017, 21:17

Post Saturday, 30th September 2017, 00:37

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Playing Hellcrawl for the first time.

I really like it so far.

Pretty much only 2 additions I'd like to see, and these are FUNCTIONALITY ONLY.

1) PLEASE let me use my mouse to click spots for movement/attacks like v0.20. 90% of the time I'm on a laptop without a numpad, and since some of the shortcuts overlap with my directional numbers if I use NUMLK, this is REAAAAAAALLLLY annoying.

2) Institude the SHIFT+g "Go to...." shortcut. Once I've cleared a floor, I'd love to be able to auto-pilot to the next one instead of backtracking manually across the dungeon. Not THAT big of a deal, though.

3) See number one.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Joined: Monday, 14th October 2013, 01:05

Post Saturday, 30th September 2017, 21:21

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

not that it shouldn't have full mouse usability but fwiw I still play using a key setup I made back when I was on laptop and I still think it works quite well.
QWE
ASD
ZXC
is movement, and the other actions that were on those are moved elsewhere. I find it makes it easier to switch back and forth between crawl and games that used WASD for movement because my finger placement is the same.

Swamp Slogger

Posts: 174

Joined: Saturday, 16th September 2017, 21:17

Post Sunday, 1st October 2017, 00:07

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

True, I'm quite used to the WASD movement. Might end up doing that. Alternately, I could always use "1-0" number bar across the top as directional movements. Have to keep it memorized, but I wonder if that would work :P.

Still, I think mouse utility would be nice. I mean, at least for the basic things like movement, selecting squares...that's enjoyable. I mean, in my ideal world this would have the same level of full mouse gaming like v0.20's downloaded version, but that's a long shot here.

I think basic utility would be enough, just because there are SOOO many times I need to select squares in this game (casting, moving, X-amining, etc.) that it would be better than having to key-press my way through the game.

EDIT:

What I would LIKE to see happen would be the making of Stabbers more viable.

The easiest way of doing this, in my mind, would be to make more monsters spawn asleep, sleep be a bit deeper, and make each increment of stealth more powerful. At max stealth, you should make everything you do utterly noiseless, but also make stealth items/boosts rare enough that max-stealth is REALLY hard to get.

Ofc, if there are other ways of doing this they are MORE than welcome. But still -- make stealth builds an actual "thing" that works.

EDIT EDIT:

Also, PLEASE add an up-to-date shortcut list. Can't figure out how to pray at an altar because I can't figure out the proper shortcut. (EDIT x3 -- figured it out, but still--- please update the Help Menu :P)

Snake Sneak

Posts: 94

Joined: Sunday, 26th April 2015, 22:16

Post Sunday, 1st October 2017, 15:59

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

despairbutalsodespair wrote:ive download msys2 but when i try to paste your code into it, it doesnt recognise what i am trying to do (uknown command). sorry if i am coming as lazy but would you mind compiling the latest build for me and other less tech savy people?


This is how I managed to get a copy of the current hellcrawl build to work on my cheap Win8 machine:

Step 1: go to https://msys2.github.io/ and download msys2-x86_64-20161025.exe

Step 2: run msys2-x86_64-20161025.exe and let it install.

Step 3: open C:\msys64 and run mingw64.exe.

Step 4: type in each of the following, hit return. You have to do these one at a time and wait for it to finish before typing in the next line (some of these take a bit of time to execute). Do not copy/paste, it won't work. I literally had to type each line in.

  Code:
pacman -S base-devel git

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain

cd hellcrawl

git submodule update --init

git checkout master

cd crawl-ref

cd source

make TILES=y PCH=y -j8


Step 5: close mingw64.exe and then go to C:\msys64\home\***\hellcrawl\crawl-ref\source (*** is the user name on your computer). There is a bunch of stuff here. Ignore most of it. The morgue and save directories are here. Find Crawl.exe. Run it. Enjoy.

Spider Stomper

Posts: 241

Joined: Saturday, 29th October 2016, 17:41

Post Monday, 2nd October 2017, 14:59

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Alphaeus wrote:True, I'm quite used to the WASD movement. Might end up doing that. Alternately, I could always use "1-0" number bar across the top as directional movements. Have to keep it memorized, but I wonder if that would work :P.

Still, I think mouse utility would be nice. I mean, at least for the basic things like movement, selecting squares...that's enjoyable. I mean, in my ideal world this would have the same level of full mouse gaming like v0.20's downloaded version, but that's a long shot here.

I think basic utility would be enough, just because there are SOOO many times I need to select squares in this game (casting, moving, X-amining, etc.) that it would be better than having to key-press my way through the game.

EDIT:

What I would LIKE to see happen would be the making of Stabbers more viable.

The easiest way of doing this, in my mind, would be to make more monsters spawn asleep, sleep be a bit deeper, and make each increment of stealth more powerful. At max stealth, you should make everything you do utterly noiseless, but also make stealth items/boosts rare enough that max-stealth is REALLY hard to get.

