Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[MarvinPA]

So I'm not entirely sure whether this qualifies as a "thing I don't like" or a bug: is it intentional that Loremaster lets you see all traps on chests immediately, without having to search for them? I thought it was a bug and was going to fix it but some of the people in IRC weren't so sure, I guess in vanilla Angband it's intentional that you can identify chests to find traps on them (or possibly it's just an accidental consequence of how chests work there too?). It feels thematically wrong to me that an ability that lets you recognise objects because of your knowledge of lore also somehow lets you know about traps on chests without having to actually search for them.

[taptap]

I don't like a few ability dependencies:

* Cruel blow depending on Assassination

Pet issue. I like light weapon / subtlety without stealth, but it is an understandable otherwise (I would love if it would additionally depend on subtlety as a second route.)

* Song of Freedom depending on Song of Elbereth

I really do not understand this. Song of Elbereth is quite powerful all in itself it doesn't need to be condition for freedom to be taken. Song of Freedom really suffers from this, I would like to take it with characters that have little use for Elbereth as a rule.

P.S. Bug notification: lantern of Brightness autoIDs, feanorian lamp of brightness doesn't. so you need to look for special lanterns to get the xp for your lamp.

[taptap]

What I do at the moment is to inscribe spears/whatever with @t5. Then I use "t5" to throw one of them (if I don't care which). Since I have one hand on the numpad this comes quite naturally. I realise I've basically never done throwing with a slot letter.

I find this surprising I always got the idea that you use spears in melee as well - I wouldn't want my melee spear thrown (and not recoverable) by accident. I inscribe @t1 @t2 @t3 etc. for the different stacks I have. I throw quite often by letter when I was too lazy to setup the inscriptions. I almost never put inscriptions on melee weapons and wield / switch by inventory letters.

[evilmike]

I've thought of "tt" many times and then realise that it will throw the item in slot 't'. This would only work if you made it so that manual throwing takes three keypresses (which might be the best option). Another idea is to use control-t for quick throw. I'm imagining that the main thing you want is something like "ff" that selects both the item and the target automatically?

Yeah, basically it would be the same as ff, and that's why I suggested tt. Control-t doesn't seem ideal, because that ctrl is basically an extra keypress by itself, although it's easy enough to remap stuff. Items that are on 't' are a problem with this, so you'd need something like y or space as suggested already.

I'm all for stuff that streamlines ranged combat controls, anyway. Macros help a lot, and I like to use one for 'ff', just so I can use archery with a single keystroke (when sensible). Crawl supports this out of the box with it's "autofight" key, which is nice. It sounds trivial, but it practically cuts in half the number of buttons you press to make ranged attacks (not quite in half, because you still want to use manual targeting sometimes).

[Nick]

Note that we don't feel obliged to make throwing weapons all that good. We have heard of them historically and in fantasy, but not all that much in Tolkien's works.

I guess adding apples and burning pine cones isn't on the agenda

[debo]

I like the idea of saying 'thank you' to a monster by hurling an axe at them

[half]

Point taken, but I could just as easily live with tT.

I can't even do that, as capital letters are reserved for choosing that slot with a confirmation prompt. I'm not sure if anyone actually uses that though.

I might be able to do 'ty' though, as the inventory stops at w. Or t<space> or something.

[BlueFish]

Very small thing but broken doors should just disappear rather than looking like slightly off-color normal doors. Unless I'm missing something and broken doors have some meaning beyond empty space. I can never distinguish broken doors from normal open ones, and I often waste a turn trying to close them, unsuccessfully.

I guess this might be in an edit file? I'll check.

[debo]

I've thought of "tt" many times and then realise that it will throw the item in slot 't'. This would only work if you made it so that manual throwing takes three keypresses (which might be the best option). Another idea is to use control-t for quick throw. I'm imagining that the main thing you want is something like "ff" that selects both the item and the target automatically?

What I do at the moment is to inscribe spears/whatever with @t5. Then I use "t5" to throw one of them (if I don't care which). Since I have one hand on the numpad this comes quite naturally. I realise I've basically never done throwing with a slot letter.

Further ideas on this interface for throwing are welcome!

Point taken, but I could just as easily live with tT.

(Or, take away 'tunneling' from T, force people to use ctrl-dir to tunnel, and then have TT be the command instead. But this is getting weird now.)

[debo]

Actually, maybe I only agreed to restricting the special types and to making stacks more common. I think the only real thing against your proposal is that it is useful to be able to find spears of both fine types. Even then, I guess that damage sides first is fine. So thanks for the improvement.

