suggestions/enhancements

[fbas]

Hi, I hope this is not the wrong place to offer enhancement requests.

Currently playing Angband 3.0.9b, would love to see the following tweaks:

1) option to reduce verbage of fighting. I currently have up to 8 blows with certain weapons and it's a bit tiresome to view "You hit _____! You miss ____! [more]" again and again. I would like an option that boils it down to "You hit ___ 4 times, miss 3 times".

2) Similarly, when fighting creatures that hit you with a certain attack that their brothers are immune to sets off a flurry of "____ resists. ___ resists. _____ resists." I'd like to turn that off since I can assume that none of the other creatures in the pack are going to succumb to the attack of one of their members.

3) I think this may be in part related to my squelch settings (or it's possible in my haste I hit some keys I didn't intend to) but I have dropped quite a few things in stores - and once you do that, you'll never see it again. Aside from setting inscriptions on everything, I'd like an option to either block dropping items in stores, OR confirmation that I want to drop the item, OR that the item gets placed on the ground outside the store.

4) I notice that it's still possible to farm creatures for objects and artifacts. I thought someone would have weeded this out long ago, never combining breed explosively creatures with carry objects. It makes no sense that a black ooze, which may be carrying something, will breed and all its descendants are also carrying something else. I notice when playing around with this (possibly because of my squelch settings there are many items on the floor that are invisible to me) that I can really slow down the game, causing it to freeze for many seconds (which feels like an eternity).

I'm also surprised at the rate at which good items and artifacts are generated. It seems back in the day of playing moria I could never have a fully maxed (stats) character at level 40 like I have now. This isn't so much a complaint, just an observation.

Anyways, love the game.

[PowerDiver]

3) I think this may be in part related to my squelch settings (or it's possible in my haste I hit some keys I didn't intend to) but I have dropped quite a few things in stores - and once you do that, you'll never see it again. Aside from setting inscriptions on everything, I'd like an option to either block dropping items in stores, OR confirmation that I want to drop the item, OR that the item gets placed on the ground outside the store.

4) I notice that it's still possible to farm creatures for objects and artifacts. I thought someone would have weeded this out long ago, never combining breed explosively creatures with carry objects. It makes no sense that a black ooze, which may be carrying something, will breed and all its descendants are also carrying something else.

(3) Dropping squelched items in stores without any prompting is absolutely necessary until Takkaria allows a buyout button. If you think you are squelching things you shouldn't be, change the option hide_squelchable reached via '=' 'a' 'g'. Or [much better] you could somehow convince him to allow the button, and I'll change to automatically revert any squelch setting that indicates to squelch what you just bought.

(4) Breeders do not breed in 10 seconds. That would be silly. Like many other words used in the game, it doesn't mean what the dictionary says it should. They summon one of their kin, who should be expected to be carrying the same distribution of stuff as every other member of the type meandering about the dungeon. At least, you can tell yourself this if it helps, and ignore me if it doesn't.

[Timo Pietilä]

(3) Dropping squelched items in stores without any prompting is absolutely necessary until Takkaria allows a buyout button.

About that we could go other direction completely and not allow stores to restock at all as long as you are in the town. IMO that is better approach for things.

This is not about game of shopping, much less buying stuff you don't need just to get something store might get after you have bought it empty.

[Magnate]

About that we could go other direction completely and not allow stores to restock at all as long as you are in the town. IMO that is better approach for things.

This is not about game of shopping, much less buying stuff you don't need just to get something store might get after you have bought it empty.

This debate has been waxing and waning for a good few years now - it started before most of us migrated here from rgra, but the "buyout button" campaign is more recent, and is a consequence of the extreme scarcity of consumables in 3.1.0.

I remain of the view that fixing drops (which Ewert has accelerated brilliantly) is vastly preferable to a buyout button. But then I want no shopping at all, so my opinion is not worth much.

[Derakon]

Even with fixed drops, there are some items that get used more than the stores usually stock and that (quite reasonably) don't show up in large quantities in the dungeon. My big contenders are !CCW and !Heroism, where I always end up buying every one in stock and wishing there were more. Another popular one is stat restoration; though it's been awhile since I let a stat get heavily drained, when one is it's very annoying to play with low stats (particularly if you lose blows or spells) and the alchemist is unreliable with stocking the relevant potions.

This could be trivially fixed by modifying store.txt to make the stores carry more of these items, though.

[fizzix]

This could be trivially fixed by modifying store.txt to make the stores carry more of these items, though.

I agree with Magnate that the better solution is to fix the drop frequency in the dungeon.

[Magnate]

I agree with Magnate that the better solution is to fix the drop frequency in the dungeon.

