Re: YACD - Down at Zot, press on, or back off?

"dpeg" <ploog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fkug9b$ono$03$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You are having fun, good :) Crawl... evokes powerful feelings in
friends.

In spite of my whining, yes :) I'm just very critical, and picky about my
gaming, and I was sort of burnt on roguelikes, not a lot of new thought.
Ironic, since this is an old game, guess I just missed out. How long has
Stone Soup been in dev?

A bit more than two years by now. Before that, Crawl was in a kind of
hiatus.

I dimly recall checking it out *many* years ago, but I think at the time it
was very basic, and I didn't find anything interesting about it. Which
reminds me, the tileset Crawl uses is incredible. I've played roguelikes for
umpteen years now, and always preferred ascii, usually even preferred dos
mode console, and yet with Crawl, I adore the tiles. I understand they were
done originally by a group of japanese crawlers, and now updated by someone
on the SS team? Really amazing stuff though, just spectacularly detailed and
informative at a glance, something most tilesets I saw never achieved, due
to size. Heck, if they were ~double their current size, Crawl could pass for
a friendly (ha, HA) dungeon crawler, giving a nice candy coating to
introduce new players with.

Oh, and ctrl-q is not an obvious key :P I didn't see it mentioned anywhere
in the key help file, I hit it accidentally. But it is a useful one!

You can discuss things with me. Some words on the devteam: it is much
smaller than what the Sourceforge page suggests :) There are six coders
doing all the work, and they carry me as a baggage: I don't code, so I am
restricted to designing, making vaults etc. Thus, you are probably best of
discussing your issues directly with me (email address is valid -- if I
don't reply quickly, something went wrong), at least for immediate
feedback. The Sourceforge Bug/Feature Reports are in use, but it very hard
to comment it all. The lists are maintained, though.

I'll work on something for this, and save SF posts for bugs (though I don't
know the game well enough yet to spot bugs probably), and possibly putting
up suggestions that have been thought through. Most likely interface stuff,
thus far, there aren't really a lot of core gameplay systems I'd like to see
changed, just a handful of features I really dislike (Distortion :P), and of
course, stuff I'd like to see added. I usually don't bother with the latter,
as they are rarely useful for active dev groups, I'm sure the SS team has a
list a mile long of new features they'd like to add. New dungeon branches,
yay!

At the same time, I find some of the interface stuff baffling, since
stuff
like auto-explore, very smart autopickup, find, ego weapon glow, artifact
weapon semi-id, and so on, all seem built to remove some of the pain, and
yet they still have the archaic wear/wield/put
on/remove/quaff/evoke/zap/read interface, and stuff like prayer,
dissection, racial skill affinities, spell usage (seriously, shift Z to
cast spells? :P

Beware that Crawl has a long tradition. We try to be strong and get rid of
traditional but awkward 'features' but it is a slow process given Crawl's
size and age.

New ideas are welcome. I think these should be discussed on the list (just
mail me your ideas and I'll do the rest.) Also, be sure to read the manual
completely at least once. Yes, it might be boring, but you can improve the
documentation at the same time. :)

I'll do this, and I did in fact just finish reading the manual fully last
night. I was in a crawly mood, but too tired to continue my current
character without risk of death :) (another fighter, he's done with Lair,
has PR, ready to head into pits/swamp, and dive part of the way to vault,
yay).

I can't remember them all offhand, but I did find a few obscure tips in the
manual that I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise. The fact that you
can browse shops from the ctrl-f menu makes an already cool feature even
cooler.

I also found explore_greedy, which is also awesome, though I was wondering
if there's some way I can disable it from ingame - I'll leave it active for
normal dungeon floors probably, but no way I'm leaving that on in certain
dungeon branches (swamp comes to mind, and dangerous bottom floor areas
too).

