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[frostshotgg]

My understanding was that the topic was changes specifically in .14/.15 to simplify things. If it's not then my bad.

[Krath]

Also I'm not sure what value potion throwing brings in anyway.  I can already carry around wands and curare for inflicting statuses on monsters, and if I want to do it to a large group then I can learn a cloud spell.  What does making me carry around tonnes of almost useless potions in addition to these things add to the game?

Does it detract anything from the game? Alternate methods of attack and extra versatility never hurt anything. While it's been a long time since I've Crawled and I'm only just now getting back into it, I was around back when Evaporate and Fulsome Distillation was in. It's hard to disagree with forsaken; flinging around those otherwise useless potions was tons of fun.

I get what you mean by 'not adding anything wands/darts/needles don't already do', but I don't really see why there can't be any overlap whatsoever. What if I've had bad luck finding wands, or I'm low on charges and don't want to waste that last charge of my wand of confusion? I don't really see a reason for potion throwing to not be a different, albeit weaker and one-use, alternative to zapping things.

I'm not going to get into all the bits about racial armor and the old debate about mountain dwarves. I just wanted to put in my two bits on that.

[forsaken1111]

It sounds to me like development of the game has taken a significant turn from the direction it was heading before. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but it does sound like many of the things I enjoyed have been removed while stuff I couldn't care less about (cats and octopus?) have been added.

So I probably just won't play the game much any more.

[Retropunch]

My problem is less about individual issues and more about the direction as a whole. A lot of stuff is getting homogenized/simplified and flat out removed with nothing to take it's place in terms of complexity/interest.

I think there was a long push for a few years about getting rid of 'tedious stuff' but now there's just no strategy - food is a non issue, item weight is getting removed and fast/'difficult' attacks are now getting added to monster descriptions so that people don't get surprised. This kinda simplifies it past most basic arcade-y hack'n'slashes.

[Mr Space Cat]

My problem is less about individual issues and more about the direction as a whole. A lot of stuff is getting homogenized/simplified and flat out removed with nothing to take it's place in terms of complexity/interest.

That was exactly what I was trying to say with my post. Yeah. What this guy said.

[Leafsnail]

I think there was a long push for a few years about getting rid of 'tedious stuff' but now there's just no strategy - food is a non issue, item weight is getting removed and fast/'difficult' attacks are now getting added to monster descriptions so that people don't get surprised. This kinda simplifies it past most basic arcade-y hack'n'slashes.

So just to be clear, you believe that the entirety of the strategy in this game as it existed before came down to food, item weight and not knowing what attacks your enemies had?

I will have to disagree strongly on each of those points.  Food was never an issue for most races, it's just that it used to be an annoying non-issue (got nausea/sickness?  Better wait for a few hundred turns for that to go away) rather than a trivial one.  I cannot think of a single time that I starved to death as a regular species in either the old or new versions.

Item weight almost never causes/caused players to make an actual important decision, and the only area where it really mattered was large rocks (and there's still a cap on those related to your strength score in the weightless branch).  Yeah it meant you left some of your strategic consumables lying around on the floor, but you can always go back and pick them up later so it makes no gameplay difference.

Attacks in monster descriptions... Dungeon Crawl has, and always has had, clarity as a design goal.  That means you're meant to be able to play it without memorizing/looking up loads of facts from a wiki page.  If you really have an objection to this point then it probably isn't the game for you (although I will also point out that hiding monster attacks from their description will only cause them to be more dangerous once, and also most players would just look up the monster online when finding it anyway so it again makes no gameplay difference).

So in other words I don't think any of these things have been a major strategic element.  I think the real long term strategy in dungeon crawl arises more from:
- skill training decisions
- spell learning decisions
- strategic consumable usage (eg enchantment scrolls)
- god usage (depending on the god)

[Leafsnail]

Actually yeah that's a good point, food if anything mattered even less when Hive was still around (because Hive gave you far more permafood than you could possibly eat in one game).  So what factor are you referring to that made food more significant in the past?  Are we talking sickness or nausea era?

Come to think of it the same applies to item weight.  It used to be much more similar to all species, which means it would have mattered even less than it does now for small species (who are the only ones who could theoretically be harmed by it).

