Request for Updated Walkthroughs

[1158511]

Dear super talented community,

If you haven't noticed us, the newer players, ask a lot of questions. Ask a lot of the same questions. That has got to get tedious. So proposal here, I think a potential solution would be updated walkthroughs. Because the existing ones are like on .11. If someone of you kind crawlers could write an updated walkthrough that would be super appreciated and I believe would significantly reduce the amount of redundant threads. I myself I'm thinking about writing one but I know deep down in my heart it will be the blind leading the blind.

Why do I say this? Because I was just about post yet another thread about my character in a specific point of the game. I would have receive great responses however it won't benefit the next newbie player who invariably gets his character to my point in the game and has the same questions.

[Implojin]

May I ask where you are finding a 0.11 walkthrough, and where you would like this kind of thing to be updated?

[Fingolfin]

Look at this one :
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Majang%27s_Caster_Walk-Through
It's from 0.17 (almost up to date) and it's very exhaustive and complete, and I learned a lot with it. (it also helped me get my first win, which incidentally wasn't a GrEE)

[Sprucery]

Look at this one :
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Majang%27s_Caster_Walk-Through
It's from 0.17 (almost up to date) and it's very exhaustive and complete, and I learned a lot with it. (it also helped me get my first win, which incidentally wasn't a GrEE)

I just skimmed through it and it seems to suggest getting both Shatter and Fire Storm for a 3-rune game. "You’ll want those spells, and getting them online is now your most pressing need." That quote is from before getting the first rune...

It also suggests doing 3 levels of Lair rune branches before doing D:15. That's also bad advice imo.

[Fingolfin]

The aim of the walkthrough is not to give optimal play, it's to allow novice players to play (and win) a specific character (gargoyle nuker) and I think it achieves it pretty well. Following the advice in the guide almost to the letter did get me a 5-rune GrEE win and another GrEE (or GrWz, not sure) found 14 runes before dying on Dis:7, so the advice can't be all that bad. Also, the guide goes to great lengths to explain what is dangerous in each branch and why, some inventory management, some strategy and tactics points and many other things that are not easy to understand by yourself.

This walk-through will not only talk about strategy and tactics, but it will also explain some of the basic game mechanics, particularly those related to casting spells.

[Magipi]

That guide was discussed here in another thread. viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20458

In my eyes, the most accurate comment is this.

it is a mix of some good and quite a lot of bad advice, both of which are mixed up together and buried under a deluge of information that is not really necessary, with some misleading or just flat out incorrect stuff thrown in.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

So, in essence, better guides would be good. That is what was requested above.

In my view complete guides are pretty tricky to get right. My recommendation would be to split this into (at least) three aspects:

1) A guide of general advice (don't walk towards monsters, fight one enemy at a time, use stairs/doors/corridors, don't worry about food, etc.).
2) Specific game (not characters) review, where a good player talks through some of their strategic decisions, like god, weapon, armour, spell and branch choices.
3) Tactics, where potential actions (consumable, movement, spells, invocations, etc.) are evaluated for specific dangerous situations.

Now, 2) is already available in YASD/YAVP. 3) happens fairly regularly on the forum. And many threads contain bits of 1), but not very well compiled.

[Fingolfin]

Sorry for misleading you with that guide then, I really believed it could help.

[tasonir]

One thing that always divides the crawl community on guides is how in depth to be - new players want to see as much explanation as possible and details like most dangerous monsters in each branch, recommending specific spells, etc. Experienced players want much fewer details because they might pick different things depending on what generates or because some generally good advice might not always apply in other cases, etc. Big level 9 blasty spells are often helpful for newer players, but become less important when you know how to split up groups and fight slowly, so experienced players don't want to 'waste' all of the experience trying to get them castable.

I myself wrote the Melee Naga guide (linked in my signature), which suffers from these common problems as well as having a somewhat tricky scope issue: it should probably be reworded to just be melee cheibriados characters, rather than nagas. Nagas used to be great for it in .10 when I wrote it, but now that they don't get constriction from level 1, the early game is very difficult with Chei.

