Generate killer bees later


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Post Wednesday, 19th December 2018, 17:54

Generate killer bees later

Most characters on D:2 won't have the tools to successfully fight or flee from a swarm of killer bees. This scenario involves no meaningful decisions and no relevance to player skill, and as such does not meet the design goals.

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Post Wednesday, 19th December 2018, 20:31

Re: Generate killer bees later

D2 is pretty far out of depth, you got pretty darned unlucky. I'm not sure I've seen that in ~370 games. I've seen ogres in d2-d4 on rare occasions.

You can still live sometimes depending on where they are relative to you on discovery and whether your panic resource usage bears fruit, but I agree this kind of encounter where you can't run and get a D2 gear check isn't ideal.

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Post Wednesday, 19th December 2018, 20:33

Re: Generate killer bees later

Try using consumables and staying closer to stairs.

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Post Wednesday, 19th December 2018, 21:32

Re: Generate killer bees later

There's a picture of the situation on Reddit. Player had explored most of D2 and was caught approaching the last set of stairs, with the bees between him and stairs.

Per the picture, he could have survived because he began as a gladiator and had throwing nets, making it possible to net a bee in the door and have a good chance of getting away without dying. Still, this encounter as a 31 health octopode would have killed many characters as having the correct consumables identified or used by chance in time is down to RNG.

I actually didn't realize D2 bees were even possible, it be a pretty annoying way to lose a streak lol. Still, he didn't have to die this time.

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Post Thursday, 20th December 2018, 00:03

Re: Generate killer bees later

You'd have to be pretty lucky to get a consumable that would save you from a bee swarm before finishing D:2, and if you stayed close enough to stairs to be able to escape the much faster than average bees, you'd likely never discover a stairwell down to D:3. Most characters do not start with nets, and I can attest from personal experience that killer bees tend to break out of them before you can escape even if you do have them.

"Proper" use of out-of-depth monsters, in my opinion, does not include situations that the average character should not be expected to survive even if played perfectly.

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Post Thursday, 20th December 2018, 14:20

Re: Generate killer bees later

I find killer bee swarms hard enough in Lair. I'm glad I've never seen them on d:2 (although I'm pretty sure I saw a hell knight on d:3 or something silly the other day)

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Post Thursday, 20th December 2018, 19:55

Re: Generate killer bees later

delarado wrote:I find killer bee swarms hard enough in Lair. I'm glad I've never seen them on d:2 (although I'm pretty sure I saw a hell knight on d:3 or something silly the other day)


Hell knight is way too far OOD to spawn naturally in D3. There are some cases where late game enemies spawn on early levels and are 100% enclosed by glass. There's a vault that does this with fire and ice dragons in elf, but leaves open tiles so if a TP trap generates there it can teleport a dragon onto the level. In elf this isn't a big deal since dragons are less threatening than normal enemies on the floor, but it could be a problem if something similar happens elsewhere.

I'm not sure any similar "has open tiles" thing generates on early floors, but if so these should probably be banned from having traps as the player isn't intended to ever enter them.
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Post Thursday, 20th December 2018, 22:27

Re: Generate killer bees later

It's a good tradeoff for d:2 killer bees to occasionally be "guaranteed death despite perfect play" if they mostly are survivable by running away, and I think that's mostly true.

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Post Thursday, 20th December 2018, 22:30

Re: Generate killer bees later

chequers wrote:It's a good tradeoff for d:2 killer bees to occasionally be "guaranteed death despite perfect play" if they mostly are survivable by running away, and I think that's mostly true.


On d2? If you don't have luck with blind-using a consumable or happen to be within 10 tiles of stairs most species will die. 4x bees on d2 will kill more often than not, I don't agree with "mostly survivable". Maybe for spriggans or a blind quaff of lignification. Not for normal 10 aut move species, even if they don't press autoexplore.

Notably, many early game characters on D2 can't solo-kill a *single* bee reliably (even less likely below max health), so just getting to the stairs isn't enough. Once you go up, there's nowhere left to go.

