Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup questions/thread

[betamin]

That's some pimp shit bro, keep it up and you'll ascend a centaur fire elementalist, I know it

 

[Castanova]

0.7 is officially out:

http://crawl.develz.org/main/0.7.0.txt

 

[Malakal]

Heavy armor is back which is good, Slime Pits are even harder now, a small buff for ghouls and demonspawns and good gods. Not much changes, still not enough goodies for Zin or Elvywhatever.

 

[Zomg]

Not very much is in this for a year's work considering how much yapping there is in the Crawl playerbase. Content wise it's a few vaults and portals, balance is shuffled slightly, nothing really tactically interesting. I really want to see stuff like new branches with difficulties that vary a lot depending on your character, complete lair/orc cave replacements that may or may not appear, etc. They add new gimmick portals every release that you only run into every 20 games, you'd think they could save a few up for branches instead. And everything that goes in seems to have some open source programmer silliness with volcano eruptions or the tides in the merfolk branch with krakens that spawn tentacles and blah blah just make a nice core of balanced enemies that interact in interesting ways (like orc wizards/priests/warriors do currently in the early game) and put a bunch of them in a two-level branch with special harder vault + treasure pit at the end, hey it's a cool branch. Swap it randomly with the orc caves/lair or swamp/shoals/snake so the midgame isn't so boring.

Balance-wise armor is just good enough now to be about as good as going full evasion/evasion+shield, which means it's not good enough when you consider spellcasting and troll armor/robes of resistance/general availability of nice ego robes and light armor. It's also dumb that stuff like the heavier dragon armors/crystal plate come late and/or are rare as hell like they're still the home run items they were pre-0.6 instead of just okay choices.

 

[Castanova]

I agree they need to make some broader changes to the game that doesn't revolve around fluff. Some of your ideas are pretty sound.. maybe you should post something to the tracker or whatever? Get yourself heard.

Also, it would be nice to have a class that's pure melee but doesn't start with a shield. Chaos Knight fits the bill except that you're stuck with a pre-determined god which sucks. I hate planning on starting, say, a fighter with the intention of going battle-axe and then I have to waste like 3-8 levels of Shield skill.

My question is this: with the Slime Pit walls being acidic, how the fuck is a melee character supposed to kill the Royal Jelly if you can't do the dig-a-tunnel trick anymore? Or am I over-estimating how heavy the new acidic damage is?

 

[Zomg]

My question is this: with the Slime Pit walls being acidic, how the fuck is a melee character supposed to kill the Royal Jelly if you can't do the dig-a-tunnel trick anymore? Or am I over-estimating how heavy the new acidic damage is?

The walls on the bottom level that turn into transparent rock after the RJ dies aren't acidic, so a melee character just fights it in that 4-way corridor area.

On the other hand the slime walls can appear next to staircases and you can easily be forced to walk through dozens of dangerous tiles to reach the staircases to get to the bottom of the pits, so you basically have to have an rCorr amulet and be wearing artifacts, +5 armor and substitute junk equipment. If you wear the rCorr ego cloak it's gonna be like -3 by the time you leave pits.

I usually stick with the shield on non-polearm fighters and gladiators, early 1-handers are shitty enough without getting some SH. If I turn it off it usually doesn't creep over 4 or so by the time I get a decent 1.5-2 hander. I guess it might be different with a sword character if a great sword just never appears, but you get your first battleaxe/broad axe or great mace/dire flail pretty early.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS THIS SHIT IS GOOD

I AM STILL RELATIVEL;Y A DIPSHIT I DO DECENT WITH MY TROLL BERSERKER BUT SUCK AT MOST ANYTHING ESLE. I HAVE HAD A GOOD SPRIGGAN ASSASSIN OR TWO ALSO.

BROS CAN THE TROLL MAKE IT ALL THE WAY!??? I AM GETTING FARTHER AND FARTHER LEARNING SHIT LAST DEATH WAS GIVING THE ELF FAG HALL A GO AND SOME SUN DEMOIN RAPED ME?

