What do lice add to the game?

[Starhawk]

I don't have a problem with lice... but then again, my first Roguelike was ADOM. Which didn't have the N limit on breeders, as far as I could tell -- and had persistently saved levels. So, those lice were still there when you came back.

Lice can be just like any other "bad monster situation", in that it can force you to use up escapes and/or bail from the level. The difference is that you usually have lots of turns to decide on your course of action before they nibble you to death.

(Exception: Hummerhorns. Allow me to wave a fist of anger at those confusing little bugs... cost me a promising character a couple weeks ago)

[RogerN]

Perhaps the problem with lice is that they are not dangerous enough?

Nobody seems to mind the fact that certain monsters can force the player to avoid parts of the level or leave the level altogether. Rather, it sounds like the problem occurs when players don't feel threatened by the lice. When population explosion occurs the player may try to force his way through the lice. Annoyance ensues when characters who aren't really supposed to take on a lice explosion do it anyway, and the encounter just drags on and on... player can't kill the lice, and the lice can't kill the player (not quickly enough anyway).

[Jazerus]

Regarding buzzkill's comment: as soon as I saw the lice I did my best to kill them. By this point they were awake and there were two of them, within the radius of a ball spell, and beyond the range of my crossbow. So I tried zapping my rod of acid balls, and it failed (75% success rate, natch). The following turn there were more than could be killed by the rod, which meant that I had precisely zero hope of being able to contain the infestation. I suppose I could have tried nppangband's tactic of teleporting one away and letting it make a huge colony elsewhere on the level, but I didn't think of it at the time and that strikes me as an abuse of the game mechanics at some level.

You gave up on killing them far too quickly. Lice reach critical mass relatively slowly - unless you were slowed, you could have dealt with the results of a few turns of breeding while you got into position to shoot them. Would it have taken a couple of minutes? Yes, probably. But exterminating them even one at a time is still doable until you have 10+ lice breeding at once - and even then it's conceivable you could have kept them contained by killing them until your rod of acid balls recharged.

They're irritating, but with a bit of patience lice should rarely make a room impassable.

[Derakon]

Keep in mind two things:

1) This thread's pretty old.

2) The context of the explosion. This was in a rather nasty greater vault "Hellpit", which consists largely of open space. Wading into a mass of lice to try to keep them contained while the rod recharges isn't an option because there's tons of actually threatening monsters in the area -- it was kill the lice from a distance, or not at all, since they can't be lured out of the pit into a safer killzone.

A shame, because I was really looking forward to taking on that pit otherwise. I've never had a chance to see how it actually plays out.

[bio_hazard]

I may be weird, but I think lice are one of the most tactically interesting monsters in the game. Something you need to seek out and kill relatively quickly before they wake up and get going, something with early characters that you have to weigh how you will kill it (stinking cloud that might wake up other monsters? use a thrown weapon or not very accurate missile weapon to try to kill it faster, or walk across the room and kill it in melee but risk it multiplying as you travel. If you are fighting something tough and a louse wakes up or lands next to you, do you divert your attention to the louse while giving the tougher monster an extra turn against you, or do you finish with the tough monster and have a harder clean-up job when you are done?)

Granted these are mainly interesting trade-offs for very low level characters.

[nppangband]

2) The context of the explosion. This was in a rather nasty greater vault "Hellpit", which consists largely of open space. Wading into a mass of lice to try to keep them contained while the rod recharges isn't an option because there's tons of actually threatening monsters in the area -- it was kill the lice from a distance, or not at all, since they can't be lured out of the pit into a safer killzone.

A shame, because I was really looking forward to taking on that pit otherwise. I've never had a chance to see how it actually plays out.

The way to handle lice in a vault is:

1) Teleport other the first one you see.

2) Go find it, and let teh infestation build up in an uninteresting part of the dungeon, since each dungeon level has a 99 limit for each monster race.

3) Go back to the vault, where hopefully the lice infestation is limited to a small, manageable amount. If not, do something like cast stinking cloud to kill some of them, then go back to the decoy infestation and let the game hit the 99 limit there instead of inside the vault. Repeat as necessary.

[Derakon]

Yeah, I addressed that earlier. Not only didn't I know about the cap on per-race limits on each level at the time, but I don't really like exploiting caps that way.