Still Living That Dungeon Crawl Life

King of Posters
#27

Not a month ago I was touching up ice caves to add in a few of the newish slow-movement-inducing rime drakes, and I made the ice statue gardens a bit harder for the sake of variety in their enemy sets (separated appearances of white ugly things amongst solely ice beasts and ice statues. I do have to admit that generic (hypothetically decent) floor items from open terrain plus multiple visible ice statues is a hard sell, and I’m leaving myself a note for whenever I’m done with my current break and current freak-out as part of my targeted vault review to touch up the loot in those ice caves. The ice cave portals already have their own known issue I have to stab at eventually- the randomized placements and inconsistent behaviour of their freezing cloud generators frustrates a few prominent voices I need to shut up because it’s something that can’t be solved by luring away / running up to and killing something (see: complaints about Labyrinths, Abyss, shadow traps), so I’ll got ridiculous surgery planned for have vague floor tile range indicators.

The hardest ice cave even outside of consumable abuse and general terrain generosity probably continues to be a pre-/early Lair twin ice dragons cave, anyway, regardless (and is a personal reference point sometimes for vicious specific placements, as a new late demonic gameshow portal of mine in the next weeks will attest to). I’m not sure if all of the special-cased auxiliary resistance armour will last, either, as I’m split between the niceness of unique + rare + unusual rewards and the unreliable weak / strong competition in those slots (especially gloves)- I suspect I’ll stick with, say, keeping the flavour (and poison / magic resistance ego comparison) of temperature-resistance cloaks for a while as a compromise and then even those will be thrown out in a few years for the general inconsistency.

#28

Died in a fire portal this time to a bunch of gargoyles. I’m telling you guys, I should probably just avoid portals. I’m bad at leaving them even when it’s obvious my character can’t handle them.

#29

They are almost always just poke around a little for xp then duck out. If I have the resistances needed to make a go of one then the treasure inside rarely seems worth it.

#30

From my level dev perspective I rather like portals- they get to use weird mechanics and non-standard monster sets, that they’re usually anticipatable as scary, and that they prevent easy escape or putting-off: serving thus as ideal temptations and hard choices. The specific just-before / in Lair portals are at an ideal cusp of character build realization and power level alongside their brutality, as well- early D’s ossuary / sewers rely on swarms of weak / slow monsters, and post-first-rune just can’t keep up with the power curve.

Of course, for players, it’s always an arduous effort to learn when best to fold, and they definitely feed into power spirals. Possibly this sort of affair paired with the innate randomization / permadeath genre conventions is how over-concerns of optimality really took root.

#31

When I was on my kick of playing only DEFE until I won, early portals were always excellent. Sewers go down really easily to ranged fire spells, + anything tough will die to the steam clouds the fire creates. There are only a couple varieties of the undead portal that fire doesn’t solve too. Only the super-open ones with swarms I have to back out of. Labyrinth is easy too (although I think one time the Minotaur had a wand and killed me?) Fire and Ice are always super dodgy for me, though. And Ossuary(EDIT BAILEY) can suck too, especially the ranged-attack focused ones.

#32

Confusing the Ossuary and the Bailey reminds me of my notes for lategame baileys with vastly upgraded and mixed warrior sets, including skeletal warriors and ancient champions. Makes me a slight bit sad that such a project is outside of my leaving plans.

Trying to magic Labyrinths into more dangerous places is part of my leaving plans, but I’m heavily relying on a random contributor to pick up some level builder / connectivity woes.

#33

I was always fond of the Labyrinth as a sort of contemplative interlude between the frantic scramble for the portal and the possibly fatal encounter with the minotaur. I tend to have a soft spot for the under-designed bits of games, though.

3 Likes
#34

On one hand, I probably will never satisfy the loud, old, obnoxious, reputable, and experienced voices of the kinds of players who would make custom settings to mute the Labyrinth announcement message and render the entrance invisible. Not-too-prominent, uniquely simple and quiet things like such mazes shouldn’t be thrown out just for being of a different era.

On the other hand, I will always have the quiet fear of flux, that in different ages and atmospheres of perpetually discordant and non-unified development another dev will okay a severe shift or outright cut to the maze portion of the maze. The enthusiasm (if not the capacity for development conversation) of this thread paired with my stressors made me pick up some almost certainly overdesigned minor balance work very recently, anyway, as I poured over spreadsheets thinking of randomized balance and feeling out numbers, and I can’t help but think my frenetic work won’t allowed such simple outliers to last.

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At any rate, my Labyrinth plans aren’t that much of a drastic shift anyway: make the full level smaller, have the level builder work around fixed level chunks instead of needing a perfect border through them as which makes the maze much easier, and guarantee a decent number of those fixed level chunks and the minor encounters they foster with themed monsters and a few wanderers from the level before. Once the Lab is reliably a little dangerous all over then I’d let the miserable discourse decide whether the periodic maze shifting + minimap erasing + autoexplore-disabling should be kept or not (and it almost certainly will eventually be cut), while hopefully staving off the decent chance of the complete and utter removal of any maze elements or the Labyrinth itself.

This sort of eternal invisible panicked thinking around volunteer development is why I thoroughly advocate not playing Crawl for very long, as many get impatient and irritable about new changes and old cuts. Such a shift in attitude is admittedly dependent on person to person and probably mostly just over-represented in influential individuals and dedicated communities, but I still wonder if the base product and work model caused any of that, and I know it is changed in accordance to that.