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Post Friday, 21st December 2018, 00:16

Re: Generate killer bees later

The bee might not notice you due to stealth. There might be a door to close. You might be one of many starts with a way of dealing with a bee or two (Fi has might, Gl has net, As has curare, Ar has wands, just from first column).

Reducing d:2 bees to "well I'm dead" is short changing the possibility space that DCSS offers.

DCSS generates exciting situations which are sometimes unsolvable. I think early killer bees are a decent contribution to that. Unfortunately it's hard to get stats about what happens to players when they encounter bees on d:2. I can say they represent about 0.2% of d:2 deaths, but that's pretty meaningless without knowing what percentage of games get a d:2 bee spawn.

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Post Friday, 21st December 2018, 00:34

Re: Generate killer bees later

One bee would be relatively reasonable, but I think bees only generate in swarms. And yes, I'm not saying there's *never* a situation where a character can survive encountering a bee swarm on D:2, in fact if I could choose which consumables to have randomly found by that point in the game, I'm certain I could have survived my encounter. And I accept both the fact that hopeless situations are part of Crawl's design, as well as the reasoning behind that fact. But, there's a difference between a situation that a particular character encounters and has no way to survive, and a threat that the majority of characters that encounter shouldn't be reasonably expected to have a way to survive. By my understanding of the design goals, the first is accepted as a necessary price to pay for the randomness that is so important to Crawl's replay value, but the second doesn't need to be (and therefore shouldn't be).

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Post Friday, 21st December 2018, 20:32

Re: Generate killer bees later

chequers wrote:The bee might not notice you due to stealth. There might be a door to close. You might be one of many starts with a way of dealing with a bee or two (Fi has might, Gl has net, As has curare, Ar has wands, just from first column).

Reducing d:2 bees to "well I'm dead" is short changing the possibility space that DCSS offers.

DCSS generates exciting situations which are sometimes unsolvable. I think early killer bees are a decent contribution to that. Unfortunately it's hard to get stats about what happens to players when they encounter bees on d:2. I can say they represent about 0.2% of d:2 deaths, but that's pretty meaningless without knowing what percentage of games get a d:2 bee spawn.


I have > 360 games played and have never encountered D:2 bees to my knowledge. It's not impossible they might have been there on some of the D:1 splats.

While the game can create unsolvable scenarios it's good practice to at least attempt to avoid obvious implementations where it is likely. Take an extreme scenario, like a D:2 caustic shrike. Some characters will have escapes that let them get a shrike near a stair then skip the floor, making the game still technically winnable. But it's still not a healthy monster to put on D:2.

Bees are not that extreme, but given their high speed + very high damage (plus poison risk) relative to HP available at the time the are likely to be disproportionately lethal compared to nearly anything else that can generate on the floor. Sigmund, 2h ogres, even skeletal warriors are all substantially safer d:2 enemies.

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Post Saturday, 22nd December 2018, 06:24

Re: Generate killer bees later

When some monsters are generated there are 3 possible choices:
1) run without trying to fight,
2) fight and risk to spend consumables, 3) fight without risk to spend consumankes.
Good monsters are those that fall into second category and player has multiple choices: escape without fighting to save consumables, fight without consumables and hope for the best, fight with consumables and which one to use? Other categories lead to limited decision-making and are bad due to either too high rate of unavoidable deaths or popcorn fighting.
Bees on D2 fall into first category and should be fixed, one bee on D2 falls into second category and is ok.

Edit. The above applies to ideal game which has explicit difficulty levels. In crawl good monsters should fall into second category for most or at least some characters. If a monster is too dangerous or trivial to every character, it is bad monster.
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Post Saturday, 22nd December 2018, 09:08

Re: Generate killer bees later

Can you really use nets on a bee? Aren't they tiny?
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Post Saturday, 22nd December 2018, 16:08

Re: Generate killer bees later

Nets can be used on Tiny creatures, they just have a really good chance of escaping early because of their small size and high EV. According to the wiki (which may or may not be at all even remotely accurate), you can net anything except a Giant-size creature, of which there are none naturally (only Dragon Form makes one Giant) - and you can't net anything insubstantial like a ghost, obviously, or something that eats items (a jelly will just eat/corrode the net off itself).