[Leafsnail]

They added a few bee vaults, they don't usually contain anything like as much food as hive did though.  There's still less food than there was in the game several versions ago, probably.

You're still ignoring my point, by the way. To pick a single example; we have an item weight system in the game. You appear to be saying the problem is that it has little effect, so it should go. Please explain why that would be a better option than adjusting the numbers so that it does have an effect.

Is there something intrinsically untactical or boring about item weight systems? If that's the point you're making, I think it deserves to be argued on its own merits rather than just assumed, given every other major roguelike has one. If it isn't your point, and your problem is just with the current iteration, then I ask again; why not simply improve it?

There is something intrinsically untactical and boring about item weight systems in a game like this, yeah, and I think you'd realise that if item weight were more constraining.  Basically there are three factors, as I see it:
1. You can always go back and pick up the item you just dropped at the expense of nothing but your own time
2. There are a lot of items which streamline your gameplay experience but which aren't necessary, and which take up weight
3. Having to constantly prune your stacks of various consumables is annoying and doesn't make much tactical difference

These problems are already in the game, of course, but the fact that item weight restrictions are pretty loose means that they aren't too game-ruining.

However, if item weights were pruned down to a meaningful level then realistically you probably should:
- Not carry around any convenience items like identify or remove curse.  This makes no gameplay difference but would have you walking back and forth a lot more often.
- Not carry around any food, except maybe one emergency ration.  You definitely wouldn't be able to hold chunks.  If you get hungry then you'd have to go back to your stash, which again makes no real difference but is annoying.
- Not carry around more than one of each consumable, with some rare exceptions.  Generally you will only need one Potion of Haste or whatever per fight, so you can leave all the rest at your stash without getting any real disadvantage.  But again this would necessitate a lot more walking back and forth to your stash without adding any kind of tension.  Heck, consider ammunition.  Would you like to carry enough arrows to just finish each encounter, and have to go back for more frequently?

In other words the game would become pretty miserable, with you spending the majority of your time managing your inventory instead of fighting or making decisions that matter.

Basically I think to avoid problem 1 and 2 strategic items and food (or at least chunks) shouldn't take up weight/slots so that you aren't asked to meaninglessly walk back and forth for them.  Problem 3 is however inherent to item weights: quite simply the diversity of items in your inventory is usually more important than how many of each you have, tactically speaking.  Therefore if there are to be more constraining inventory limits I think that a) they should not apply to strategic items and b) they should be in the form of slot limitations, not item weight.

[Mr Space Cat]

As far as stuff like item weight goes, I can understand cutting that out with the excuse of streamlining gameplay.

What I don't like is the various content getting cut out because "it's not used enough" or whatever. Spells like lethal infusion and the other ego brand spells, the summon elemental spell, tweaks to stuff like Nemelex's piety and sacrifice system--which I thought was a very unique and distinctive part of worshipping him in the first place, as well as the stalker class, evaporate, and so on. I liked how when djinn first came out players found that you could choose to be a berserker, a class which wasn't recommended for the race, and get this completely different playstyle than what a djinn might be meant for. Last I checked, devs ruined it by making djinn unable to berserk.

For balance, I guess it makes sense, but I really think complaining over balance in a single player game is silly. You could just as easily ban a race+class pick in tournaments instead.

[Retropunch]

Leafsnail, again, it's not about one particular thing (or even two or three!), it's about how it fits together as a whole and the general direction. Individually, getting rid of item weights or adding monster attack descriptions isn't a problem, it's how every part of the game is being simplified or homogenized past 'clarity' and into 'arcade'.

Looking over the past change blogs/trunk log on the site, tons of stuff/spells/abilities/monster differences are being removed and if it keeps on with this trajectory it'll resemble a coffee-break RL rather than a dungeon-crawling epic. I'm not saying it's the end of all things to come, but just that I personally prefer my dungeon crawling to have a little more complexity - hopefully new mechanics will come into play to take over from them, but at the moment it just seems as though we're losing stuff a bit arbitrarily

[Leafsnail]

The thing is you haven't provided me with a single supported example of what you mean, so I don't see what your point is.  I don't even get what you mean by "arcade" or why you regard that as a bad thing.

