Monster disparities

[fizzix]

There's an idea floating around that suggests that detection should be limited to letter, so that a player would know there was an Ancient dragon but not necessarily what type of dragon. This thread is mainly to go through each letter and indicate the largest disparity that exists for each letter. *s indicate what I consider to be a very large power disparity.

a: soldier ant - giant blue ant
a (group of): army ant - queen ant
A: angel - Azriel *
b: fruit bat - doom bat
B: crow - phoenix *
c: white centipede - carrion crawler *
C: werewolf - Huan/Carcharoth *
C (group): Jackal - hellhound *
d: baby dragon - kavlax *
D: ancient dragon: GWOB/GWOMC/Glaurung *
e (static): floating eye - evil eye
e (moving): spectator - omarax
E: spirit - elem uniques *
f: wild cat - displacer beast.
F: all flies are alike
g: flesh golem - bronze/bone golem *
G: glutton ghost - Tselakus *
h: scruffy hobbit - Fundin *
H: harpy - Jabberwock *
i: clear icky thing - blue icky thing
I: fruit fly - hummerhorn
j (non-moving) who cares
j (moving) blue ooze - acidic cytoplasm
J: snakes are the same
k: small kobold - large kobold
K: all killer beetles are the same
l: lice are the same
L: lich - demilich (reavers and archlichs have pass wall, feagwath and vecna have escorts)
m: mold - death mold
M: 2 headed hydra - Lernean *
n: black naga - medusa *
o: snaga - azog
p: novice - sauron *
P: hill giant - Greater Titan *
q: cave bear - mumak
Q: quylthulg - qqlzqlzuup *
r: small rat - wererat
R: rock lizard - tarrasque *
s: skeleton kobold - cantoras *
S: giant spider - Ungoliant *
t: who cares
T: forest troll - rogrog
u: tengu - bodak
U (sing): marilith - pazuzu *
U (group): Vrock - Gothmog *
v: elem vortex - time vortex *
V: vampire - Thuringwethel *
w: white worm mass - wereworm
W: white wraith - nightwalker *
X: umber hulk - Xaren
y: blue yeek - master yeek
Y: there are only 2!
z: zombified kobold - mummified troll
z (group): ghoul - greater mummy
Z: elem hound - aether hound *

A few cases move to a more reasonable range if you are able to identify unique monsters through detection. Some however are troubling still, D, W and U are obvious problems, but even R (greater basilisk), H, and g (drolem) can be huge. (an adept player might be able to put in some more distinction levels based on monster speed, but do we want to force players to know that?)

My suggestion would be, if we are going to blur monster distinction, we need to provide other rough hints to distinguish between some of these monster levels.

[Hariolor]

I realize this would penalize new players to some degree - but early on I think it would add fun/excitement/challenge to not be certain whether that c is a centipede or a carrion crawler.

Later on, at least in the other thread, the idea was to somehow add one or more buffed detection options for items. Presumably there would be improved ID for monsters as well available in the mid-late game when not having a clear idea could be very dangerous.

Also needing to be considered will be the amplification of stealth/aggro benefit/cost that will result if detection on monsters is redone.

[fph]

What about tiles users?

[buzzkill]

What about tiles users?

Unless something is done to specifically address tile mode (which I kinda doubt as it would require new tiles and would really alter the way that tile user 'see' the game), we would get to see the tile... as we do now . You would just have to be able to ID an enemy by recognizing at the tile without the benefit of monster recall... as we do now .

With tiles everything has a unique, recognizable tile. That's why I use them despite having a limited field of view (less dungeon on screen). To cloak that recognizability in the exact same way (as ASCII) would be far harsher on tile users, in short, because we're used to knowing exactly what were looking at, while ASCII players, I assume, tend to (l)ook at enemies more often just to be sure of what it is.

DaJ has something similar to this happening already. That is, the ability to hear (and thereby learn the location and genus of) monsters, and that (as described above) is pretty much how DaJ handles it.

