[Tulpa]

You can absolutely damage turrets. They're just like any enemy except they're immobile, and most potions will do nothing to a turret.
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[Oh God Spiders No]

Unfortunately the lightning staff has zero charges at the moment.

Re: why is my shit not ID'd... I have no idea, usually I have a drinkfest somewhere around d:5. This particular game I've been playing in little chunks so I guess I forgot.
Honestly when I started playing it this round I was genuinely shocked when that wraith popped up; I hadn't realized I was already at D:11.

The turrets can be killed just like normal enemies.

I have those staffs of blinking, and all the bad potions affect everybody in the area, so maybe I could just drink them willy-nilly and blink out of there if it's bad, stay and fight if it's good.
A descent potion could still be potentially disastrous, though...
I should also ask before I try this: are wraiths immune to anything?
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[Tulpa]

there's a current bug that makes a descent potion super helpful in this situation though. Only one of these things actually appear on the floor below when a descent potion is used: you, the monsters, or items, prioritized in that order. So if you drink a descent potion you'll actually escape the Wraith entirely and hopefully get back to D:11 in time to kick the Wraith's ass.
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[Oh God Spiders No]

Oh, nice! Thanks! I'm going to try quaffing some shit when I play tonight.

My strategy will be to try saving my healing potions, while still playing conservatively and drinking them if there's even a little risk that I'll die otherwise.
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[mauve]

Today is slow as hell so I played it for the first time today.

Floor 8, ran away from an ogre, tripped an unseen paralysis plate. Survived, then a nearby jelly stepped on it. Didn't survive that time.

This is pretty interesting as far as roguelikes go. I like the more puzzle-focused ones out there and this seems to lean that way rather than "learn every single possible nuance of the mechanics" like certain other entries.
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twit

[Oh God Spiders No]

My favorite thing about it is the interesting dungeons it generates. Rogue, Nethack, Crawl, and Shiren are (pretty much) just box rooms connected by tunnels. This, on the other hand, has places that feel like real places.
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[bza]

Nethack and Crawl are way more than boxes connected by tunnels. Heck, Crawl even has a chain of islands with tides as one of the branches!
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[Tulpa]

Hey anyone got any tips for managing dar blademasters? I just died to a pair of them again. I just keep running into them without any ranged weapons to take them out before they blink to me.
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[Oh God Spiders No]

I was exaggerating a bit, but I have a point when you put them next to Brogue. Unless things go crazy near the end?

[GrimmSweeper]

Crawl goes crazy near the mid-game with some of the rune branches (Swamp, Shoals, Slime, Tomb). Nethack gets decidedly non-boxy during the trip through the Elemental Planes.

[mauve]

Nethack's level generator is rubbish. Sorry. 40% boxes-with-tunnels, 40% one-tile-wide-mazes(why), and the rest are all premade maps, sometimes with variants swapped in from game to game. Elemental Planes are all static and premade, with some random item placement.
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twit

[Tulpa]

Yeah I was gonna say the only non-boxy levels in nethack are premade.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

despite winning I returned to this game.
what kind of jerk roguelike makes an allied monster hostile when you polymorph it

also I wonder why this computer thinks Stone Soup is substantially more intensive than Brogue.

[Tulpa]

huh. I don't think that's an intended behavior. they're usually not supposed to become hostile when polymorphed.
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[Oh God Spiders No]

[bza]

If you're playing Crawl online it's gonna be laggy due to the tournament. No idea why it would have performance issues locally.
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[Oh God Spiders No]

Oh, I entirely misread DAIS' post and pulled the exact opposite meaning. Never mind.
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[Norberton]

I like watching this game play itself. They should've had that setting on by default.

Like an interruptible attract mode.

[Tulpa]

I started playing really risky once I got too confident in my latest game. I got to D:22. I died to a tentacle horror because I was underleveled but I brought it down to 1 hit from death through really smart play right before I died.

I can't believe I got that close to winning. That's only 4 floors from the amulet.
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[OffalAl]

[Norberton]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

I can't believe it didn't sink in that it's a full 26 levels until I read Tulpa's post. I suppose it was willful ignorance. I was under the impression that it was in the mid-teens to clear the game, with the kind of enemies you run into at the lowest levels from a much wider pool of monsters. I don't think I'll ever get anywhere near that - by level 8 or 9 I can't help but search every few steps because traps, and I never explore efficiently.

I wish I knew enough about the relevant stuff to know more about how this game generates packs of enemies. I suppose I just need to keep using potions of telepathy, but are some monster packs spawned that way (like a group of sleeping jackals or wandering monkeys or a little party of goblins). Do any other roguelikes do that?

also I need to stop using wands of plenty on ogres. They look cool bunched up like that but they keep setting off and dying from poison gas traps.

