What do you like/dislike about roguelikes

[Awor Szurkrarz]

What is Crawl like?

Does it have Tactics or something similar, overland map, towns, unique NPCs, etc?

 

[DakaSha]

No its a barebones dungeon crawl. It is quite 'uninteresting' but it is still a very very good roguelike. Stone soup enhances it quite a bit.
It may be 'less interesting' but it is also quite a bit mroe polished.
Adom is just A LOT more atmospheric for one thing

 

[DakaSha]

THAT SAID, the geometric maneuvering like you get in good squad tactics is still pretty primitive in the roguelikes I've played, there are minor considerations but mostly you just want to back into a corridor and fight one monster at a time. It's an acknowledged weakness and people are thinking about how to unfuck it.

Incursion, though unfinished and problematic in its current state, actually has extremly complex tactical oppurtunities.. Incursion seriously is my best contender for greatest fantasy RL of al time and i cant wait for the 'real' release. (Which will have an overhead map and factions and shit)

Ive had 15 min long battles with a single(!) enemy. That may sound tedius but it was the most fun ive ever had in a RL.. even though i was the dead one in the end

It was some kind of mage that kept turning into a spider and sending summoned monsters at me while i was slipping on the ice floor.. god was it awesome

edit: to elaborate incursion actually allows for complex character builds that you will seriously be thinking about when you level up. One of my fav builds is a kobold warrior/mage that uses spider climb to crawl on the ceilings of the dungeon undetected and then drop down on the unsuspecting enemies.

Small races fight better in enclosed spaces, stealth is actually useful (and overpowered in fact in the last release), things like rushing an opponent and knocking them to the ground then laying a power blow on them with a battleax are viable tactics

all weapons actually behave as they should.. spears reach farther and chain weapons can be used to disarm opponents.. polearms can trip oppents etc etc etc. Incursion is the fucking shit.

Just be aware that the current version is a 'teaser' its just the devs test medium for the game.. the real game is currently in the works and with all probability will be the (extreme?) fucking shit. That said the current version is def playable as a pure dungeon crawl and fun as hell (although with a tedius and cumbersome learning curve/ interface)

Fuck i should play it

edit again: Oh.. it also has very viable party opportunities xD. although a bit buggy now they are def 'part of the game'
However you dont design the party at the beginning. you can just pretty much get any monster/humanoid/animal on your team somehow.. Talking, Hiring, Summoning all exist

 

[sirfink]

What is Crawl like?

Does it have Tactics or something similar, overland map, towns, unique NPCs, etc?

Pretty much none of those things. DCSS is very streamlined. It's taken all the best stuff of major roguelikes and done away with all the annoying and fairly useless stuff.

Huge variety of character types and builds and combat is very tactical.

 

[Zomg]

(although with a tedius and cumbersome learning curve/ interface)

Yeah it's holding me back, I didn't ever crack a 3rd edition book got no fingerholds to learn it from.

 

[DakaSha]

What is Crawl like?

Does it have Tactics or something similar, overland map, towns, unique NPCs, etc?

Pretty much none of those things. DCSS is very streamlined. It's taken all the best stuff of major roguelikes and done away with all the annoying and fairly useless stuff.

Huge variety of character types and builds and combat is very tactical.

Thats a pretty biased and subjective way to describe it.. But yes if you just want pure hack and slash it is prob the best one out there

 

[DakaSha]

(although with a tedius and cumbersome learning curve/ interface)

Yeah it's holding me back, I didn't ever crack a 3rd edition book got no fingerholds to learn it from.

For the record everything is explained in game.. so the feats etc dont need to be looked up. Id say give it a try.. even if it pisses you off during a day of learning you will prob be amazed if tactics are what you want.
You do have to be a bit open to some crap though, again its not a 'real' release. I def think the good outweighs the bad but thats me

 

[Zomg]

When I was a kid I liked learning systems period, no game necessary; now I really gotta have an immediate application. I keep waiting for a spergier than normal mood to seize me and get me into Incursion but it hasn't happened yet. I really wasted a good sperg jag learning the rules and interface of Dwarf Fortress.

