Chaos Theory

[The Avatar]

It is possible to purist without RNDISWALL or any way to crush walls. I even played a fighter on that run. Don't forget, if you're trapped, that taking one well positioned blow from Rex can get you out of there.

[Sidestepper]

Oh I know it can be done. Remember, I'm the guy who did this: http://www.qcfdesign.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1841&start=10

It's just that lately I've stopped getting nice interconnecting maps like that one and lots of one corridor snakes instead. I'll see if I can't capture a few screenshots illustrating the problen.

[Bloggorus]

It's not like the devs to sneak in changes like that without mentioning it, although they have been busy lately.

It might be because they changed the RNG to put monsters in choke points and corridors. This was back when they were concerned that everyone was just skipping monsters and only fighting bosses because it was more efficient.

Either its changed the dungeon generator somehow, or the unskippable placement of a few monsters has made the whole map seem much more claustrophobic than before. Probably the latter.

[Sidestepper]

So after scumming for LEMISI a few times to document the problem, I couldn't find any snake-maps. I think that snakes must be a rare result and that I just had terrible luck getting three in a row earlier. Ah well, nevermind then.

EDIT: I just remembered that you can quickly view the whole map by suiciding. The made things much easier. This is an example of the kind of map I am talking about



About 80% of the map is just one long corridor with no significant options. A player will most likely follow this corridor until they encounter something they don't want to fight (in this case, that will probably be the Snake-5 if they aren't on the very cusp of a level up). They will backtrack to look for better options only to discover that there are none. This creates a lotto-style game where the only black space left on the whole map is behind the last discovered monster. Eventually you run out of gas, and/or you attract Rex's attention and you have no choice but to take a 50/50 gamble at getting stuck with each fight.

I know that yu can get out of these situations by prepping Bearmace/Binlor/Magnet: Defend, and in my guide I even recommend this as a way to 'turn off' the dungeon's gimmick, but I'd rather be confronted with a maze scenario that can be defeated on its own terms. An algorithm that creates several self-contained 'mazelet' regions is much more fun and engaging than a single corridor death march.

[Abraxas]

[The Avatar]

I disagree with the very last statement. It will matter if something is OP, but only if it's so OP it's stupidly broken. What if the fighter got 10 DP per level? That would make dungeons easy to beat and hard to master, but it would also take the fun out of beating them it's such a joke. While monkrogs are fine, anything truly and in all ways OP does not belong in this game.

Maybe I've just played too much Vicious and the Vicious philosophy is "Hard to beat, broken if you master".

[Lujo]

I'm with avatar here. Allthough the entire argument (as in having one about it) makes sense to me only if removing the Undying rage stacking bouns wouldn't hurt the game too much overall. I really thought noone else would miss it, and it would make the Monk strat a little less braindead.

[Darvin]

[Sidestepper]

Yeah, the Labyrinth has this problem bad. The other two mazes (Shifting Passages and Rock Garden) have special conditions that mitigate the problem and give the player control. SP starts out open and closes over time, giving the player a window of opportunity to prepare. RG starts out closed but opens up over time, introducing new options as the game goes on.

The Labyrinth on the other hand, not only lacks a mitigating condition, but actually has an aggravating one. If those megahallways were guaranteed to connect back into the central open area more frequently, that would help a lot.

[gjaustin]