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

[Gwarl]

People who think a 'bump nearest monster' button is too much; how do you justify a 'shoot/zap nearest monster' button? On some characters I'll press it to zap an adjacent monster. Why can't my melee characters have the same convenience?

Again, consider that frog/composband has autofight capabilities; it hasn't damaged the game at all, the players simply ignore the feature.

As wobbly says said variants also have autoget which is the most useful part of DCSS autoexplore. The second most useful part is basically equivalent to angband's 'run' feature in utility.

[smbhax]

In the back of my mind, I can't help thinking that if your game needs autoexplore, you've got the design all wrong; you're saying that your regular gameplay is so boring, it needs to be automated.

Obviously that's a knee-jerk and pessimistic take, but--aren't there ways the early game could be made more interesting for everyone, even the jaded old timers? Rather than having to resort to making the computer play it for you?

More interesting dungeon features that require active decision making by the player? Smarter AI that requires intelligent stratagems? More monster types and behaviors? Dungeon layouts that simulate recognizable areas that would inspire the imagination, like lairs or barracks or mines or forges or laboratories?

I just think making a big skip button--which is what autoexplore/autofight are, basically--is the wrong way to go. Look what's happened to DCSS: later stages look amazing, even in character graphic mode, but the early stages, the ones where everyone would be using the autoexplore and autofight, look absolutely terrible, and have awful balance--because nobody cares anymore and just skips them.

When I was playing DCSS, starting over again, alternating the autoexplore and autofight buttons to spam through the early stages AGAIN, I was just dreaming of making it to stage 10 or so, where the fun stages start--and incidentally, those stages look, more than anything else, like simplistic Angband stages--heck, almost Rogue stages. But those boxy rooms and short corridors have bottlenecks and flanking passages, and militarized AI groups with tough officers in unpredictable ambushes, and occasional incredibly dangerous lurking monsters; they feel structured and meaningful, even though they're just random grid layouts, more or less.

But they don't last very long. And the game has other fairly deep-seated design issues. And I didn't want to auto-spam through those gawd-awful early stages ever again--because THAT is not a game, it's just a chore, that could use something like Homer Simpson's keyboard-pressing drinky bird to automate the automating button pressing. And I'm more interested in long games, even endless games. So I came back to Angband.

If people are saying they can't stand playing your levels, make better levels. Or just rip them out, start everyone at level 10, and add 10 levels to the end game if you still want that big #100. : P

Autoexplore and autofight are a huge game design crutch.

[Nick]

Well, I guess the grognards have spoken. I'll summarize what I've heard:

The game is fine.

Thematically, it's a sandbox where epicness matters, but only when people compare Angband to anything else, especially if on reddit. Angband is its own game, where the nearly-vacant fortifications to the impregnable successor to Utumno are guarded by molds, jellies, and fruit bats. Heroes are hauling around trash bags of potions while effortlessly killing Satan and his minions because they lack object permanance and you are slightly out of view. This is all fine because reasons.

The defaults are also fine, unless they're not, but then that's your fault. You're free to play any way you want to, and if you're not having fun, you're playing it wrong, but there's no "right" way to play. Reddit is very bad and no one should ever go there. The end.

If that's what you heard, I don't think you were listening very carefully

For what it's worth, I think your experiment with autoexplore and autofight is an interesting one, and raises some good questions. In fact, it has gone further toward persuading me that autoexplore might be a valid addition to Angband than any previous such argument. I'm not sure if you're aware, but there is a kind of primitive version of autoexplore already existing, where you can target any grid on the screen, and the game will attempt to pathfind toward it. This may not be immediately obvious to new players, but Angband is quite a complex game, and it's hard to make every feature of it apparent at first glance.

As for the reddit issue, my reaction is partly due to many, many years of reading r/roguelikes and being told that Angband is too grindy and DCSS and ToME are much better by people who haven't played it since 1998. There's also been a fair few cases of people showing up here and starting threads about how Angband should be more like DCSS. So I thought it was worth at least putting the position that Angband is its own game, and that popularity - even relative popularity among roguelikes - isn't necessarily the best judge of what direction it should take.

Note that I'm not saying that Angband should not change; in fact, I would probably have changed it more if not from pushback from some of the, er, grognards here (all of whom I love ). If you were to make a fork with autoexplore and autofight and maybe other changes, people are likely to play it, and some of your changes are fairly likely to end up being incorporated into V. Your ideas are well thought-out and (last post aside) reasonably expressed

[wobbly]

Poscheng derivitives have auto-get which I miss when playing characters with a shooter. Also fast travel to stairs and loot which I don't use but others seem to like.

[Djabanete]

When I tried out DCSS after much experience with Angband, I did not expect to like autoexplore. My hjklyubn key usage was, I felt, way too expert for me to need autoexplore. I was totally wrong. Autoexplore turned out to be great in DCSS. Others in this thread have mentioned two reasons that DCSS may need it more than Angband: (a) DCSS has weirder-shaped levels with fewer straight lines, and (b) in Angband you don't need to clear levels. That said, it sounds plausible to me that many players would enjoy autoexplore in Angband. Many players enjoy clearing Angband levels, and many who don't typically clear levels could find satisfaction in doing so with autoexplore.

If you end up implementing autoexplore and/or autofight, please do share!

[Sphara]

Both DCSS and Angband punish you greatly, if you play real-time fast with more frail character. Both games also have very easy early game, IF you always pick something like Minotaur Berserker or Half-Troll Warrior. Also, if you die often, you're gonna find yourself playing the early game often.

