The Hardest part of Angband

[debo]

You can get full monster memory using debug-mode. There is a command to acquire full monster memory: ^ar which writes monster memory to your savefile. If you then quit and start fresh using that same file you have full monster memory. You can do reverse with ^aW (wipe recall).

I was thinking reverse for competition. No monster memory whatsoever. It is people that compete each others, no need to level the playing field. Unless whoever comes up with competition char wants to. It's pretty arbitrary, and I feel that monster memory is not necessity in any way.

As much as I hate not having full recall in normal games and think it's utterly stupid, this could actually be a really fun idea for a competition!

HallucinationMushroom took it a step further in Sil, where I think he changed all monsters to have the same name and glyph, so that you never knew what you were fighting until it did stuff. That might also be a hilarious comp mode

[buzzkill]

Since full knowledge would mark @ as a cheat, I shamelessly savescummed through the new version a few times, Probing everything. Now, with a full-knowledge Savefile I play without savescuming. It was a pain, but if I win the character won't be marked as a cheat. Seems to me that the competition characters should always have full monster knowledge to level the playing field.

Presumably you endure this penance so you won't be marked at a cheat on the ladder. If so, wouldn't it be far easier just to edit the char dump (txt file), remove the bit about cheating, and maybe put in a note about having full monster knowledge.

[krazyhades]

It depends on whether you're interested in getting more (and therefore, usually meaning newer) players into the competitions. Heck, I'm a longtime player and I've only recently submitted to the general ladder, much less the competition ones. They're intimidating enough as-is.

[Timo Pietilä]

Well, without any monster info, it is obvious that experienced players are in advantage because they know a lot about angband monsters.

Obviously, but for competition I fail to see why that would be a bad thing.

[Mondkalb]

Well, without any monster info, it is obvious that experienced players are in advantage because they know a lot about angband monsters.

[Timo Pietilä]

Since full knowledge would mark @ as a cheat, I shamelessly savescummed through the new version a few times, Probing everything. Now, with a full-knowledge Savefile I play without savescuming. It was a pain, but if I win the character won't be marked as a cheat. Seems to me that the competition characters should always have full monster knowledge to level the playing field.

You can get full monster memory using debug-mode. There is a command to acquire full monster memory: ^ar which writes monster memory to your savefile. If you then quit and start fresh using that same file you have full monster memory. You can do reverse with ^aW (wipe recall).

I was thinking reverse for competition. No monster memory whatsoever. It is people that compete each others, no need to level the playing field. Unless whoever comes up with competition char wants to. It's pretty arbitrary, and I feel that monster memory is not necessity in any way.

[debo]

We should just have full monster knowledge all the time so you don't have to do these ridiculous things

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Since full knowledge would mark @ as a cheat, I shamelessly savescummed through the new version a few times, Probing everything. Now, with a full-knowledge Savefile I play without savescuming. It was a pain, but if I win the character won't be marked as a cheat. Seems to me that the competition characters should always have full monster knowledge to level the playing field.

[OOD Town drunk]

Perhaps monster knowledge could be acquired via esp. At least for intelligent monsters. That would likely help newer players without breaking the game.

[Philip]

I wouldn't go that far. Just because you can't count on a resist for anything better than ~15% damage reduction doesn't mean it won't often reduce damage a lot more -- you could get 85% reduction instead, for example. Your argument is kind of like saying that because a spell does 1d100 damage, it's useless because you can't count on it to deal more than 1 damage. Overly reductionist, in other words.

That's not quite the same thing. Player characters have low hitpoints and are threatened by burst damage. Monsters have massive hitpoint pools and not much healing, so we wear down monsters through avoiding damage, healing and having good average damage. Resists are good for a couple things, but mostly reducing maximum damage to a survivable level, avoiding side-effects and for nether, conserving healing supplies.

[Timo Pietilä]

I wouldn't go that far. Just because you can't count on a resist for anything better than ~15% damage reduction doesn't mean it won't often reduce damage a lot more -- you could get 85% reduction instead, for example.

I didn't say resistances are useless. I said that without them, if you have protection to side-effect, game would be nearly as easy as it is now. There are far more effective ways to prevent damage than resists.

[Derakon]

I wouldn't go that far. Just because you can't count on a resist for anything better than ~15% damage reduction doesn't mean it won't often reduce damage a lot more -- you could get 85% reduction instead, for example. Your argument is kind of like saying that because a spell does 1d100 damage, it's useless because you can't count on it to deal more than 1 damage. Overly reductionist, in other words.

[Timo Pietilä]

Resistances are a serious part of the game and trying to get double resist in some and at least one in others is key to staying alive.

Resists for high elements are not reliable. It's the side-effect of the thing why you might want it, not damage reduction. They definitely are not the key to stay alive. If you feel that you need all resist you are doing something wrong, or at least you could do something better. We could well remove all damage reductions from high element resists and game would be nearly as easy as it is now.

[fizzix]

Anyone ever think of making a resist for the "unresistables"? It may make it much more strategic once you have so many resists that you can't choose them all, or it could get more tedious for those who resist-swap (which I typically do not, except for maybe poison early).

I think every game uses resist swapping to some extent, Carrying swap gear is pretty common across roguelikes, and I generally view it as a positive, especially in games where inventory slots are limited. However, if it's not *easy* to swap, and it needs to be done often, then it can really detract from gameplay. (ring swapping right now is the biggest problem in V because of the extra keystroke) Tome gets around the swapping tedium problem by generally allowing the player to kit gear for areas rather than individual monsters. Sil play seems to involve a lot of swapping, and it can be pretty tedious (although I suck at Sil...).

Right now V has probably the right number of resists based on what can usually show up on gear. You very rarely achieve full resist, but you can typically ignore some slots (confusion by level 20 is super optimistic by the way.) I think we might do better by giving partial resists rather than full resists.

I've always really disliked the permanent and static resist situation. I hope we can change that to something more transparent at some point.

[dhegler]

Eh, I disagree with you on this. At least, I think we should get rid of the out of the blue ones, and leave the "you were careless and forgot to wear cold resist around Huan" ones (yeah...i did that...) Even knowing everything you can still get surprised by a big attack.

In other words, the player should know the drolem breathes for roughly 600 damage in some way. Hiding this feels unfair.

I am with Fizzix on his suggestions... And maybe I did not realize the first placement of positions was different from:

#######p#
#@
#########

When you can target several squares beyond the "p" and get your arrow/bolt/magic to turn the corner at the right spot to hit a monster that can't hit you back.

Resistances are a serious part of the game and trying to get double resist in some and at least one in others is key to staying alive. However, not knowing that a monster has an unresistable attack (mana bolt, water, etc) does seem unfair. It is basic knowledge to have FA and probably rConfuse by lev 20 or so, along with most/all basic resists. However, nothing prepares you for finding out about non-resistables.

Anyone ever think of making a resist for the "unresistables"? It may make it much more strategic once you have so many resists that you can't choose them all, or it could get more tedious for those who resist-swap (which I typically do not, except for maybe poison early).