#35

[spoiler]In true proof of that, as soon as I pushed the work involving those spreadsheets a stubborn and unapologetic jerk (who thinks the game is won by Lair) spoke up in the development channel and brushed aside my continued work. The old “small boxes packed with monsters” is straightforward and used by other old roguelikes Crawl tries to distance itself from, or so throw-away comments could be contextualized into. There are tons of old and new “small boxes stuffed with a themed monster” fixed level bits that rely on the actual surrounding level to provide terrain and context, but no, nothing that isn’t perfectly ideal to a few individuals can ever be fixed and those opinions are the only ones that can be acknowledged.

I just want some understanding and gratitude from peers on this damn work I tricked myself into feeling obliged to do after spending lots of my time on it. Instead I work on background content players can’t notice and devs/contributors either don’t care about, can’t parse, or are assholes about.[/spoiler]

4 Likes
#37

People who want an orc army to survive through out game the system by killing off any spellcaster they receive. That way more experience goes into the warrior/knight/warlord line that has better chances for survival due to their AI still being the basic ‘if not random(casting) or random(shooting) then move toward targetted enemy.’

Some saviour they are, picking for the best orcs!

#39

Looks like this will serve well as a dedicated Crawl-space (lolz). Not a huge amount to say here as I continue to suck at Crawl (and indeed any game that requires more than a trivial amount of time investment at this point (that I haven’t already pulverized and ingested, such as Football Manager)); however, I did run across this neat delve into statistical analysis of data from a public server:

2 Likes
#40

webtiles should have webtunes

#41

these are well-crafted numbers

#42

Won the very first game I played in the tournament and it was all downhill from there! I really struggle with identifying threats in the mid-game. I think I’m trying to play faster than I’m actually capable of?

It’s kind of frustrating because I know I’m getting better (1/3rd of my games have made it past Lair, and nearly that have retrieved runes, which certainly wasn’t the case a year ago) but I’m not seeing that reflect in my winrate yet. I think I understand the early game pretty well at this point. I’m pretty comfortable with Zot, too, so it’s really the mid-game post-Lair that trips me up (which I think makes sense; there’s a lot of variation in that part of the game).

A lot of my recent deaths have been real heartbreakers. My characters have been feeling pretty consistently strong so I think I’m making good strategic build choices, but I’m making tactical errors or autopiloting monster packs that are more dangerous than I expected (check out how many of my morgues either contain bragging or fear that I got too lucky with items so I’m surely going to screw it up).

Forcing myself to look at all available spells, items, abilities every time I get in a bad situation has helped. Hopefully I can get another win before the week is over (because there’s a big point bonus for your second win).

I’ve got a good game going currently with a Merfolk Wizard; if I’m one of the first 8 people to win with that combo I also get some extra points.

I feel like I’m pretty close to being good at this game! I just need a little more discipline.

2 Likes
#43

Exhibit A

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Feeling “so strong” that I elected to fight a Fire Dragon on Lair:1 which was 1) incredibly incredibly optional 2) absolutely not something you should be fighting at that level, especially with no fire resists.

#44

Exhibit B

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jfc this hubris

1 Like
#45

This was a good plan though

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2 Likes
#46

And it still gives you at minimum 50% of the experience. Very well worth it if you aren’t lugging around bolt-type wands.

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#53

Whew, played waaaay slower for the second half of my Merfolk Wizard and finally got another win! Even with playing slower I had one major mistake – got down to 2 HP in Elf:3 (why the fuck do I ever go to Elf? The loot has never made my character significantly better).

I was mostly carried by my god Hepliaklqana who feels like cheating. Hep summons an ancestor who is basically a permanent ally. The ally levels with you, gaining new gear and abilities and at ** Piety you can choose their background: knight, battlemage, or hexer. Summons are really good in this game, and an effectively permanent one is even better!

Since your ancestor is part ghost or something they’re poison immune, so I shot Mephetic Clouds at my ally (confusing everyone around her) in the early game. Later I transitioned to polearms as my main damage dealer (due to Merfolk’s frankly gross +4 aptitude with them) and just used my knight ally as a wall while I poked enemies through her.

Transitioned to ice magic later, due to finding good books and Merfolks having good aptitudes. Metabolic Englaciation turned out to kind of be the MVP spell. It slows all enemies in LOS that aren’t cold resistant, which trivialized so many fights.

Learned freezing cloud to have some AOE burst before Vaults:5. Had a few scary moments there but I survived! I probably should have done Abyss instead since I’d already been there once this game and nothing was too scary, and the threat of mutations is greatly lessened by letting my ally block. The ally also means you don’t take nearly as much chip damage, so Abyss is way less scary (I’ve had characters die there due to death by a thousands cuts).

Got the bonus points for my second win and being one of the first eight people to win a Nemelex Choice. I’m pretty happy with this result in the tourney even if I don’t win any more!

my tournament page
merfolk wizard morgue file

1 Like
#54

Fuck, I died with a super strong Gargoyle character that had max unarmed combat with Oka’s heroism and blade hands. Turns out even the strongest characters die when you get marked in Zot (because you can no longer avoid getting marked in Zot with the new trap system) and 7 Orbs of Fire chase you down.

I was killing individuals OoFs in like 3 turns but the combined ranged fire damage is too much.

That’s what I get for trying to finish the game tonight; I should have slept and done Zot in the morning when I was fresh and thinking more clearly.

Oh well, tourney ends on Sunday so that’s probably my last game.