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Post Saturday, 22nd December 2018, 18:36

Re: Generate killer bees later

From my experience, the nets delay a bee by 1 turn per net, and when you consider that it takes a turn to throw a net, nets really are not a viable escape tool vs. bees.
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Post Monday, 31st December 2018, 06:09

Re: Generate killer bees later

Yeah, D:2 bees are dangerous AF and will kill a lot of characters. But here's the thing: sometimes you will survive. You might be near enough to stairs or a door. You might have good a summon or consumable that helps. Maybe you have Passwall. You might be just about to get trounced and then run into a shaft or teleport trap and then need to figure out how to survive in that new situation. Better gameplay and thinking about your options will absolutely make the situation more survivable.

And in those cases, the ones where you do survive, you'll have "that one game where there was a friggin' bee pack on D:2 and you still won because X and Y and Z" and those stories are an important part of a big roguelike's nature.

And when you die, you'll have "that one game that was amazing until D:2 where there was a friggin' bee pack and you couldn't do anything" and those stories are, too.
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Post Monday, 31st December 2018, 07:54

Re: Generate killer bees later

njvack wrote:Yeah, D:2 bees are dangerous AF and will kill a lot of characters. But here's the thing: sometimes you will survive. You might be near enough to stairs or a door. You might have good a summon or consumable that helps. Maybe you have Passwall. You might be just about to get trounced and then run into a shaft or teleport trap and then need to figure out how to survive in that new situation. Better gameplay and thinking about your options will absolutely make the situation more survivable.

And in those cases, the ones where you do survive, you'll have "that one game where there was a friggin' bee pack on D:2 and you still won because X and Y and Z" and those stories are an important part of a big roguelike's nature.

And when you die, you'll have "that one game that was amazing until D:2 where there was a friggin' bee pack and you couldn't do anything" and those stories are, too.


So it will result in lots of unavoidable deaths and sometimes you will escape by miracle? This is bad and should be fixed. It is especially bad provided there are no characters who can kill a pack of bees on D:2 so there is no any choice here: you either escape or die, it's a no brainer monster pack. We don't put packs of orbs of fire on Depths:1, do we?
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Post Monday, 31st December 2018, 15:23

Re: Generate killer bees later

Orbs of Fire on Depths:1 would actually be more reasonable than Bees on Dungeon:2, because by that point you likely would have some tools on hand you could use to escape.

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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 02:52

Re: Generate killer bees later

VeryAngryFelid wrote:So it will result in lots of unavoidable deaths and sometimes you will escape by miracle?

If it resulted in lots of unavoidable deaths, yeah, that would be bad. As far as I know, this results in vanishingly few unavoidable deaths. Even if you do run into a D:2 bee, it's a situation where good play can make death more avoidable.

I'm not saying "bees should be a standard D:2 spawn," they're way out of depth there. But big roguelikes gotta throw you a weird curveball sometimes.

An OOF on Depths:1 would be dangerous but hey, so's Mennas.
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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 04:18

Re: Generate killer bees later

I've seen D:2 killer bees quite a few times. I've never seen an unavoidable death to one.

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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 05:15

Re: Generate killer bees later

VeryAngryFelid wrote:We don't put packs of orbs of fire on Depths:1, do we?

no, we put packs of caustic shrikes (which were explicitly designed as "killer bees of depths")

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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 06:01

Re: Generate killer bees later

CanOfWorms wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:We don't put packs of orbs of fire on Depths:1, do we?

no, we put packs of caustic shrikes (which were explicitly designed as "killer bees of depths")
Ok. I think devs should increase probability of killer bee packs on D:2 then, I haven't seen any yet as far as I remember.
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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 17:12

Re: Generate killer bees later

njvack wrote:If it resulted in lots of unavoidable deaths, yeah, that would be bad. As far as I know, this results in vanishingly few unavoidable deaths. Even if you do run into a D:2 bee, it's a situation where good play can make death more avoidable.