Note that we don't feel obliged to make throwing weapons all that good. We have heard of them historically and in fantasy, but not all that much in Tolkien's works. Since it was easy enough to allow them, we did, but this doesn't mean that we also need to balance the rules to make them competitive with, say, bows or swords, which are really key weapons in his works.

I think all we agreed to was just making the stack size larger. ie. in situations where you'd expect to find X throwing items of some type in a stack, you'll now expect to find Y where Y > X

The only reason I suggested this was because a lot of times I'll find 1 or 2 spears of awesome, and there's no reason for me to hang onto them if I can just stack 8-10 vanilla spears. However, if I find 3-4 spears of awesome in one stack... that's at least an interesting tradeoff to make. (For me, of course. Others may disagree.)

I'm not sure if throwing weapons get generated by two routines right now (like 'generate one thing' and 'generate stack'), or if everything gets generated the same way and certain things are permitted a stack size. If the former, increasing the probability that you're going to get a stack given that a throwing weapon is being generated might be good.

In either case, I'd like to see the expected stack size be larger though.

[half]

That way if you have a stack of throwing axes and a stack of daggers, "tt" (for example) would throw one of the axes, and then when you run out of those it would throw daggers instead.

I've thought of "tt" many times and then realise that it will throw the item in slot 't'. This would only work if you made it so that manual throwing takes three keypresses (which might be the best option). Another idea is to use control-t for quick throw. I'm imagining that the main thing you want is something like "ff" that selects both the item and the target automatically?

What I do at the moment is to inscribe spears/whatever with @t5. Then I use "t5" to throw one of them (if I don't care which). Since I have one hand on the numpad this comes quite naturally. I realise I've basically never done throwing with a slot letter.

Further ideas on this interface for throwing are welcome!

[half]

Yes, this is planned. I think I already agreed to something like this that debo suggested earlier in this thread.

Actually, maybe I only agreed to restricting the special types and to making stacks more common. I think the only real thing against your proposal is that it is useful to be able to find spears of both fine types. Even then, I guess that damage sides first is fine. So thanks for the improvement.

Note that we don't feel obliged to make throwing weapons all that good. We have heard of them historically and in fantasy, but not all that much in Tolkien's works. Since it was easy enough to allow them, we did, but this doesn't mean that we also need to balance the rules to make them competitive with, say, bows or swords, which are really key weapons in his works.

[half]

This would already help a lot, you could hold on fine items with a more reasonable hope to build a stack of them.

Yes, this is planned. I think I already agreed to something like this that debo suggested earlier in this thread.

[debo]

I don't actually care about the quiver part anymore, but to build on the 'tt' proposal -- instead of having the game make a value judgment for you, it might be neat if it just used the inscription index sort ordering.

So e.g. if I have throwing axes on @t1 and spears on @t2, tt would do 't1f' until I ran out of axes, and then go to spears

[evilmike]

I would love to have a quiver type of equipment, but doubt it will happen. It is good that they don't vary in weight like other equipment but even the different fine items have attack bonus, damage bonus or attack+damage bonus and all these combined with different slays makes it possible to have a dozen different slots used up only by one throwing weapon type. Unless I am lucky to find 4 of a special-type I end up throwing away the good weapons just to keep the larger stack. The consolidation of the slays to Nargothrond / Gondolin / Doriath was probably already made partly for this reason.

Seconding this. The inventory managment aspect is why I tend to avoid using throwing weapons. It's not only because of the stacking issue, but because it takes a relatively large amount of effort to throw items. The archery interface is just so much better, in every possible way. And while arrows also have different types, there are only a few, so you don't deal with many stacks of them in general.

I don't think I've ever seen a roguelike do throwing *well*, to be honest. Plenty of games do a good job with archery type stuff (including sil), but throwing always seems really clunky. A quiver-like option probably wouldn't be enough to fix it either, because you're not going to have massive stacks of throwing weapons like with arrows.

Macros help a lot, but imo that's a case of the user fixing the interface, instead of the built-in one being good in the first place.

All I can really suggest right now is a "quick throw" feature that just defaults to your "best" throwing weapon (potions would have to be selected the manual way, and so would anything that's useful in melee). It would at least control a bit like archery that way, although it wouldn't be perfect. That way if you have a stack of throwing axes and a stack of daggers, "tt" (for example) would throw one of the axes, and then when you run out of those it would throw daggers instead.