Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - The Soupening

Well I've made it to the point where my last attempt at 15 runes ended: tomb. Going to take this step verrrryyyyy slowwwwly.

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/ma...

Math wrote:

Well I've made it to the point where my last attempt at 15 runes ended: tomb. Going to take this step verrrryyyyy slowwwwly.

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/ma...

Nice! Good luck with the rest!

12030860 math the Bringer of Light (level 27, 199/199 HPs)
Began as a Gargoyle Gladiator on Jan 25, 2018.
Was the Champion of the Shining One.
Escaped with the Orb
... and 15 runes on Jan 30, 2018!

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/ma...

Big shoutout to my MVPs: the +9 Holy Great Mace and +9 Holy Triple Crossbow. The later with Portal Projectile is a monster and carried me through Tomb.

After Tomb all I had left was the lungs in Zot:5, both of which were blocked by perma-tele-traps. Felt pretty strong and just said "to hell with it" and jumped. Landed in the Orb Chamber where I promptly murdered a bunch of guardians. After I grabbed the rune I had to try another half-dozen teleport traps to get out of the lungs, but after that it was smooth sailing up to D:1. I even killed both Pan Lords I saw on the way...

Awesome work, Math! Congrats!

Ultraviolent's latest vid has the most insane Zot5 shenanigans.

I feel like a total losing watching that. I am so bad...

1442270 math the Metallomancer (level 27, 131/185 HPs)
Began as a Gargoyle Earth Elementalist on Feb 1, 2018.
Was the Champion of Vehumet.
Escaped with the Orb
... and 3 runes on Feb 5, 2018!

The game lasted 09:19:25 (105591 turns).

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/ma...

First caster win, but continuing my Gargoyle dependency...

Nice work, you're racking up the wins!

So after watching Ultraviolent4's DDFi speedruns I had to try that combo for myself...

2016535 math the Hoplite (level 27, 206/288 HPs)
Began as a Deep Dwarf Fighter on Feb 6, 2018.
Was the Champion of Makhleb.
Escaped with the Orb
... and 3 runes on Feb 7, 2018!

The game lasted 03:14:40 (50325 turns).

Not exactly a speedrun, but about 2 hours/30k turns faster than any of my others! Once Makhleb's heal-on-kill gets going this character becomes an unstoppable o-tab wrecking ball. I managed to find 21 (!!!) healing potions but I never used them (or the DD racial healing) past the early game until Zot5.

I generally don't mind dying in roguelikes. It sucks, but I can usually trace the reason back to a bad decision I made. I just lost a promising DrCj to Rupert. I went down the stairs and saw the staircase was surrounded by Rupert, Urug, a centaur warrior, a gargoyle and some other stuff. The only action I take is to go back upstairs, but Rupert gets a paralyze off on me and game over. That just really sucks. Retreating was the correct course of action. I hadn't found any MR items. Ugh.

I'm 100% certain I would have made the same move as you, Erik. But using this as a learning opportunity for myself, I think I might instead consider 1) read blink scroll to put as much distance (and other enemies) between myself and Rupert; 2) read fog; 3) read tele; 4) step further away. Maybe throw a haste somewhere in there around 2 or 3. It's too bad you didn't have a scroll of silence.

merphle wrote:

I'm 100% certain I would have made the same move as you, Erik. But using this as a learning opportunity for myself, I think I might instead consider 1) read blink scroll to put as much distance (and other enemies) between myself and Rupert; 2) read fog; 3) read tele; 4) step further away. Maybe throw a haste somewhere in there around 2 or 3. It's too bad you didn't have a scroll of silence. :(

Yeah this is definitely the next best strategy. I am sure I could have at least blinked and teleported, but teleporting on a new level is a dicey proposition, and with my luck I probably would have ended up next to Rupert anyway.

Unless you're playing something that is 100% static from map generation to damage calculations, you will always end up playing the odds. I know one of the taglines for DC:SS is that you've always got options, but what generally fails to follow this is that each of those options is just hoping for a more or less likely outcome. And don't compare yourself to streakers, they're just counting the cards

Got absurdly lucky with my Demonspawn mutation set:

A: horns 3, slimy green scales 3, demonic guardian 3, powered by pain 3, augmentation 3

Powered-by-pain combined with Augmentation is pretty broken, and demonic guardians are game-carrying.

So sad, because Xom was kind to me right up until the end...

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/ma...

Xom roars with laughter!

Looks like a long-requested feature was added in Trunk: the "spell library". No more books taking up inventory slots, you just always have access to what you've found.

What a long distance we've traveled in terms of inventory management: no more item weights, item destruction, everything seems to stack nowadays (fruit, wands, chunks), now no more spell books. I wonder what then end goal is exactly. I don't care too much about any one of these changes by themselves, but collectively it has been a pretty radical shift.

The commentary on the dev forums indicates that a small core of looong time players have taken control of the codebase and direction with a focus on streamlining things, ultimately from an end-game perspective. I think they have just grown so bored with all of the 'chaff' that gets in your way before Pan that the focus is now on speed and efficiency rather than flavour and fun...

It's certainly still interesting to play, but it almost feels like a stripped-down mobile port to me now. I know DC:SS has always had its idiosyncrasies (the move away from victory dancing was a huge step forward), but the continual simplification of systems and content speaks to a different game than the one I enjoyed playing a few years ago.

DC Malleus wrote:

The commentary on the dev forums indicates that a small core of looong time players have taken control of the codebase and direction with a focus on streamlining things, ultimately from an end-game perspective. I think they have just grown so bored with all of the 'chaff' that gets in your way before Pan that the focus is now on speed and efficiency rather than flavour and fun...

