Messages

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sil 1.1.1

« on: January 05, 2013, 08:56:42 PM »

There was a second minor bug (you didn't always need to be adjacent to get free Opportunist attacks), which has now been fixed in the available files.

Sorry about these. Our fault for pushing out a release for the anniversary without enough testing!

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: [Sil] Goodbye Leron the Noldor...

« on: January 03, 2013, 05:27:06 PM »

Thanks for the compliments.

I have to ask: what would have happened if I'd opened it before Christmas?

I'm afraid you would have been cursed. (Rolling each skill roll twice for the rest of the game, and taking the worse result.)

I feel like Naugrim are simpler to play than Noldor. Maybe even easier. There are really two consistent walls of doom I hit in the early to mid game. One is the darkness death (shadow spider, shadow worm mass, anything like that.) If you can't see it, can't hit it, and can't escape or recover, you are pretty much screwed. The other wall I hit is the "can't hurt it" wall. Elves and their fancy little rapiers don't always do well against Easterling armor, and dwarves don't have that problem.

Interesting. I think you'd probably find you could do pretty well now going back to an elf. Dwarves don't have much of an edge over the Noldor on either of those two counts (the +1 Str from Belegost helps a bit, but they hit much less often than elves, which counteracts this). However I can see that the high protection enemies can form a barrier, and you often need a plan to deal with this. There are a few alternatives, such as keeping a large weapon on swap, using Subtlety to get lots of criticals, singing Song of Sharpness, or simply avoiding them.

Good luck with your continued adventures! There's a new version out, by the way.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: [Sil] Goodbye Leron the Noldor...

« on: December 31, 2012, 10:18:53 PM »

Congratulations. A win with a dwarf is extra impressive.

What was your Christmas present?

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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike of the Year - getting the list sorted

« on: December 24, 2012, 03:31:36 PM »

Regarding only having new roguelikes, well... look at the poll as it stands.  The winners would be FTL and Diablo III.

Hey! Sil has been ahead of Diablo III the whole time. 

There would indeed be something odd about discouraging releases until polished, but I think this has some good elements as well as some bad. It is nicer to play polished games, and can help the community to release them. I think the benefit of earlier releases is mainly that they can increase the chance of later getting to a polished game, by giving feedback and perhaps motivation.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sil (now at v1.1)

« on: September 07, 2012, 04:03:55 PM »

Any chance for a console version? Like a single full screen ui layout?

I just can't hang with the multiple terminal windows.

You can make all the other windows invisible and resize the main window. Will that do what you want? If not, could you specify what you're after?

(You are always able to access your (e)quipment and (i)nventory in the main window. I think the only information you lose are the combat rolls, and from your description of how you like to play it sounds like you'd rather not have those anyway.)

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: New versions of Hellband and Quickband

« on: June 15, 2012, 06:07:42 PM »

Unfortunately, I didn't get to play since it keeps crashing when I try to resize the windows.

Very sorry about this, known bug (but not yet fixed). However there's an easy workaround: resize the windows (you can also change the fonts as well as window contents) after you've started a character. The crash only happens at the main menu (and perhaps the very start of character creation). After you've done it once the game will remember your preferences.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: [Sil] Goodbye Leron the Noldor...

« on: June 13, 2012, 02:42:21 PM »

Thanks for the chime in! This is quite interesting piece of knowledge you impart. It would explain why later on orcs behave like wussies despite my characters not accumulating strictly offensive powers. I smash a single champion or captain of theirs and the rest flees in disorganized manner. Turns out the answer is I shined on them too much. :-)

This is partially right. Bright light does make them more afraid (I hadn't actually meant to imply that, but that's because I forgot!), but there's a larger temporary effect where they get scared if you kill one of their leaders.

Has the berserk bug been fixed? While under berserk condition when you look at creatures the name is just displayed as "enemy" but you can still use recall command to bypass this and get to know its name.

Thanks for drawing attention to this; we'll think about the best behaviour (ultimately the inability to tell what monsters are while enraged is more flavour than deliberate extra challenge, but I agree it's a bit silly to have such an easy workaround).

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: [Sil] Goodbye Leron the Noldor...

