A bunch of convenience tweaks.

[kvaak]

So I've been fiddling around in ToME for the last month or so. Frankly it has lots of things that I find irritating or flat out nonsensical, although that being said I have quite a bit of experience with roguelikes and despite its flaws ToME does have a charm of its own.

I'm not going to list any of my thoughts on game mechanics/balance/engine as changing those would be a larger project with weighing, vehement opposition and whatnot. So without further ado:

- Allow filtering of flying messages or somehow else prevent lines from overlapping each other. It's nice to know that rogue is off-balance but I'd rather know whether I succesfully managed to stun it or not without having to mouseover. This could also be done with status icons but just how many of them you can fit in or around a 64x64 tile is something to keep in mind.

- Add more options for auto-use. Instead of the rather simple system we have now add an option to enable/use an ability if [condition 1 is met] or [condition 2 is met] AND a second option that prevents its usage or disables a sustain if [condition 3 is met] or [condition 4 is met]. E.g. "Automatically enable meditation if resting or no monsters are in sight. Automatically disable meditation if a monster is in sight." These could have a variety of conditions like a percentage of hp remaining, a rare/unique/boss is sighted, % of resource remaining, time on the buff left etc. Manually activating a sustain with auto enable/disable conditions set should probably ignore the disable conditions. Bonus points the ability to save the options on a per-talent basis between games.

- List more/all effects that affect your character in the combat log (I lost a skirmisher in Grushnak pride because it was suddenly thrown to the middle of the lever room from the entrance hallway. I looked over the combat log multiple times, there was absolutely no mention of what caused it. Resultantly I don't know how to avoid this the next time.). In addition add an option to configure the combat log in the main screen so that you can toggle/filter what is displayed, e.g. currently something like flurry with a bunch of on-hit damage effects and retaliation can fill the entire log whereas odds are you'd be perfectly fine just knowing what the total damage dealt/absorbed/reflected was without the individual components. You could just open the full log at any time if you wanted to know the specifics, 'h' should probably allow you to scroll through the filtered log as well. TL;DR: More stuff in the entire combat log 'h', less stuff in the main screen combat log.

- Add the source of the effect for (de)buffs when mousing over. This allows you to quickly identify the stunning monster or whatever when fighting multiple enemies without having to scroll through the combat log.

- Allow dragging the scroll bar in the chat and combat log screens. Using arrow keys or scroll wheel is tedious when going through lines and lines of "the wretchling's area of effect hits the wretchling for 0 acid damage".

- Don't make parts of the interface windows click-through. Currently if you left-click even slightly left of the race's name in the character creation screen you're thrown back in the main menu even though the green window extends much further than that which is extremely annoying.

- Make the character creation screen remember either all of your previous choices or none. The fact it currently remembers the name but NOT the difficulty is misleading to say the least.

- Show the weapon damage of the monster when mousing over. You shouldn't need an addon for something this important.

- Rest should wait for all temporary detrimental effects to wear off.

- Allow annotating zones and/or making notes. When entering a previously annotated zone/floor the annotation will be displayed in the message area.

- Autoexplore exclusions. Press shift+x or mouse over a tile, press e. The tile and all tiles with a line of sight to it (unexplored ones within a sight radius being updated automatically, until you know otherwise unexplored squares are assumed to have a line of sight) will be avoided by autoexplore. Pressing e a second time will exclude only the targeted square. Pressing e a third time will remove the exclusion. If the floor has exclusions and autoexplore has nowhere else to go you'll get notified about this when attempting to autoexplore. Excluded tiles should probably have some kind of marker over them.

- Show treasure chests in the minimap. Alt maze comes to mind.

- Keep auto-use settings when replacing an inscription with one of the same type.

- Show a message in the message area whenever a previously undetected monster enters your LoS, possibly restricted to elites or rares and up. Not noticing a skirmisher rare hidden behind your UI is bad.

- When switching equipment as a demonologist give an option to swap the previous item's demon seed to the new one.

- Sort demon seeds by slot rather than demon. While summoning demons is certainly helpful mostly you use seeds for the equipment bonuses. It's really awkward to find that fire imp for your weapon when there are a whole bunch of fire imps for all the other slots in the mix.

- Allow "forgetting" a level so you can autoexplore it again. Sometimes autoexplore misses stuff, notably items dropped from chests have to be picked up manually if you press 'z' while standing on the chest right after opening it. This also makes it easier to find backup guardians etc.

- Add a prompt if attempting to equip body armour while wearing man/bikini and you haven't removed it previously. Currently it's frustratingly easy to disqualify yourself by accident.

- Prevent shift-move from moving at all if there's an enemy in sight. Currently it behaves just like move if there is one which makes no sense at all, I thought this thing was largely supposed to allow covering large amounts of ground without having to be extremely careful or dying to buttonmashing.

