GV and LV frequency

[fizzix]

In lieu of an actual monte carlo simulator, I randomly generated 100 levels at dlevel 99 and checked vault frequency.

Greater vault: 5% (standard error = 2.2%)
1 lesser vault: 25% (standard error = 4.3%)
2 lesser vaults: 9% (standard error = 2.9%)
3+ lesser vaults: 6% (standard error = 2.4%)
No vaults: 55% (standard error = 5%)

Obviously, I need more simulations to bring these error bars down, (and I may indeed to some more by hand) but from these results it is extremely unlike that the GV frequency is at or more than 10%.

The question I have, is what would be an ideal GV percentage at dlevel 99?

How about dlevel 50?

[Therem Harth]

I have to ask, what's the frequency of great item generation in various sorts of vaults? In ToME the GCVs and nests were pretty much the only worthwhile types.

[Derakon]

If I recall correctly, the best guaranteed items in vaults are generated as if they were 10 levels deeper and automatically bypass the "good" check (practically pointless these days, since damn near everything past 400' passes the good check). There used to also be a 20 levels OOD / auto-pass "excellent" check, but I seem to recall hearing it got merged with the other one.

(The symbols in vault.txt for these are 9 and 8, respectively. They also generate out-of-depth monsters, more out-of-depth than the items are)

[fizzix]

I have to ask, what's the frequency of great item generation in various sorts of vaults? In ToME the GCVs and nests were pretty much the only worthwhile types.

I'm not sure there is a great item generation per se as there used to be. I can say that the average Greater Vault will yield more artifacts than the average dragon pit. And the average dragon pit will yield more artifacts than the average lesser vault. I don't have much experience clearing demon pits or graveyards. I usually avoid graveyards and demon pits tend to get half destroyed by horned reapers before I get there.

Of the lesser vaults, the best by far are the diagonal vaults. These are also the most difficult, so that makes sense. In distant third is the turnabout vault and then probably planet X or rooms. Of my floor based artifacts, over 50% tend to come from lesser vaults.

For GV vaults the best are probably the bubble type vaults (individually sectioned off rooms with monster + item), mainly because they're easy to clear and have lots of attempts at artifact generation.

[Timo Pietilä]

If I recall correctly, the best guaranteed items in vaults are generated as if they were 10 levels deeper and automatically bypass the "good" check (practically pointless these days, since damn near everything past 400' passes the good check). There used to also be a 20 levels OOD / auto-pass "excellent" check, but I seem to recall hearing it got merged with the other one.

It used to be that symbol 8 means guaranteed excellent item 20 dlvls OoD and monster 40 dlvls OoD. Spiral CGV has all squares as such and zig-zag CGV has every other. Those two are the best GV:s. Most of the others are far far worse.

If that got changed then that just plain sucks. I don't recall any discussion about that kind of change and can't think of any sane justification for such change. Vast majority of GV:s pretty much suck already, so making them even less interesting is something that I can't understand.

[Therem Harth]

Now that I've given it some thought... I think the way to go is to improve monster drops, especially from powerful monsters. Maybe keep floor items around for flavor (or for something sharp to throw at the Magic Mushroom Patch across the room), but make all the good items monster drops.

In particular, I think that artifacts should always be found on monsters. Maybe even go a step further, and have some high-level uniques guarantee at least one artifact.

[Derakon]

It appears I recalled incorrectly; at least, as of the 3.1.2v2 source I have on this computer (can't be arsed to install git and download the latest just at the moment), '8' still means an item 20 levels OOD and a monster 40 levels OOD. However, they aren't guaranteed-great anymore. In fact, the "great" boolean argument to place_object appears to always be false these days.

[fizzix]

Now that I've given it some thought... I think the way to go is to improve monster drops, especially from powerful monsters.

I think this is already mostly the case. You are much more likely to get artifacts from monsters rather than the floor. The major exception is vaults, and honestly, I don't think this a problem either.

@Timo

What do you think about adding more top level items to some vaults. Some vaults are notably stingy with items. Of course most of this is moot. I average less than one greater vault per game...That needs to change too (hence the title of this thread)

[Timo Pietilä]

@Timo

What do you think about adding more top level items to some vaults. Some vaults are notably stingy with items. Of course most of this is moot. I average less than one greater vault per game...That needs to change too (hence the title of this thread)

I'd say remove some of the GV:s. Notably the ones that are very long in vertical direction. Those are annoying and I suspect that they do not fit in the dungeon very easily, so it might prevent creating one.

I also think we need a mid-level vault between GV and LV. There was a bug at one point where CrownGV was marked as LV and that was fun. It is open vault where monsters can escape easily, the "8" spots had dangerous monsters and reward was good. We need to have more of that kind of vaults, not necessary the huge closed GV:s or open weak LV:s. Getting CrownGV at start of the stat-gain was...interesting. How to get that Golden Crown that that ghost couldn't pick up but not get killed by three times as fast as you Azriel next to it? Or wonder if monster in that "8" spot where you don't see a monster with detect evil is a white icky thing, drolem or maybe Azriel.

Seriously, that was seriously fun. We need more of such things in dungeon. Vast majority of current levels are just boring.

