So I've played the game some more. Think problem might be more of the advice I got of "spam a single character until you win". I chose GrEE as my spam thing, and as a result all of my early interaction fell into very few categories:
1. Sandblast the enemy
2. Tab the enemy
3. Use random consumable.
After 100 games of spamming "Za", this choice tree can end up being rather boring. Especially when I've found quite a lot of early dungeon stuff doesn't threaten a gargoyle(I could tab adders and ants to death). There are of course, threats like orc priests, but I found the list of things that can't kill you was a lot bigger than the list of things that can.
So what do you do when you're bored? Pick a new character combo. So I picked DrTm.
Adders are a lot scarier when you're not a gargoyle. I've grown to respect things that can poison me.
The amount of interesting things that you can do is different here too on earlier floors.
1. Run into a threat
2. Yes you can tab, but do you need tab enhancers to kill something?(spider form, Beastly appendage)
3. Do either of those tab enhancers make you vulnerable in some other way(spider form rP-).
4. Okay if you cannot kill it with just tab, do you need snakes. If so, how many snakes? Have to conserve arrows.
In addition skill training is kind of ambiguous compared to the EE start(where you train only earth magic until LRD). You want fighting, Unarmed combat, transmutations, etc... You can to pick and choose in that regard more in early floors.
I've found that this particular start provided a lot more of a varied decision tree then the previous one I was playing.
So when bored, pick a different character.
sanka wrote:zardecil wrote:I hit "o", it stopped when grinder moved into view and paralyzed me. I then died.
This was a choice of whether or not to hit "o" for autoexplore. Not a tactics thing.
Why do you think autoexplore is not a tactics thing? Surely it is not a strategical decision, you can freely change from autoexplore to manual exploration.
Using autexplore is tactics, and a very bad one. There is a reason why streakers rarely use autoexplore early on.
How am I supposed to know that as a new player. Bring handed a tool, and then being told it's bad to use is rather counter-intuitive.
Scuka wrote:I'm gonna argue that a good permadeath game NEEDS to be long.
In a game like Spelunky, I don't care if I die because an entire run is 30-45 minutes long. If I die, I can restart and get back again to where I died very quickly. I don't mind taking risks because I don't have a lot to lose.
But if I invest hours into developing my character in a game like Dungeon Crawl, then every non-trivial situation is tense because a lot of progress is on the line. That's what makes it fun.
The tension that I had when I had reached D:15 for the first time was fantastic. Also killed emotionally when I ended up dying there(beware ettins with dire flails).
When I die on d:4 there isn't nearly that tension because I know it's just d:4.
cliffracer wrote:Dungeon is probably my favorite branch of the game. There's a lot of variety (instead of a few gimmicks like the lair branches or Orc), and it's not Oops, All Bullshit like Depths.
In my mind I tend to sort it into pre-Lair (10 and below) and post-Lair (10+). On the later levels you can start to see nastier stuff like slime creatures, ugly things, unseen horrors (if you don't have SInv access), tengu, etc. that look a lot easier after you've dipped into Lair.
Won't deny that late dungeon was pretty interesting. It was mostly the early dungeon I was talking about.
tealizard wrote:Learning about the gameplay and design of crawl is a totally reasonable step in developing ones own ideas about roguelike games with an eye to writing something oneself. If that's what you're doing though, make sure to approach the game critically with an eye to moving the ball forward. Also, just as a matter of using your time effectively, you really ought to look at a good guide to crawl tactics, like patashu's, to move your study along as quickly as possible. You should be able to win pretty quickly with the right guidance.
I don't think there's that much to learn from the crawl source outside of information about the game itself, but playing with the source and creating your own crawl variant is a valuable way to develop ideas.
Link? I'd love to read that.
I have some tactics down, like:
1. Lead enemies into known territory
2. If you can make a unit count advantage(summons, etc..) fight in an open area.
3. Fight in hallways if you can't.
4. Running away is the most powerful thing in the game, abuse the heck out of it.
5. Play like a total wuss *oh no a rat ahhhh!*
Would be interested in learning more.
johlstei wrote:Randomly dying to autoexplore once doesn't demonstrate anything. Want to give a representative sampling of the ways you've died, or is this just about pulling out the single one that would confirm your hypothesis if we foolishly generalized a single example?
PS Most people who cite autoexplore deaths actually do have turns after, even when they describe them this way. Do you have a ttyrec?
I'm not saying that most of my deaths are to RNG. Just that RNG has killed me, and that it was rather frustrating at the time. Also going to point out that a newer player is going to have a very hard time distinguishing between a mistake death, and an RNG death. This has been pointed out to me several times where what I thought was an RNG death turned out to be a mistake that had happened many, many turns before.
Think last real RNG death was my last game. Start of dungeon had a single hallway leading out. Go down that hallway and run into a hobgoblin wielding a +4 dagger of venom. I was playing DrTm, and as such I had 2 options. 1 leave dungeon and lose, 2. Fight the goblin. 1 hit later and I'm lethally poisoned. Clearly an RNG death. Crap happens.
Is every game like this? No. When I started playing there were a lot of situations that looked impossible, but were just that I shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Other death I had, the difficulty rating thing rated a pack of gnolls as a white difficulty monster. So I thought oh a d:1 hobgoblin level encounter. How very wrong that was. I died quickly.
The one main bit of criticism I have right now for the game is that it's seemingly impossible to calculate how much damage you are actually most likely to take from fighting a monster. Last time I asked about EV I got told "you want to find out if this encounter is possible? Go get a unit tester and test it 10k times". This makes it rather difficult to look at a threat and go "this can kill me, while this other thing can't". It's rather ambiguous.