Ideas to Improve Scouting

[Parcae2]

These solutions strike me as inadequate. The devs should, I think, weigh in on what the intended purpose of scouting actually is.

Are all classes supposed to be able to scout (which is currently the case, taking items and escorts into account)? In that case, make scouting less tedious. Casting Arcane Eye around every corner is not fun and should not be optimal. I suggest wider access to wide-radius Telepathy: All, e.g. as a passive on vision runes. Autoexplore should also use TP more extensively, e.g. stopping when TP reveals a rare or boss. In fact, I would argue for making all telepathy Telepathy: All, since TP to only a creature type or two is useless now that any creature can be a powerful rare.

Are only a few classes supposed to be able to scout? In that case, remove the various ersatz scouting solutions (like gloves of the Nighthunter or the relevant escort rewards) from the game, and limit scouting to a few fragile or underpowered classes.

[b0rsuk]

Just curious, what kind of characters find themselves relying or even benefitting from scouting ? I mostly play melee classes and hybrids. By Sandworm Lair, I have 1-2 escape tools available at all times. I can see the benefit for Aim-based Archer or mage (Oozing Horror), but otherwise... ? I don't find ToME's monsters to be varied enough to bother compared to dcss.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Apparently, on insane anytime you step around a corner and get hit by something, you die. So you HAVE to constantly detect EVERYWHERE, or you get oneshot.

Personally, I think that indicates more of a balance issue then a need for everything to scout.

[SageAcrin]

Not every time.

Just enough to encourage scouting. Strongly.

It's not really a balance issue, in that ToME basically runs on high enough damage values(and, indeed, the player has tools that specifically allow this to work out) so that even on Normal, you can get most of your life ripped off in one turn.

In order to up the difficulty meaningfully(as opposed to just making every enemy a grind of durability), you have to up the enemy's effectiveness...which means you need to scout some to reliably deal with situations. That's all. Obviously, this kind of challenge isn't going to be for everyone.

I admit, it sounded kinda terribly unbalanced to me until I ran Nightmare, but it does work, in its strange, strange way.

[Doctornull]

IMHO, as a relative n00b, what scouting does is allow play with fewer spoilers.

Is that a dangerous vault? Thanks to spoilers and experience (and UI bugs) I can usually find out, but that's obnoxiously meta-game style play. I'd rather the character had a way to learn about the vault's guardians without me, the player, being able to tell just by vault shape or worse.

Classes with scouting built-in are more friendly to in-character exploration; classes without scouting disproportionately reward player experience (and spoilers, and UI bugs) rather than rewarding good play.

Hmm, not sure if this is clear.
Let me know if it doesn't make sense, and I'll try to say it better.

[Infinitum]

So anyhow, looking at this thread again I had an idea: what if the Track skill makes enemies spawn clue markers across the level instead of the seeing through walls schtick? The higher the level of track the more markers would spawn, and the more information they'd yield. Obviously the markers would only spawn as the player enters the level for the first time, and be removed after the parent critter dies to prevent cluttering.

Example given:

Track - Passive talent
Level 1: Enemies on the same level have low chance of spawning marker. Marker yields the same information inspeting the base creature would (but not class talents for uniques/rares, and not showing base level of the creature). Base chance modified by Cunning and level of track.
Level 2: Marker gives limited (possibly colorcoded sprite?) clues as to how close the creature is to the marker.
Level 3: Shows what level the creature is (kinda weak since levels sscale outside of vaults but eh). More accurate proximity clues.
Level 4: Marker shows class talents upon inspection (ie can fully inspect uniques/rares). Tells in which direction relative to the marker the creature is ("close to the northwest", "far away to the south" etc).
Level 5: Activating the tracker opens a menu with exact number of enemies remaining on the floor, their information and their relative position to the player.

Even at low levels this would be useful as (somewhat unreliable) strategic early warning system for nasty levels in general and vaults in particular (eg enter Nur 3 -> see Worm that Walks track marker -> exit Nur 3). At higher levels it's "almost" as good as Telepathy whilst still not giving the player exact information to act upon and being functionally different from it. Granted, not sure if it's even codeable without the game optimization suffering but it'd be nice fo sho'.

[jenx]

+

So anyhow, looking at this thread again I had an idea: what if the Track skill makes enemies spawn clue markers across the level instead of the seeing through walls schtick? The higher the level of track the more markers would spawn, and the more information they'd yield. Obviously the markers would only spawn as the player enters the level for the first time, and be removed after the parent critter dies to prevent cluttering.

Example given:

Track - Passive talent
Level 1: Enemies on the same level have low chance of spawning marker. Marker yields the same information inspeting the base creature would (but not class talents for uniques/rares, and not showing base level of the creature). Base chance modified by Cunning and level of track.
Level 2: Marker gives limited (possibly colorcoded sprite?) clues as to how close the creature is to the marker.
Level 3: Shows what level the creature is (kinda weak since levels sscale outside of vaults but eh). More accurate proximity clues.
Level 4: Marker shows class talents upon inspection (ie can fully inspect uniques/rares). Tells in which direction relative to the marker the creature is ("close to the northwest", "far away to the south" etc).
Level 5: Activating the tracker opens a menu with exact number of enemies remaining on the floor, their information and their relative position to the player.

Even at low levels this would be useful as (somewhat unreliable) strategic early warning system for nasty levels in general and vaults in particular (eg enter Nur 3 -> see Worm that Walks track marker -> exit Nur 3). At higher levels it's "almost" as good as Telepathy whilst still not giving the player exact information to act upon and being functionally different from it. Granted, not sure if it's even codeable without the game optimization suffering but it'd be nice fo sho'.

+1