[3.3.0] Dracolisks in red dragon pits ?

[Estie]

Just lost a promising priest to Dracolisks mimicing as red dragons. Late endgame, found armor with fire immunity and soon after a red dragon pit. opened it and went to work, keeping one eye on hit points and another on inroads from other parts of the map, suddenly "you died.", killed by Dracolisk.
I had noticed them on monster list, but assumed they were part of Ancalagons entourage which was at some point in my detection range, but shut in in a GV with perma walls. They must have been in the dragon mix from the red pit unless Im very much mistaken.

While the new undetectable mimics are great ("this scroll of *Acquirement* is actually a mimic!" got me laughing), I strongly dislike this other type of mimicry. At least on my Vista screen that has the most horrible colouring of all my computers, Dracolisks and Great hell wyrms look the same, both oscillating their colours. Whats more, it happens in a part of the spectrum (dark red, dark brown is the worst) where I have to strain my eyes to see it at all.

So Ill have to change Dracolisks to something that doesnt look like a red dragon, but thinking about it, I really dont want anything to oscillate at all. If a hell wyrm looks exactly like an ancient red, thats fine, they have a similar threat profile. Is there a way to do that ? With uniques, I can pick the option to display all as purple which I am happy with. What does "animate flicker" do when turned to "yes".

Also: the option to toggle special symbol for stacks display seems to have gone, which I only mind because it is stuck on the wrong default now :P
I guess chances for that to go back are slim ?
I did my best to try and get used to the &&&s littering the floor, but it just looks wrong. Sorry

[buzzkill]

Play with tiles. Tiles rock.

[Estie]

Play with tiles. Tiles rock.

Been there. Done that. No thanks.

[fizzix]

dracolisks in red dragon pits are thematically good but in some sense problematic because for god knows what reason they're considered to be 10 levels less powerful than great hell wyrms (they have the same HP and dracolisks breathe nexus in addition to fire, go figure)

watch out for dracolich's in ice dragon pits also. Sometimes those pits will have to be avoided, which is a shame, because dragon pits are usually worth piles and piles of gold.

[Timo Pietilä]

dracolisks in red dragon pits are thematically good

Um, no, they aren't even pure dragons but basilisk/dragon hybrids and as such they should have 'H' as their symbol. Dracolich OTOH is a dragon, just undead one, maybe White Dragon pit could contain those. If we have Dracolisks in RedDP then Dracolich belongs in WhiteDP. How about Blue and Black? We don't have anything really nasty for those. Do we have GreenDP? Drolems there?

BTW, noticed that Great Wyrm of Perplexity, bronze dragonfly and all the bronze dragons are still in game. Confusion was removed from resistances, so those should go away too (Ethereal Dragon confusion breath has been removed already).

[EDIT], now that I looked at the pit.txt, it looks like WhiteDP will have dracolichs. They are ancient dragons, they breathe cold, and they do not breathe fire.

[Magnate]

[EDIT], now that I looked at the pit.txt, it looks like WhiteDP will have dracolichs. They are ancient dragons, they breathe cold, and they do not breathe fire.

Exactly. People should be careful about the concepts of "dragon pit" that they may have in their head which may now be out of date. Pits can contain whatever's specified in pit.txt, so a pit full of stuff that looks like red dragons could be simply a bunch of things that breathe fire - with no restrictions on what else they might breathe.

[Estie]

I dont mind having the monotonous unicolour dragon pits spiced up at all, quite to the contrary. What I do mind is populating them with different things that look as similar as can be. Something like fire-red Ds for the dragons and nexus-pink Ds for the ´lisks would work, or maybe change the symbol of the latter to H. Anything, just dont let "thematic" become a "guess the monster"-game.

Anyway...might be just me and my stupid system, maybe everyone else has no problems distinguishing between a great hell wyrm and a dracolisk.

So Im going to try to re-colour my monsters, or, failing that, switching to tiles as last option. My memories of the Zang-days where tiles became popular are not fond though.

[Djabanete]

I like that pits are more interesting now, but you should definitely be able to tell dangerous monsters apart from safe ones if they're going to be appearing together a lot.

[Derakon]

It's certainly true that when you see a giant list of red dragons, you expect that all of them would be fire-only. Slotting Dracolisks in there is therefore a nasty little gotcha.

I wouldn't mind changing Dracolisks to H, but such a fix doesn't handle the nigh-identical Dracolich problem. Those should definitely be Ds.

[fizzix]

BTW, noticed that Great Wyrm of Perplexity, bronze dragonfly and all the bronze dragons are still in game. Confusion was removed from resistances, so those should go away too (Ethereal Dragon confusion breath has been removed already).

They're still in monster.txt for some reason (i'm not sure exactly), but they're constrained to not appear in the game by some mechanism that I haven't quite figured out yet.

[Antoine]

I wouldn't mind changing Dracolisks to H, but such a fix doesn't handle the nigh-identical Dracolich problem. Those should definitely be Ds.

Au contraire they should be red L's

A.

[Timo Pietilä]

Au contraire they should be red L's

A.

No fire reference there, so no red. Either white or light green L or D is OK. (they are lichs, but they also are dragons, and they breather cold and nether).

IMO dragon pits should contain only pure dragons, not something else. Make another type of pit/nest if you want something else than dragons there. OTOH, I have nothing against making GW:s a bit more dangerous giving them a bit more punch in their arsenal, plasma for GWoH, ice (cold/shard damage, maybe stunning) for GIW, plasma also for blueGW, can't think anything for black though. Maybe remove that pit type? Same with green (too weak both).

[Zikke]

Dracoliches behave, appear, and are treated more like dragons than like liches. If you made them into an L of any color, the player wouldn't be used to wondering if that lich in front of him is going to breathe dragon breath all of a sudden.

They already appear in the Graveyard pits, which makes sense being undead, but they shouldn't also appear in the White dragon pits, even if one of their breath attacks happens to be frost.

The other dragons in the pit would look at them funny and not speak to them, because they don't belong. Mostly because they are freakin' skeletons.

[Magnate]

They're still in monster.txt for some reason (i'm not sure exactly), but they're constrained to not appear in the game by some mechanism that I haven't quite figured out yet.

Their rarity is set to zero. They're in the game so that 3.2.0 savefiles don't crash. They'll be removed for 3.4.0

[Timo Pietilä]

Their rarity is set to zero. They're in the game so that 3.2.0 savefiles don't crash. They'll be removed for 3.4.0

Odd, I'm pretty sure I saw one D of Perplexity not long ago (either summon or Ancalagon escort). Can't be absolutely sure though.

Which brings my mind: it would be nice to be able to save your entire message history in a file, so that every time you start the game you have it all in messages. Maybe even in external message log, so that you could check WTF happened after you get RIP, not just few last messages.