The Tavern

While I have little experience with extended, I see everyone complaining how boring and unbalanced it is, so I was wondering why no one seems to have proposed removing it (or, more likely, I have just missed it).
An often-seen argument is that it is voluntary, but this hasn't kept other features from being removed (and it shouldn't, IMO).

The voluntary argument does apply here though, moreso than to some other features anyway. If there was e.g. a badly designed god who was a good choice for some characters, if you want to play to win, you have to follow this badly designed god during some games. If you are playing to win, you never want to do extended since you can just get the orb and win, not taking any unncecessary risks. So it is completely up to the player's personal preference whether they do extended or not.

(I also think extended has plenty of good moments - the last hell levels are exciting, the named pan lords are as well, slime pits are quite a good branch especially now that corrosion is temporary and meaningful. Tomb and Abyss have the biggest problems)

And I think 90% of tomb's problems are mostly just death curses, which could be removed fairly easily. Not sure they need much to replace them. Torment, smite, summons should be nasty enough on their own, and then I can finally slouch 30 mummies at once without insta-death.

So the fact that a whole branch is composed of 1 group of sphinxes and 3 types of mummies, one of which is harmless and two of which are the same except one takes longer to kill, only accounts for 10% of tomb's problems? You must really hate death curses

Did I mention the time that I slouched 30 mummies to death in one turn and killed my 15 runer during the .14 tournament? Because it was months ago, and I'm still sore. I want my save file reinstated *immediately*.

intr wrote:While I have little experience with extended, I see everyone complaining how boring and unbalanced it is, so I was wondering why no one seems to have proposed removing it (or, more likely, I have just missed it).
An often-seen argument is that it is voluntary, but this hasn't kept other features from being removed (and it shouldn't, IMO).

It isn't that bad. Tomb and Slime are branches I do reasonably often for my third Rune. Tomb currently has problems, but they are fixable problems even though Tomb is pretty low priority due to being so late in the game. It just needs more variable layout and a more variable set of interesting monsters.

The problem with Pan and Hell is mostly that they are too long together. They've got nine Runes between them and substantial overlap in their monster set. Pan is particularly prone to being far too long because the special levels can randomly take far too long to generate, but recently it did at least get some new chaff monsters added. Hell, on the other hand, has some occasional fairness issues what with paralysis that comes out of nowhere and you die from full health without being able to take another turn, but when the system works as intended it is fun and exciting.

I usually clear as much as the post-endgame as possible before I cash in my win. I'm not in a rush, here, like I might be if I was playing in a tournament. If cuts were to be made, I could see putting Hell and Pan in rotation and cutting the generic Demonic Rune in both cases, leaving the game with 10 Runes, but I'd hate to see either be removed completely. The problems do exist, but they can be fixed.

Agree with KL, except that personally I don't like Tomb and don't do it very often.

Also, it would be a *lot* of content simply to remove; that would be no problem if it were irredeemable, but extended is far from that. Some of the problems are interrelated so it would be a considerable effort, but not crazily so.

i really had fun playing extended

, as a noob

game complexicity also attracts some players who wouldnt otherwise bother to play "just another minigame". if u want to improve the gameplay in those areas sure i like it, but in terms of flair + possibilities in the game it would be a loss to remove everything imo.

and into wrote:Agree with KL, except that personally I don't like Tomb and don't do it very often.

Oh, I hasten to clarify that I don't like Tomb very much either. Vaults 5 has just gotten a lot harder, though, and I can be pretty close to 100% confident that I can handle Tomb as long as I have my Tomb Kit together. My Tomb Kit is pretty much just the Haste spell, although middling stealth is very nice, too. In Vaults 5 there's just more that can go wrong.

cerebovssquire wrote:So the fact that a whole branch is composed of 1 group of sphinxes and 3 types of mummies

That's no longer true, as some more generic undead dudes spawn in the Tomb too. I've seen (a)liches, unborns, skeleton warriors (for whatever reason). Mummies are still most prevalent, though, and most of the "new" monsters are just Crypt inhabitants.

yay how fun

IMO, extended is fun the first time you do it. And the second. Maybe even the third, but after that, as the other posters have said, going through endless Pan levels until the unique levels appear gets tedious.

