qw VS crawl

qw is a bot by elliptic that's capable of playing and winning completely unassisted games of DCSS. It's fully written in lua and runs via a normal crawl rc. Elliptic improved qw over many years to where it has won many combos using melee with a few different gods, and has also won some 15 rune games and completed a zig. Over the past year, I've resumed qw's development to add a goal system, better travel and exploration, among other features described in qw's first official release.

Regarding the goal planning, this is rule-based as advil mentioned. The gameplan system I've recently added is meant to allow qw to be fully programmable in terms of its goals. In order to coordinate its goals with crawl's travel system, qw does build a representation of branch and level layout that it "walks" with a simple algorithm that incorporates persistently stored data about every staircase qw encounters. You can find this code in travel.lua. But there is nothing terribly sophisticated here algorithmically, since I'm trying to keep processing in qw as simple as possible to avoid lua throttling. Some day qw may become so sophisticated that I have to move it to python and talk to crawl over the webtiles WebSocket, but that would require a full rewrite and lots of new code to build a representation of crawl levels and data from the json. Hence I'm not going to do that until I feel I've reached the limit of what I can do with crawl's clua.

There are a couple of examples in my rcfile that hook into crawl using c_answer_prompt() and c_message() instead of using ready(). You probably also want to check out qw.rc for examples: This is the most well-known bot that plays Crawl; it uses Crawl's Lua api.

DCSS has been beaten by a handcrafted Lua bot, written by the (at the time) indisputably best player in the game. Unlike the approach here, it got to benefit from human expertise, and also it can only win with a very narrow set of characters. Learndb entry:

qw: A fully automated lua bot written by elliptic, with some code borrowed from parabolic and xw. The first DCSS bot to ever achieve an uninterrupted and unassisted win (see '!lg qw won 2'). Now maintained at https://github.com/crawl/qw by the DCSS devteam. See qw[2] for a summary of results.

As of 0.29-a, qw has a 0.36% winrate with GrBe with 1 win in 276 attempts. See https://crawl.dcss.io/crawl/morgue/qwqw/morgue-qwqw-20220613... and games are sometimes played on cdi. Historically its best 3-rune winrate was 15% DDFi^Makhleb, and, for 15 runes, about 1% with GrFi^TSO before the 0.28 hell rework.

Branch order: D -> Lair:8 -> Orc:3 -> D:15 -> S:5 -> Vaults:4 -> Depths:5 -> S:5 -> Vaults:5 -> Zot

On the online servers, qw plays with an extra added delay so that it doesn't use too much server CPU. Playing locally without this delay, qw is much faster.

I don't really know the details on this but I think the slot name got renamed, and you may want to look at the following PR for qw: https://github.com/crawl/qw/pull/3

One example is the bot qw, which is written in Lua and can win Crawl without human input.

Elliptic isn't updating the bot any more; qw is now (semi-)maintained by the devteam at: https://github.com/crawl/qw

It's probably not as rigorous as what you're thinking of but the devs of DCSS have cited online win rates of certain combinations as the impetus for balance changes before.

https://crawl.develz.org

In a similar vein, see Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a free and open-source roguelike that's been continuously developed by volunteers for 20 years: http://crawl.develz.org/

They are entirely too humanoid. I mean, look at these splash screens: Kiku, Ignis, Chei. While those images shouldn't be taken as canonical, they at least demonstrate the general inhumanity of the Crawl pantheon.

Since you like turn-based games too, try some old-school roguelikes. Many are open-source freeware so you have nothing to lose but time. I've been playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for almost 10 years.

Since Brogue's already been mentioned, I'd add Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Tales of Maj Eyal as pretty beginner friendly games.

For people who don't follow trunk, Okawru's gifting has been changed (and arguably* nerfed):

My personal first timer recommendation? Maybe Nethack or Dungeon crawl?

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Free traditional roguelike with fair mechanics and a lot of variety between species/skill/god choices (~25 gods and maybe with the exception of sif/veh and oka/trog, they are very distinct). The tiles are great. There's many developers and they are very welcoming of code or vault contributions. Reducing incentives to play tediously is one of the goals. Easily hundreds of hours of gameplay for free. Playable online (connecting to a server through your browser/terminal) or offline (terminal or tiles version). There have been win streaks of 50+ games with a variety of species/background combos so you know it's mostly fair(it IS possible for rng to give you an unwinnable game), but it's very difficult if your goal is to win every game.