A: The number of unavoidable deaths caused by D:2 bees.
B: The number of characters that encounter D:2 bees.
C: The number of games played.

When you say "vanishingly few", are you looking at A/B or A/C? If A/C is extremely small, but A/B is fairly large, I still think it's a problem. If A/C is extremely small, and A/B is fairly small, then it's okay. However, specific anecdotal cases aside, when I consider the different circumstances in which a player would encounter bees on D:2, I imagine that the unavoidable deaths would be more common. Basically, it comes down to one of:

1. They don't notice you and you manage to get to safety, despite that there are several of them, and they move faster than you and are likely to have multiple chances to spot you before you're safe.
2. They do notice you, but you're close enough to a door or staircase that you can break pursuit before they catch up, despite their fast movement.
3. You have a consumable or spell that can save you, despite that you have only your starter equipment and 1 to 2 floors' worth of items to work with, and the vast majority of items can't save you.

Probably the most likely survival scenario would be that a player opens a door and sees the bees before stepping into the doorway, and the bees don't move into the doorway on the same turn, because then the player can just close the door and make a run to the nearest downward staircase. This presents its own problem, because to maximize your chance of seeing the bees before stepping into the doorway, you should open the door, then move to each tile on your side of the doorway, and then, only when no bees have been spotted, proceed into the doorway. Doing this won't guarantee that you'll be able to close the door on the bees, but it would significantly improve your chances. This is optimal but tedious behavior (though I guess autoexplore could be modified to include this behavior, thus mitigating the tedium).

Even with all the factors taken together, I still imagine D:2 bee encounters would be inescapable more often than not, though there's no way to know for sure. The closest we could get would be to create an experimental branch where D:2 is always guaranteed to contain 1 swarm of bees that must be encountered before players can descend to D:3, and species/background combination is randomly assigned weighted by popularity. There would still be the problem that players would have advanced knowledge of the swarm's existence which would likely influence their behavior, but if the most consistently successful player still died on D:2 the majority of the time, I think the answer would be pretty clear.

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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 21:27

Re: Generate killer bees later

Nekoatl wrote:When you say "vanishingly few", are you looking at A/B or A/C?

I'm using 'vanishingly few' in a purely qualitative way. Basically, I'm saying "D:2 bees are rare spawns" and "relatively few deaths are truly unavoidable."

It's true that an encounter like a D:2 bee requires you to look at your resources and maybe take some risks you wouldn't later in the game, but it's also true that you will almost always have something at your disposal to help tip the odds in your favor.

I guess I simply reject your original assertion that the scenario "involves no meaningful decisions and no relevance to player skill." Instead, having monsters where the normal tactics of "just kill it" and "just walk away" don't work as well as normal are helps to differentiate player skill.

Next time you find yourself in a "I have just seen a monster and it will unavoidably kill me" situation: Stop and post a character dump to Advice; you will likely find that the death is more avoidable than you think.
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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 21:52

Re: Generate killer bees later

njvack wrote:
Nekoatl wrote:When you say "vanishingly few", are you looking at A/B or A/C?

I'm using 'vanishingly few' in a purely qualitative way. Basically, I'm saying "D:2 bees are rare spawns" and "relatively few deaths are truly unavoidable."

It's true that an encounter like a D:2 bee requires you to look at your resources and maybe take some risks you wouldn't later in the game, but it's also true that you will almost always have something at your disposal to help tip the odds in your favor.

I guess I simply reject your original assertion that the scenario "involves no meaningful decisions and no relevance to player skill." Instead, having monsters where the normal tactics of "just kill it" and "just walk away" don't work as well as normal are helps to differentiate player skill.

