Slime Squisher
Posts: 387
Joined: Monday, 15th August 2011, 16:31
Location: Frankfurt
Luring
tl;dr: Retreating more than 10-20 tiles is rarely optimal, the exception being open levels and branches with predominantly fast monsters.
Assuming a situation like this in D:
- Code:
......░░░░░....
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Coming up from the south, the player encounters a wight (X and Y aren't monsters, but spots that I want to discuss). In a situation like this in this kind of terrain I would retreat to the spot marked X. Fighting at X with the wight to the left means: a) LoS is somewhat shielded from the surrounding area b) there are enough walls around to subdue ordinary melee noise and c) I have a direct line of retreat to the nearest stairs, if necessary.
There's no point in retreating much further. The wight is speed 10, so if anything dangerous wanders in from the left, I can still retreat to the stairs and the wight will actually be beneficial to me as a meatshield.
Splitting up packs is a thing, of course, but either, like here, it's a pack of whose members I can dispatch quickly, so getting some distance between them is more than enough. Or it's a pack (like early death yaks) where maneuvering too long and too circumstantially runs the risk of running into wandering monsters anyway and avoiding them altogether might be considered.
In general, luring is not entirely without downside: Maybe other players are more successful than me -- and by a large margin -- at keeping the dungeon at sleep. But I find that the longer one is retreating the greater the risk of running into a wandering monster, coming in from a disadvantageous angle. Here, the stairs are close, so it doesn't matter; there's nothing to be gained though, either.
(If I have a wand of digging or disintegration, then in practical play I'd even just retreat to the spot marked with Y. At worst I'm risking only a wand charge and the risk is low enough that I value my convenience higher.)
The situation is very different in open levels, like here, in Vaults:
- Code:
▒...........▒......▒.....▒▒.........▒ ▒......▒ ▒....▒
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I call this an "open level": From most positions, you have unimpeded LoS in most directions and noise travels as far as noise can travel. Basically, I see no way here but to retreat half across the dungeon floor to the room with the up-portal and engage the enemy there, especially if the "p" is a convoker or sentinel.
I recently got into the habit of simply skipping open levels in D when playing non-summoners. In Vaults, I find this is often not feasible, since the level below might not look much better and with convokers, boggarts, deep elf demonologists etc. situations in Vaults can escalate quickly, so direct access to the stairs and the option to teleport are highly desirable.
In discussions about "fixing luring" I have often seen the proposal to make all monsters fast. I find this puzzling, because in my estimation, the opposite is the case. This is a situation from Spider:
- Code:
..s.▒ ▒.▒...
▒...▒ ....▒ ▒. ▒....▒
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▒........▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒..............
▒.......▒▒......................
▒.....▒▒▒▒......................▒
Coming up, the player encounters a spider to the north (the nearest stairs are off the map to the south). I call this kind of level "semi-open": There are many open spaces and very few chokepoints. But there are some walls, impeding both LoS and limiting noise propagation. When engaging monsters it is often possible to utilize the terrain to make a "fighting retreat" to keep monsters from entirely surrounding me.
Now, if this were Lair, encountering a normal-speed Lair monster, I'd retreat to the spot marked with "X" or possibly to the spot marked with "Y". Assuming, again, that I can still retreat further if more monsters arrive. Unlike in a closed level as above, though, arriving fast monsters can catch up. In Lair, the only dangerous fast monsters are black mambas and spiny frogs. (And blink frogs, but these don't count here, because they're bad at chasing you.) Black mambas and spiny frogs are lone monsters and past L:1 or L:2 they're dispatched quickly. It rarely happens that two or more wander in at the same time. In my estimation, the risk of running into more dangerous things by retreating too far significantly outweighs the risk of having more than one black mamba or spiny frog wander in from the dark.
In the spider nest, however, most monsters are fast. So, in my estimation the safest thing is to retreat as far as possible towards the stairs until the monster catches up. This is quite far, actually, much farther than going to X or Y.
Well, that's it, my thoughts on the matter of luring ...