I have nothing against adding an autoexplore in angband. It's just that I'd not use it myself. Again, my way of enjoying roguelikes is not smashing fast through the early levels. In DCSS, I played for streaks. In Angband, I mostly play for minimizing the turns.

[smbhax]

Also also, in DCSS, it is quite common even for veteran players to die on, like, level 4 (there's an odd difficulty spike at level 4, it seemed to me), or other early level. And because even a winning game is much shorter, you're playing through the early stages of DCSS much, much more frequently than in Angband.

And they're awful.

[Estie]

Well, I guess the grognards have spoken. I'll summarize what I've heard:

The game is fine.

Thematically, it's a sandbox where epicness matters, but only when people compare Angband to anything else, especially if on reddit. Angband is its own game, where the nearly-vacant fortifications to the impregnable successor to Utumno are guarded by molds, jellies, and fruit bats. Heroes are hauling around trash bags of potions while effortlessly killing Satan and his minions because they lack object permanance and you are slightly out of view. This is all fine because reasons.

The defaults are also fine, unless they're not, but then that's your fault. You're free to play any way you want to, and if you're not having fun, you're playing it wrong, but there's no "right" way to play. Reddit is very bad and no one should ever go there. The end.

You have a way of showing things in a hilarious light.

A few points:

I think there was 1 comment somewhere dissing reddit ? You make it seem like theres some war going on here.

As for molds and bats, the LotR had Bill Ferny and neekerbreekers for starting encounters. I see nothing wrong there. You see, we arent really playing Angband. We are actually playing Moria II with the powercreep incursion that sequels are wont to have.

"The game is fine as is" is a strange statement considering all the substantial changes Nick has made since he became maintainer. In fact, there are people who mourn the loss of a maintained vanilla Angband tradition and call his game a variant, and they have a point.

Now maybe changing the first 10 levels would be a good idea and maybe not, but is this really such a big deal ? If the suggestion to do such is met with conservative caution for this very old game, that clearly is reason for a satiric dismissal with, hopefully pretent, finality.

[smbhax]

Hm. I could be wrong about this but I think another reason DCSS probably needed to automate their gameplay--aside from the terrible early dungeon layouts and, it seems to me, difficulty curve that is much more random and less well worked out than Angband's--is that you don't really have the same option to dive in that game, because there are fewer levels and they do not regenerate, so resources are quite limited, and you really do have to go through every nook to get everything you possibly can. And also the way items work in that game, items you find very early on can quite easily serve as end-game items. So you've got to poke through every bit of even the early levels, no matter how boring you may find them, rather than being able to race for stairs and skip the bulk of the level.

[emar]

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[Estie]

How would new players get the message that diving early and/or avoiding encounters is the "right" way to play? It's effectively dogma here but the game doesn't do anything to document or signal that as the right strategy, or penalize players that grind (not necessarily that it should). The food clock (I think) is supposed to achieve that implicitly, but doesn't (except in ironman).

A tutorial or even an in-game guide accessible via the character creation screen would do a lot to motivate new players in the right direction without any gameplay changes, but it still leaves the early game as a slog to repeatedly find stairs until you start facing meaningful resistance, and anyone who doesn't read guides (most of the general population) will play for ten minutes and say "Yep, this is grindy" and never come back.

The "right" way of playing is only defined in a competitive context, which you can have with Angband but you are not forced into.

I dont know how much a guide being "in-game" would help; we live in the age of Google. Certainly all the people who find Angband through reddit will not miss an in-game guide - they may miss a good comprehensive guide in general though. A small tutorial is a different matter, basically pointing to where more information can be found, like the various menus.

Angband can be viewed as many game modes in one game. Many of the issues you addressed can be solved by picking the right mode - like you noted, food clock becomes relevant in ironman.

So, whats good about early empty levels ?

They provide an easy shot at character improvement. The monster population is such that even a very weak class combination played by an inexperienced player can make progress without much risk of getting overwhelmed. Slow progress, thus it feels grindy.

I wouldnt like handholding new players towards one or the other playing style.
If their short attention span prevents them from getting involved deeply enough to become interested, so be it. There are thousands of games out there for them - Angband has its rustic, but unique spirit. There is room for that, and some new people will prefer it this way.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

DCSS, for instance, has sexier graphics....

I used to play Angband with graphical tiles, now I just play with ASCII. I'm not looking for "Call of Duty", and besides, I think my imagination is far better than any graphics will ever be.

[smbhax]

DCSS, for instance, has sexier graphics, lots more playable races and characters, and an easily accessed, much more polished, graphical web-based front end, with servers on most continents. It also has, for most people, a much shorter play time--or so I gather.

For that matter, Diablo is far more popular than DCSS.

Those of us who are here rather than there are clearly after something else.

[Nick]

In my opinion part of it is in the name. Angband is the fortress of the great evil of the world, Morgoth. Getting to the bottom of it, and killing him, is going to have to be epic. This is not a "let's go on a random Dungeon Crawl to kill some generic monsters and grab loot" exercise, it's an attempt to overthrow the Middle-Earth equivalent of Satan, defeating most of his minions along the way.

Timo (Angband player from the early days) used to complain about the focus on turncount, diving etc because he saw Angband as an adventure, not a contest. Or maybe it's a puzzle. You can make up your own mind - it doesn't tell you how to play it.

I'm not being very focused here, but (by happy accident) that's actually a metaphor for what I'm trying to say. Angband is its own game, and I think comparing it to other roguelikes is to some extent missing the point. I was drawn to it by the theme and the atmosphere, not by the fact that it's a roguelike and certainly not by reddit.

Rantier than I intended, but hey

[emar]

The user has deleted this post.