[mauve]

21st floor, killed myself by mashing too hard on combat on what I thought was only one enemy, but was instead a one + a phantom that killed me. (On reviewing the recording, it had a 13% chance of hitting me, which it did twice in a row. Ugh come on.)

I'm not liking how random the early game in this can be, it feels like sometimes you just don't get what's needed to survive later on, so it's a bit of a crapshoot. I didn't find a single scroll of remove curse or protect armor that entire game, so I'm lucky nothing was cursed!

Amusingly, on reviewing the replay, I discovered that the runic weapon I found was a +1 dagger of dar battlemage slaying. Most useful weapon ever.
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twit

[Tulpa]

Use wands of plenty on troll allies, they regenerate so fast.

On my last game I had an awesome troll posse including one that could fly and blink and another that could cast protection spells on everyone. Got to D:21 and died to a lich, a phantom, a dar battlemage and a revenant all attacking me at once. I could have survived but I accidentally turned capslock on as I pressed 'a', turning on autoplay mode instead of drinking a potion like I wanted to.

I got a couple of golem allies in that game, I thought they were pretty useless. For dudes that are supposed to have a ton of health, they had less than 50% from a single centaur attacking them for maybe 20 turns.

DAIS there are deeper floors too, that you collect lumenstones from to increase your score, but that's all optional.

mauve I agree that the early game is seemingly a bit too random. I feel like the game becomes much harder/riskier without a potion of detect magic and those are seemingly the rarest thing to find on the first 4 floors. mid and late-game when you're most in control of your situation but also have to contend with the deadliest floors (around when your visibility drops to 10 tiles in any direction) is really good though.

I also hate when the game seeds vampire bats on D:2 since there's no way I can physically kill them that early in the game. They're worse than Ogres on D:4.
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[T.]

i've only made it to floor 5 yet but i will beat this game i swear it
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o tempora, o mores

[mauve]

So.

Was on floor 15 or 16 or something, saw a pack of 3 ogres. Lured them back into a hallway so I could zot all of them with my staff of lightning and start hacking them to bits.

Zombie came up out of nowhere behind me. I think, okay, yeah, that's easy to survive, my armor's good.

Behind the ogres comes a will of the wisp.

So now I'm surrounded, on fire, next to a zombie and a pack of ogres. Okay, I can actually survive this since I have a lot of healing potions.

I decide to kill the ogres and the wisp, and get out of the fire ASAP, so I use my staff of blink on the far wall.

Click.

Paralysis trap, of course.

My own fault for not going to a tile I'd already stepped on, but, seriously. Fuck this game.

(Also, the out-of-depth monsters are a new addition in 1.6.2, and they are certainly making me rage. There's no guarantee that they'll keep that feature, fortunately. The majority of my games end before floor 5 because of some random bullshit I have no sane way of dealing with. My favorite is still the bog monster 3 steps from the stairs on floor 4.)

[Tulpa]

Yes I sincerely hope that the out of depth monsters are dropped since they make the early game way too luck based. Even as far as depth 9, I feel, an out of depth monster might be simply impossible to defeat.

Now, when sighting an out of depth monster, I drink ID all the potions I have more than one of, and read ID all my extra copies of scrolls.
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[mauve]

If I'm past floor 7 i will almost always get to 15+ before finding a stupid, careless way to die, so yeah. ("Stepped on a paralysis trap near an arrow turret", "Stuck in spider webs while an invisible phantom runs up and kills me in two turns, how did he even get over there through the webs", "Why the hell was there no food for 7 floors????", etc)

I could live without the vampire bats on the second/third floors. If you aggro them you either fight or die trying. There is no other option.

Early ogres are pretty annoying too but at least you can run from them. Same for pink jellies.

Actually ran into goblin totems on floor _2_ the other day. Yeah trying to face a hasted goblin pack at that point is pretty futile.

I understand why they added them in but holy shit. The game does a lot right but this is really unfair.

[Tulpa]

I generally think the RNG has issues. Dar blade masters at depth 8 on a run with no armor is pretty impossible to deal with.
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[bza]

Totally just won my first game of DCSS online, pretty happy about it despite it taking forever 'cause I mostly played at school and was afk for half the time! Ended up grabbing 6/15 runes; skipped the Hells and Pandemonium because Spriggans have such low HP :(

http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/0.10/bza/morgue-bza-20120323-053050.txt

Next goal is to win in Brogue! My best so far is floor 20 or so before being wrecked by traps while running from a lich and a tentacle beast or whatever they're called.

[absolutego]

'grats bza! i got my first streak last week, three straight. :)
i played a bit of brogue a few weeks ago, and my first impressions were quite good. it gets a lot right, specially interface-wise (with a caveat that sometimes i have a hard time parsing what i see because glyphs can be hard to discriminate; probably a palette issue). it was also my experience that the RNG is a bit wonky: there are situations early on that seem inescapable, specially since monsters follow you across levels, and there is only a staircase on every level. i've tried potions of descent and throwing myself over a chasm, but that can land you in a mess too. i guess i have some learning to do. i've put it aside for a while.