Next time you find yourself in a "I have just seen a monster and it will unavoidably kill me" situation: Stop and post a character dump to Advice; you will likely find that the death is more avoidable than you think.
What kind of skill do you have in mind here? Identifying your scrolls on D:1 so you have teleportation or blinking? Exploring in spiral around stair and shouting? Major problem with the pack is that even most powerful consumable are worthless because the bees are very fast, deal lots of damage, lots of poison and there are many of them. Haste/resistance/confusion/paralysis/might/agility/fear etc. are very unlikely to help you unless you were lucky to meet the bees in a corridor or were noticed by only one of them.
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Post Wednesday, 2nd January 2019, 22:05

Re: Generate killer bees later

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
njvack wrote:
Nekoatl wrote:When you say "vanishingly few", are you looking at A/B or A/C?

I'm using 'vanishingly few' in a purely qualitative way. Basically, I'm saying "D:2 bees are rare spawns" and "relatively few deaths are truly unavoidable."

It's true that an encounter like a D:2 bee requires you to look at your resources and maybe take some risks you wouldn't later in the game, but it's also true that you will almost always have something at your disposal to help tip the odds in your favor.

I guess I simply reject your original assertion that the scenario "involves no meaningful decisions and no relevance to player skill." Instead, having monsters where the normal tactics of "just kill it" and "just walk away" don't work as well as normal are helps to differentiate player skill.

Next time you find yourself in a "I have just seen a monster and it will unavoidably kill me" situation: Stop and post a character dump to Advice; you will likely find that the death is more avoidable than you think.
What kind of skill do you have in mind here? Identifying your scrolls on D:1 so you have teleportation or blinking? Exploring in spiral around stair and shouting? Major problem with the pack is that even most powerful consumable are worthless because the bees are very fast, deal lots of damage, lots of poison and there are many of them. Haste/resistance/confusion/paralysis/might/agility/fear etc. are very unlikely to help you unless you were lucky to meet the bees in a corridor or were noticed by only one of them.

Eh. I'd think that fear, at least, is going to save you 90+% of the time. (Along with many of the consumables you didn't mention; lignification, teleport, blinking, enslavement, clouds, etc.)

I also suspect that people are underestimating average stealth on D:1. Something like half the backgrounds start with positive stealth, and it's fairly likely that low HD animals don't auto-spot you on walking into LOS.
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 00:05

Re: Generate killer bees later

I'm pretty sure that a killer bee pack on D:2 _can_ be an unavoidable death. However, personally I don't remember if I've ever died to one, so they must be rare. All in all, whenever someone thinks they are encountering an unavoidable death, it would be very interesting to see the character dump.

(I still remember exactly one unavoidable death in my long and windy Crawl career. It was when Xom summoned a hostile brimstone fiend on D:4. There was absolutely no way I could have survived that.)
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 01:07

Re: Generate killer bees later

I should have been more clear in my initial post. I didn't mean to suggest that encountering bees on D:2 would automatically mean unavoidable death, but rather that under normal, average circumstances it would.

One D:2 bee would be reasonable, but bees spawn in swarms.

Expecting players to almost always have an appropriate tool to deal with a group of monsters that they otherwise would have to means to survive upon completing some random percentage of D:2 strikes me as extremely optimistic. I think fear and teleport are the 2 best options, and there are several others that could work under suitable circumstances. But, of them, only teleport is particularly common, and I've lost count of how many games I've played where even very common consumables like identify were not found until much later in the dungeon, so I don't think it's reasonable to expect the player to have a suitable tool on hand so early. If every character generated with a scroll of teleport, it would be a different story, of course, but most backgrounds don't provide any sort of escape tool.

I agree that bees on D:2 are very rare. Prior to discovering some, I thought two-headed ogres on D:4 were shockingly out of depth, but by D:4 you have (on average) more than twice the loot you have on D:2, and ogres can often be avoided with skillful positioning even if you don't have an escape tool.