- Allow using 'm' in the world map. I mean, why not? Also PgUp/PgDown don't work in the world map but scroll wheel does.

######

There's probably a bunch of other stuff I can't think of right off the bat. Yes a lot of this comes from addons and other roguelikes. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

[0player]

- Allow filtering of flying messages or somehow else prevent lines from overlapping each other. It's nice to know that rogue is off-balance but I'd rather know whether I succesfully managed to stun it or not without having to mouseover. This could also be done with status icons but just how many of them you can fit in or around a 64x64 tile is something to keep in mind.

If it's off-balance, you stunned him . Can be done, I suppose?

Add more options for auto-use.

Ask yourself: do you really want the game to be played for you to THAT level?

- Add the source of the effect for (de)buffs when mousing over. This allows you to quickly identify the stunning monster or whatever when fighting multiple enemies without having to scroll through the combat log.

Many effects don't have a source attached.

- Allow dragging the scroll bar in the chat and combat log screens. Using arrow keys or scroll wheel is tedious when going through lines and lines of "the wretchling's area of effect hits the wretchling for 0 acid damage".

We're onto it, but unlikely for 1.3

- Show the weapon damage of the monster when mousing over. You shouldn't need an addon for something this important.

It's in "Inspect creature" currently if you need it, but sure.

[donkatsu]

Ask yourself: do you really want the game to be played for you to THAT level?

Yes. Checking a simple condition and then executing your response to that condition (pressing a button) is not an interesting part of a turn-based game. The appeal of turn-based games is in deciding your response, and if it's going to be the same thing every time to a certain condition, you might as well be able to communicate that to the game. The current auto-use features personally suit me just fine, but Dungeon Crawl's support for scripting was pretty cool and ToME's auto-use is a more limited but user-friendly tool along the same lines. The auto-use menu is already pretty bloated though.

Someone should do an add-on

[kvaak]

If it's off-balance, you stunned him . Can be done, I suppose?

Are you sure about this?

Off-balance occurs when a physical talent hits, and the attacker's Physical Power is in a higher tier than the defender's Physical Save.

I'm fairly sure I see plenty of off-balances without stuns when attempting to stun things, especially early or against powerful rares/uniques/bosses.

Ask yourself: do you really want the game to be played for you to THAT level?

Yes. As the game progresses my hotkey bar keeps getting more and more stuff that I can't just ignore. Most of it I don't need most of the time. Some of it gets outdated or is just filler stuff I can ditch at some point. But also most of it I need at some point and when I have 20+ talents to manage it just gets awkward when a large part of it requires very little thought yet nevertheless I have to keep mechanically going through it.

Take a summoner for example. Setting Meditation to auto-use is mostly a nobrainer as it allows me to constantly use Earth's Eyes and also allows me to passively detect monsters through obstacles, an ability that summoners arguably benefit more from than any other class. Also it greatly increases eq and life regen when resting. Yet when I do encounter an enemy turning off Meditation is also largely a nobrainer as that 50% damage penalty for the summons is rather undesirable. Need to activate Meditation mid-fight to keep equilibrium down? In that case the manual override could just kick in. It's simple, it's mechanical, there's no downside to doing it yet it makes summoners all the more obnoxious.

Another example? Arcane Eye on Archmage. It's very useful at 5/5 (or 4/5 due to 1.3 mastery) as it essentially gives you the ability to completely ignore infravision, light radius and invisibility detection yet if I just set it on autocast it'll empty my mana pool because it keeps refreshing itself when the ability comes off cooldown, not when the buff expires. Again, simple, mechanical, no reason not to do so.

Certainly, you could argue abilities like these are problematic in themselves but unless they're changed a workaround wouldn't hurt. There's no choice involved as far as passive detection Meditation or self-cast Arcane Eye is considered (yet both of these abilities also have other uses!) and making choices is what makes the gameplay interesting.

It's in "Inspect creature" currently if you need it, but sure.

Certainly, but I'd argue the mouseover table should provide enough info you don't have to manually inspect every single purple. Just in case.

[edge2054]

Certainly, but I'd argue the mouseover table should provide enough info you don't have to manually inspect every single purple. Just in case.

Personally the tooltip is already too cluttered for my tastes.

Not saying it couldn't be implemented as an option.

[supermini]

- Allow filtering of flying messages or somehow else prevent lines from overlapping each other. It's nice to know that rogue is off-balance but I'd rather know whether I succesfully managed to stun it or not without having to mouseover. This could also be done with status icons but just how many of them you can fit in or around a 64x64 tile is something to keep in mind.

If it's off-balance, you stunned him . Can be done, I suppose?