[Oh God Spiders No]

There's a minor cheat available in the most recent version.

If you hold control at the startup screen, you can create a "custom" new game, which allows you to choose the seed for dungeon generation.

Here's the cheat part: If you lose and then start a new game in this fashion, it will autofill with the seed from the game you just lost. So if you had a really promising game last round you can use this to start over in the same dungeon.

[bza]

Still chugging away at Brogue, the RNG seems ridiculous. Although it's tempting, I won't be using the custom game thing...

Is there a way to find out how a weapon compares to the one you're using? I keep wondering if something I found is better but I'm not sure how to test besides just hitting dudes and making a guess!

Also an example Crawl map, just to show the complex level generation in the plain ol' dungeon levels:

[mauve]

Equip it, hover the mouse/cursor/whatever over an enemy. It'll tell you the damage and chance to hit. That won't account for unknown stat modifiers though.

A better weapon at -5 or -7.50 or sometimes even -10 weight penalty is usually better than the crappy garbage dagger you start off with, as long as you can hit the enemy.
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twit

[Oh God Spiders No]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Sometimes it's useful to equip a weapon somewhat heavier than recommended, such as an axe or spear when facing a crowd of enemies (or a jelly). Identified, useful magical side effects are are another reason.
That said, does anyone bother to use maces/war hammers? I usually just throw them at enemies.

I've used repeat dungeon a few times to see how far autopilot got without my help. You know, as an ego massage.

Most of my ideas about this game at this point somewhat hinge on how out of depth monsters at tweaked, since that's usually my biggest problem (that and poor decisions, of course). If I had any initiative, I'd mess with the source and play with some ideas I have, since the core game is so simple and the interface so nice, but I don't so....

(ex: a mod to replace wands with seeds, which when planted can turn into trees that produce mangos, common grass seed that will spread like creeping death, flower fields that will cause enemies to sleep/start wandering if previously hunting, noxious flowers that will indiscriminately belch out tiny poison gas clouds occasionally, spore plants that will repeatedly spawn weak nuisance enemies, etc)

(come to think of it, is there any enemy that swarms towards bloody tiles when they are present but prefers to feed off them if the player is far enough away? There should be. Dungeon sharks)

I do think certain factors besides a Ring of Awareness should cut down the number of turns it takes for a secret door to appear. I realize it wouldn't be a risk/reward thing if it always took one turn even while standing right next to it, and you can apparently detect them from several tiles away, but it'd be nice if you could find them in one turn if, say, you have seen them from both sides.

[mauve]

War hammers have absurd average damage. Like "can kill ogres in a single hit" high. Think of them as the alpha strike weapon in the game: Kill them before they get a chance to do anything. On certain types of enemies this is really useful sometimes, but I don't think they're a good main weapon because against groups or some faster enemies that will make you regret it.

Even the weaker maces do at least twice as much damage as anything less than a broadsword or war axe.

If it's supplemented by, say, a staff of lightning or something, you should be pretty well set though.
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twit

[Tulpa]

I did it! I ascended!

http://www.mediafire.com/?9pbasef27rj6arj check it out guys! I hope this recording plays back for you folks. Note how around floor 20 I really started rushing through the floors because the difficulty plateaued at that point.

This was a really hard game, though! I have had much easier runs done in by a stupid mistake. I only won this game because of careful diligence.
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[Oh God Spiders No]

Congrats Tulpa! I've downloaded the recording and it works, but I'm going to review it when it's not 1:30AM.
I have a feeling I'm still very, very far away from my first ascension. Hopefully I'll learn from you.
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[HarveyQ]

[Broco]

I was doing really well yesterday and got to Floor 19 (the first time I've gone deep enough to see the "chaotic embers"). Then I got greedy and decided to grab a key even though I probably didn't need any better equipment to ascend (I was feeling confident and how bad could the trap be?).

Three Golems, a Naga and a Troll popped out of statues. I had never even seen a Golem before; looking at their stats I saw that three of them was way more than I could handle. They are vulnerable to Negation but I had none of that; and I had a pixie ally who can sometimes cast Negation but she just cast a lot of Slowness and Discord until she died. I tried to manuever into a doorjam but stepped on a paralysis trap; miraculously I survived until the end of paralysis thanks to my pixie's spells making them not attack me as much. I used an unidentified scroll; it was a teleport scroll so I got out of there (not that lucky; odds were pretty good that that was it). But I still didn't have a path to the down staircase so in my final mistake, I tried to kill the golems using the old hide-behind-door-and-warhammer trick, but it wasn't enough and they killed me. I should've tried harder to avoid fighting them at this point, since I had Telepathy and could be smarter about it.