Halls Hopper
Posts: 72
Joined: Wednesday, 5th January 2011, 21:48
Crawl's midgame is too long!
First of all, I think the early game, up until the lair and perhaps its first few floors, is just about perfect. It is challenging but fair, often very non-linear, and designed just-right to push you through a few mad-dash scrambles to survive. However, at this point, most characters are just about ready to move past a big hurdle in their development, such as a crusader that's finally pumped his Charms to have haste castable on demand, or an IE that has just gotten Freezing Cloud and Bolt of Cold, or a Stalker that has Petrify at adequate power, or Vehumet/Sif has just gifted his first book, or a Chaos Knight that has pumped invocations high enough to have Greater Servant at Excellent, or Okawaru has just gifted his first piece of equipment, or a Berserker finally has enough piety for high-powered Brothers In Arms, or a Transmuter that has ice form reliable without much Ice Magic investment, etc, etc, etc, need I go on. It is a general trend for most types of characters (except for all types of Ogres, bless their souls), that they'll hit a power plateau at some point in mid-lair. After that, the rest of mid-game is a slow, linear process of resource accumulation. For characters that can do Lair, Orc is just for gold; for characters that can do Orc and have rPois, Hive is easy food and easy items; for characters that can do Hive, Snake and Swamp 1-4 are easy; and for characters that can do these, and have, say Rmsl, Elf 1-4 is just as easy; and if a character can do Elf, they can do Vault 1-7; and if a Vault 1-7, then they can finish the dungeon. If a character dies in midgame, it is generally because they were lulled into a sense of security, and then met some nasty unique, or ran into some kind of crazy vault, or got bored and decided to rush a branch-end needlessly. It is accepted that general mid-game floor is a process of simply trudging through, collecting items and collecting XP, at very little risk. This is opposite of early-game pacing, and against what makes Crawl such a great game. And partly because of this safe but boring buildup, and partly because of all the great additions and balance changes over the last few years, the end-branches thus become much easier and safer as well. Characters that I reach, say, Vault 8 with these days, feel much stronger than how they did a few years ago.
I thus propose shortening the midgame by quite a bit:
- Lair could go from 8 floors to 5
- Snake/Swamp/Shoals/Slime/Crypt could go to 3 floors
- Elf and Orc could be lowered to 3 floors
- Vaults lowered to 4 floors
- The Dungeon, lowered to 21 floors, cutting 6 floors only from floors 14-27
- Hive changed to a guaranteed 1-floor portal
Now, while this sounds aggressive, I also propose that to counter the loss of XP and items, the incidence of Shops/Floating Vaults/Portals/OOD monsters/Uniques should be scaled up accordingly. So, for instance, if Elf were shortened from 5 to 3 floors, the chance a floor has a shop would be increased by 5/3. Overall, you'd end up with a much more interesting dungeon, the mid-game would be shortened by 3+4+1+2+1+3+6 = 20 floors (which could mean as much as an hour to an hour and a half shaved off the total game-time of a 3 rune game), and, most importantly, the game would have much more consistent pacing - therefore be much more exciting!