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[Infinitum]

As per thread title. Having to pause and check in order to assess ammo usage kind of breaks the game's flow.

[ParaSait]

Digging this.
Not only is this convenient, it's also very doom-like :>

[Klear]

I believe this is already planned? In any case, I would like that. Useful and doomy.

[thelaptop]

Blech.  In all my time of playing DoomRL, running out of ammunition is the least of my problems.  The important thing is not the exact amount of ammunition you carry, but a good estimate of number of shots you can expend.  And with that in mind, the stacks are more intuitive than a raw number.

If I see that I only have 1 stack of ammo for my main weapon, I would be very afraid.  But if I have anything from 3 to 5 stacks, things are good.  Does it really matter if I know that I have exactly 127 shotgun shells?  Nope, I just see it as "oh it's enough".

You might need to rethink how you are going about feeding your main-line weapons if ammo usage becomes a real problem.  I'm not really in favour of showing the counts on the HUD due to clutter, but some config-file accessible way of showing low/medium/high/abundant levels of ammunition on the HUD might be a better deal than just raw numbers.

[SageAcrin]

Considering that stacks are essentially ways to interpret raw shot quantities, anyways, I don't get your objection there precisely.

Just because you can wing it easily doesn't mean it's actually inferior to display it as a raw number. I've heard people say that the raw numbers game can be misleading in Roguelikes and that you should go with your gut-and there's some validity to that, I feel-but that's taking it to a rather rough extreme. Stacks represent X shots and you're just doing rough mental math really fast(Or kneejerking based on past experience that you have enough shots...same difference.) to get the actual values-you can just as easily gutcheck a totaled value the same way.

The real reason I can see to support this, though, is that I'm constantly having to go into my inventory for no more reason than to check my ammo. Why should I? That's like having to Shift+2 to see my HP. It's a vital statistic. Even if some clarity is lost-which I very much disagree that any is-it's worth it for the convenience value.

Personally, I think just displaying the ammo remaining on your primary weapon would fix the clutter issues. It's not quite as Doom-like but it strikes a nice compromise between HUD clutter(DoomRL has to display more info than Doom, after all) and useful, relevant information.

Oh, and "You shouldn't be having ammo problems anyways" is a better argument for removing ammo than lowering the amount of information given. After all, you shouldn't be having ammo problems anyways, therefore it's not a useful statistic. (I do not agree with this, either, naturally.)

[Infinitum]

@Laptop: Funny, running out of bullets is what precluded the death of most of my midgame characters (forcing me to use weapons I weren't spec'd for, taking more risks and generally running out of resources - ammo conservation is very much a thing for at least some builds). Also, the UI is also pretty spartan as is - there's plenty of room below weapon information for an extra line regarding ammo reserves. Adding it there wouldn't take from any currently used space and simultaneously fit in a -lot- of commonly referenced gameplay information. As for stacks, it wouldn't be unfeasible to have a graphic display of those next to the counter as well.

[IronBeer]

I've been a supporter of this idea before, and I'll support it still.