Anybody here play with the circular distance setting on? Does it meaningfully affect the way the game plays?
Also somewhat related is the map, its extremely distorted due to it being based on ASCII I guess, any chance that will ever be fixed somehow so that longitudinal and lateral distances are represented equally?
The only meaningful difference is diagonal directions take slightly more energy to move then strait directions, and yes, I tend to play with circular distance on all the time.
The distortion is due to the tiles not being square. The default ascii graphic has each tile be twice as tall as it is wide. This is because majority of letters are taller then they are wide.
A great deal of functions in the game are always square distanced anyway, mostly due to technical limitations.
If enough people cared (or someone volunteered to do it) it could be updated, but it would be lots of boring copy+paste work.
You can remove the distortion by using a square font.
I use circluer distance because it looks better etc other than that no idea what advantages/dissadvantages there are 
If circular distance is not used, you can escape faster when moving diagonally all the time.
The monsters move faster when moving diagonally as well, so unless you can force them to move in odd ways it’s not going to help.