Come to think of it, IS there an in-game options menu that I'm missing
somewhere? I know Nethack has the ability to tinker with most init file
options in-game. While manually hacking text files to tinker with
functionality (yay gearset.lua, a nice find) might be something of a
roguelike tradition, I'd argue that it is one of the least fun or friendly
aspects of the genre for new and inexperienced players, and when it obscures
friendly, helpful functionality, that seems like a loss.

I think there was also some mention of the speed boost for levitation, is
that obsolete? Also, I don't see movement speed on the % display, am I
missing something?

There were a few others, I'll look it over again and make some quick notes
on the (useful) bits that I found that I didn't discover by playing the game
and skimming the manual occasionally.

I also find the early game frustrating. Dying two steps off the stairs in
melee as a melee char is lame.

An important Crawl trait is to run away and skip a level. Do that!

Believe me, I'm not playing on tilt, I know how to be cautious (my current
character still doesn't have some of his starting potions or scrolls
identified, since I don't want to risk quaffing an unid'd cure mutation
potion, and I didn't have heal wounds id'd until sometime in lair!).
Sometimes you just... die. Go down a corridor, goblin on one end, hobgoblin
on the other, they get close, whack, you die.

However, as Martin commented on in a post below, tinkering with the
difficulty would tilt the game towards Angband or Nethackish behavior, which
I'm assuming is not desired (I don't think I desire it either). It's a razor
sharp edge to walk between so hard as to be offputting to new players (or
even roguelike vets!) and so easy as to be boring (one of the reasons I'll
likely never beat Angband now!), it terrifies me that the impression I'm
getting is that SS is friendlier than Crawl has been in the past :P

Wielding a weapon of distortion is lame.

You got exceptionally bad luck. Weapons of distortion are _much_ rarer
than
your experience makes you think.

Two of my first *twenty* characters died to wielding an unid'd distortion
weapon. Two of the friends I introduced died to one in their first ten
characters. I just don't like them, period. They don't involve any choice -
I'm not going to burn id scrolls on ego weapons until *maybe* very late in
the game, they're simply too precious of a resource early on for rings et
al, I *DO* go out of my way to save detect/remove curse scrolls for unid'd
weapons, but requiring an id scroll for every ego weapon wield is just
excessive, and in the early game, unreasonable.

I suppose you could make an argument that it's an acceptable risk for
attempting to acquire an ego weapon in the early game, but in my experience,
if you don't take that risk with a melee, you're going to wind up stuck
wielding a basic weapon for a good long time. If Distortion weapons are
considered fair, feel free to add spellbooks that on initial r(ead)
occasionally throw the user into the abyss or kill him instantly if he's sub
30 hp :P Just not fun, don't like them.

I have, admittedly, run into them less since then - I'm up to 70 or so
characters in the morgue I think? Which reminds me, how do I access the
scoreboard for posting, the scores file in the saves folder looks like its
parsed by the game to display.

But even so, they're still nasty for even my later game characters to
encounter, effectively useless on a blunt weapon, and I find the behavior of
the weapons to be too uncontrolled to be powerful, making them a lethal
random early game death, and dangerous later in the game without a
commensurate payoff, shrug.

Running into OOD enemy + named enemy, fleeing, centaurs, fleeing, ogres,
fleeing, big room + water + ranged enemies, fleeing, big dungeon + ranged
enemies, fleeing, orc casters. By this time you've had to skip the bulk
of
3 dungeon levels, and you've gone from floor 3 to floor 7, with floor 3
stats and gear. The dungeon floors up to the temple should have some sort
of 'maximum craziness' limit. One or two floors being a bit dangerous is
ok, running into stuff that you simply cannot handle floor after floor is
just frustrating.

We will not implement player-care. Yes, it can happen that nasties stack
on
several levels. This calls for special thinking: which of the nasties is
killable with best chances? You might take a different approach with
potion/scroll id.

I've fooled around with a few methods of using scrolls and potions, the
conservative approach seems to be treating me best, and I'm rather unfond of
reading/quaffing randomly in hopes of finding something to help me in a
fight - based on rarities, it is usually fairly easy to find identify,
detect/remove curse, teleport, and healing, which are all helpful, but
escape or recovery often aren't enough to deal with some of the situations
I've run into.