 

[DakaSha]

Haha, hey everyone is different and i can understand. Im really expect the real game to be a bit (maybe alot) more accesable.
Maybe not mechanics wise but if the overall interface is improved it will make learning the game mechanics that much easier.

I just downloaded again.. gonna get my ass whipped by shit catching me flat footed

 

[Topher]

I too loved Incursion and am awaiting the eventual full release.

 

[7hm]

What is Crawl like?

Does it have Tactics or something similar, overland map, towns, unique NPCs, etc?

You're probably better off playing DCSS than Crawl as it does add quite a bit.

It doesn't have an overland map, it's a strict dungeon crawl (as the name indicates). It also doesn't have towns or NPCs. There are different branches of the dungeon to provide variety; you'll find animals and such in Lair, orcs and ogres and such in the Orc mines, swamp themed monsters in the Swamp, etc. There are also a lot of interesting portals - short one level "branches" that are not random but which show up randomly (and can be missed if you don't reach them fast enough) - they typically but not always contain more difficult monsters and better loot.

DCSS is a fairly stripped down game. It is intended that every decision you have to make should be meaningful; non-meaningful choices are to be removed. This is a process of course, they're not there yet. The vast majority of skills / items have a valid use and they're usually fairly obvious. You get more depth when combining skills / items than through single use of said item or ability.

The character choices are pretty good. Builds play very differently through a large portion of the game, though eventually they do kind of converge into fairly similar hybrid builds. There are a lot of races and backgrounds with very different early games.

A great thing with DCSS is that it's open source and being developed with great regularity. And people are encouraged to develop for it - through fixing / improving documentation, adding vaults (premade map sections), adding patches, etc. That's a great advantage for DCSS I think, though it does lead to some ass choices sometimes, like the armor nerf from .6 and .7 which killed heavy armour characters.

It has the best exploration / stash management system I've seen in a roguelike, by far. This really does help cut down on tedium.

John Harris has a great intro - I've linked the four or five posts he made on the second post of my let's play.

 

[Rpgsaurus]

Re: Incursion

Did any of you run into the problem, though, that when you get deep enough into the dungeon
enemies start summoning help so quickly that the game lags to a halt (or crashes)? This made it
unplayable for me.

Too bad, it also had very pretty ASCII graphics, probably one of the best out there.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

What is Crawl like?

Does it have Tactics or something similar, overland map, towns, unique NPCs, etc?

Pretty much none of those things.

Oh. It's not for me then.

 

[DakaSha]

Re: Incursion

Did any of you run into the problem, though, that when you get deep enough into the dungeon
enemies start summoning help so quickly that the game lags to a halt (or crashes)? This made it
unplayable for me.

Too bad, it also had very pretty ASCII graphics, probably one of the best out there.

I never got that deep into the dungeon to be honest. did this happen with the latest release?

 

[Rpgsaurus]

Re: Incursion

Did any of you run into the problem, though, that when you get deep enough into the dungeon
enemies start summoning help so quickly that the game lags to a halt (or crashes)? This made it
unplayable for me.

Too bad, it also had very pretty ASCII graphics, probably one of the best out there.

I never got that deep into the dungeon to be honest. did this happen with the latest release?

Yeah, I think so. It hasn't really been updated for like 2-3 years, right?

It starts on level 6-7 of the dungeon, not that big of an issue if you save-scum a lot and load whenever the crash happens, but it crashed so often that I just gave up.

 

[DakaSha]

Latest version was either last year or the year before.
I dont know.. as said i havnt played it too much just because i want the real deal but i do know for a fact that people have beat it

 

[Topher]

Re: Incursion

Did any of you run into the problem, though, that when you get deep enough into the dungeon
enemies start summoning help so quickly that the game lags to a halt (or crashes)? This made it
unplayable for me.

