Search • The Tavern

Your problem is that you don't use heroism and you don't use good spells. You should use heroism in every nontrivial fight. So like, fighting Mara would be an example of a nontrivial fight. You also train your skills as if you don't have heroism, for example you train bows to 16.8. Everything past 1...

The big problems with pack monsters, pack splitting etc., are really problems with crawl and obviously cannot be solved by changing monsters alone. On the other hand, replacing a lot of trash monsters in packs with monsters that can actually do something would change naive group combat dynamics in a...

Another suggestion involving a numerical parameter whose value should obviously be zero.

The +10 pain/+5 str trident and +10 elec hand crossbow really stand out in this dump, as well as the 11 points in shields. You could easily win this game without putting any further skill points into conjurations and that may be the best way to go. I would be working on getting more ac with this cha...

Orb run is addressed in the OP, though I would see no problem with ending the game when the player gets the orb. That would be an interesting species distinction. With the "stairs rotation" ability, you would have to think about the new stair dancing possibilities, probably place some clev...

I just mean the hardest part of the game is the first few floors. The factors you're talking about contribute to the fall off in difficulty later and the weird learning curve.

As far as the shaft effect goes, the first thing that happens to a player when they start the game is they get "shafted" into d:1, i.e. if they do not fight their way out of the immediate vicinity of the entrance, they lose the game. Incidentally, this is where the vast majority of unwinna...

See, this is what I'm talking about re: not appreciating the actual probabilities involved.

I did not say that no-downstairs is the solution to front-loaded difficulty.

sanka is more or less on target and I basically endorse his views on the questions IveGoneSupine asks me (the point about the importance of simple, transparent rules is particularly good), but I would add to the d1-d15 shaft scenario that this is a highly, highly improbable situation and that makes ...

A reasonable way to avoid the downstairs -> trapped scenario would be an ability that allows you to "rotate" stairs by going up, so going up has the effect of replacing you on a different staircase on the same level. There are other issues with eliminating stairs in dcss, which have been w...

VAF uses this weird reasoning a lot where he'll say there was an infinitesimal but nonzero chance that the player could have died and therefore he went on to win the game only by luck. This is like saying it's bad luck you didn't get rich by finding a winning powerball ticket in a parking lot. There...

Chess is a silly comparison. It's a deterministic game. Crawl is a dice game, more like backgammon. In backgammon there is a clear difference between better and worse players that shows up in statistics across numerous games. The confounding factor is that crawl is absurdly long, so the importance o...

I'm not sure I can speak for the devteam on shafts, but the way I read the position (and I think this is correct) is: shafts are good, getting shafted twice is good, getting shafted three times is good. If you got shafted from d:1 to d:3 then to d:5 and so forth all the way down to d:15, that would ...

The demon whip will be much better for general combat than any short blade you're likely to get. -3 aptitude should not scare you away from an early demon whip for a melee-oriented spriggan. And indeed, it is 1-handed spriggans.

In my opinion, the way character building works in crawl is already too loose, but species at least somewhat constrains or at least shapes the long term possibilities for a given combo. Existing gods, e.g. Okawaru, Cheibriados, and especially Ashenzari undermine these distinctions among characters b...

Learning a lot in this thread.

You don't need to get too hung up on using summons to kill things. Worst case is half xp, land some damage on them yourself and you'll get more. It's not a big deal.

I would clear out some of your low level spells and use orb with servitor. Between lightning spire, orbs, cflame, and sticky flame, you should be fine. You want your servitor to use orbs, not mystic blast and similar garbage.

Your best spell is lightning spire and you've already used the skill points to get it working, so you should use it. You should be able to do swamp with what you have no problem.

His spell list is fine, he just needs to use summons.

He answered: "Zero."

wiki -> salad shooter -> Leo Littlebook's thread.

I mean, you can call this trolling, but I like this thread better than the other long running CYC threads people regularly post in.

Hellcrawl has no rune locks (runes are purely for scoring) and you can play it on servers in the US, Japan, Australia, and I believe the EU, but I don't know if the x-crawl people still maintain their server. You can do a no rune, no side branch game in hellcrawl and in fact it is probably the most ...

Measures that would make the transition-to-regen process more automatic and less intrusive may improve matters and many reasonable possibilities exist, but a 5 turn delay does not make the transition strategic. It just makes it a costly tactical move. Whatever you have to do to start regenerating, i...

"Go with the heaviest armor" is slightly reductive. You're supposed to make maximum use of naga stealth early in the game (this applies better to the NaWn early game than the NaFi one, maybe) in order to get more poison spits off at each possible target (incredibly tedious btw). Obviously ...

