Going in and out of areas

[Aquillion]

I think a good possible solution would be to heal all monsters on entry to a level, and on exit allow any enemies immediately surrounding the player to follow him to the new area, spawning around him.

Not possible. The most dangerous enemies are bosses, and many of them are scripted to things in their area that would break if they left (eg. the guardian to your home is one of the most likely candidates for stair-scumming, since it spawns right near the stairs, is fought in a tiny room that otherwise causes huge problems for any build that up until then depended on being able to run away, and tends to have an annoying regen rune that some builds have a lot of trouble overcoming. Yet it would utterly break the scenario if it could follow you up the stairs, not in the least because the stairs disappear once you beat it.)

[marvalis]

In earlier betas you could not leave the level if you had infusion/runic saturation. This has been changed so player can leave the level at any time. I consider this change to be an improvement.

Generally speaking, players should be encouraged to identify a danger and run from it instead of mindlessly killing everything in sight. To enable this kind of game-play, there has to be a way that the player can always escape. I strongly suggest keeping it this way. There are currently not many things you need to run away from in t4 (except maybe from some bosses), but this might change some day as the game continues to evolve.

Healing the monsters might be an option, but monsters that split could then form a problem, as mentioned before in this thread.

[Aquillion]

Generally speaking, players should be encouraged to identify a danger and run from it instead of mindlessly killing everything in sight. To enable this kind of game-play, there has to be a way that the player can always escape. I strongly suggest keeping it this way.

Yes, but -- currently fleeing off the map is definitely unbalanced. I mean, as I understand it, the enemy is basically frozen in time while you can heal. And if you simply stand on the stairs while fighting them, you can escape trivially at any time for free. This is totally out of line with other escape and recovery options in the game.

I'm not sure fixing it is worth the potential annoyance any fix could have to people playing the game 'normally'. But I do think that stair-scumming is a bad thing, and I say that as someone who's exploited it several times before.

[ohioastro]

Meh. Roguelike games always attract players who want to make them hard in various ways. TOME is a breath of fresh air, in the sense that it doesn't demand repetitive and hyperconservative play in order to get somewhere. There is an important asymmetry here: the players advocating a harder line are demanding that all players follow it, not just the hardcore. There should be a high threshold for such changes. The choices I see are

1) Leave it be. There are plenty of ways to lose in this game, and only a handful of cases (such as the orc prides) where the tactic is even useful.

2) Induce the equivalent of a level reset in cases like the orc prides: if you exit before a benchmark is cleared then the level resets. You get to try again, neither advantaged nor disadvantaged.

Anything more complex will just break more things than it fixes.

[tiger_eye]

How about this simple modification to (slightly) discourage stair-scumming: reentering a zone that you've already entered before uses one movement energy. Hence, if there is an enemy standing next to the stairs, then it will be able to attack you immediately after you enter.

[Frumple]

It was like this for a bit, iirc. People kept getting one-shot (or <insert debilitating status debuff>'d, then murdered before they could react) by whatever was waiting for them besides the stairs.

Heavens help 'em if there's a crowd waiting for them

[edge2054]

Another option would be to have changing zones happen at the end of the game turn.

As an example you use the stairs and have some creatures around you, they get one hit off on you before you actually zone (because zoning out is delayed). It would take some of the advantage away from the player.

[greycat]

In earlier betas you could not leave the level if you had infusion/runic saturation. This has been changed so player can leave the level at any time.

No, not quite. You still cannot leave if you're poisoned, diseased, etc. This is a throwback to ToME 2 where wilderness travel performed hundreds of individual walk-steps for every overview-map step. If you took hundreds of steps while poisoned, you might die, and so this was a safety precaution. In ToME 4 it's just in the way of your ability to survive.

[Covenant]

I'll go with the healing monsters, that seems fair enough. But I don't think you should be too purist about making it hard. While stair scumming could be a little underhanded (although I would never have killed Bill without it when starting in the new Trollmire - basically this is now a come-back-later task for me) I don't think it should be removed at the cost of losing the ability to run away.

...

I think you always need the option of sticking you toe in a level and then deciding "I might come back a bit later". I think stair scumming is a small price to pay for this fun aspect of the game.

I agree with you there - you shouldn't die simply because you don't know what's coming. Given how mobility seems more limited than in previous iterations of ToME, I can accept that having a monster follow you up the stairs would be too much.

However, I still think the people talking about something as small as a free hit when entering or leaving a zone are missing the point. Aquillon summed up the problem well, in my eyes. As a random example, I shouldn't be able to kill Bill (or any other monster) by popping through the stairs, hitting him for 1% of his total health, taking 2 hits that nearly kill me, then retreat, heal, and repeat the process till he's dead. It encourages the sort of boredom and conservative play that ohioastro seemed to be warning against.

Simply healing the monsters on level entry seems like a good compromise - cherrytapping a monster much stronger than you to death would no longer be possible, but it would leave you with the chance to flee and reattempt a battle that starts going badly. As someone mentioned, this could form a problem with monsters that split, but if the monsters are splitting at such a rate that you can't kill enough of them before you have to retreat, perhaps that's simply a sign that you're in an area too difficult for your current strength/tactics.

[bricks]

As someone mentioned, this could form a problem with monsters that split, but if the monsters are splitting at such a rate that you can't kill enough of them before you have to retreat, perhaps that's simply a sign that you're in an area too difficult for your current strength/tactics.

"Split" could stand to get some sanity checks anyway. I see two ways of doing this:

-have a generational marker that starts at X and decreases by one for every split (child and self); at 0, splitting is no longer possible
-On split, change max health to current health (or at least reduce it noticably)

The former, or similar, may already be in place; I haven't really looked at that code.

[Grey]

The former is indeed already in place. So the whole heal upon level re-entry really has no associative problems.

[Canderel]

Kill Bill achievement (killing Bill as a lvl 1 char) is impossible without stairscumming, and pretty impossible without save-scumming. :-/

That being said, there are some bosses in the game, where if they follow you, you'd be toast... and if they are fully healed when you come back, well then you'd need to be at least 5 levels higher when you do them.

In terms of things that are not perfect that needs to be fixed this is on there, but not top of the list.

[Grey]

That being said, there are some bosses in the game, where if they follow you, you'd be toast... and if they are fully healed when you come back, well then you'd need to be at least 5 levels higher when you do them.

Examples? If there's a boss that's too high a level for when you'd ordinarily face it then that's a problem that should be addressed separately.