Too bad, it also had very pretty ASCII graphics, probably one of the best out there.

I never got that deep into the dungeon to be honest. did this happen with the latest release?

I've never gotten that far into the dungeon either.

 

[Rpgsaurus]

Latest version was either last year or the year before.
I dont know.. as said i havnt played it too much just because i want the real deal but i do know for a fact that people have beat it

I've played the last version.

So either
1) the people who did beat it played on earlier versions, or
2) something's wrong with my laptop, but that sounds unlikely - it's an ASCII roguelike, dammit, I don't need the latest video card drivers to play it!

Anyway, later dungeon levels IIRC were basically swarmed with monsters summoning more monsters summoning more monsters, i.e. just one total giant clusterfuck of colored letters.

 

[DakaSha]

do you have the djikstra pathfinding on?

 

[Rpgsaurus]

do you have the djikstra pathfinding on?

No idea. The "djikstra" rings a bell from my math A-levels though.

 

[DakaSha]

You can select the option to use a different form of pathfinding and it recommends against it since it hasnt been implemented in a fast enough fashion.

Btw djikstra is the same as A* pathfinding only it doesnt use a heuristic value

 

[Rpgsaurus]

You can select the option to use a different form of pathfinding and it recommends against it since it hasnt been implemented in a fast enough fashion.

Heh, maybe that was it, then.

Btw djikstra is the same as A* pathfinding only it doesnt use a heuristic value

Now that's way too advanced terminology for me

 

[PorkaMorka]

What is Crawl like?

Does it have Tactics or something similar, overland map, towns, unique NPCs, etc?

Crawl's deal is that they took a standard roguelike dungeon crawl, and eliminated a very high percentage of the grinding, scumming and spoiler reliance that plagues the genre. So you won't need to read a ton of spoilers or do tedious repetitive actions.

Then they added an extremely high quality interface and attractive tiles that convey information more effectively than ASCII.

Because there is little reliance on spoilers, it does not have all the weird stuff you can do in Nethack, like writing your name in the snow to scare off monsters or dipping unicorn horns in pools of vomit.

Instead, it focuses on tactical gameplay. Not in the sense of the japanese tactics games; you only control one guy. But he may well have as many tactical options available to him as a party in other games. Resources are limited though, and the game is quite difficult and unforgiving, so you will need to use those options intelligently and conserve the best ones for the trickiest situations.

It's basically an exercise in making as few mistakes as possible, for a sustained period of time.

Recommended if you want a single player game which is actually challenging.

 

[DakaSha]

For anybody who is interested here is what i was working on today:



Procedurally generated corridor link between two rooms that is populated with rectangle rooms.
Corridor can be of any width and the rooms can be of any 'type' (Rectangle, random or any other type i define)

so once i get the method done to have the corridor evenly populated it could for instance be used to generate something like a 'realistic' office floor or bunker or whatever. The two square rooms could easily be made into elevators or just the typical RL staircases

edit: just for the fuck of it here is the same setup with crazy random rooms:

 

[mondblut]

Especially with various spells and special abilities available both to the PC and the enemies.
Then there's ranged combat. So no, you are completely wrong.

How many levels have to be gained and false starts have to be abandoned until you get those "exciting special abilities" and start encountering opposition that requires their use?

Until then, a roguelike is basically a turn-based Pacman. At least a proper RPG *is* interesting on low levels.

And how do you imagine defeating a group of relatively strong enemies just by pressing arrow key? You have to maneuvre to make sure that you don't get surrounded (each additional attacker gets a bonus to hit), often you have to run past enemies in coward mode to get into better position.

Going back into a corridor you came from and THEN holding an arrow key as AI goes to his slaughter one at a time is about as old as DND and Rogue.

More like the more thought and work is put into designing a roguelike, the better it becomes.

Hardcore RL fans out there tend to disagree with your choice of an example of thought and work. I wonder what does that have to do with ADOM not being "pure" enough?