What do lice add to the game?

[Derakon]

I'm getting rather weary of dealing with lice. The way I see it, there are a few scenarios here:

1) You catch them before they wake up and kill them. No big deal.
2) You catch them one or maybe two turns after they wake up, and have a ball spell to kill them all off, and successfully use that ball spell.
3) By the time you get to them, they've started breeding past the point that you can kill them all.

Part 3 has two sub-groups:

3a) You're able to close off the area infested with lice by closing doors. That area is barred to you now; better hope nothing was behind it.
3b) There are no doors handy to contain the infestation. You must now flee the level as lice will chase you everywhere you go.

Is this fun? Not for me. I suppose it's better for mage-types, who have Detect Monster and Stinking Cloud, but my warriors are getting heartily sick of being unable to contain lice, and my holy characters aren't much better off. Just now I was slowly clearing a greater vault (Hellpit) by kiting out monsters a bit at a time. I crept in to pull some more out, noticed some lice start breeding at the edge of my detection range, and failed to zap my rod of acid balls (the range was too far to hit them with my crossbow, not that single-target kills would have sufficed anyway). So much for that vault! And this is hardly an isolated occurrence.

I'm all for having hard monsters in the game. But I am definitely against having annoying monsters in the game. Annoyance is not fun. Lice are, at least to me, annoying. I'm not certain how I'd suggest improving them to be interesting instead. Other breeders aren't an issue, largely I suspect because they don't move quickly and aren't as observant (thus, less likely to wake up and explode before you get to them).

Any suggestions?

[Nick]

Any suggestions?

Drink some concrete and harden up

Seriously, I think annoying monsters have an important place in the game - after all, those lice stopped you looting the vault more effectively than a bunch of tough monsters.

[Derakon]

There's a hidden assumption in your statement that randomly blocking off parts of the level with zero player recourse is a good thing. I'm not convinced it is; care to marshal some arguments?

[Nick]

Well, the dungeon is supposed to be a bad dangerous place - random bad stuff should happen. Is this any more frustrating than getting teleported off the level, for example? Or getting gear trashed by breathers?

Any particular annoyance can be removed from the game, but remove too many and the game starts to lose character.

On the other hand, you could make an argument that they should be rarer. I am probably judging from O/FA, too, where shallow monsters rarely appear at deeper levels.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm getting rather weary of dealing with lice. The way I see it, there are a few scenarios here:

3) By the time you get to them, they've started breeding past the point that you can kill them all.

Part 3 has two sub-groups:

3b) There are no doors handy to contain the infestation. You must now flee the level as lice will chase you everywhere you go.
Any suggestions?

There is a limit in their breeding so leaving level is not necessary. They might have infested some area that is now unaccessible, but it isn't very large area.

Their job is to do just that. They are no different to Nexus Q in that, you either manage to kill it or you can't enter the area it is guarding.

With fractional blows lice have become much more tolerable. You can actually fight them even with just few blows / turn and "swim thru" even large infestation.

[AnonymousHero]

Do they actually stop breeding completely, or it is just that there cannot be more than N of them on the level?

[Timo Pietilä]

Do they actually stop breeding completely, or it is just that there cannot be more than N of them on the level?

No more than N on level.

[Derakon]

Nick: I'd actually say that this is more frustrating than getting teleported off the level. Reason being, being teleported off is very final. You're off the level, that's it, might as well move on. With breeders, though, the game's saying "Neener neener neener, there's dungeon over here but I'm not going to let you get to it unless you're willing to slog through a bunch of bugs." It's taunting you, basically.

Moreover, it is possible to deal with level porters. Have a good saving throw, teleport the offending monster away (at the risk of letting it get off a teleport spell), or just kill the thing. Monsters that levelport you are also very rare; certainly more rare than fast erratic breeders (which covers not just lice but also fleas, hummerhorns, giant fireflies, etc.). It is quite impossible to kill an established lice infestation without access to convenient level structure, or various ludicrously high-powered magical effects like speed and ball spells, genocide, or destruction.

Timo: in my experience, even if you have 4+ blows/round, you can't effectively fight lice in melee. They move quickly and erratically, which pretty much guarantees that some of them will get away from you and then breed back up to full population. Fractional blows does make it a bit easier to move through giant piles of lice, but that's about it.

(The limit on breeders for a level is 100, by the way)

Looks like most people don't agree with me that these guys are seriously not-fun. Bah.

