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What's your favorite stable version available under crawl.develz.org/release? Please give at least one feature that you like about that version.

Looking forward to reading, thanks!

I am suspicious about your intentions. How about you offer something up first as collateral?

0.20.1. Best interface and balance of any stable version so far.

I vote for 0.16-0.17. A bunch of quality-of-life improvements, but still quite a lot of older Crawlness. It's a friendlier era for the player.

I'd pick 0.16 outright if it wasn't for shadow traps.

I always play trunk and so far haven't disliked any changes enough to want to switch to any old stable versions. I just play "Crawl", a constantly updated game, and part of the game for me is playing through the development cycle. The game is constantly getting better imo.

I'm a returning player--I've played off and on since .05 IIRC, however I've come and gone from the game due to RL stuff including some mild tendonitis. I love 0.20! I plan to switch to trunk eventually, but right now I'm having too much fun with the current stable version.

As I've seen Crawl go through changes, I don't necessarily love every single change, but what I love is that the constant development keeps the game fresh. In order to get the fresh changes I love, I have to accept the changes I don't like. For anything I miss, there's something else new and cool to love, or maybe even something old I never noticed.

The overall direction of the game in the time I've been mostly inactive is to make the game a little shorter and simpler. That's fantastic in my book! Crawl is still plenty long and complex enough.

What cjo said.

The stuff I miss was ridiculously overpowered (R.I.P. disc of storms).

It also matters whether you play for 3 runes or for 15. If you go for all runes, 0.17 is by far the best version, and 0.20 is awful beyond words. In 3 runes, the differences are smaller.

My answer does not qualify but Linley's Dungeon Crawl 3.20 had one great feature: you only needed one rune to enter Zot.

(It also had a bad feature of allowing control teleport everywhere but nevermind that.)

Magipi wrote:It also matters whether you play for 3 runes or for 15. If you go for all runes, 0.17 is by far the best version, and 0.20 is awful beyond words. In 3 runes, the differences are smaller.

Just to be clear, "best" for what reason do you think?

It may seem ironic I'm asking since I think that was the only version I've ever gotten 15 runes in... But I very rarely get to the point where I see near 15 as a realistic pursuit. And I think the game is perhaps big enough that there could be more than one possible reason.

I assume some kind of objection to the mutation changes and/or yellow wand removal.

The key item to an enjoyable extended game is a ring of teleportation. (The real one, not the crude mockery that exists in current versions). With that, you can hop-hop-hop through extended, which is much faster and also more exciting than slogging through.
(As a slight aside, in the top score world record game Charly used it 263 times).

When you have only a tele wand, that is less good, but still okay. When you don't even have that, that's terrible. Enjoy those nameless Pan floors, my friend, you'll be there for a long-long time!

And on top of destroying the tele wand, 0.20 also has stupid newtomb, which is just an awful experience.

(And no, I don't mind the new mutation system much. I think the whole system of mutations is annoying and uninteresting. But if we have it in the game, than the new system is not worse than the old one, and possibly even better.)

I'm kinda stuck with 0.20.

I mean i noticed many people don't like too much. Yet still I really like scarves and the removal of all those utility wands. Sounds a bit weird but somehow I felt like these were way too strong in their own rights. Right now we have to actually care about our resource pool and how to manage.

What I don't like about 0.20 though is that with these changes some races like the Mummy are kinda like stuck to some decisions to be able to clear the game properly. 0.20 is the version where you are going to play Gozag for your Mummies. I think there could be some ideas else than that but I see how the removal of the utility wands gimped this species hard.

Overall I like the things 0.20 did to the game and removing some items which bring too much comfort to the game sounds pretty nice to me. Also the introduction of the noise meter is great.

One might dislike my point of view here but I certainly think that removal of too comfortable items is good for the game in long terms. We do want a challenge or no?

The one thing I am not sure about in 0.20 is cloud immunity scarves. Generally speaking, I don't think it was strictly needed to create a new item category for these effects, and 3 AC would have gone OK with them, but that's a minor thing. The problem with cloud immunity, however, is that it's the kind of item you lug around "just in case". However, it cannot be easily swapped to because it's armour. So you carry it around for: Volcano, ice cave, wizlab. You can leave it down and recover it if you want to do swamp, L:5-6 or hell. I don't think it stimulates fun. It would have been better on a cloak, because, at least, it's always useful because of the AC bonus. So you would actually wear it instead of just carrying it.

Something that I also don't get is why invisibility is still a cloak instead of a scarf, which would have been a little nerf to one of the most powerful items in the game. Probably certain scarf effects could have been set on cloaks and invisibility, resistance and spirit be the only scarves. Some effects seem to deliberately step on Qaz's feet (cloud immunity and rmsl).

Otherwise, I am enjoying this version much more than the previous ones. The work on wands has been very well done, although it's not yet complete. The new mutation system also is good, or at least much better than it earlier was. Some problems in inventory constraints have been addressed, new mutation being an example, as well as the decrease in food types.

So, all in all, 0.20.

0.17, though there are a few things I would change in it. 0.16 would be the next runner up but, shadow traps...

Also I enjoy doing turn-count speedruns and that has basically been repeatedly shit on in versions after 0.17 through various removals, spell changes, and branch changes.