Yes, some things (most of them bad ones, in my opinion) have been removed from the game over the past few versions.  A lot of other things have been added (new gods, new races, new evocables, new monsters, new branches and so on), way more things in fact since we now have more races and gods than ever.

[Grek]

Changes that I think were dumb:
-Getting rid of the Evaporate/Fullsome Distillation combo. The alchemist/potion thrower build was an interesting playstyle. If they didn't want it as a spell, they could have made it into a God, like they did with Summon Elemental and the new Cloud God in trunk.
-Deleting these spells: Dig, Summon Scorpions, Song of Shielding, Demon Horde, Summon Ugly Thing, Summon Dragon, Mass Abjuration. More spells are more good. Deleting spells without a good reason is bad.
-Changing Swiftness to have slowness at the end of it. This makes getting an Air Elementalist off the ground even more obnoxious than ever.
-Removing reaching on whips. More weapons should have special abilities, not less. It makes melee combat more interesting.
-Nemelex not giving Decks of Dungeons. Dowsing, Water and Vitrification were all cool effects. Minefield and the deleted aspects of Trowl were stupid, but those could have been replaced with something more interesting.
-Skald changes. War Chants is more useful of a starting book than Battle. Battle is too gimicky with Spectral Weapon/Song of Slaying.
-Removing Zin, TSO and Maklehb as starting gods. Both Zin and TSO have interesting conducts, while a Maklehb start opens up more possibilities for Deep Dwarf characters.
-Clouds, Summons etc. not working while outside player LOS. It's pure "Don't be clever, don't try to think of anything new. Play how we intend you to" BS.

Things I don't actually care about:
-Turning Slowness into Lignification. Lignification is a much more interesting effect than Slow and still has the same basic result of no longer being able to run away if you're drink-IDing in battle for Cure Wounds potions.
-Getting rid of racial weapons. They never did anything good in the first place and it always struck me as weird that we had orcish/dwarven/elven but not minotaur, spriggan or merfolk racial stuff.
-Getting rid of item weights. Logistics are boring, and picking how many of which items based on their weight is also boring.
-Adding more info to ingame monster descriptions. All this does is save me a trip to the Wiki whenever I encounter a new Unique. Bravo.

[Grek]

I disagree!

With enemies that require specific counters (like flaming scimitars against hydras as a sword wielder, or some poison resist against killer bees, or negative energy resistance against shadow dragons) you're going to bring the counter, or you're going to die. That's not a tactical choice. That's just saying that if you want to do Swamp, you have to ditch some of your best items first. With ammunition, you're going to pick whichever does the most overall damage and take that. Everything else gets left behind if you can't carry it. Due to the food clock and out of depth spawning, you don't want to be running back to your stash for every situational encounter.

It's not even a balance question. Spellcasters get new abilities through weightless spells. Warriors get their new abilities through heavy weapons and heavy armour. Making item weight more meaningful sounds like it would make the game more interesting and tactical, but if you actually tried to implement it, you'd quickly realize that all you're arbitrarily boning non-casters.

[Leafsnail]

-Getting rid of the Evaporate/Fullsome Distillation combo. The alchemist/potion thrower build was an interesting playstyle. If they didn't want it as a spell, they could have made it into a God, like they did with Summon Elemental and the new Cloud God in trunk.

Well Evaporation was incredibly powerful, and transmuters are still a really good class due to the fact that they get the insanely useful Spider Form.

-Deleting these spells: Dig, Summon Scorpions, Song of Shielding, Demon Horde, Summon Ugly Thing, Summon Dragon, Mass Abjuration. More spells are more good. Deleting spells without a good reason is bad.

Here is a list of new summoning spells in 0.14: Lightning Spire, Guardian Golem, Forest, Mana Viper, Monstrous Menagerie, Forceful Dismissal, Aura of Abjuration, Spellforged Servitor, Dragon's Call.  Some of those are explicitly reworks of the spells you listed (Summon Dragon -> Dragon's Call, Mass Abjuration -> Aura of Abjuration) and the others are intended to fill the slots they left.  Indeed summoning now has more spells than ever, this is basically a rework rather than a removal.

Summoning has always been kindof boring, they're trying to make it so that using them has some meaningful strategy other than "Spam allies, hang around (possibly even out of LoS) while they kill things".  I'm not sure how successful their efforts have been so far but I appreciate that they're working on it.

