The Tavern

I returned to Crawl after a year's absence this weekend and I have to say thanks for the hard work making 0.14 what is today. It feels like a much tighter, more interesting game than 0.11. The new tiles, the new species, the new and improved mechanics are all great. It seems like a new game.

Congratulations and thanks.
Ohmi

Thanks for the trunk updates on the main page, Grunt! I'm always waiting to see new changes!
Keep 'em coming!

Thank you for removing many of the tedious item swapping situations in trunk (i.e. sickness , corpse/skeleton carriage, weight restrictions, curse scrolls, corrosion effect, item destruction etc.).
It really made the game so much smoother and more enjoyable.

EDIT: I know it´s trunk and things are likely to change, but I’m loving it all the same.

Thanks for Qazlal, because even if I don't like the name, it brings to the table an entirely new flavor of Oni, where previously there was only Og^Makhleb.

The new "eye" splashscreen is creepy as hell. I love it. Thanks to the one who made it !

Thank you all for this game. I have enjoyed 100s of entertaining hours playing it. It's my favourite game among giants like Deus Ex, Master of Magic and Master of Orion.

Thank you for removing the -10 EV penalty from statue form. Now a defensive form doesn't have to rely on only one defense

thanks to all who are working on this great game, one of the few games of the last years which got me playing numerous hours with fascination.

playing since 0.13 but always thought its like nethack (500 pages of spoilers or a quarter lifetime to learn it ) and very hard (had no clue and no spoilers, mostly played like 30 minutes then quit after 2 failed runs - occasionally reaching lvl 15-20 and dying somewhere there) now i learned it a little and its very fun

I've tried to get into Cataclysm: DDA recently, but was appalled to see how abusive the lead developer(s) was to the fan base. Just in a really angsty juvenile kinda way. Like thinking everyone is out to dog on their "skills" as a programmer. Anyway, I've never seen that with the Crawl community and suffice it to say this game is like a ragged pair of boxer-briefs to me now (in a good way). If I'm to believe every community has leaders or "role-models" certainly CDDA doesn't have a chance of expanding its somewhat pitiful fan base.

Thanks for keeping it cool. Thanks for being helpful. Thanks for not (generally) being angsty and juvenile when someone has something to say.

Oh, and thanks for allowing Crawl to grow and flourish in the way that it has.

I've been playing DC:SS on and off for the past many years... and not once have I ever managed to even get remotely near victory. Excluding when I savescum, of course.

Thanks for the 0.15! It's so much better! Loving every new change! Keep a good work, Devs!

Thanks for making a game that makes me forget I've been playing it for three years.

I'd also like to say thanks for one extremely nice game! Still busy getting into it, so I won't make any final statement, but I can already say that I will definitely stay with the game for a long while.
My fave roguelike (and my alltime fave game at all) is ADOM, but Crawl and ToME are my first choices when I'm in the mood for a somehow faster pace.

Gotta love Stone Soup. Been playing for 2 years now, and still thoroughly enjoy the game. Thanks to the development team for their hard work, and thanks to all the great players who actually know what they're doing so that we can pretend to be good at the game. Happy crawling!

I discovered DC a couple weeks ago and haven't gotten anything done in the rest of my life since . . .

Also, I suck at this game. I sucked at the original Rogue, which I played far too much as a kid, so this just validates my lack of skill, or something.

Really should've tried to find some rP+ before going into Swamp with my MiMo just now . . .

Getting to swamp in only a couple of weeks doesn't sound bad at all.

The thing I noticed at the end of my game last night, as my character got vaporized in poisonous clouds and eaten by hydra swarms after daring to step foot in Swamp 5 (there was no where else for him to go), was the absence of the usual sting when my good characters die. I have resigned myself to the fate of dying ten thousand deaths. I hope this means that I've pushed through to the next level of understanding.

I meant to eventually give thanks for the entire Summoner book remake (especially Lightning Spire), but I just found and used Summon Forest for the first time. Thank you for this spell. It is amazing.

I just felt like I had to give some thanks for everyone that has contributed into making this game and this seems like the right topic to do that. I used to play lots of Nethack, managing to beat it once, and some variants of Angband, but now DCSS feels like the best roguelike for me.

There are just so many different, viable playstyles with all the combinations of many colourfull races and classes and gods. Also, in my opinion "no grinding" design philosophy, fast interface ( autotravel and macros ftw ) and clear, coherent tileset are the kind of features that should be in every actively developed roguelike by now. ( I can understand using only ASCII, though. It is better than an incomplete tileset )

Hmm.. This is creepy: My GrEE just saw Sigmund sleeping in a DL2 hallway, stepped back for a couple of turns and came back to see that he is gone. I bet he will reappear with a pack of orcs when I least expect it..

Gonna borrow this thread to add my own thanks. Great game, everything I want from a crawler.

I never got into dungeon crawlers back in their heyday (mores the pity), I was locked into Elite for much of the 80's.

Having eventually found Dwarf Fortress (Adv mode) round 2000, I quickly googled my way through the roguelike offerings and then spent 5-6 years trying to complete Angband (D:99 sauron death as best run).