Also all other dungeon specialties needs to be a bit more common except pits. Pits I find very common.

[Timo Pietilä]

It appears I recalled incorrectly; at least, as of the 3.1.2v2 source I have on this computer (can't be arsed to install git and download the latest just at the moment), '8' still means an item 20 levels OOD and a monster 40 levels OOD. However, they aren't guaranteed-great anymore. In fact, the "great" boolean argument to place_object appears to always be false these days.

Does that mean that next CGV I find might have enchanted dagger in "8" spots? That would just suck. In fact now that I think of it I had one CGV in recent game and wondered where all the good stuff are? I got way more great items from killing monsters than from the vault. Some spots had suspiciously low quality items, but since it was the zig-zag -type, I just thought those places were the ones without "8".

Is there a way to test this? I rather not play ten million turns scumming for GV:s to find out.

[fizzix]

I'd say remove some of the GV:s. Notably the ones that are very long in vertical direction. Those are annoying and I suspect that they do not fit in the dungeon very easily, so it might prevent creating one.

I also think we need a mid-level vault between GV and LV. There was a bug at one point where CrownGV was marked as LV and that was fun. It is open vault where monsters can escape easily, the "8" spots had dangerous monsters and reward was good. We need to have more of that kind of vaults, not necessary the huge closed GV:s or open weak LV:s. Getting CrownGV at start of the stat-gain was...interesting. How to get that Golden Crown that that ghost couldn't pick up but not get killed by three times as fast as you Azriel next to it? Or wonder if monster in that "8" spot where you don't see a monster with detect evil is a white icky thing, drolem or maybe Azriel.

Seriously, that was seriously fun. We need more of such things in dungeon. Vast majority of current levels are just boring.

Also all other dungeon specialties needs to be a bit more common except pits. Pits I find very common.

I agree with you on almost all of this. I do think we need a guaranteed "great" specification and that every GV should have at least 5-10 items with that designation.

Changing the vault layouts are fairly easy, although I kind of like the wide variety of vaults. I'd be more inclined to flip vaults sideways rather than remove them. Remember for a standard player each vault will very likely be the first time the player has ever encountered that structure. I've had something like 15 winners or so, and there are vaults that I've never seen. That's good.

If I get the GV placement changes done that I want to, I'll see if that raises vault frequency. If it does, then difficulty of placing vertical vaults will be a moot point. The next step would be to beef up some of the weaker vaults. It's ridiculous to me that the easiest sectioned off vaults are full of 8s while other GVs have 1 or 2 only.

I also think the mid-level vault is a good idea. They could span from diagonal vaults up to some of the weaker GVs, like snake maze.

The vault placement algorithm I'm thinking of would be.

generate new level.

check for GV (if passes, make GV)

[if MVs exist, check for MV here, otherwise:]

begin current dungeon making scheme.

[Derakon]

Switching '8' back to guaranteed-great would be a trivial change. I'm curious why it was changed to guaranteed-good in the first place. Though, not to the extent of trawling changelogs.

Therem: I don't agree with you that artifacts should always come from monster drops, nor that there should be uniques with guaranteed artifact drops. I wouldn't mind seeing a quality boost in the drop from unique monsters (their drops are currently bad proportionate to their challenge), something like "if unique, then treat monster as if their native depth were 25% deeper". But tweaking artifact generation like you suggest removes some of the random fun from the game.

[EpicMan]

Perhaps great was changed to good to allow higher-level non-equipment?

I think we need a new classifier, say 'supurb item', that includes the big three weapons, the best egos,
DSM and mithril/adamant ego armors, as well as the best consumables and devices.
That way, while it is still random you know there is something great in that vault.
You could also add them to graveyards to make them more tempting.

[Therem Harth]

If you want to make graveyards tempting, you have to make it possible for characters to tackle them without dying. Currently that... doesn't really work, IMO. Though I can think of a way to do it without unbalancing things, which I'll post elsewhere.

[fizzix]

I'd say remove some of the GV:s. Notably the ones that are very long in vertical direction. Those are annoying and I suspect that they do not fit in the dungeon very easily, so it might prevent creating one.

Checking the code, this actually does not matter. Room generation looks like this:

1. Select room type and location.

2. See if room fits on map (or overlaps other rooms)

3. If it fits, select specific room

4. Mark all parts of the room as filled

So at the point where it's checking if the room fits it's using the default size for GVs (66 x 44) which is friggin huge, much larger than any actual vault. It also forces LVs to fit in a 33x22 block, even if they're the tiny hidden vaults.

edit: One more thing that's kind of surprising to me. A GV is so big that it'll fail the 'fit-on-map' test 7/9 of the time! That's insane. edit the edit, this is wrong, it's actually closer to not fitting 2/3 of the time. (23/36 to be exact)

The only thing I'm really stuck on is how to scale the GV frequency with level... ideas for that?

more edit: testing the code out so far. GVs are created 15 times out of 100 randomly generated chances at dlevel 100. I calculated it should occur about 18% of the time, so things look right.

for scaling I'm thinking of some sort of geometric scaling where the GV frequency drops by 1/3 every 10 levels.