MAYBE I JUST DONT RUN AWAY ENOUGH WITH OTHER GUYS THE BERSERKER SHIT WITH TROLLS IS LIKE AN I WIN BUTTON EARLY GAME ESPECIALLY CAUSE IT IS EASY TO GET FOOD TO MAKE UP ANY HUNGER COST

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS I HAVE ALSO HAD AN OKAY MINATAUR MONK AND MOUNTAIN DWARF FIGHTER BUT USUALLY DIE APPROACHING MIDGAME

MAYBE I JUST NEED TO GET BETTER!!!!!

 

[Malakal]

Trolls are hard later what with big food needs. BUT if You intend to only do the necessary branches to win then they are easily usable. Only Pandemonium/Hells and other ungodly areas suck for trolls. Way better choice than I initialy though, especially with cancelled stat death (oh hi 30+ STR trolls with 3 INT!).

But You are right BRO, berserk makes early game too easy and gives You bad habits.

 

[BLOBERT]

BRO GOOD TO KNOW I JUST WANNA GET A WIN THEN WORRY ABOUT BE A SUPER BRO THOUGH I STILL PLAY WITH OTHER CLASSES EVENTUALLY

BRO THE MAIN PROBLEM WITH MY SPRIGGAN ASSASSINS WAS THAT THE POISON RESISTANT MOTHERFUCKERS WOULD FUCK ME UP CAUSE I COULDNT KITE THEM I GUESS YOU JUST RUN UP AND DOWN LEVELS FOR THAT SHIT!!!!

 

[Malakal]

If You really want to win try playing trollish paladins of TSO with giant spiked clubs: no need for see invisibility (aura of TSO), free rN+++, healing on killing demons and undead, and of course You can bless that giant spiked club to be +8/+8 artifact weapon of holy wrath. Best god and best two handed weapon in the game.

Plus, of course, golden dragon armor for even more resistances. With just this one god and one armor You will have all necessary resists to win.

 

[Castanova]

Spriggan Enchanters are a pretty easy win, too. Just Hibernate/Confuse every enemy and if they resist just run away.

Chaos Knights of Makhleb seem also to be an easy win. As long as you're not stingy with summoning your demon friends, you barely have to deal with any tough situations. The not-being-stingy part is the hard part for me, hah.

 

[Malakal]

I downloaded the 0.7 version and FUCK its way too dark to see anything. How do I change that? Tried increasing my brightness but that didnt help at all. New tiles set sucks ass.

 

[Zomg]

Unarmed trolls have it hard in the midgame. Their defense blows and to me it feels like unarmed goes like great -> amazing -> okay -> eeeh -> pretty good -> great as you progress through the game/skill levels (although not too good in the hells without transmutations, 'cause no holy brand). I don't know if the damage math would back me up there, that's totally subjective. Whereas melee weapons go eeeh -> okay -> okay -> pretty good -> fukkin tight -> great

Trolls also really have to depend on large rock throwing for ranged damage and large rocks are a pain in the ass to deal with, although they do hit really hard. If you get shoals you can usually get a nice stack of javelins there, I guess. If you work up throwing and get Okawaru as a god you can get gifted nice stacks of curare darts and shit if you're carrying around a blowgun. I don't mess with Elf without good ranged damage, there are lots of blinkers and crystal spear casters and shit down there.

 

[verbatim]

I'd like to note 0.6 was released only 4 months ago and 0.7 was, thus, mostly a bugfix and balance release. Your proposed branch is definitely less interesting than these so called "gimmicky" portals and the rest of the so-called "open source silliness". A lot of the people contributing these vaults wouldn't be involved in designing new branches anyway.

 

[Zomg]

I've never really had anything interesting happen in Shoals because of the tide, even with the unique on the last level that can raise it to the highest point. Certainly never anything even close to interesting on the first four pointless-ass levels in Shoals. You get there in the early-mid teen levels and levitation is a very common spell/evokable.

I'm sure it was a huge amount of programming work, and it's because these guys are programmers that want to have fun implementing interesting stuff like kraken tentacles and not doing boring shit like painstakingly hammering out a few balanced enemies to throw into a boring generic Roguelike generated level that are merely interesting for the player to fight.

