Increasing home size

[mushroom patch]

The "game of shopping" complaint has been around for almost as long as I can remember, but when I look around me I see far more people whose real life hobby is shopping than whose real life hobby is fighting.

Check your privilege, yo.

[Timo Pietilä]

The "game of shopping" complaint has been around for almost as long as I can remember, but when I look around me I see far more people whose real life hobby is shopping than whose real life hobby is fighting.

Idea: you select some of the items at your "home" for shopping, and game acts like townspeople are (slowly) buying those while you are at dungeon adventuring. You get the money from them without selling them anywhere, and price is something game decides. Kind of like a competing shop owner.

Game is still no-selling, but you get to do "game of shopping".

Advantage is that you still don't carry huge amount of items in your inventory for selling, but items at your home go for sale.

This OTOH would require limited home space so that you don't just carry stuff for sale at home, so it is opposite of thread purpose.

[the Invisible Stalker]

How will the variable home size affect competitions? Selling vs no selling is not an issue in comps since that's a birth option. But home size is now an edit file setting and, like other edit file settings, not visible in the dump. I would regard using a non-standard setting in a comp as cheating, just as it would be cheating to nerf hounds in monster.txt. For individual play I wouldn't think of either of those changes as cheating, even if the character is going to be dumped to the ladder eventually. It's not an issue which is likely to affect me as I very rarely participate in comps, but it should probably be clarified.

[debo]

Monsters are also an edit file setting. I could reduce Morgoth's HP to 1, and it wouldn't be visible in the character dump. We basically assume people are going to use a stock install when we run a competition.

Also, home size would be pretty visible in the dumps, since the chardump lists everything in your home?

[the Invisible Stalker]

I'm more worried about carelessness than deliberate cheating. Anyone who is willing to do that can just modify a dump file, or even create one from scratch, in a text editor. But from reading the comments on this thread, and some earlier ones, it looks like a lot of people are are likely to increase their home size for ordinary play. They should probably be told explicitly to set it back to its default value before starting a comp character. If they forget, and don't cover their tracks by editing the dump, then it will be visible once they have enough stuff stored at home and they'll have to abandon the character and start over with a clean attempt. It will preempt any whining if you can say they were warned.

[MattB]

I'm more worried about carelessness than deliberate cheating. Anyone who is willing to do that can just modify a dump file, or even create one from scratch, in a text editor. But from reading the comments on this thread, and some earlier ones, it looks like a lot of people are are likely to increase their home size for ordinary play. They should probably be told explicitly to set it back to its default value before starting a comp character. If they forget, and don't cover their tracks by editing the dump, then it will be visible once they have enough stuff stored at home and they'll have to abandon the character and start over with a clean attempt. It will preempt any whining if you can say they were warned.

This man speaks sense.

[wobbly]

99% of comps are win = least no. of turns. Chances are the advantage of a large home is going to be minimal compared to the no. of turns wasted hording excess junk. At least that's my take on the issue.

[the Invisible Stalker]

99% of comps are win = least no. of turns.

This is true. Well, I'm not sure about the percentage, but it is overwhelmingly the least number of turns which wins. And I think that's rather unfortunate. It means that winning the comp is mostly about tactics rather than strategy. Imagine for a moment a comp where the birth options and/or race/class combination are so brutal that it's unclear at the start whether anyone will get a winning character. Then you have two viable strategies to win the comp: play aggressively, hoping to get a winning character with a low turncount, but with a high probability of death, or play conservatively, trying to survive long enough to get a high experience/turncount ratio, and take the risk that someone playing the other strategy actually kills Morgoth. To me, at least, that sounds more interesting than the average comp.

Apologies to everyone for straying far off topic in this post, but this is something I've thought about before, and the remark above reminded me of it.

[StMicah]

Have you seen comp 169?

No artifacts and forced descent with a human ranger. A lot of fun and brutal

I think turn-count is really the only way for comps with the same character to go--what would be another viable standard (one that is not based on mere luck) when we're all playing the same character?

[Timo Pietilä]

Imagine for a moment a comp where the birth options and/or race/class combination are so brutal that it's unclear at the start whether anyone will get a winning character.

Since there are winner without artifacts or ego-items, that would need to be pretty insanely hard comp. Eddie won with one, and I believe I could have won as well, except that I grow too fond of the char and had to retire it without winning because it hurt me too much to put that char in such a hard environment.