It's true that most characters start with some minor amount of stealth skill, but even unarmoured characters typically only stay unnoticed for a turn or two if they're luckily, unless they actively invest points in stealth, and most of the time investing your first skill points into being able to effectively damage enemies makes more sense than investing in stealth. With bees, you could maybe avoid notice the first turn you see them, but unless they're asleep, there's a good chance at least one of them will randomly wander back into range after you start to retreat and spot you. And there's plenty of noisemakers to reduce the chance that they'll be asleep.

I agree that it's valuable to have monsters that "just kill it" and "just walk way" don't work as well as normal, and there are plenty of these. The problem I see with the super early bees is that, more often than not, neither of those approaches will work at all. Except in rare cases where the terrain is particularly favorable or the bees don't notice you, you need a suitable escape tool or you're going to die.

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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 01:30

Re: Generate killer bees later

It would really help your case if you had, like, even a single example of an unavoidable death to a killer bee that actually happened. A ttyrec would be sufficient.

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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 04:19

Re: Generate killer bees later

Well then, I'll make a mental note to learn what a ttyrec is should I ever encounter D:2 bees again.

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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 05:37

Re: Generate killer bees later

duvessa wrote:It would really help your case if you had, like, even a single example of an unavoidable death to a killer bee that actually happened. A ttyrec would be sufficient.
This reminds me that thread where a dev changed all traps to reveal on explore and waited for feedback before reducing traps generation rate. It does not take a genius to predict some things.
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 06:12

Re: Generate killer bees later

byrel wrote:Eh. I'd think that fear, at least, is going to save you 90+% of the time. (Along with many of the consumables you didn't mention; lignification, teleport, blinking, enslavement, clouds, etc.)

I also suspect that people are underestimating average stealth on D:1. Something like half the backgrounds start with positive stealth, and it's fairly likely that low HD animals don't auto-spot you on walking into LOS.


Fear is more precious than teleport and in my experience at least some bees return and catch up very fast so you still need to be close to stairs. Clouds/enslavement require corridor. Anyway we are interested to see if somebody can fight them instead of retreating. I've just checked lignification, attacking a killer bee with XL3 MiGl who spent all XP into M&F while using starting +0 flail:
  Code:
Maces & Flails
   | Source | AvHitDam | MaxDam |  Acc | AvDam | AvTime | AvSpd | AvEffDam
 0 | Player |      7,3 |     18 |  16% |   1,2 |   140  |  0,71 |      0,9
 1 | Player |      6,9 |     20 |  17% |   1,2 |   135  |  0,74 |      0,9
 2 | Player |      7,0 |     22 |  19% |   1,4 |   130  |  0,77 |      1,1
 3 | Player |      6,8 |     23 |  18% |   1,3 |   125  |  0,80 |      1,0
 4 | Player |      7,5 |     23 |  19% |   1,5 |   120  |  0,83 |      1,2
 5 | Player |      7,4 |     22 |  21% |   1,6 |   115  |  0,87 |      1,4
 6 | Player |      7,5 |     26 |  23% |   1,7 |   110  |  0,91 |      1,6
 7 | Player |      7,9 |     23 |  22% |   1,8 |   105  |  0,95 |      1,7
 8 | Player |      8,4 |     24 |  22% |   1,9 |   100  |  1,00 |      1,9
 9 | Player |      8,2 |     27 |  24% |   2,0 |    95  |  1,05 |      2,1
10 | Player |      8,3 |     22 |  27% |   2,3 |    90  |  1,11 |      2,5
11 | Player |      8,3 |     21 |  25% |   2,1 |    85  |  1,18 |      2,5
12 | Player |      8,7 |     24 |  26% |   2,3 |    80  |  1,25 |      2,9
13 | Player |      8,9 |     27 |  27% |   2,4 |    75  |  1,33 |      3,2
14 | Player |      9,1 |     25 |  27% |   2,5 |    70  |  1,43 |      3,6
15 | Player |      9,0 |     28 |  30% |   2,7 |    70  |  1,43 |      3,9
16 | Player |      9,9 |     29 |  29% |   2,9 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,1
17 | Player |      9,8 |     25 |  29% |   2,8 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,1
18 | Player |      9,5 |     26 |  31% |   3,0 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,2
19 | Player |      9,9 |     34 |  31% |   3,2 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,5
20 | Player |      9,7 |     26 |  30% |   3,0 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,2
21 | Player |     10,0 |     28 |  31% |   3,2 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,6
22 | Player |     10,4 |     36 |  32% |   3,4 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,8
23 | Player |     10,1 |     28 |  33% |   3,4 |    70  |  1,43 |      4,9
24 | Player |     10,7 |     34 |  33% |   3,6 |    70  |  1,43 |      5,1
25 | Player |     10,9 |     33 |  33% |   3,6 |    70  |  1,43 |      5,2
26 | Player |     11,4 |     28 |  33% |   3,8 |    70  |  1,43 |      5,5


