Lair and Swamp/Spider/Shoals/Snake is too long and grindy

[reetside]

I really like crawl. The main thing that bothers me about it is that the mid-game side branches -- Orc, Elf, Lair, Spider/Snake, Shoals/Swamp, Vault -- feel repetitive and grindy after awhile. Elf and Vault are not so bad. Lair and the sub-branches of Lair are bad. Orc would be better if you just skipped to Orc:4, or did Orc:1, then Orc:4. The main dungeon, Depths, Zot, Hell, Crypt and Tomb (+zig, abyss, pan presumably), all of that is quite exciting. Going through e.g. Spider:2 or Lair:5 every game becomes a drag to do. I can think of two ways of improving this:

1) get rid of Lair and its side branches, or just preserve the "bottom" of each Lair side-branch, and instead make the main dungeon deeper, with possibly old-Lair themed levels that you must pass through on the way down.

2) keep a similar structure of a long and tough mid-game side-branch+sub-branch like the Lair but add enough variety to keep it interesting after playing many
times. this is a bigger amount of work than (1), you would need to create at least 6 different new themes so you get different combinations all the time. and not just themes for the lair sub-branches, but the lair itself should be randomly chosen from among several themes.

this is really just a level design issue, not a game mechanics issue, and it is a fairly minor one. the mid-game is too repititious. It is sufficiently hard, and balanced -- no question about that. i just don't want to have all this fun and variety of e.g. playing a shapeshifter of cheibrados or something then oh right i have to kill 300+ nagas again. always 300+ nagas... that come in 4 flavours. or orcs. or merfolks. nethack has the orcish mines and that's it. orcish mines is annoying to endlessly repeat as you play nethack awhile but its early and you get through it quick enough. Lair+spider/snake+shoals/swamp is like nethack's orcish mines on steroids: almost 20 levels of sheer predictability.

i don't mention acid pits mainly because i race straight to TRJ and the loot, so i've never found that dull (just terrifying).

[Sar]

It's being done, developers just prefer small steps. Snake/Spider/Swamp/Shoals lost one level each recently.

[bel]

i don't mention acid pits mainly because i race straight to TRJ and the loot, so i've never found that dull (just terrifying).

You know, you can dive anywhere. If some thing is tedious and non-threatening, it is probably safe to dive. I usually dive to the last floor of lair branches anyway (at least the second one, the first one, I sometimes need the XP).

That said, as pointed above, all lair branches except Slime are reduced to 4 in trunk.

[all before]

I've made two proposals for ways to shorten the mid-game, particularly the Lair sub-branches, so if you want to get a sense of arguments for and against such changes, you can check them out:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14850&p=203683
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16104&p=219852

That said, I think your post raises a question that hasn't really come up in these discussions: what makes for a good branch? Are there reasons besides length and level of challenge that many players find the S branches, and to some extent L, less interesting than other parts of the game? It seems like you're saying that these branches are too narrowly focused, that Snake with its 4 flavors of nagas is less fun because it doesn't present the same variety of threats as D, V, or U. I agree--the branches that are designed around a single kind of threat are boring compared to those that distinguish themselves with a few, unique features or challenges. V, for example, offers a large variety of monster types while standing out due to level layout and the three or four vault employees. The fun of a roguelike comes from not knowing what's around the next bend and from unique challenges arising from random combinations of a set of potential threats. Narrowly focused branches diminish both of these.

[Sandman25]

I am not sure I agree. Every branch should consist of several floors because floors allow to differentiate players: speedrunners and top players can dive, weak/normal players stair dance a lot etc. Why is it bad to have a branch with slow poisonous high MR monsters only or fast low MR poisonous monsters only?

[Elystan]

Yeah I don't find Lair any more grindy than the rest of the game. Once you've found the side branches which can happen as early as lair 3 and never past lair 6 you don't have to go any deeper if you don't want to.

[Wahaha]

Branches are more than one floor long because presumably the goal is to have the game be composed of different types of enemies and decisions in different areas. It makes sense for these areas to be more than 1 floor long, so that the challenge takes up a decent part of the game. 1 floor is not enough to encounter enough dangerous situations, and it is too short compared to the rest of the game. 5 or 4 floors could be too long, but I don't see how going from say 2 floors to less than 2 floors could be an improvement. 3 to 2 is probably not an improvement either.

The game only becomes grindy after the first rune (after the first Lair branch) in my opinion.

Disagree that themed monster sets are bad. Yes they make the branch predictable, but only in the sense that you know what monsters to expect. It does not really diminish the variety of challenges in my opinion. If the branch is too easy because the themed monsters are too easy, then I think it is better to increase the strength of their gimmicks rather than adding a bunch of different non-themed monsters hoping that some would "stick" in the difficulty sense. What IS boring is when a branch tries to have every type of threat in it and stops being different from other branches. That's exactly what happened to Snake. I honestly enjoyed Snake more in 0.10 than after the addition of the mess of monsters. But I'm probably in the minority.

It is sufficiently hard, and balanced -- no question about that. i just don't want to have all this fun and variety of e.g. playing a shapeshifter of cheibrados or something then oh right i have to kill 300+ nagas again. always 300+ nagas... that come in 4 flavours.

If you don't like the flavor aspect of seeing many nagas (and think that the challenge they pose is fine), then I can't argue against that. In my opinion it's not boring to get Snake once every 2 games, but it's opinions.
If it's just a matter of flavor then the words "grindy" and "drag" are contradicting that. It can't be grindy and a drag if the enemies are challenging. Maybe you could clarify what you dislike.

I am not sure I agree. Every branch should consist of several floors because floors allow to differentiate players: speedrunners and top players can dive, weak/normal players stair dance a lot etc. Why is it bad to have a branch with slow poisonous high MR monsters only or fast low MR poisonous monsters only?

Thanked for the 2nd half, not the 1st.

[Sandman25]

Thanked for the 2nd half, not the 1st.

Well, I don't see where we disagree provided both of us would not like 1 floor branches especially as long as Teleportation and Apportation exist. Enter Snake 1, read mapping, haste, control teleport into rune vault, apport rune, control teleport back to stairs.

Edit. Thanked for whole message.

[reetside]

OK, it is good they are shortening the Lair sub-branches in the devel version. I am not an expert, and I find Spider or Shoals hard enough that I end up stair dancing and burning expendables on them most of the time... in fact, I recently had an epic battle dragging my first stabber through shoals and that was very exciting. But, I really feel the boringness when I'm getting attacked by a pack of poison-rats for the 7th time on Lair:5 or whatever. The floors in the main dungeon are *much* more interesting, so why not just add more of them? Make it all more linear.

The point that was made that you can usually dive the second lair sub-branch is a pretty good one, and maybe I will start doing that (and avoid going to Lair:bottom everytime). That scales to skill, though, and is ultimately just a work-around.

Really what I am trying to say is that e.g. Depths is really fun and only 5 levels long. Why not make that 10-15 levels long? ... Zot, probably because it is more "themed", is IMO less fun than depths, but still OK. The 50% of a 3-rune game amount of time spent slogging in Lair and Orc is the biggest downside that I feel when I start or get moving on a character in DCSS. I like action and variety. I like dungeon sprint. I wouldn't mind a mid-game ziggurat. Whatever.

Really it is similar to the time-suck nethack has going on with mines and to some degree castle (quest is awesome). The NH end game is just trash, but if the same minds that decided "lets make the 4 branches of hell dives because otherwise we are being to grindy" took a long hard look at the middle-game, eh. I dunno.