However, nearly every character I've had run into this situation has not
survived, despite my best efforts, and some spanning ~5 floors of the
dungeon as I struggle to dodge nastiness and return to deal with earlier
nastiness if I find anything to change my power level at all.

On the upshot, on the rare occasions I do survive these situations, my
character does come out boosted a few XLs, though I've rarely found there to
be any direct correlation to a better set of loot or gear, which might be
one of my gripes with this - XLs you're going to earn anyway, getting a few
early doesn't help a ton (at least so far, with my melee chars), not nearly
as much as a good ego weapon or some solid armor, or even a useful bit of
jewellery or a wand, etc. And so far, I haven't noticed cases where ood
enemies or uniques are providing better goodies in return for the added
risk. At best you get some extra xp, at worst (and more frequently), you
die.

Is it that the case that OOD enemies or named enemies trigger the generation
of better items on the dungeon level, or carried by them? (though an ood
melee enemy armed with a wand or ego weapon is even worse...) If that is the
intent, I have not noticed it.

I'll report some of their comments. I just introduced a fourth friend
tonight. He just died to wielding a weapon of distortion with his 29hp
character.

Wow, you run into distortion weapons as if there was a factory near you :)

It's strange, in my gaming group, I'm known for being exceptionally lucky in
whatever we're playing at the moment. Crawl, apparently, has decided that a
debt must be paid. I get horrible mutations, run into guardian naga a few
floors in, and die to distortion weapons with great glee from the game. I'm
inured to roguelikes enough that I can laugh off most horrible deaths early
on, but I had to take a break for nearly a week after dying to wielding a
weapon of distortion. I've literally never had a roguelike make me that
angry before, I suppose I should be glad I didn't play the game when the
early game was *less* 'friendly' than it is now!

Looking forward to a mail,
David

I'll put together a concrete list of interface gripes and send that along
with some suggestions for changes/fixes/additions. I'm not nearly
experienced enough to comment on much gameplay stuff yet, other than the
ones that annoy me and spoil my fun (distortion, teleportitis, amnesia,
etc). Those are rapidly solidified opinions for me, whether they're popular
with the dev team or crawl community being another matter entirely. The rest
is generally just idle commentary based on my experiences thus far (ie, why
are Slime Creatures and Odd Things the most common enemies for half the
dungeon? :P)

Oh, I'll also do a quick three question poll of my friends on the tutorial
and most and least favorite aspects of the game. I don't know if the SS team
is actively targeting new players, I know I've run into roguelike devs in
the past that seem almost hostile to newbies, or features that are too
'friendly', which always struck me as a bit odd. However, that gets into
rather philosophical questions about the reasons behind making a game
(specifically a roguelike) in the first place :P

I can only say that Crawl is a Good Game, and it is (I think) very close to
being playable by a roguelike newbie, with the tileset, who could really
have fun with the game. I don't introduce friends to Nethack or Adom unless
I'm literally sitting over their shoulder guiding their play, the games are
just too frustrating otherwise, and nearly impenetrable from an interface
standpoint.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: [Crawl Stone Soup] 0.3.3 - New player - Questions, comments, annoyed whining (long)
    ... I appreciate that Crawl makes it easy to get started and die so that I can ... the early game has repeatedly pissed me off and made me angry - ... branches with clusters of monsters and very few choke points: ... wielding a weapon of Distortion. ...
    (rec.games.roguelike.misc)
  • Re: YACD - Down at Zot, press on, or back off?
    ... like auto-explore, very smart autopickup, find, ego weapon glow, artifact ... new players to roguelikes, ... Crawl currently has *no* container-objects. ... Yeah, but I have to say, until I broke past the early game, I did not find ...
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  • Re: YACD - Down at Zot, press on, or back off?
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    (rec.games.roguelike.misc)
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