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
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.
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.
[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
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!
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
webtiles should have webtunes
these are well-crafted numbers
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
Exhibit A
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.
Exhibit B
jfc this hubris
1 Like
This was a good plan though
2 Likes
And it still gives you at minimum 50% of the experience. Very well worth it if you aren’t lugging around bolt-type wands.
1 Like
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!
1 Like
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.
Ughh I’ve learned nothing. Don’t play Crawl tired. Slow down and think when you’re in danger. Maybe turn off blade hands so you can actually block things with the large +4 shield and the maxed with heroism shield skill you had!!! Maybe put on your fire protection ring instead of for some reason still having your magic resist ring on you idiot.
Very embarrassing death.
There are two major things they changed with the trap system. The first is ALL traps now can be triggered by enemies against you instead of just Zot. They also introduced a dispersal trap that blinks you and everything in line of sight when triggered; a bonus when you’re a mage/ranger fighting non-ranged enemies but not great when it’s the other way around.
The second is there is an algorithm that randomly applies teleportitis, getting shafted if on a valid level or triggering an alarm (along with getting marked without recourse) as you explore most levels of the dungeon. This is known to be occurring more than the previous rates of encountering these trap types and being especially egregious the first time you go down stairs (as you’re typically revealing a lot of tiles at once and it’s rolled for every new tile revealed). The reasoning for it was to combat an invented hypothetical player that maximizes tedium; they would previously spend time marking all the tiles they had walked over so they wouldn’t fall prey to the earlier trap system. Instead they made an aggravating system that promotes even less aggressive play and still doesn’t reduce hypothetical tedium. You could be wearing an easily removed -TELE source during exploration to prevent the teleportitis. You could forgo auto-explore and manually explore in ever-expanding circles around a known avenue of escape for the alarm/mark double-whammy. Or just take up worship of Ashenzari because they are immune to this system altogether.
Ohhh, I actually didn’t know the Ash thing; is that why my Ash games were going so well?
And yeah, at least anecdotally I’m getting shafted way more often. The shafting has yet to kill me, but the marks are rough due to the relative rarity of cancellation. I think the shafts are at least kind of exciting to deal with; I like navigating unexplored floors, making footholds and slowly making my way back. The marks can go to hell though.
I’m a huge nerd and watch all the git commits so like I know about all these changes. If there’s one place that I should be more careful and plan escape routes, it’s Zot. Even though the new trap system is pretty ass, I still had counter play that would have almost certainly saved me, at least in this scenario. A bunch of extra blocks and an extra pip of rF would have almost certainly given me more turns to turn the corner and escape up the stairs. And I should have expected the OoFs would be all clumped up after a mark and not opt to fight the first two I saw, which attracted the other five.
1 Like
The new trap system is bad, but if they just reduced the numbers on the randomly activated events it wouldn’t be nearly as egregious. (And get rid of the random mark effect entirely; it should only happen if you or an enemy steps on an alarm trap. That at least gives it some counter-play in most scenarios.)
The old trap system was also bad, so on paper it sounded like a lateral move to me.
They also didn’t consider the extreme cases of those numbers. Reasonably the chances of the random trap trigger on explore are greater the further down you go. However, it is also influenced by the density of the level: smaller levels are also more dangerous. The relatively open area of the dungeon and many of the branches makes this fairly unnoticeable to the chance…until you reach a place like Tomb:2 and :3.
Suddenly there’s a non-trivial chance that your first step into these places, places where you want to approach with caution and stealth because of the deadly nature of the common enemies present in number, immediately throws you into danger. You’re either revealed immediately from an alarm or randomly teleported away from the relative safety of known space. Worse still, the change of the traps now being triggered against you instead of an enemy snowballs the randomness heavily against you, especially with Zot, net, or dispersal traps.
Yeah I’ve still never beaten extended (I always get bored in the middle and make stupid mistakes) so I’ve not experienced how it affects those places.
I’ve been in Zot 3 times since the change, and I may have just gotten lucky because the placed traps weren’t a big deal any of the times. The one time when it was going to be bad, I just read a scroll of fog to break line of sight and avoid a dispersal trap getting triggered.