Really unreliable, 20% accuracy hurts and bees have 10-22 HP so it is expected to take 5-12 turns (not attacks) to kill a single bee.
Damage from killer bee in tree form:
  Code:
Armour
   | Source | AvHitDam | MaxDam |  Acc | AvDam | AvTime | AvSpd | AvEffDam
 0 |   Mons |      0,7 |      6 |  91% |   0,6 |    50  |  2,00 |      1,2
 1 |   Mons |      0,6 |      6 |  91% |   0,6 |    50  |  2,00 |      1,2
 2 |   Mons |      0,6 |      6 |  91% |   0,6 |    50  |  2,00 |      1,1
 3 |   Mons |      0,6 |      6 |  91% |   0,6 |    50  |  2,00 |      1,1
 4 |   Mons |      0,7 |      6 |  90% |   0,6 |    50  |  2,00 |      1,2
 5 |   Mons |      0,6 |      6 |  90% |   0,6 |    50  |  2,00 |      1,2

So again we need to be in corridor, fighting several bees simultaneously is a bad idea.
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 07:28

Re: Generate killer bees later

Ok, I see TrMo in treeform can kill a pack of killer bees so it is probably a good idea to have them generated on D:2.
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 14:49

Re: Generate killer bees later

Is 'having a corridor' a reasonable assumption for D:2 monster placement? That's clearly a function of speed, since for speed 10 monsters the answer is always 'yes'.

Bees are twice as fast as most species, so you have about 6 tiles you can retreat from initial sighting of the bee without taking damage (assuming LOS spotting, which is the most common.) How often are you more than 6 tiles away from a corridor? You can also probably extend that to 9 or so by tanking one bee at half damage.

I THINK that's the vast majority of the time on D:2. Are there any stats on how many D:2s are wide-open, such that you're reasonably likely to not have corridors in 9 tiles?
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 15:23

Re: Generate killer bees later

Why 9 tiles? XL 3 Mi has 30 HP, that's 3 max damage attacks of killer bee, 1.5 turns (it has speed 20) and as bonus you get extra 6-12 poison damage from every attack if wiki is correct.
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 18:38

Re: Generate killer bees later

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Why 9 tiles? XL 3 Mi has 30 HP, that's 3 max damage attacks of killer bee, 1.5 turns (it has speed 20) and as bonus you get extra 6-12 poison damage from every attack if wiki is correct.

Because, in my experience, the mean damage from 3 attacks (the cost of backing up 3 tiles) is far less than 30. For your MiGl fsim, it was 3.6 mean damage plus poison. And you get 6 tiles before the first bee reaches you if you spot them at LOS. (If you don't spot them at LOS, then there's a corner. Which makes the probability of a nearby corridor much higher.)