[fizzix]

Later on, at least in the other thread, the idea was to somehow add one or more buffed detection options for items. Presumably there would be improved ID for monsters as well available in the mid-late game when not having a clear idea could be very dangerous.

I have proposed some different ideas in the past that can be used to supplement weakened detection. So I would think something like this could work:

1: Uniques are always differently distinguished in all detections

2: Floor terrain is changed to indicate the presence of certain monster abilities.

3: Searching gives players a chance to identify the name of one close by monster. (like, you "hear a greater balrog" or "there are nightmare tracks here")

3 is a bit hard to implement because you need to add squelch tracking for monsters so that you can squelch jackal tracks at some point. 2 is hard to implement because of the current difficulties of adding new terrain to the codebase. So this is a long way off...

For tile mode, I would propose you use a greyed out version of the strongest monster tile available. If greyed out tiles are too difficult, just use the strongest monster tile.

[MKula]

The "quick" and "basic" implementation would be to just remove colour-coding for all detected monsters. Make them all appear as white characters, for example. The monster list currently just creates a basic list of all the monsters anyway, right? So the list will say:
c blue centipede x 1
c carrion crawler x 1
On the screen you see two white c's in different locations, so you won't know which is which.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Make them all appear as white, *except* the uniques.

Another option might be to use range. All monsters within a given radius get fully IDd, as now; outside that radius but within spell range, they get MKula's white-out treatment. Uniques could always get a special color, OR could be fully IDd at 2x radius. You wouldn't necessarily know where Huan was, but at least you'd know that he can't be *too* close by. The radius can be spell dependent, so Detect Monsters and ESP might be radius 15, Reveal Monsters 25, Clairvoyance 35.

[Derakon]

I'm vaguely tempted by the concept of a sense-danger spell. It wouldn't reveal color or type, but it would reveal the monster's native dungeon level. You'd get a * for each monster, and it'd be more towards green if the monster was from a shallower depth and more towards red if the monster was from a deeper depth.

I doubt this would be remotely useful so long as we have more powerful detection spells, but I thought the concept was neat, so I'm throwing it out there.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Actually, I like that as a mod of MKula's idea, Derakon, or my range-based variation.

[Hariolor]

Is ESP still slated to be a scaling power in 3.3?

If so, esp could be a good stopgap - detection would have larger range but provide less information until *detection* becomes available.

If ESP always provides flavor, but has a more limited range, this might be something that could be balanced. Especially if the weakest ESP starts showing up around 2000', which IMO is about the time when specific detection first starts being more relevant as well...

[Magnate]

Is ESP still slated to be a scaling power in 3.3?

If so, esp could be a good stopgap - detection would have larger range but provide less information until *detection* becomes available.

If ESP always provides flavor, but has a more limited range, this might be something that could be balanced. Especially if the weakest ESP starts showing up around 2000', which IMO is about the time when specific detection first starts being more relevant as well...

I am definitely intending to move ESP to a pval-based power at some point, but I have a lot of aspirations for 3.3 so whether this gets done depends on how quickly takkaria wants to release. I've raised the idea of genus-specific ESP (e.g. weapons of *slay* Foo would grant some degree of ESP of Foo monsters), but this is yet further away. This is partly wrapped up in an ongoing discussion about object flags and edit file formats - I am intending to put up a discussion page on the trac.rephial.org wiki when I get the time. Basically we will need more object flags if we're going to track different types of ESP at different levels - there's no inherent problem with this but it needs to be concordant with takkaria's and others' aspirations for object flags.

To chip in on the basic idea: I remain of the view that detection info should be seriously nerfed for the first ~80% of the game, with "*detect*" becoming available very late. I like both the whiteout idea and the range idea, and I don't even think uniques need to be visibly distinct until they are in LOS. I like the idea of "hearing" uniques at a certain range, and thereby getting some sort of warning.

I don't have an issue with the massive disparity in power of monsters sharing the same letter. That was Timo's entire point in bringing this up in the first place.

I don't use tiles so have no opinion on what would be best for them.