« on: June 11, 2012, 02:23:14 PM »

A bit late to the party, but I'm glad you've been enjoying the game, and it sounds like you're both quite close to escaping with a Silmaril (though perhaps that will happen in 1.0.3).

Agreed, light radius is quite important. More than in other Angband variants.

Since light against darkness is such a major theme in the books we tried to keep it important in the game! I'm afraid the following isn't properly documented in the manual yet, but some monsters (e.g. orcs, undead) are light-averse, and get a penalty to all their skill rolls if the light level on their square is above 2 (penalty size equal to the degree of excess).

Maybe not a waste but more like suboptimal. I think with your amounts of protection accuracy ring would suit you better.

It might depend what kind of monsters give you problems. In general specialising in protection (or evasion) can be extremely effective, and the more protection you already have, the more the marginal value of getting more. But some enemies just do enough damage that if possible you're better with a different strategy entirely for surviving them.

I thought focused attack + blocking would be more worthwhile but now this is up to debate again.

Pausing to focus your attack won't break the concentration bonus (but of course it will build up slower than if you attack every round), so you can combine these if you want.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sil released (1.0.2)

« on: March 18, 2012, 02:00:36 PM »

Question for the dev: do I get the best of both worlds with a bastard sword and the subtlety feat?

No, Subtlety excludes hand-and-a-half weapons (this is explicit in the manual, but the in-game description is shorter and just covers it with "other hand free"). It isn't possible to choose to wield a bastard sword one-handed and thus get the Subtlety bonus -- it's meant to work only with the easiest to control weapons.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sil released (1.0.2)

« on: March 15, 2012, 11:03:31 PM »

In the tutorial it says to use 'u' and then a letter (i.e. 'a') to equip an item.  But in actuality you have to press 'i'->'u'->'a', otherwise it will just tell you that you have no staffs to use.  Now I realize that you inferred that from a previous note, but someone who hasn't played a lot of roguelikes or who has played ones with simpler key commands might not realize that.  It's not really a big deal, but those are the little types of things that cause some people to quit the game before it even gets started and I wanted you to be aware.  You don't want potential players to sit there wondering why the tutorial is wrong about what key does what.

This would be well worth correcting, but I think you only get this behaviour if you've dived into the options and switched on Angband-like commands. The notes correctly describe the actions you need to take with the default keyset.

The other main thing that caught my attention was an los bug:

###&#
  @
###&#

Where # is a wall that is visible, and for some reason & is a wall that is not visible.  It doesn't really make sense that there is a visual gap there, and I imagine it would have a gameplay impact if there was an enemy on that tile instead of a wall.  I had the same issue with my first los algorithm, but it's not that difficult to fix.

I would guess what's created this effect is probably not a line of sight issue, but that your light radius is one. The wall squares marked & are dark, so not visible. The far ones are lit by some other source (probably the doorway to a lit room, but could be some kind of light-creating item or monster). But of course if you can verify a bug of that nature it would be important to know about -- I certainly don't normally see this behaviour.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sil released

« on: January 07, 2012, 01:03:19 AM »

I hate stair-scumming, and Sil does nothing to prevent that

Hi there. I'm glad you're enjoying the game. I just registered to correct this statement. Since we'd generally like optimal gameplay to be fun, we were somewhat concerned about stair-scumming (although we're happy to have the stairs as an escape), and we put in some mild measures against this:

Using the stairs increments the turn count by 100, and also uses 100 turns' worth of food. Thus it counts against you in terms of two clocks: the food clock, and the forced descent of Morgoth's power calling you down, which pushes you down to a deeper level when you've taken too many turns. It doesn't use any turns of your light source because we didn't want to encourage players to unequip their light source before taking the stairs. We hope that this is enough of a discouragement to stair-scumming, but these measures could always be increased if it turns out that's needed.

Anyhow, I realise that this wasn't in the manual, so there wasn't any way you would have realised (except perhaps trying to abuse the stairs ridiculously yourself), but I thought I'd let you know.

Have fun with the orc soldiers! They get bigger bonuses to hit you if they're spread out and attacking you from all sides rather than lined up on side, so they will normally try to do this if you give them the chance.