I made a new fork based around some design ideas not suitable for mainline crawl. Dungeon Crawl Souper Turbo is a quicker to play crawl variant with emphasis on tough item choices and more aggressive tactics.
Mechanical changes from mainline:
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Major changes to item availability. Each floor has two “vendor” shops that give you a free item (either acquirement level gear or consumable stack) from a small selection. Most floor loot, monster drops, and shops are removed: only portals have non-gold floor items, only uniques drop their gear, and only Orc has its regular complement of shops.
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No rest-to-regen. All species have explore regen instead (amount based on normal regen speed and level). Humans get a larger selection of items in vendors instead of explore regen.
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Descent mode dungeon structure: no upstairs, no explore traps, D is 12 floors, stair peeking, etc.
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Zot Clock is much faster, 1500 turns per floor with a 1500 turn maximum cap.
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No attacks of opportunity or random energy.
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Most starts begin with a few more consumables.
That’s it. Changes are mostly self contained and deliberately light because I intend to keep it updated with mainline for a while. Source code is at GitHub - Hellmonk/dcst: souper turbo - you can compile it yourself or play online on Sentei’s Germany sever http://164.92.176.162:8080/. I will see about getting it on regular servers eventually.
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Now available on https://crawl.dcss.io/! Also pushed some bugfixes and balance adjustments to regen rate (too low lategame) and vendor equipment (too strong and consistent).
It’s fun. But how is stair peeking supposed to work?
this is my new favorite way to crawl and on the whole think this is a huge success
some stuff that I don’t think works quite right yet though
-Imo the zot clock changes do nothing good at their current duration. I only ever felt the spectre of the zot clock when autoexploring; it’s too long to prevent most durdly strats or to incentivize actually leaving levels early, but short enough that autoexplore can waste the entire clock exploring some stupid corner.
-Vendor options should probably respect equipment sets? You can get every single XP evocable and wand, and this A: makes evocations really quite nuts and B: creates some intense inventory pressure (particularly considering the need to carry around all your long term plan items)
-It would be really nice to have a quick way to check ‘have I vended both times on this floor’. Maybe $ could tell you?
-Early equipment vending feels a little too good. You’re pretty likely to get an endgame option and some huge immediate power spike D1-3, often trivializing the early floors.
-Temporary regen does not work very well as-is. Armataurs, for example, need to uncover new tiles in a very short span of time to actually benefit from their regen; particularly early on it’s basically nonfunctional.
-You can’t regen at all in gauntlets or necropoli; this seems unintentional
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some thoughts on this after playing & winning a game:
- the zot clock doesn’t feel oppressively short & i was never threatened by it at any point, but as monkooky said, autoexploring has a tendency to waste a lot of turns and put you in the “zot is near” state
- the early game is very easy, between the vending machines and the supercharged explore healing
- enemies not dropping their nets feels sad
- some statuses (slow, corrosion) last way too long for this mode
- the amount of vending machines is too much, to the point where you are drowning in acquirement loot by the endgame. it should probably be toned down, at least post-dungeon
- adding to this, empty branch end loot vaults (vaults:5, slime:5, elf:3) feels very strange. you should give them bonus vending machines or shops or something (i didnt find any shops besides the ones in orc, despite getting money throughout the whole game)
- many loot vaults that take up a large portion of the level no longer serve any purpose other than wasting your time and spawning lots of OOD enemies that wander around
- shout luring is actually optimal - just not doing it for 10k turns. exploring new tiles at full health is essentially wasting potions of heal wounds, and a lot of branch ends (especially zot:5) are very punishing in this mode because they concentrate a lot of enemies in one area (where you cant heal very much). so shouting to lure a few out at a time and then going back out to an unexplored open area to heal is the optimal strategy. i dislike this
- abyss (and pandemonium, but i havent gone there) i dont feel really have a place in this mode
- i wish you could go back upstairs after using a scroll of revelation on a staircase :(
overall i thought it was pretty fun. definitely a lot shorter than mainline. feels a bit pigeonholed to only be played with powerful builds that can stay ahead of the curve if you want to win though (more games needed to really form an opinion on that)
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that explore regen isn’t working quite how I’d like it to, I’m going to try out some other things with that mechanic soon. Will continue to push changes, I’ll try to get a big update out in a few days.
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The first game I played as a Coglin Hunter I was absolutely buried underneath handcannons, artifact as often as not, which was a bit much.
But now (after an update I think) the weapons you’d see in a shop as a coglin hunter are rarely even ranged weapons, and it’s not clear to me when I could expect to find a hand cannon.
I did like it when there was a chance to get very desirable equipment early. And picking between “weapon I have 0 skill for” and “anything else” is a non-choice (past the very early game).
Pushed a relatively big update that should hit servers tomorrow. Before giving up on explore regen altogether I thought I’d try a sort of hybrid model; explore healing still happens but ‘overheal’ goes into a regular regen pool that can restore you over time, so healing isn’t wasted. Shortened the Zot clock a bit further to 1200 turns as well. I’m not really confident that this will work, but I want to at least try it out before abandoning the explore heal idea. Necropolises and Gauntlets get a new feature that lets you fully heal once (with >) as long as there aren’t nearby monsters. Also added some (regular) shops to Elf, Crypt, Vaults, and Slime ends to make them feel a bit more worthwhile, and let dancing weapons drop themselves as loot, plus various bugfixes and changes to vendor items. The $ command will now tell you how many vendors remain on a level, in case you forgor.
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