You can get off-balance without getting stunned. I assume it's when you resist stun due to stun resist % but they still have more power/accuracy than your physical save.

[kvaak]

Certainly, but I'd argue the mouseover table should provide enough info you don't have to manually inspect every single purple. Just in case.

Personally the tooltip is already too cluttered for my tastes.

Not saying it couldn't be implemented as an option.

I do agree it's somewhat of a mess.

The current tooltip looks something like this:

Name
Thing / Subthing
Rank: Something
Level: n
HP: x (%)
Resists: a% fire, b% cold, c%... ...y% all
Hardiness/Armour: x% / y
Size: Something
Accuracy: x Defense: y
P. power: x P. Save: y
S. power: x S. Save: y
M. power: x M. Save: y
[description/flavour]
Faction: Something (attitude, x)
Personal reaction: attitude, x
- Effects
Killed by you: n
Target: Something

Personally I'd change it to something like this:

Blorp
Humanoid / Human
Level 2 Boss
HP: 1000 (100%)
Resists: 10% physical 10% mind
10% arcane 10% nature
10% fire 10% cold
10% light 10% darkness
10% lightning 10% acid
10% blight 10% temporal
10% all
Armour/Hardiness: 50 / 100%
Size: Tiny (1)
Mainhand damage: 50, APR 20, accuracy 20
Offhand damage: 50, APR 20, accuracy 20
Defense: 30
P. power/save: 10/5
S. power/save: 10/5
M. power/save: 10/5
- Pace yourself
- Stunned (3)
Killed by you: 0
Target: You

It's Blorp the tiny human. Run while you can!

Merging rank and level drops one line and makes sense IMHO, if you use tactical borders (and you should) you can distinguish between normals+elites and purples easily and level is as easy to pick up at a glance as ever. Colour is defined by rank as usual.
Resists get a proper table format, could possibly also have up to 3 per line. I'm not sure whether to show 0%s but the relative order should stay constant and colour coding is added so it's easier to identify resists relevant to you.
Armour and hardiness swap places, it just feels counterintuitive as armour is the "value" and hardiness is what modifies that value. Could be just me.
Size shows the actual numeric value so it's easier to compare especially if you have talents that are directly affected by it.
Weapons get between 1 and 3 lines depending on whether you're fighting something wielding just one weapon or a dual-wielding mindslayer.
Powers and saves just use x/y format, they can retain the corresponding colouring but IMHO this is overall less messy.
Faction and personal reaction can just move over to inspect creature. Borders are there to identify hostiles/neutrals/friendlies, they are not important enough to clutter the tooltip.
The same could largely be applied to killed by you but I think it's a fun little bit of trivia that can stay.
You're the target most of the time but when you're not knowing it won't hurt.
Description is moved to the end since it can take up lots of space while not being directly relevant when assessing the monster's abilities. It can give some insight to them certainly but since you can just as well encounter bow-wielding snakes...

There's an addon that also shows the monster's talents (separated to actives and sustains, effective talent level in brackets) when holding shift while mousing over the monster which I find a nifty addition, it's a much faster way to identify which class a rare represents than having to inspect it.

This is just a rough outline, a bunch of stuff could be modified; e.g. defense, armour and saves could be clumped together (so instead of P.power/save you have Saves (p/s/m) and Power (p/s/m).) etc.

E: Oh, and:

- Show a message in the message area whenever a previously undetected monster enters your LoS, possibly restricted to elites or rares and up. Not noticing a skirmisher rare hidden behind your UI is bad.

- When switching equipment as a demonologist give an option to swap the previous item's demon seed to the new one.

- Sort demon seeds by slot rather than demon. While summoning demons is certainly helpful mostly you use seeds for the equipment bonuses. It's really awkward to find that fire imp for your weapon when there are a whole bunch of fire imps for all the other slots in the mix.

- Allow "forgetting" a level so you can autoexplore it again. Sometimes autoexplore misses stuff, notably items dropped from chests have to be picked up manually if you press 'z' while standing on the chest right after opening it. This also makes it easier to find backup guardians etc.

- Add a prompt if attempting to equip body armour while wearing man/bikini and you haven't removed it previously. Currently it's frustratingly easy to disqualify yourself by accident.

- Prevent shift-move from moving at all if there's an enemy in sight. Currently it behaves just like move if there is one which makes no sense at all.

[Effigy]

I agree with most of these. I'd really like to see unopened treasure chests on the minimap.

[Mordy]

At least, I'd like to see an "auto-use while resting" option. Would be much much better than the "auto-use while no enemies are visible"

[Candesce]

At least, I'd like to see an "auto-use while resting" option.

Oh, this.

It'd be a much better way to make sure I'm not forgetting to restart sustains than any option that might decide to kick in mid-combat.