Take blinking monsters out of zoos

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by cromignon, Aug 18, 2014.

  1. cromignon

    cromignon Member

    I encountered a Monster Zoo with at least two varieties of monsters with the ability to teleport. I think one of them (the last one I needed to kill) blinked away, but I'm not sure what the range is for that ability, and I never found it anyway. I eventually got loaded down on loot, and had to go back up a level to sell stuff, and when I came back, the "1 Monster left in zoo" message was gone, so apparently I missed out on a heavily enchanted item because of one Blink Batty.

    {EDIT}
    I eventually found the Batty (I knew it was the one, because it was low on health and was in a room on the other side of the wall from the Zoo), but still too late, because leaving the floor and coming back cancels the Monster Zoo event.
     
  2. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    Honestly, I agree with this. Monsters spawned within a zoo should only be able to randomly to tiles inside of the zoo. There's too many of them to take out the blinkers first.
     
  3. cromignon

    cromignon Member

    On top of that, Arboreal Wisps have the infuriating tendency to sneak past the player. They're invisible until you're right on top of them, so it takes just short of forever to track them down.
     
  4. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    I'd hate to see them go. I think the blinkers add a needed element of uncertainty, in that they (or diggles) can suddenly cut off your escape route. Zoos are meant to be hard, and the reward is meant to only be available if you stuck to your guns and won the war of attrition without leaving the floor. It's a reward for completionism and perseverance.

    You can always skip them if you don't feel the reward is worth the challenge (or worth trying to figure out where that last blinker went). Choosing when to scour the dungeon, and when to skip ahead to the next level, is part of the challenge and the strategy to the game.

    Getting rid of all the blinkers during zoos would also allow for sloppier play, which would change a core dynamic of the game. In general the game penalizes sloppy play. You die more often to complacency, such as stepping on a trap or misjudging the danger of your situation, than to monsters that you honestly can't beat if playing sharp and paying attention.

    When you play a melee character, the zoo is often fought in two parts. In the first 3/4s, you stand in one spot near the door and smash face. In the last 1/4, you have to risk crossing the room towards that back area with the blinkers and other casters that didn't come to you, some of whom have really potent spells to unleash if you don't have the right resists. Getting rid of blinkers would make that easier, and thus reduce overall difficulty for those builds and remove some of the complexity and variance within the game. It's not just blink batties we're talking about here, some blinkers can infest you with thaumites.

    For that matter, invisible creatures like the wisps are only invisible if you don't have enough trap sight. Some builds will have a harder or easier time with that. Again, removing them allows for sloppier play, and reduces the difference between different builds and play styles. I just don't see that as an improvement.
     
    Vitellozzo likes this.
  5. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    I think it is reasonable to restrict the blink ability when used by a blinking monster to return them to a cyan zoo tile. The reason for this is that otherwise they could create a situation where it is impossible (or at least not reasonably possible; IE you could use spatial instability potions and save scum if you were really dedicated) to finish the zoo, but the game still suggests it by saying "1 monsters left in zoo!". I think this is just going to cause frustration, although the blinking monsters themselves can stay so long as they're not allowed to truly randomly teleport into unreachable places. The same should probably be true of Lord Dredmor and quest monsters, for that matter.
     
  6. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Seems like a lot of programming work for not much reward. This is a pretty rare corner case event we're talking about - where a blinker actually ends up in a small sealed off section of the map that the player can't get to without a random teleport, rather than just slipping past an inattentive player and fooling them into thinking something like that has happened. I've played over 600 hours of Dredmor, just counting my hours on Steam, and I've had maybe 2 or 3 zoos where I honestly suspected something like that had happened.
     
  7. cromignon

    cromignon Member

    'Inattentive' seems rather harsh, considering 50+ monsters, fully a fifth of which may be invisible, plus an inordinate amount of damage effects and various kinds of explosions.
     
  8. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    In the case of restricting things to zoos, it's a pretty simple concept, create a big array of zoo tiles and pick a random element. To prevent monsters from blinking into unreachable places in general, you need something called a flood fill algorithm, but this would have been useful to have had in dungeons of dredmor to begin with.
     
  9. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    My preference for this has always been to have X number of monsters contributing to the zoo counter get mini map markers, where X is a number not likely to cause performance problems. Blinking, invisible, diggleburrowed or otherwise slipping by, you then know roughly where to go to find them when they stand on explored space. If the remaining number is greater than X, then when a marker bearer dies, move its marker onto an unmarked zoo monster, if any exist, until the zoo is resolved.
     
  10. Kaidelong

    Kaidelong Member

    An even simpler solution for this is to allow blinkers to continue blinking even after they're out of sight of the player, so that they can't get stuck.
     
  11. cromignon

    cromignon Member

    You mean like the markers that sidequest groups get?
     
  12. MindWanderer

    MindWanderer Member

    I signed up mainly to echo Wolg's suggestion: when a zoo is down to, say, 5-7 monsters, mark them on the mini map. Doesn't diminish the challenge, and helps with blinking/invisible (or the godawful blinking invisible wisps) getting lost in other rooms. At least if they get stuck in secret rooms, you'll know and can move on with your life.