Also playing a really hard combo is rather boring, like the last one with low starting stat human. Without turn restriction any char is winnable, but it can take insanely long time to do that. We just recently deducted that you could get a end-game ready char without ever leaving town (though it's probably safer to do that in dlvl1 than in town).

Though it could be fun to try something like hobbit mage with permanently cursed shovel and sling in weapon slots, so that it could still kill very low level critters with weapons, but had to rely on devices and magic to kill high level ones. That has an added difficulty from not getting other bonuses from weapon slots as well.

[the Invisible Stalker]

Have you seen comp 169?

No artifacts and forced descent with a human ranger. A lot of fun and brutal

I think turn-count is really the only way for comps with the same character to go--what would be another viable standard (one that is not based on mere luck) when we're all playing the same character?

That's not nearly brutal enough. Comp 79 would be more what I had in mind, but that's really the opposite extreme. There it was clear that no one would win, so again there was only one viable strategy. I don't agree that turncount is the only possible standard. There are all sorts of standards which could be used, but turncount and experience/turn are the two that oook's code understands. The rules for almost all comps specify both, depending on whether there's a game winner or not. It's just that there almost always is, so experience/turn rarely matters. I think it would be interesting to have a comp where it gives a viable strategy for winning.

[Timo Pietilä]

Have you seen comp 169?

No artifacts and forced descent with a human ranger. A lot of fun and brutal

That was not hard, but it was rather frustrating char to play, and as such quite boring.

I think turn-count is really the only way for comps with the same character to go--what would be another viable standard (one that is not based on mere luck) when we're all playing the same character?

That's the weakness of comps. There isn't really a good base to compare chars, and turncount is bad measure because it doesn't really tell you anything how well you played, and that is because turns are mostly used in doing stuff that have no important impact on gameplay. Like resting and route selections: teleporting around is far far far faster way to move around than walking, so there's a trick to cut down you turncount considerably that doesn't really tell anything about how well you play the game. Also checking stores with "~" instead of actually walking in them cuts turns like 100x when in town. Trying around different combos of equipment instead of reading them from some spreadsheet you keep off-game uses turns. and so on and on.

If you don't care about your turncount you can probably play game a lot faster in real time, and it probably also is a lot more fun. Unless you are a person that cares about trivial things like turncounts off course. That is why I don't play competitions. I find caring about turncount extremely boring, and that is why I never excel in it. If I have to start pondering if I should kill some monster or not based on if it is wise choice turnwise, and not based on "can I kill it, can it kill me, do I get a reward worth the trouble" triplet, game is ruined to me.

[the Invisible Stalker]

Since there are winner without artifacts or ego-items, that would need to be pretty insanely hard comp. Eddie won with one, and I believe I could have won as well, except that I grow too fond of the char and had to retire it without winning because it hurt me too much to put that char in such a hard environment.

Also playing a really hard combo is rather boring, like the last one with low starting stat human. Without turn restriction any char is winnable, but it can take insanely long time to do that. We just recently deducted that you could get a end-game ready char without ever leaving town (though it's probably safer to do that in dlvl1 than in town).

Though it could be fun to try something like hobbit mage with permanently cursed shovel and sling in weapon slots, so that it could still kill very low level critters with weapons, but had to rely on devices and magic to kill high level ones. That has an added difficulty from not getting other bonuses from weapon slots as well.

Artifactless hobbit mage is certainly a good start. Ideally you want the whole game to be hard. Hobbit mage makes the early game hard and artifactless makes the late game hard, so they complement each other nicely. But I'm not sure a V comp is the best place to try this. As you point out, it's hard to make V almost unwinnable without making it tedious. Some variants are better suited to challenge games. FA's thrall mode, as in the comp I linked above, is one solution to this problem.

[AnonymousHero]

But I'm not sure a V comp is the best place to try this.

Try Baldur's Gate No-reloead with the SCS/SCS-II mod. Amazingly (given the gaming context and AD&Dv2 in general), it's incredibly well-balanced. AFAIK there's only one (or two) character combinations that have been conclusively proven to not be able to complete the whole game (solo!).

[Derakon]

Though it could be fun to try something like hobbit mage with permanently cursed shovel and sling in weapon slots, so that it could still kill very low level critters with weapons, but had to rely on devices and magic to kill high level ones. That has an added difficulty from not getting other bonuses from weapon slots as well.

I like this idea. You could do variations of it too: any equipment slot can be rendered useless by starting the character with a permanently cursed, no-modifier item in it. Ringless competition, anyone?