 

[verbatim]

It's certainly more interesting than the vast majority of the branches; indeed, some of the branches will likely be overhauled before new ones get considered. There's a chance 0.8 will have a new branch, but it may also end up being a portal vault.

 

[Zomg]

I remember reading something about the hive getting completely removed (I know it used to have an aburdly larger number of pointless floors and the current 2-floor version is the intermediate step before removal) so I'm a little bit encouraged in the direction stuff is moving.

 

[Castanova]

I'm with Zomg on this one. The Shoals is easily my least favorite area in the game. The only time I have any "fun" in there is when I'm playing a character that can beat it as quickly as humanly possible (i.e., a Merfolk or some kind of stealth character with apportation). There really aren't any interesting situations going on there. Tactics surrounding the environment are nonexistent since there it's virtually a pure open space and if you go deep in there without Levitation (or very good survivability) then you're not playing very smartly. The Merfolk varieties are all very similar to one another and the Mermaid/Sirens are annoying but typically easy to deal with. The challenge level in the Shoals is almost binary and very luck based - either you're blowing through it because you're only aggro-ing one Merfolk at a time or suddenly you're dead meat because you aggroed 10 Merfolk and you're stuck in a wide open space.

The Hive is, indeed, incredibly boring as well. Between the Hive, Lair, Snake Pit, and the Swamp, the importance of poison resistance is WAY WAY WAY too heavily weighted in the early-mid game.

 

[betamin]

A wizard lab branch would be very cool.


I started playing again and had my best run ever with a berserk ogre, cant believe people say ogres are hard, they get the best weapon in the game early and they 1 hit ko most dudes (especially when trog rains +8 spiked giant clubs), I actually got 2 runes for the first time and died of boredom induced retardedness, so BROBERT give it a shot, just pump dexterity and try to get a robe of resistance.

 

[Peeker]

Hi all, this is my first post in the codex. I've had a few tries at this game, and my last was my best so far (lvl 6 lol). Was playing a high elf assassin (random choice) and picked up a sabre of draining on the first lvl. Was going great guns for awhile. I had just defeated 4 orc mages, when suddenly my sabre of draining slipped from my grasp and attacked me. I was taken by surprise and slaughtered. Is this an unusual occurence or do all magic weapons have this ability? or was it a lingering spell from one of those orcs?

Quite an addictive little game btw

 

[desocupado]

I actually liked the new tiles.

Going with a merfolk transmuter, got that Okinawa god.

The char is lvl 9, which is the farthest I reached so far.

Found a trident, but used a scroll on it, and now it's red. It's NOT cursed, I can take it off, but the name is in red. Also, it was a +3 and after a time it became a +2.

Anybody knows what's up with that?

Also, any tips on surviving are welcome. So far, I had a few tense situations, but so far I had no problems, nor anything I could not kill. Of course, it's probably not gonna last.

 

[Castanova]

I don't really know how they determine the color scheme for the text of your weapon. Red doesn't always mean cursed. Sometimes if you curse it, it turns red, then when you un-curse it, it stays red until you re-equip it. Weird.

The reason it went from +3 to +2 is probably that you hit a Jelly with it. Jellies corrode your weapons and armor which reduces the weapons +/+ ratings and reduces the AC of the armor.

 

[Malakal]

Red means forbidden for certain gods or cursed or I think of pain possibly draining. Also I think that when You make Your own weapons (ie use vorpalize weapon on weapons given brands through enchantment spells) then weapons of pain get to be red.

Confusing since weapons of cold dont get to be blue...

So anyone knows how to amke the tileset brighter? I cant see shit.

 

[Zomg]

Hi all, this is my first post in the codex. I've had a few tries at this game, and my last was my best so far (lvl 6 lol). Was playing a high elf assassin (random choice) and picked up a sabre of draining on the first lvl. Was going great guns for awhile. I had just defeated 4 orc mages, when suddenly my sabre of draining slipped from my grasp and attacked me. I was taken by surprise and slaughtered. Is this an unusual occurence or do all magic weapons have this ability? or was it a lingering spell from one of those orcs?

Quite an addictive little game btw

The only way I know of that can happen is if you've taken Xom as a diety (god of random lulz).