A generic guide for how to build fighters, hybrids and casters would be helpful, and then maybe a branch order or monster guide, but it's tough to balance all of the variance in crawl with the "do this to win" kind of advice new players are often looking for.

[1158511]

I agree with the above comments, writing any sort of walkthrough is a difficult thing to do because there is such a large amount of information. Each class and each race is going to have a specific game plan. Tasonir definitely has a point but I think they don't have to be in depth. It seems like the guides are individually trying to tackle the entire game which makes it a daunting task. If a general guide was made with the basics, it would be less intensive writing a guide assuming the player knows the basics. I also think that specific bare bones skilling guides would be excellent. Like for a enchanter level up this, this, this that. Granted that could be accomplished by looking at a morgue files of great players. Unfortunately I don't know how to do that and I'd imagine newer players don't either. @ Implojin I was looking on the wiki for current guides, (http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Character_guides). Is there a better place?

[quik]

There are Youtube channels with nice up-to-date walkthroughs. You can find them on the right bar of https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/.

[Majang]

First, in response to the original question, I have brought http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Majang's_Ca ... lk-Through up to version 20, in one fell swoop jumping three versions.

Second, as the writer of a walkthrough, I want to spill some ink on the question as to why I would spend time and effort on something that is not that much appreciated by really good players. The reason is that this kind of advice helped me a lot to get going in the game, when I knew neither right nor left. In those days I was benefiting from Mr. K's excellent guides, and his equally enjoyable diaries. Reading through these, I understood a lot more about the game and what to do than from collecting the same information (which is available!) on countless individual wiki pages. These pages give you helpful snippets of information, but they never add up to something like a strategy, or a way to go about the game. This you only get from looking at a particular game, as suggested above. But a morgue file does not give you a reasoning behind the decisions the player made at any given time, and it does not exactly tell the reader about the skill training plan the player followed. And a morgue file is not exactly fun to read.

Yes, a walkthrough does not give you an optimal way to play a game, because it cannot account for all the random things the game throws at you; it provides a fairly fixed path to victory, which in many cases could profitably be altered depending on what happens. But once you can accept that, a new player can certainly take advantage from the advice, as long as it is not bad advice.

My (and other) walkthroughs have been criticized for providing bad advice (I have read the relevant threads in this forum), but almost all examples of that have in turn been hotly disputed by others, and in the end it seems to boil down to the fact that some people just don't like walkthroughs, no matter what advice they give. These people I can just warmly invite to heartily ignore all walkthroughs, or to suggest on the talk page as to how they can be improved. Blanket statements such as "all walkthroughs are ridiculously bad" by experienced and successful players might deprive newbies of just what they need to get to their first victory. Had I read these comments here before seeing Mr. K's excellent works, it might have driven me off the game in those days.

Back to the original question: one of the challenges each walkthrough faces is that it becomes a little bit more obsolete with each new version that comes out. I have the choice of watching the walkthrough rot on its page (the choice Mr. K seems to have taken), or investing a lot of time and energy in keeping it up to date. Sometimes this is impossible, when changes to the game render the whole walkthrough irredeemably obsolete (when a species or background gets entirely scrapped, for example). This is the problem with me as the author attaching my name to the walkthrough, which is now something that I regret having done. It scares off people who might be motivated to update things without the permission they believe they need from me. Eventually I may want to turn my back to the game, but then if nobody else feels free to keep it alive, I would probably have to delete my own walkthrough.

[MainiacJoe]

Majang's guide was my second win, after MiBe. I learned a lot from it, in particular what to expect from various upcoming branches.

[tasonir]

Yeah, for all the flaws with guides I've had quite a few, probably at least 5 people although I haven't kept count, tell me they got their first or an early win following my guide. I mostly feel a bit bad now that constriction was moved to mid game, but aside from that it isn't really that hard of a plan to follow. If you can survive lair it helps people get through the late game.

One thing a lot of experienced players forget is that for newbies, the late game is actually harder than the early the game, because they've practiced the early game 300 times, but have never entered zot once, so they don't know what to do there. Having a build with high late game power helps new players more than experienced players who are probably going to dive through zot rather than clear it anyways...I still clear zot for some unknown reason, it makes me feel safer