I didnt finally stumble onto DCSS until a couple of years ago, and never made a serious attempt past the temple until a month or two back. Liking the active and thus-far welcoming community. Big props also for being the first roguelike I've 'completed'. Though in my own mind I wont have beaten DCSS until one of my avatars scoops 15 runes, I have at least had all 15 at some point between my 2 winners and a couple of extended game deaths.

What I love so far about crawl:

Simplification without over-simplification: Many traditional roguelike mechanics are less arcane/complex here, while not being axed outright. I do rather like the (very recent) removal of item destruction and associated conservation, just another must-have mid-late resist in many roguelikes. Something like 75% of my Angband end-game chars were ultimately doomed by consumable destruction. Smashing +hit and +dam together makes weapon selection less of a mental math minefield and makes it far easier to compare weapons of differant base type, brand, enchant and so on. Love that change. Im also quite fond of levels not being randomized everytime you enter/leave as they are in the *bands, mapping the dungeon and noting where supplies lie to later find with ctrl-F adds some meta-game planning and stops the need to carry everything remotely useful at all times. I spend a lot of time late-game here running to and from the stash trying out gear combos to beat the challenges.

Still plenty of gotchas: Like any roguelike there has to be gotchas. Sigmund is a classic gotcha as he can kill just about any character you might roll if you hit him really early and insist on engaging. Banishment and the Abyss is a another great humbling gotcha, as was the MiFi I had who starved to death on a beach staring at a siren he couldnt reach. The rule of 'do not have to engage everything' has been hammered home by DCSS

Plenty of options: The concept of extended game is very smart, it lets me take a character just as far as he can manage (typically further, but thats my problem, not yours). I rather like struggling my way all the way down to Zot:5 and then deciding whether its time to snatch'n'run, or whether the journey is just starting..

Cheers all the players, testers and devs that make DCSS what it is!

Celem, proud owner of a 0.1X% winrate and father to so many ghosts.

I've forgotten how many years I've been playing Crawl at this point; it has been at least three now, possibly more. Thankee, all ye who have been involved in making this most excellent of games what it is today. Thankee, also, to those who come by to give advice and knowledge to the unskilled such as I. More than once, now, I've been helped out of a deadly situation by other players. You are all wonderful.

I am among those who began their roguelike pursuits with NetHack. Valiantly indeed did I try to win that game, but as the months went by I was continually thwarted, first by lack of skill, then of knowledge, and finally by sheer boredom. If I remember correctly, the last run of NetHack that I ever seriously attempted ended in starvation in the castle, because I simply forgot to eat. Such is the unrelenting slog that the game becomes once one survives the early levels, IMO. It has serious issues in its design. It forces one to gain levels to the mid teens in order to progress past a certain point, but simultaneously punishes you for doing so and the amount of experience that you gain from normal play quickly becomes inadequate to actually reach high levels in a timely manner. It's also far too reliant on arbitrary instant death mechanics to challenge the player. Wands of death IMO are a terrible idea and should go. I could continue for quite some time after forcing myself to play for as long as I did. Suffice to say that I'd be much more excited about giving it another try if it was still in development; as it is, nothing is going to be done about the game's many questionable elements of design.

I've only dabbled in other roguelikes, unless one considers the Diablo series to be one of them.

first thing i do in the morning, after i get to work is to hop on http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ to check if anything changed in trunk. its been like that for last 6 months.


yes i am for real

Thank you for displaying success chance for hexes, it's really fun to see 14% chance to polymorph TRJ!
I hope some day similar change will be done for other attacks (25% chance to hit Enchantress with Demon Whip or 8% chance to hit Spriggan Air Mage with Bolt of Cold can be fun/useful too).

If you've never been to the blog http://www.crpgaddict.blogspot.com then you should! The guy has made it a personal mission to play EVERY crpg that came out in the Western World from 1977ish to the present. 5 years now, he's into the 1990's
involuntarily.
I cannot agree with you about the Wizardry series. Yes, it's part of the cornerstones of the crpg movement but the gme seies does NOT hold up well. And when you get to Werdna- that's just hard for the sake of being hard. Yuk. IMHO, but MO portion is backed up with the opinions of many other people

But that's just me. If I don't like something, then that means... I don't like something. I realize it doesn't change the flavor of whatever it is I don't like and that's fine. It shouldn't change things involuntarily. You should like what you like. My not liking something ONLY means that- I don't like something Doesn't mean it's bad. A lot of people can't make that distinction

NearlySeniorCitizen
http://www.youtube.com/user/williamroeben

In nethack, you only need lvl 14 to do the quest. And leveling is much easier: either reverse genocide (or otherwise eat) wraiths or sleep with foocubi. You can almost always level to max by luring away and eating the wraiths in the Valley of the Dead, though it does require some tedious play.

This is not to say that Nethack doesn't have serious issues (I also started there and now play mostly crawl).

I remember when I played an Elf and found a sink on D:1. When I left the level I was XL 12. I was sure I would be killed soon because of getting harder monsters without getting better loot, but it turned out fine and I went on to ascend that Elf.

This game is incredible. There is so much variation - but it virtually never feels gratuitous; the variations of monsters, characters, equipment and gods lead to so many interesting playstyles and decisions. Thank you!