Jeremiah wrote:going through endless Pan levels until the unique levels appear gets tedious.

Lovely Pan, wonderful Pa-a-n,
Lovely Pan, wonderful Pan,
Pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-an,
Pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-an,
PA-A-A-A-A-A-A-AN,
PA-A-A-A-A-A-A-AN,
LOVELY PAN, LOVELY PAN,
LOVELY PAN, LOVELY PAN,
LOVELY PA-A-A-A-AN...
PA-AN, PA-AN, PA-AN, PA-A-A-AN!

I'm sure extended can eventually be made more awesome.

I enjoy the existence of extended even though I never do it (and would like the main or minimal game to be slightly shorter.)

I'd also like to point out that there are more possibilities than 3 or 15 runes. For example, my last 3 victories were with 5, 6 and 7 runes. I really enjoy the possibility of doing whatever parts of extended I want with a certain character.

XuaXua wrote:
Jeremiah wrote:going through endless Pan levels until the unique levels appear gets tedious.

Lovely Pan, wonderful Pa-a-n,
Lovely Pan, wonderful Pan,
Pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-an,
Pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-an,
PA-A-A-A-A-A-A-AN,
PA-A-A-A-A-A-A-AN,
LOVELY PAN, LOVELY PAN,
LOVELY PAN, LOVELY PAN,
LOVELY PA-A-A-A-AN...
PA-AN, PA-AN, PA-AN, PA-A-A-AN!

rosstin wrote:I enjoy the existence of extended even though I never do it (and would like the main or minimal game to be slightly shorter.)

Slightly, like, 5 times.

cerebovssquire wrote:(I also think extended has plenty of good moments - the last hell levels are exciting, the named pan lords are as well, slime pits are quite a good branch especially now that corrosion is temporary and meaningful. Tomb and Abyss have the biggest problems)

Abyss can be really annoying and not let you descend deeper into it when you want to, but that's about all that is truly "pretty bad" about it. It's a fairly easy branch.
What's more problematic are the 24 floors of playing hide and seek with the stairs in the hell branches with constant interrupts.

Jeremiah wrote:IMO, extended is fun the first time you do it. And the second. Maybe even the third, but after that, as the other posters have said, going through endless Pan levels until the unique levels appear gets tedious.

I don't really see why Pan level generation can't be tweaked so that a special level is guaranteed every N levels if any ungenerated special levels remain.

KoboldLord wrote:If cuts were to be made, I could see putting Hell and Pan in rotation and cutting the generic Demonic Rune in both cases, leaving the game with 10 Runes, but I'd hate to see either be removed completely.

Making Hells and Pan an alternative branches sounds like an idea worthy of trying. Also, do not cut the Demonic rune, rather #demonicrunetoelf

KoboldLord wrote:Hell, on the other hand, has some occasional fairness issues what with paralysis that comes out of nowhere and you die from full health without being able to take another turn

Minor tangent, but that was removed in January.

sage wrote:Minor tangent, but that was removed in January.

That's good to hear. Thanks to whoever ameliorated that.

Extended is optional, and for players wanting an 'epic' size game, it can be great fun.

3 rune games are still brutally lengthy, though.
#learn-2-coffeebreak

Yeah, I'm looking forward to a roguelike that's almost as good as Crawl, but can be beaten comfortably in 5 hours or less.

how much time do you guys take to beat it, on average?

rosstin wrote:Yeah, I'm looking forward to a roguelike that's almost as good as Crawl, but can be beaten comfortably in 5 hours or less.

If you learn to play faster, you can beat Crawl in 3 hours.
I'm slow though, I can't break 7-8 hours yet.

Hirsch I wrote:how much time do you guys take to beat it, on average?

The average duration of my 3-rune wins in 0.14 and 0.15 is 3:40:13. You can get this figure for any online account with this Sequell query:

Code:: !lg [name] won recent x=avg(dur)

so much stuff to learn! thanks duv.

rosstin wrote:Yeah, I'm looking forward to a roguelike that's almost as good as Crawl, but can be beaten comfortably in 5 hours or less.

