Corridors considered harmful

[mushroom patch]

Friends,

I come to speak with you about corridors, you know, this kind of shit:

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I see so much discussion of corridors, how to generate them, and so on. The answer in regards to corridors is simple: They are bad, don't generate them.

There are many alternatives to corridors, so I will not bore you with an exhaustive account. If you are still writing a roguelike game that uses corridors, though, I suggest to you that it is time to rethink and reevaluate.

[jere]

Is this real life?

[mushroom patch]

No, corridors are fine in real life. I only mean in roguelike games.

[Tilded]

So how do you connect rooms? Do you think wider corridors are okay?

[mushroom patch]

This is a good question. Wider corridors are better, but unfortunately they are still bad.

[jere]

I had to use increasingly wider corridors in DUMUZID, so the player can more easily fit in the later levels.

The most basic roguelike tactic is to use corridors to your advantage. It's perhaps too good of a strategy, so it's nice when the higher level monsters have some way to disrupt your plans in corridors. Monsters can be made to destroy walls or to summon monsters that surround you on the opposite side.

I have to assume this is a troll thread but even so it's still an interesting topic.

[mushroom patch]

Still better if all monsters, big and small, are able to avoid corridor cheez through nonexistence of corridors.

[Aleksanderus]

You should let the RNG decide wideness of corridors... Nothing will go wrong right?

[Lord_Mork]

This is a good question. Wider corridors are better, but unfortunately they are still bad.

Before I threw out the dungeon gen system on my project, I had corridors generate like long rectangular rooms.

What exactly is the reason not to have corridors?

[mushroom patch]

Why are corridors bad?

They are overly uniform. If full exploration is important in a game, corridors offer required, one-dimensional exploration. This is the sort of tedium autoexplore features are designed to remove, but they generally result in worse play than manual exploration so that if you want to win consistently or you want to win fast in turn count, you're stuck traversing them at least semi-manually.

They lend themselves to cheezy combat tactics around which games tend to be balanced, meaning that the player has to use them or lose. Those tactics involve luring monsters in every nontrivial encounter, e.g. whenever there's more than one monster after you, sometimes a long way.

Baking the assumptions of corridors, with their abundance of chokepoints and all the rest, into your game limits the tactical situation right out of the gate. Don't do it.

[corremn]

Breaking a game down into more abstract parts corridors are a tool to deal with certain situations. If you have more interesting (and therefore better in terms of gameplay) ways to deal with a given situation, then its true, corridors are a redundant and antiquated part of game play.

I have often thought RLs in essence are just a series of encounters and a bunch of actions and re-actions. I have pondered on a game which has one room at any given time. You deal with the room and you can then progress to the next room. Obviously rooms can be much more intricate and detailed than a normal RL and therefore open up to more tactical situations.

That being said, because this is a troll thread, I like RLs because I enjoy the dungeon layout and exploration aspect. You just never know what will be around that next bend. So long live the corridor (just keep them short ). 

[Elystan]

Well, Angband has corridors, but they're slightly less subject to abuse because the monsters have AI. This is how I plan to solve the corridors problem - have the monsters refuse to fight you single file in a corridor.

[mushroom patch]

Angband has some of the worst dungeon generation in the genre. Huge levels with corridors that stretch all the way across them. On the other hand, it has so many other broken mechanics, e.g. more or less unlimited consumables that allow you to reshape the dungeon, instantly teleport off a level, instantly kill any monster, stealth that renders the vast majority of monsters entirely immobile, brain dead AI etc., that just starting to address the problems of angband doesn't even get you to thinking about layouts.

I guarantee you will not solve the problems of corridors through changes to monster behavior.

[Skullcoder]

"Save scumming considered harmful.
Don't allow saving in your roguelikes because this can be abused by save scummers."

Compare the above with the following:

"Corridors abuse is considered harmful.
Don't allow corridors in your roguelikes because they can be abused by corridor campers."

If the pinch points are exploited it's not the pinch point's fault.  Eliminating corridors won't remove pinch points, just make them less prevalent, and they'll still be abused by abusers.
Likewise, if the gameplay breaks in the presence of corridors it's not the corridor's fault.  Gameplay needn't break due to corridors.  A more intelligent adversary can exploit pinch points as well or better than most players can.  Dumb AI isn't the fault of corridors.

Bad dungeon gen that has shitty corridors doesn't mean all corridors are evil.

Translation: Don't do bad dungeon gen, and also don't use shitty AI.

[mushroom patch]

"Save scumming considered harmful.
Don't allow saving in your roguelikes because this can be abused by save scummers."

Bro, if this is your idea of wit, I got bad news... But I'll tell you, it's true: Any local game can be cheated, savefile or no. This is why roguelike games are best played on a secure third party system.

If the pinch points are exploited it's not the pinch point's fault.  Eliminating corridors won't remove pinch points, just make them less prevalent, and they'll still be abused by abusers.

This is pretty obviously false. There is no requirement that "pinch points" exist anywhere. In any case, the blame for any problems with choke points in a game lies with the game's designer.

Likewise, if the gameplay breaks in the presence of corridors it's not the corridor's fault.  Gameplay needn't break due to corridors.  A more intelligent adversary can exploit pinch points as well or better than most players can.  Dumb AI isn't the fault of corridors.

Bad dungeon gen that has shitty corridors doesn't mean all corridors are evil.

Translation: Don't do bad dungeon gen, and also don't use shitty AI.

So your idea is that with some kind of magical AI algorithm, the basic asymmetry between a group of many monsters and a single player character with respect to choke points can be resolved? Please elaborate on that.

It seems to me that as a practical matter, you want your AI to be as dumb as it can get away with being. If not generating certain features that are problematic for various reasons helps you do more with less, this is a good thing.