The goal for OOD spawns on D:2 is not 100% survivability, so 3 max rolls in a row shouldn't be the design criterion, IMO. In a perfect world, I think max-OOD monsters on D:2 should have a 90% survivability or thereabouts.
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Post Thursday, 3rd January 2019, 22:21

Re: Generate killer bees later

Nekoatl wrote:Well then, I'll make a mental note to learn what a ttyrec is should I ever encounter D:2 bees again.
It doesn't have to be one of your deaths; if you can find any online game that had an unavoidable death to a killer bee, that's enough. But I don't think you'll be able to find one, because I don't think one exists.

Slime Squisher

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 05:15

Re: Generate killer bees later

To attempt that, I would need to know how to view online deaths in a comprehensible and detailed enough manner to be able to assess what options were available to the players in their final turns, and how to filter out all such deaths that were not caused by a killer bee on D:2. Right now, I don't even know if either of those things are possible, as the overwhelming majority of my experience has been in the offline tiles version (and if not for a brief attempt to play a certain thorn god branch, the entirety of my experience would be offline).

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 07:32

Re: Generate killer bees later

I have just looked at last death by killer bee from top killers page.
On D:7, no less.
Last scroll of teleportation was used too late but you can pretend it does not exist, no fear, no blinking etc. There is a wand of iceblast but again you can pretend it does not exist (really, how many times did you find one on D:1? Probably it cannot be even generated there)
http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/ ... 042107.txt
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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 09:02

Re: Generate killer bees later

Sorry, but what is that D:7 death supposed to prove? That character had wands of enslavement and acid as well. Plus 3 potions of haste. So no reason to die to killer bees. I don't think its fruitful to look at some character and say that if it was on D:2 it would not have these and these items.
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 09:30

Re: Generate killer bees later

Haste is not a big deal (15 is still much less than 20). Point of death on D:7 is that putting killer bees on D:2 is ridiculous. Halve character HP, remove those wands and imagine you are on D:2.
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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 09:32

Re: Generate killer bees later

If you need some items to survive a monster pack, generating the monster pack is a bad idea.
High speed, being a pack and lots of poison really limits your options.
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Snake Sneak

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 15:29

Re: Generate killer bees later

Stupid idea: why not just scale bee packs to the D:X floor? D:1 bees can only spawn one at a time if they spawn at all, D:5 you can get 5 in a pack, and so on. By the time you hit D:10-12 and the bee packs start getting huge you should be equipped to deal with them.

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 18:41

Re: Generate killer bees later

I just reworked the OOD monster code in bcrawl so killer bees shouldn't appear until D:4.

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 19:36

Re: Generate killer bees later

Nekoatl wrote:The closest we could get would be to create an experimental branch where D:2 is always guaranteed to contain 1 swarm of bees that must be encountered before players can descend to D:3 *snip*


I would love to try this (but not with random combos). I think I'd become a much better player.

So if someone can code Kbrawl, I'd be most happy! :D

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 20:03

Re: Generate killer bees later

VeryAngryFelid wrote:If you need some items to survive a monster pack, generating the monster pack is a bad idea.


Uhm, why? I thought the point of items is to use them...

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Post Friday, 4th January 2019, 20:33

Re: Generate killer bees later

Spawning enemies that require a certain amount of items to defeat is healthy, but the question is what exactly is "a certain amount"? I don't have a precise answer to that question, but I'm willing to venture that it falls somewhere below "more than everything the character is likely to have found up to this point".

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Post Saturday, 5th January 2019, 07:03

Re: Generate killer bees later

sanka wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:If you need some items to survive a monster pack, generating the monster pack is a bad idea.


Uhm, why? I thought the point of items is to use them...
In that post I meant some specific items, not just a number of items. Something like you need a potion of resistance to survive modified Nikola who always casts chain lightning as every action. It is gear check with zero tactics/strategy.
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Post Saturday, 5th January 2019, 07:14

Re: Generate killer bees later

cool, it's a good thing that killer bee backs don't have that problem at all then

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