Are autoexplore and autofight (ala DCSS) worth it in V to reduce early game tedium?

[emar]

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[Estie]

You tested only strong @s. Try with a hobbit priest and kobold necromancer.

[Gwarl]

I implemented autofight in composband early on enough for it to also exist in frogcomposband. AFAIK there isn't a single player who uses it. I honestly thought it would be a killer feature.

With all the above in mind, philosophically speaking, what exactly is going on in the early game? Is it *intended* to be threatless drudgery that ramps into interesting situations and desirable loot?

Try playing some ancient version like 2.9 or even moria to find out.

[emar]

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[emar]

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[Gwarl]

I just want to say my main motivation for autofight is that it reduces the cognitive load for melee characters. You can clear a room of nonthreatening wolves or the like as a caster or ranger by hitting your 'fire worst ammo/cast magic missile at nearest target' button over and over but the fighter has to check where the wolves moved and choose the right direction every single turn.

Seems to me in older versions the early game consisted of scouring 50' for consumables to sell-ID until you could finally afford a lantern and a word of recall scroll and maybe some basic pieces of armour. The modern game skips over that more or less completely.

[Sphara]

or create a birth option that make stairs behave like ?Deep Descent would all give diving players a shortcut around the grind if they wanted it.

If you do play locally, you can edit Angband/lib/gamedata/constants, and set the number of levels for one stairs.

# Number of levels for each stair
world:stair-skip:1

[emar]

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[Angdrim]

Let me stick up for the probably-unpopular opinion: I think Angband is a better game for having lots of tedium and grind in the early games. The reason is that it makes you much more invested in each @. Dying HURTS when you've invested many hours in a character, and so the early game effects how you play. Namely, much more conservatively than you would if a @ dying didn't cost you much. Even beyond the auto-save-upon-death thing, Angband rewards careful game play (and early versions did much more so), which is one of its strengths.

[emar]

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[smbhax]

Autofight and autoexplore are necessary in DCSS because the early dungeon layouts are dreadful--just incredibly depressing to explore. And they don't take the problem away, in fact they make it even more tedious, just in a shorter period of time.

Angband does not have that problem, the early game is actually pretty fun.

[Djabanete]

For me the beginning of the game is the best part. I haven't played in a while, but I was last playing PosCheng. My recipe for an enjoyable early game was simple:

(*) Random race, random class, random personality, random spell schools
(*) Don't intelligently assign stats (distribute your stat points across all stats evenly)
(*) Don't enter any shops
(*) Take every down staircase as soon as you see it until dungeon level 10 or so

Bumpy ride guaranteed.

[Nick]

I started playing in the early 3.0.* days and I remember the early game being more unfair and deadly. I don't know how much of that was my own lack of skill versus the game itself, so it's a fair point for me to go play older versions to compare.

I think it was the game itself. My vague impression is that 3.2 was suddenly much easier (for several reasons, some of them accidental), and then since then there's been a fairly steady trend of the game overall getting gradually harder, apart from the early game.

Let me stick up for the probably-unpopular opinion: I think Angband is a better game for having lots of tedium and grind in the early games. The reason is that it makes you much more invested in each @. Dying HURTS when you've invested many hours in a character, and so the early game effects how you play. Namely, much more conservatively than you would if a @ dying didn't cost you much. Even beyond the auto-save-upon-death thing, Angband rewards careful game play (and early versions did much more so), which is one of its strengths.

I'm sympathetic to this idea, but I also feel that it's a bit of a hangover from when Angband was new and there were no other games like it and people were prepared to put large chunks of their life into trying to master it. I also had some experiences with Oangband (which was even more brutal) that (while fun in a masochistic sort of way) left me feeling that I was on the wrong track, and harder is not always better.

So my aim has not been to bring back the old days, but rather to try to make the game hard in new and interesting ways.

[Pete Mack]

If you're spending that much time on the first 30 levels you're doing it wrong. It should take under an hour.
Also: taking out an OoD Glabrezu at DL35 with a CL18 HE Mage is a whole lot of fun. Yes, I was very lucky to meet it in the first place, but it's not even possible if you are grinding.

[Estie]

The tedium of early game, with a strong or risk inclined character, is finding the stairs down. Moving through empty areas with shift-direction works fine for me; I doubt auto-explore would speed that up by much. Getting stalled by irrelevant encounters is one of the major mistakes that new players need to learn to avoid.

Once that has become habit, I dont see how auto-fight helps. So auto-fight would be for players who insist on clearing snaga hordes, but dont want to manually press the button.

Now I am sure I would like playing with auto-anything; I also enjoy watching the Borg. But I dont think putting this into Angband is a good idea. It would split the game and create a phase where youd have to stop using it.

If skipping early game is the only purpose, deep descent scrolls arent the right tool since they also allow you to skip the mid game. If thats also intended, then sure, go for that, but be aware that making them more frequent will do more than just allow skipping of the early game.

Another option would be to introduce "deep stairs"; differently coloured "<" and ">" that skip (a randomized amount ?) of levels. You could make them more frequent/skip more levels in shallow regions.