As OP said, a major problem with Swamp is the layout, but it's hard for me to put my finger on what makes it so bad. As a first stab at it ⋅ Lack of variety: all levels of the swamp are qualitatively the same ⋅ Lack of straight sharp edges: without sharp edges the tactics ever...

I was responding to the previous comment re: abyss.

I comment on the shaft issue because the proposition that "shafts are good" is pretty central to active development and surrounding discussions. It's really weird to see people get so solidly behind dpeg's old comments on this which are really not well thought out at all. For example, he s...

I would like to hear more about the badness of swamp layouts. I consider them above average, though that's not saying a lot. Flowing water that moves the player and prevents movement against the current might work, though it may be difficult to visually convey the direction of flow. You'd probably n...

"Learn 2 Code." No. The reason ideas run aground in DCSS is not lack of skilled labor. The game itself is a limited resource and that means there has to be rationing, gatekeeping, and politics. If you want to add something big or make a big change, that is the most significant limiting fac...

I keep coming back to this point, but looking at where the thread is going, it bears repeating: The good thing about shafts is the outcome of being shafted, namely being on a level, perhaps with depth out of the PC's comfort zone, without immediate recourse to stairs. Many complaints about shafts re...

Interesting thread. If your question is "If I make a suggestion of a new branch, can I expect to see it in a future version of DCSS?" -- All evidence points to one answer: No. If your question is "How would I best go about exploring possibilities for a new branch in crawl?" -- Al...

It's still going to be better to keep your branded throwing shit and keeping it still costs nothing but hassle. Things like exploding tomahawks just shouldn't exist.

Simply removing traps would've been a fine solution and it would be better than what they've got now. Stair-traps would make a fine replacement, but not necessary. It's not true that you have to chip away at problems to make progress. [edit: Or, I should say, it is not necessary to "overhaul&qu...

One-way stairs are the only variation on crawl dungeon structure I've seen actually done that substantially improves the game. You can see big levels in the circus animals fork. It is extremely bad and makes the big problems in dcss even worse. Small levels with one-way stairs would be probably be a...

It seems to me that recent changes to traps only alter the set of weird exploration tricks that reduce the danger of traps. That's the problem with focusing on narrow problems. It makes you think you're solving a big problem by eliminating the most annoying defect, but the progress you actually make...

One aspect of shafts missing from these discussions is that the danger depends on lower floors not being cleared. So if you can clear a level of 90% of its monsters while exploring only 50% of its floor space, you may get ahead by backtracking after each half-clear to autoexplore the level two or th...

What he's saying about spaces in crawl is important. The lack of structure to crawl levels and the extreme degree of control that gives the player limits the possibilities for effects. You have to consider the virtually unlimited ability of the player to define the parameters of an encounter. It als...

Based on the description ebering gave of his estimation of the frequency of the player hitting a trap in normal play (which I'm inclined to believe more or less correctly takes into account the factors considered), I would guess the missing element is that monsters ruined traps in the previous syste...

Come on, man. How about a slice of Pandemonium Pizza???

Making them disappear would compound the XP problem, because instead of just giving stronger characters a lot of free XP sooner a weaker character doesn't get the XP at all. It's no surprise that people defend crimson imps for being what they are (purely annoying) in terms of what they clearly are n...

The defense of game mechanics in terms of their supposed didactic virtue and its reliance on testimonials from newer players or reminiscence about having been a newer player drives me nuts. Of course a lot of people who have encountered crimson imps like 20 times will find them less tedious than som...

Looking at this conversation about traps triggered by exploration (or going down stairs, or opening a door, or having walls destroyed near you), the defense that it makes sense for somebody to "booby trap stairs" kinda makes you think... what if traps were actually attached to stairs? As f...

Code:: .A. .@M | v @A. ..M The M hits your A.

While I see no problem with making pain brand kiku-exclusive, the claim that the way brands are represents a "design choice" is extremely overdrawn.

Have to disagree. Pain brand and its association with Kiku offers a good route to mixed builds for a pretty broad cross section of combos. In a game where straightforward armored melee builds do pretty well for a similarly broad cross section of combos, that's a good thing. Coming from the other dir...

If you want to see this species happen, you or some other like-minded individual will have to code it up. I doubt it would be picked up by dcss, but there are other forks that might take it.

It's the right take on a lot of crawl-related topics. You'll get more thanks writing sentimental comments about how you love everything about crawl, especially whatever people have said should be removed or changed, though.

That's a lot better than any other suggestion I've seen re: dcss vampires. Getting rid of the chunk interaction, less fine-grained player control of nutrition, less complex and consequential nutrition states, and little or no incentive to bank monsters would all be major improvements. edit: About ba...

Search found 451 matches