And in fact in the specific cases of !CCW and !hero that Derakon mentions, we should not be facilitating access to infinite supplies of these, by buying out stores or any other method (including increased dungeon frequency). Remember, the game is too easy now - we have newbies who win in less than a month and then get bored and disappear.

I'm with Timo, in that if we have to keep shops at all they should have finite stocks.

[PowerDiver]

About that we could go other direction completely and not allow stores to restock at all as long as you are in the town. IMO that is better approach for things.

That doesn't change the dynamic. Then if you need something, you are still better off buying out the store before you go to DL1 to rest for restock.

So long as the likelihood of a new wanted object being generated in a store increases when you buy out stuff you do not want, you have an impetus to buy junk you want squelched.

I've said before that IMO every store item should be either fixed quantity per game, or infinitely available without gimmicks. Any change in that direction would be great IMO. But that is a different discussion that belongs in a different thread. The OP was not about how stores restock. The question is whether to squelch an object you purchase that you have previously indicated you want to squelch.

For the game *as it is now*, store purchases fall under the category of things that you might want to squelch. If you don't want to squelch a particular item, don't set it to be squelched. Is that so much to ask?

[Omnipact]

I agree with Magnate that the better solution is to fix the drop frequency in the dungeon.

I've recently been playing with that no shops build that ewert posted a while back. Here's the post

It's r2041 I believe.

I've never really had a problem with consumables (except WoR, which I can buy).
There always seems to be enough !CCW (after dlvl 30), but not overwhelmed by them. I am quite a coutious player though (clvl30/dlvl40 so far this time).
Previous games where I've gone deeper seem to show a good balance of healing potions later on.

That's my observation over 4 or 5 games - I've never run out of cure potions and don't have the option to buy them. The balance seems great to me!

Iain

[Magnate]

I've said before that IMO every store item should be either fixed quantity per game, or infinitely available without gimmicks. Any change in that direction would be great IMO.

So, continuing with the hijack, I am certain that infinite availability is lame, whereas fixed quantities sound a good compromise to me (between lameness and no-shopping). How do you feel about those fixed quantities being per-game random? So one game you might get, say 115 !CCW and 47 ?EW+dam, and in another game you might get 167 !CCW but only 31 ?EW_dam. For example. Is that acceptable or do you require exactly 100 !CCW available every game?

[Timo Pietilä]

That doesn't change the dynamic. Then if you need something, you are still better off buying out the store before you go to DL1 to rest for restock.

Question is "what do you need?". There are no such thing in stores in my games that I would need to buy out store to make it restock. Maybe you should change your playing style if you need things in stores that they do not have regularly enough to want to have buy out button.

[Nick]

To address the OP's first two questions (sorry for my lack of participation in Buyout Button Discussion MCCLXXXVIII), I think the idea of being able to customise what messages you see is an interesting one. I know there has been quite a bit of work on messages generally, but I think long-term some player control is worth thinking about.

[Derakon]

One possibility would be to do message compression in the current display as well as in the history. So as long as the message you want to display matches the message you just did display, instead of clearing the display with a -more- prompt, you can just tack on an x2, x3, etc. instead.

This wouldn't work well in a situation where you alternate hits and misses, since the messages wouldn't match, though. It does have the benefit of being more general-purpose.

[buzzkill]

I am certain that infinite availability is lame, whereas fixed quantities sound a good compromise to me (between lameness and no-shopping).

Allow me to lobby once again for 'demand pricing'. The more of something you buy, the more it costs. If done right, it's self limiting even with an infinite supply (even in the late game). I seem to recal that at some point you were open to this approach, though I may be mistaken.

[Magnate]

Allow me to lobby once again for 'demand pricing'. The more of something you buy, the more it costs. If done right, it's self limiting even with an infinite supply (even in the late game). I seem to recal that at some point you were open to this approach, though I may be mistaken.

I'm still open to this approach - I just got a bit depressed on the last megathread where it degenerated into detailed arguments of precisely how prices should escalate: whether demand should be based purely on the player's purchases or should include some element of other customers' demand, how quickly the prices should ramp up etc. etc.

I think most of the arguments were misplaced: the real debate is about who is prepared to accept non-infinite supply and who isn't. I am, and I agree that price escalation is a better way of limiting it than fixing quantities - but the latter is simpler to implement and easier for people to understand, so is likely to be more widely accepted.

But no matter - now we have git we can produce branches which try all sorts of approaches and see how popular they are. What we really need is a website which allows you to input a github url for a branch, input your OS and then build you an executable from that branch for your OS .... d_m ;-) ?