(This is for graphical tiles)
Is there some way to highlight enemies to make them more apparent?
I’ve had a few runs nearly go bad (and one promising run actually die) simply because I failed to perceive an enemy.
Common offenders are Salamanders on lava. The most recent (and deadly) one was a dark colored Pan Lord who blinked into melee range but I missed it in the visual clutter of my Polar Vortex and thought it had blinked out of sight.
Ideally, the highlight would be something like a bold yellow square around the tile. Another that is more probably possible would be a highlight sort of like dangerous monsters or monsters with distortion/etc.
AFAIK most of that is impossible.
You can highlight monsters with unusual equipment. See unusual_monster_items in the options guide. Monsters with distortion weapons are already highlighted by default.
The defaults:
# These items cause monsters to display with unusual threat highlighting:
unusual_monster_items = wand
unusual_monster_items += disto,chaos
unusual_monster_items += curare,atropa,datura,dispersal
unusual_monster_items += throwing net
# For regular items and artefacts
unusual_monster_items += reflect,Reflect
Something you can do for any enemy you like is have the game pause the first time you see an enemy with force_more_message.
A couple of examples from https://github.com/gammafunk/dcss-rc
more := force_more_message
more += (lich|orb of fire|executioner|juggernaut|shrike).*into view
# Any uniques and any pan lords
more += (?-i:[A-Z]).* comes? into view
If you don’t want to mess with a lot of regex you can simply do force_more_message += orc priest.*into view or similar.
The “into view” message only happens once per monster AFAIK but will trigger for multiple times for monsters of the same type.
The “more” feature won’t help much since the issue is primarily about losing track of an enemy I’ve already seen. E.g. thinking I’ve killed that Salamander or that blinking enemy moved out of view.
Is there a way to convince the unusual monster item highlight to think every monster is unusual? I would prefer a different color, but I think it would be decent if every monster to be pink, and then maybe repurpose the force_more_message to alert me to unusual items.
.* would match any equipment but if the monster has no equipment at all I don’t think it would work.
Really just look at the sidebar to see what monsters are on screen
There is a filter mode for loot monsters and so on. You can activate it with Shift +\ and then choose letters to filter tiles on the game screen. Maybe it will help a little.