Ofc, if there are other ways of doing this they are MORE than welcome. But still -- make stealth builds an actual "thing" that works.

EDIT EDIT:

Also, PLEASE add an up-to-date shortcut list. Can't figure out how to pray at an altar because I can't figure out the proper shortcut. (EDIT x3 -- figured it out, but still--- please update the Help Menu :P)


Any propsoal to make stabbers better needs to take the Orb run into account. I think it cuts stealth to 1/3? And going through hell with a major part of your build cut like that is problematic. Stealth itself is actually extremely useful, its just not reliable for getting stabs so stabbers wind up with a fairly bad on/off gameplay. However skalds can make a pretty good hybrid stabber type guy.

Its not stealth so much as hexes and other MR based things that stabbers tend to use that kind of just fall off real bad. However you can get stabs off of spec weapon+dith mimic so skald of dith can actually be kind of interesting stabber even with out hexes etc.

Snake Sneak

Posts: 94

Joined: Sunday, 26th April 2015, 22:16

Post Tuesday, 3rd October 2017, 23:03

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Should Orc be moved up earlier in the dungeon? To me, O1 always feels easier than D15. O2 varies, depending on what vault(s) you get. What about ditching O1 entirely and making O2 a timed vault (like Elf) on D10-12 or something?

Slime Squisher

Posts: 386

Joined: Thursday, 26th March 2015, 01:22

Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:12

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Hellcrawl is a strategy test. On all but the strongest characters, consumables are needed to survive lategame encounters. If you are low on xp, you need to use more consumables throughout the game. If you lure to good tactical positions you will end up low on xp. If you build an op character in the first place this problem does not exist. You can clear encounters with adequate consumable rationing/very little luring. It becomes trivial to get all portals/clear slime/zot/etc for xp, further increasing the power gap between strong and weak characters.

There are already mechanics in place to balance the power of luring. Sometimes it is better to kill a monster immediately than it is to let it make a ton of noise or damage you over time. Sometimes it is safer to wait in place for monsters to approach (rather than seeking better terrain) because seeking better terrain would require venturing into unexplored space. Consumables and xp are problems. It is impossible to balance the late game for all characters. Hence every game turns into a multiple-hour strategy test.

Speedrunning any game makes for a better test of player skill, but it invariably linearizes the game. Speedrunning is the only way to reconcile modern crawl's tactical strategy/strategic rpg duality. In hellcrawl, as in speedrun crawl, creative character builds are punished heavily. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. However--some portion of the people who play crawl like crawl because they can make quirky synergies and odd playstyles work (see: the common recommendation to use untested artefacts at a slight cost to character power). Character building is part of the unique appeal of the roguelike genre.

Small floors are good. Every floor should be a self-contained tactical puzzle. Consumables can recharge every floor. xp can be awarded on a per-floor basis. Regeneration should either 1) cease mid-floor (so hp/mp are resources that recharge as you clear the floor) or 2) happen much faster than it currently does. Some builds will still be stronger than others, but without xp accrual and item accrual a character's build becomes a list of tools the player has opted to invest in. Power divergence will be kept in check. The game will be much easier to balance. If you choose not to invest in a ranged attack, the consequence is evident: you lack a way to prevent yourself from getting surrounded. The player should die asap if they have made incorrect decisions, not 20000 turns in the future when they run out of consumables/the gradually widening gap between character power and game difficulty becomes insurmountable.
Last edited by amaril on Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:15, edited 1 time in total.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 4432

Joined: Friday, 8th May 2015, 17:51

Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:14

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Probably timed portals should not be timed portals at casual difficulty.
Underestimated: cleaving, Deep Elf, Formicid, Vehumet, EV
Overestimated: AC, GDS
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Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 4432

Joined: Friday, 8th May 2015, 17:51

Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:18

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

amaril wrote:xp can be awarded on a per-floor basis


Please no. It was tested in circus animals fork. While it was probably fun for some players to dive SpEn, it completely ruined gameplay (why should I fight a monster if I can just walk way and get the same XP?). Fortunately, "get xp for entering a floor" was optional and customizable
Underestimated: cleaving, Deep Elf, Formicid, Vehumet, EV
Overestimated: AC, GDS
Twin account of Sandman25

Slime Squisher

Posts: 386

Joined: Thursday, 26th March 2015, 01:22

Post Thursday, 5th October 2017, 13:27

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:why should I fight a monster if I can just walk way and get the same XP?


If a floor is sufficiently monster dense, avoiding monsters is penalized by increased likelihood of getting surrounded when trying to approach the exit. Why should a player have to fight every monster? In a good game there are multiple viable ways to approach a situation. If there is one correct path, your game is a puzzle. Yes, Spriggans are broken.
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