That is easy. DoomRL.

Hirsch I wrote:how much time do you guys take to beat it, on average?

I haven't won much recently, but it usually takes me less than two hours to get a couple of runes. (And my fastest win being a 1:53 hour 4-runer.)

I play webtiles though, so lag contributes a lot to making it slower.

rosstin wrote:Yeah, I'm looking forward to a roguelike that's almost as good as Crawl, but can be beaten comfortably in 5 hours or less.

I still do various silly things like having travel delay set to not -1, play on webtiles, and I've won in 5:40. Not quite under 5, but pretty close. You get faster as you get more and more wins. 5 of my more recent wins are in the 6 hour range. Harder combos or ranged/magic characters take me slightly longer to play, but I'd say it's still reasonably fast.

I kind of like the longer length, to be honest. There's a lot of coffee break roguelikes out there, there should be some full length ones as well. Crawl has a coffee break mode, which are the sprints. It's not quite the same as regular crawl, but hey at least linesprint is sort of close

nilsbloodaxe wrote:
rosstin wrote:Yeah, I'm looking forward to a roguelike that's almost as good as Crawl, but can be beaten comfortably in 5 hours or less.

That is easy. DoomRL.

IMO DoomRL suffers greatly from the fact that a lot of playing it, at least at sub-Nightmare difficulty, seems to be standing in one spot and waiting until almost every monster of the level has been shot before it can return fire, often the moment it enters LoS. I'm all for roguelikes where positioning yourself correctly is really important, but in DoomRL once you have found a good position so much time is consumed by pressing ,.ff until the level is dead that it becomes frustrating.

You do that in nightmare too, you just have to make sure there's a door in the right place.

Angel of Red Alert.

Yeah but Ao100

So does angel of red alert 'fix' DoomRL

it doesn't fix cornershooting or giftdropping

What is giftdropping? Does anyone know an article I can read to learn about it?

I think it's the practice of dropping ammo to lure enemies into convenient positions.

http://doom.chaosforge.org/wiki/Strategy:Giftdropping

Basically, from my limited experience in doomRL, if you drop certain items that monsters are interested in, they'll walk towards it. Then you can predict their movement and position yourself in a good spot to hit them when they come through the door/whatever other terrain you set them up to come through.

Hopefully you find the linked article useful as a refresher, since you wrote it

fucking dragonslayer still exists in AoRA as well

cerebovssquire wrote:Yeah but Ao100

Well, Ao100 is terrible so...

Patashu wrote:So does angel of red alert 'fix' DoomRL

'Mostly.' It adds a sizeable helping of tension and excitement besides.

Impatience, Light Travel, and Confidence are cool too. Not being able to choose Red Alert + Confidence for the dual-angel game is annoying. (FR: put Angel of Confidence in Crawl)

mikee wrote:What is giftdropping? Does anyone know an article I can read to learn about it?

Drop an item that the enemy will pickup. Enemy sees the item, walks towards the item until it sees you. Simple example is stand next to a door like this:

Code:: ......... ###-##### ..@......

Drop med packs until one randomly gets placed directly in front of the door. Then wait for target practice to start.

cerebovssquire wrote:fucking dragonslayer still exists in AoRA as well

No fucking clue how to get that in the first place :/

cerebovssquire wrote:Yeah but Ao100

i think you mean AAo666

TheDefiniteArticle wrote:No fucking clue how to get that in the first place :/

Yeah it would bother me a lot more if it existed.

KoboldLord wrote: I could see putting Hell and Pan in rotation and cutting the generic Demonic Rune in both cases, leaving the game with 10 Runes, but I'd hate to see either be removed completely.

Put Demonic Rune into Elven Halls and randomly pick three runes from Hells & Pan for a total of 10 runes.

Maybe tell the player which of those three runes will be generated upon entering the Temple.

Put Demonic Rune into Elven Hall

a man can dream

The Tavern

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