I don't like the noise meter. It's like exclamation points rather than damage numbers. It doesn't tell the player what's really going on with noise, it just gives a coarse indication of relative magnitude. Noise is something that happens on the map and showing the player what it does means showing them something on the map.

The last release I thought was really good was .17, as in a significant and unqualified improvement over past releases. Since then, there have been some good interface and content changes, especially removing and replacing items. A lot of the recent content additions, especially gods, are not so good, either in not fitting in the game (Pakellas, Uskayaw, the Council thing) or just representing missed opportunities to fix existing gods (Hepliaklqana). The autobutcher stuff is a big interface improvement, yet it is a half-measure that breathes unholy life into the long undeath of food in crawl. I am also not keen on the way duration spells have been approached since .17. I believe the current approach is a dead end.

In general, I find all stable versions of dcss totally unplayable.

Removing yellow wands didn't affect mummies much imo. It's not like you were getting a wand of hasting every game. Adding Gozag had a huge (and really bad) effect on mummies, though. The god is 80% about removing the primary distinguishing feature of the species, and 20% about encouraging straight-up grinding.

Version 0.15 for me, because of the complete removal of item weight, and of item destruction. It made playing a lot more fun, and I play to have fun.

Is the double-damage melee bug allowed to be present?

watertreatmentRL wrote:I don't like the noise meter. It's like exclamation points rather than damage numbers. It doesn't tell the player what's really going on with noise, it just gives a coarse indication of relative magnitude. Noise is something that happens on the map and showing the player what it does means showing them something on the map.

I personally like it, because it's extremely visible, and I perceive the colour changes even if I am not looking at it. It's also useful for unspoiled players, in that it allows them to build a relative scale of noisiness of different sounds -- like how a creaking door is as loud as shouting, immolation is as loud as scroll of noise, and gong, alarm traps and two orbs hitting each other are around the same level. Yes, there could be a version with numbers, or a way to more clearly showing travel distance on the map, but this already is a huge step up.

Shtopit wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:I don't like the noise meter. It's like exclamation points rather than damage numbers. It doesn't tell the player what's really going on with noise, it just gives a coarse indication of relative magnitude. Noise is something that happens on the map and showing the player what it does means showing them something on the map.

I personally like it, because it's extremely visible, and I perceive the colour changes even if I am not looking at it. It's also useful for unspoiled players, in that it allows them to build a relative scale of noisiness of different sounds -- like how a creaking door is as loud as shouting, immolation is as loud as scroll of noise, and gong, alarm traps and two orbs hitting each other are around the same level. Yes, there could be a version with numbers, or a way to more clearly showing travel distance on the map, but this already is a huge step up.

I don't have a strong opinion about this overall yet, but I do feel like the bar is easier to see (at least slightly easier) than squinting to figure out if that is 2,3, or 4 exclamation points exactly. The exclamations are a narrow symbol which is just horrible for me to count against surrounding characters in a small font, they are only there until a few lines of events scroll off the bottom of the screen in tiles, and it is the bottom of the screen which has always been an area I found too easy to completely ignore for all the stats like HP that sit toward the top.

I agree it might be neat to have some accounting for how far sound travels, but I'm not sure quite how one would represent that on the floor without cluttering up the game. Possibly some light translucent color or outline, something akin to umbra or perhaps more subtle still (maybe just a brief shadow/outline on the edges of the affected area or just an overall map overlay view of it flashes up).

stoneychips wrote:
Shtopit wrote:
watertreatmentRL wrote:I don't like the noise meter. It's like exclamation points rather than damage numbers. It doesn't tell the player what's really going on with noise, it just gives a coarse indication of relative magnitude. Noise is something that happens on the map and showing the player what it does means showing them something on the map.

I personally like it, because it's extremely visible, and I perceive the colour changes even if I am not looking at it. It's also useful for unspoiled players, in that it allows them to build a relative scale of noisiness of different sounds -- like how a creaking door is as loud as shouting, immolation is as loud as scroll of noise, and gong, alarm traps and two orbs hitting each other are around the same level. Yes, there could be a version with numbers, or a way to more clearly showing travel distance on the map, but this already is a huge step up.

I don't have a strong opinion about this overall yet, but I do feel like the bar is easier to see (at least slightly easier) than squinting to figure out if that is 2,3, or 4 exclamation points exactly. The exclamations are a narrow symbol which is just horrible for me to count against surrounding characters in a small font, they are only there until a few lines of events scroll off the bottom of the screen in tiles, and it is the bottom of the screen which has always been an area I found too easy to completely ignore for all the stats like HP that sit toward the top.

I agree it might be neat to have some accounting for how far sound travels, but I'm not sure quite how one would represent that on the floor without cluttering up the game. Possibly some light translucent color or outline, something akin to umbra or perhaps more subtle still (maybe just a brief shadow/outline on the edges of the affected area or just an overall map overlay view of it flashes up).

There exists (or existed) a mode for noise propigation visualizaiton in debug by compiling with DEBUG_NOISE_PROPAGATION (Which generates an HTML showing the noise propagation for noise sources. If you just want to see how it works for yourself.

Also: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7068 a topic in which the 'heard noise' bar was propsed... in 2013

I liked 0.17 to abuse the broken throwing mechanics. 0.16 was even better for that (+3 throwing apt anyone?), but I hate circle LOS and shadow traps.

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