This sums it up well.

I don't mind removing tedious elements. Things like item weights, for example, never struck me as fun complexity.

I do wish they'd add some fun complexity to replace stuff they are taking out. For quite a while now, it seems as if the new things have been minor item/spell additions and god additions. How about some new areas, for example, or more rune options, or in-game quests, etc.? Something BIG.

My first roguelike was NetHack, which is on the completely opposite end of the spectrum from DCSS in terms of complexity and it has a lot of charm because of that complexity. There are so many different commands and item interactions it really boggles the mind.

One fun example of this complexity is the many ways by which you can retrieve an item from a pool of water. Let's say you accidentally toss your awesome artifact weapon into a moat. How can you get it back? If you have an amulet of magical breathing you can just jump in and grab it, though your scrolls and potions in your inventory might get ruined if you don't have an oilskin cloak on or if they aren't in a bag with grease applied to it. If you have a wand of polymorph and a ring of polymorph control you could turn yourself into a creature that doesn't breathe or that can swim. If you have a wand of teleport you can zap it at the square where the weapon is and it will randomly appear somewhere else on the level, hopefully a monster won't find it first. If you have a scroll of earth you can create a bunch of boulders, push them into the water which turns the water into dry ground, then you can dig the weapon out with a pickaxe. If you have access to a cold spell or a wand of cold you can freeze the water and dig it out. If you have a pet that can swim he might retrieve it for you. There are probably other ways to do it too, but this is just one example of how the many complicated systems of NetHack add to the game instead of taking away from it.

I'd love to see a game that takes the user interface streamlining like auto-explore and auto-attack, the find command, macros, etc, of DCSS but keeps weird, wonderful puzzle-y nature of NetHack.

EriktheRed wrote:

snipped awesome Nethack example

I'd love to see a game that takes the user interface streamlining like auto-explore and auto-attack, the find command, macros, etc, of DCSS but keeps weird, wonderful puzzle-y nature of NetHack.

This.

I liked DCSS because of the QoL stuff like auto-explore but I would love to see more flavour than things to make speedrunners better

Amen to that, you goddamned sexual tyrannosaurus. That is essentially what I've been searching for as I roam around the current rogue-like landscape... I've enjoyed ToME, Cogmind, Caves of Qud, and a few others (I even went back to Rogue itself for a while!) over the last year or so and they are all excellent games with their own very distinct flavours. The one thing I haven't found is exactly what you've described above... I want crunchy and quirky in equal amounts. I want stupid, delightful, unexpected sh*t to happen when I poke it in odd ways. I want to be surprised every now and then by something other then the RNG. I want a system where the fundamental rules a clear and accessible, but the game is emergent and accommodating of lateral solutions. It's certainly a lot to wish for, but I think we were as close as we've ever been a few releases before and after DC:SS 0.12.

Hear hear! I'm with you all on this.

Speaking of which, does anyone here remember Mission Thunderbolt? (Maybe Jaunt Trooper on the PC.) That had wonderful ways to combine different things/actions, just an incredible amount of interactions. So much crazy fun.

I tried to get it running again a few years ago, but I failed. I'm tempted to try again.

Having more room in the inventory for actively-used toys instead of 5 types of food and lots of spellbooks is a positive in my opinion.

I have to admit I haven't played the last 3 versions. I'm not a huge fan of the streamlining. That being said, the new gods are fun. I'd like to see some more new rune branches too to broaden the game.

I think if I went back to playing DCSS again I'd probably dig up V0.80. I loved that version because it wasn't all that balanced. You could get crunched up unfairly but you could also do the crunching and get nice and overpowered.

That brings me to my biggest sadness in current RPGs and maybe games in general. Balancing for multiplayer has taken the unbalanced fun out of most of my games. There's nothing more fun than being overpowered for a while. Muramasa blade in Wizardry 6 was an instant doubling of power for your samurai and it was fun. Putting together the giant flail thing in Throne of Bhaal was great and silly overpowered. Fireball in the gold box games jumped you ahead of the curve for a while. All of these things didn't break the game, they just allowed you to stomp things for a bit until they caught up. Now you get the blue +5% damage followed by the green +7% damage and +1% chance to stun and then the blue +5% damage with a slightly higher damage range all over again. And every opponent is increasing 2% at a time to match. It feels like the need to balance multiplayer games has crept into my single player fun and ruined it. I fear the DCSS is falling into the balance trap as well.

Hell, I'm not a fan of that balance in mp games. +5% this, +10% that is so boring.

I get why it happens and I get why it's in sp games, but it's definitely cooled me on stuff I used to enjoy about gaming. Games nowadays have really cool looking weapons that I probably would've drooled over as a kid, but they're all do the same sh*t as all the other games. *yawn*

Some members of the dev team have openly put Brogue on a pedestal of elegant and refined gameplay, and that's what they want to do with DCSS. I'm not a dev, so I guess that's up to them, but I agree I don't really look forward to it in Crawl.

It sound silly, but I liked saving that one Enchant Armour scroll in case I came upon a sweet dragon hide. Then I had to decide if I wanted to settle for Ice Dragon armour or wait for fire. Now I kill a dragon and a full suit of armour just plops on the ground. Sure, it's one less system, but I liked that system.

I liked setting us stashed, and I didn't mind multiple types of food.

I actually enjoyed different food types, as they gave you different amount of food from eating them. I understand why they want them out when they are trying to walk threw 10 levels of Pan with the most amount of wands/scrolls/potions they can, but that just isn't for me. I also miss the overpoweredness of healing/haste wands.