As for the other two I don't really care because neither was really a good spell (well Dig might be good if you used it to constantly dig murder holes everywhere, but that's not very exciting).

-Changing Swiftness to have slowness at the end of it. This makes getting an Air Elementalist off the ground even more obnoxious than ever.

Swiftness as it was was pretty absurdly overpowered and it made AE the "kite everything" class.  I think the nerf was entirely appropriate considering the other option would basically be removal

-Removing reaching on whips. More weapons should have special abilities, not less. It makes melee combat more interesting.

They did make more weapons have special abilities by giving the reaching brand to every polearm (and cleaving to every axe).

-Nemelex not giving Decks of Dungeons. Dowsing, Water and Vitrification were all cool effects. Minefield and the deleted aspects of Trowl were stupid, but those could have been replaced with something more interesting.

I don't really play Nemelex that much, but Dowsing and Vitrification are basically Ashenzari abilities and Water is basically Fedhas' Rain.  I believe they are adding new card effects too.

-Skald changes. War Chants is more useful of a starting book than Battle. Battle is too gimicky with Spectral Weapon/Song of Slaying.

I don't really like Skald either, especially in the way that some of your spells are way too noisy to be worth using.  That said I never really got what the point of the crusader class was (Berserker-lite with some buffs you'll want to cast endlessly?) so it doesn't seem like a big loss.

-Removing Zin, TSO and Maklehb as starting gods. Both Zin and TSO have interesting conducts, while a Maklehb start opens up more possibilities for Deep Dwarf characters.

I'm not sure if I'd call Zin's conducts interesting, but that's not really the point.  Starting religions are meant to be a significant advantage/gameplay difference, and TSO/Zin don't really provide enough early benefits to justify that.  Not so sure about Makhleb, but again I don't think it's that different to just picking him up from the temple.

-Clouds, Summons etc. not working while outside player LOS. It's pure "Don't be clever, don't try to think of anything new. Play how we intend you to" BS.

Do you think it's fun to wait while enemies die offscreen?

[Leafsnail]

Things like only being able to carry around 4 scrolls of remove curse instead of your full stack of 20 is rather pointless, yes (though you may want to do this anyway due to item destruction. Oh wait, they're removing that as well).

Yes, this is a good argument for removing item destruction too.  This doesn't address the argument I was making: why does it matter if I'm carrying around a stack of 20 items?  Why is this a bad thing when all it does is save me time walking back and forth?

However, again, that's just the way it's implemented now. You're right that there isn't much strategy in 'Alright, I'll carry three potions of heal wounds and a wand of teleport, and I'll head back to my stash to replace them when they're depleted'. That is annoying.

But weights can be significant and tactical when applied to things like weapons, armour, rods, evocables etc. Rather than seeing every endgame character carrying around half a dozen swaps that they'll likely never use, I'd like it if they had to think hard about what they're carrying. You want to carry around three phials of floods? Alright, but you'll have to drop that flame-branded scimitar you've been keeping as a swap against hydras. Or you'll have to choose between the penetration bolts or the steel ones. Higher strength can ease the limit to a degree, but no character's going to be able to carry around four different plate mails and five two-handed weapons anymore.

I don't think there's any point in carrying around multiple plate mails considering how long they take to swap (if you have enough time to swap it you have enough time to escape, go back to your stash and pick it up in 99% of cases) and I think weapon swapping to that degree is of dubious value.  But even if I accept all of these examples as things I want in the game then I'd say they'd be better achieved by limits on tactical item slots - you've failed to come up with any example where weight would actually be meaningful.  That would have the side benefit of not having to walk back and forth constantly to refresh your stacks, and also of not screwing over heavy armour users for no reason.

It'd require some fine balancing of the numbers, but it's not exactly a mammoth task.

I think it would be, actually.  Indeed I'd say it would probably be one of the toughest changes to implement in the history of the game.  You'd have to consider how every character uses every tactical item at every stage of the game, then somehow put in numbers that create meaningful decisions and not just annoyance/complete elimination of options in all of those.  You'd also have to massively buff heavy armour users to make up for the fact that they suddenly have a crippling disadvantage in terms of consumable capacity.