[Pete Mack]

Lice are a gentle warning of worse things to come. If you want to, you can bull through a group of lice, though it is annoying. With deeper breeders you can't even do that.

[buzzkill]

Just now I was slowly clearing a greater vault (Hellpit) by kiting out monsters a bit at a time. I crept in to pull some more out, noticed some lice start breeding at the edge of my detection range, and failed to zap my rod of acid balls (the range was too far to hit them with my crossbow, not that single-target kills would have sufficed anyway). So much for that vault! And this is hardly an isolated occurrence.

I'd say that the lice did their job exactly. You wanted to take your time and clear a vault. There were lice in the vault that you couldn't kill or TO, so you left. What's the problem? What's the solution? Nexus lice? Reaper lice? Is that the finality you're looking for?

Maybe if you had attacked the vault more aggressively you would have had greater success therein. I see the problem as being that generally there is no clock running on your adventures. A vast majority of the time you can play slowly and methodically, running up as high as a turn count as you like with no ill-effects or hardship whatsoever, and so you come to accept it as a given and expect that your shenanigans be tolerated by the RNG. When a situation occurs that actually forces you to accomplish something in a limited turn count, it suddenly seems unfair.

I'd say it's a problem with the status-quo, not the lice. They're simply fulfilling, on a microscopic scale, what food and hunger did oh so many decades ago. That is, they said "It's time to move on now."

EDIT: a 100 limit on breeders? Far too low.

[Timo Pietilä]

Just now I was slowly clearing a greater vault (Hellpit) by kiting out monsters a bit at a time. I crept in to pull some more out, noticed some lice start breeding at the edge of my detection range, and failed to zap my rod of acid balls (the range was too far to hit them with my crossbow, not that single-target kills would have sufficed anyway). So much for that vault! And this is hardly an isolated occurrence.

That's odd. If you could handle other vault denizens you should not have had any trouble handling the lice. Maybe you just bail out a bit too easily because of them.

[nppangband]

Do they actually stop breeding completely, or it is just that there cannot be more than N of them on the level?

The limit is 99 on a level. One tactic to deal with them is to use teleport away one some of them before they get out of hand. Then go find them and let them build a huge colony in some unimportant part of the level. Then return to the place you want to explore, and their number will be greatly limited.

[Derakon]

That's odd. If you could handle other vault denizens you should not have had any trouble handling the lice. Maybe you just bail out a bit too easily because of them.

The lice would not have been able to kill me, but they certainly could have prevented clearing the vault from being any kind of fun. Taking four times as long to actually go anywhere, being unable to see the floor, having to page through hundreds of little bites. I play the game to have fun, not to be an exterminator.

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.

I don't mind the concept of a monster where you have to deal with it quickly or bad stuff will happen. I object to lice because

a) Bad stuff can happen without your ever getting a chance to prevent it (lice waking up before you can detect them)
b) The bad stuff in question is annoying rather than actually harmful.

"Bad stuff" in a game should never serve purely to annoy. But lice stop being a legitimate threat to the player in any means other than annoyance very shortly after they first appear.

[Pete Mack]

"Bad stuff in a game should never serve purely to annoy"...
Whyever not?
Alternatively the thing to do is get rid of lice, and make more things like Hummerhorns, Fireflies and Neekerbreekers. I rember something called a programming bug in ToME that might suit. Or Greater Wall monsters.

EDIT
PS: If you hate breeders so much, you can always play Kobold Rogue.

[juggle5]

I've had some fun encounters with lice, and breeders in general. I think Angband is most fun when I'm forced to think creatively to extract myself from a bad situation.

Playing as a mage: After failing to kill some lice before they bred out of control, I backed off and fought them in a corridor. After killing a hundred or two, I go up a level, allowing me to finish them off with stinking cloud. Sweet revenge!

Playing as a warrior: A semi-destroyed room is full of lice, separating me from some item I want. I'm low level so I can't waltz through directly, but I use the terrain to my advantage and follow a circuitous path to minimize the amount I ever get surrounded.

Playing as a idiot: Got surrounded by hummerhorns with no means of escape, and no means of containing them. Somehow I made it to a corridor, nearly dead, and out of healing potions. As a last-ditch effort to prevent them from confusing/killing me while I made my retreat, I used a wand of polymorph to change one of the hummerhorns into a stationary monster, blocking the passage.