Angel just visited me.
More precisely, I visited crawl.develz.org and saw new design. Pure joy.
Minimalistic, which perfectly reflects Crawl philosophy.
But true gem of official site design is Live Games part.
Just imagine some noob, who decides to check out this game he heard about.
What does he see? Some wierd cubical world of lowsize pixel art. What is this? No idea.
Ok, may be writings will clarify?
4Hooves2Appendages the Slicer
Very slightly contaminated, bloodless, non-regenerating, repel missiles
(But non-real screenshoots as pictures feel like fraud, shame)

Thanks for the developers for not supporting OS X 10.6.8 anymore; I finally got around to updating my OS!

I have been playing Crawl for 5 years now and I am more pumped about it than ever. Devs <3

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Lehudib%27s_Moon_Base

Assuming this is real THANK YOU THANK YOU. Now please make it spawn in 100% of my games, thanks.

Learned of this game 4 or 5 years ago now, and only recently started playing it somewhat seriously and winning. So addicted right now. Thanks for all the hard work and constant progress, Devs!

Also learned of this game some time ago. Wish it hadn't taken me so long to get into it. Easily the best designed roguelike.

Thanks for all your hard work!

Thank you SO MUCH for this: http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... aedde92788

Thank you for giving mummies stat gain and form the 0.17 Gozag buffs.

Nice thread. Welcome & GL! I started playing fairly recently as well, but I have spent a ridiculous amount of time in the game recently and managed to win twice so far! although haven't gotten into the extended late game yet.
It is indeed an amazing game and the community seem to be very friendly and helpful.

The first thing I did when I started playing this game was find out how to increase the tile / font size (zoom in) because trying to see/read everything was hurting my eyes

Thanks a huge ton devs! You A) reverted some Ashenzari changes (** ability is skillboost again) and made knowledge transfer awesome!

YOU ALSO TOTALLY GOT RID OF MONSTER SIMULACRUM/ANIMATE DEAD! HOOORAYYYYY!

Thanks for the vault wardens, sentinels and convokers. They make vaults interesting. Thanks for torpor snails, entropy weavers, and orb spiders. They make Spider interesting.

The new monsters you guys are adding generally seem to make combat much less automatic.

Thanks for shrikes and juggernauts. They make reading the Tavern more interesting.

Thanks for removing MP cap. Didnt think it possible, but playing spriggans is sooo much more fun now!

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Thanks for being responsive devs! I don't always agree, but the very fact we can have these conversations is meaningful.

I would like to give my thanks to the devs and contributors for bringing this game to life. It's incredible. So far I've only made it into zot, but that orb is mine.
Also, this

It's difficult for me to find the words to thank the dev (and the helpful community!) for all their amazing work on what is in my humble opinion, the best game I have ever played in my life. I'm rather biased since it hits exactly what I like (I usually don't even notice the sound or music in games that have them, and my vivid imagination means I find the console graphics amazing, and most of all I enjoy games that rely on intelligence and good decision-making), but that's still mighty impressive for a free game.

Of all the hundreds of games I've played on my many consoles or my PC (from DOS to steam), there is not a single one that I find superior to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I have lost track of how many hundreds (nay, thousands) of hours I've spent playing this game and getting great characters killed through acute stupidity. In fact the only reason I've stopped playing back in 0.12 is that it was taking too much time and interfering with my work.

And now that I've come back, it's gotten 4 new versions while I was away! The game has gotten much better, smoother, more balance, and richer (special mention to the new gods here). I'm not going to say I agree with all the design decisions (give me back my mountain dwarves! they're way more different from Mi than Ha are from Ko!), but I know I'm not the only one playing the game and you can't please everyone. I salute your relentless pursuit of the original design goals of the game and your constant effort to improve on what is already an amazing game.

Hmmm...

Oh, and thanks for the android version. Crawl on the go, that's amazing. In fact the only thing I can see that would make me happier than the current crawl would be to have it on Steam so that I could show off my achievements to my friends and goad them into playing it for themselves. Of course I know that there are good reasons this isn't happening, but one can dream.

Anyway, let me give you my most sincere and heartfelt thanks for making the world a better place by introducing such amount of fun with what is one of the best games in human history.

I suppose there's the best reason yet for me to try to come up with a 'proper' name.

Thank you to whoever created Ru, whose worship leads to all sorts of ridiculous situations. This one made me scratch my head:



That was one very limber elephant.

Wuhu for the changes to the awesome search function! Now finding rF in any circumstance, and also showing carried [curse foo] scrolls when searching for armour!

I have to say thanks as well.

Crawl is a modern and decidedly different approach to the roguelike, and that's what I like about it. It's not intimidating, it's not mysterious, it's not unfair. Crawl is noob-friendly, avoids reliance on spoilers, and is designed so that you can pretty much always win with correct play. While I've never made it past even one Lair branch (let alone Zot), I love having a challenging game with a practically unbounded skill ceiling while remaining lots of fun to play. Perhaps someday, I'll get my 15 runes and the Orb...

Once again, thank you to the community for this great game.

DraconicPenguin