Rogue - let's beat it

[Squeeealer]

That's funny you mention elemental staves - I was just thinking about them last night. Right now I consider them disposable because the juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze. They miss so often and seem awfully weak for such cool sounding items.

[Vanguard]

Their damage is superb, but yeah they're still not very good.  I recently had a game where I fired a staff of cold at a centaur 5 times and none of them hit.  At this point I just treat them as slightly better arrows.

[Vanguard]

Here's a good suggestion for that Rogue variant: let enemies trigger traps on themselves.  Also it might be good to make traps break after a certain number of activations.  That way it's not too exploitable and it fixes the problem of a teleport trap blocking a room.

Squeeealer, have you spent much time with other roguelikes yet?  What do you think of them?  Two more that you may want to try out are ADOM and Ragnarok.  Both are hacklikes, which mostly means that they're full of complex interactions between items, monsters, the dungeon, etc. and that success is more about what you do to prepare for an encounter rather than what you do during the encounter.  ADOM has optional tiles and Ragnarok is tiles-only if you care about that.  Also, do you have any interest in action games?  I think you've got the right personality for arcade 1CCs.

[Vanguard]

TIL that Xerocs can imitate stairs.

RIP that character.

[LazyCat]

The thing about improving Rogue is that the roguelike genre has gotten so much better over the years that there's no point. 
You're never gonna tweak Rogue until it's more tactical than Sil or has as much cool stuff as Nethack or is as overall excellent as Brogue.  The reason for playing Rogue is because it's Rogue, you know?  Not because it's the best roguelike but because of its historical importance, or so you can say you've beaten such an infamous game.

I don't think "better" is quite adequate, for they are in different categories. I play Rogue for kind of similar reasons I might play some Solitaire card game rather than playing Chess. Different game categories scratch different kind of itch and fit in different time-investment slots. Rogue, in its category, let's call it "coffee-break", I think is still one of the best.

So when I'm talking about improving Rogue, it's not about making it more complex, but more balanced. It's not about adding new stuff, but rather making what's already there more versatile, and in turn perhaps making it slightly more tactical.


Anyhow, I agree with the changes you suggested. Ultimately they all would make the game easier, but I think they would also make it more balanced, which is more important, or so I say. Look at those Solitaire games for example, again, the fact you can beat them relatively often doesn't take away from their replayability at all.

[LazyCat]

That's funny you mention elemental staves - I was just thinking about them last night. Right now I consider them disposable because the juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze. They miss so often and seem awfully weak for such cool sounding items.

Looking at the code I think they actually never hit. The damage is 6d6 (6-36), so it's pretty good, but range is limited.

Note to Elwin:

        if (hurl)
        {
            if ((weap->o_flags&ISMISL)
                && cur_weapon != NULL && cur_weapon->o_which == weap->o_launch)
            {
                cp = weap->o_hurldmg;
                hplus += cur_weapon->o_hplus;
                dplus += cur_weapon->o_dplus;
            }
            else
            if (weap->o_launch < 0)
                cp = weap->o_hurldmg;
        }

In "fight.c", function roll_em(), there is that piece of code which assigns damage string to 'cp' variable.  The thing is 'o_launch' is never defined for elemental wands, and without it cp doesn't get initialized with o_hurldmg, so it stays NULL and thus the dice don't roll. My quick fix for that is to initialize "bolt.o_launch= -1;" in "sticks.c", fire_bolt() function.

[Vanguard]

You hear maniacal laughter in the distance
The medusa hit you
You die

Rogue!

[LazyCat]

Getting confused by Medusa's gaze can be avoided by making her invisible, by making yourself blind, or by taking hallucinogenic drugs. So some of those negative potions are not useless after all, that's what I call versatility!

[Squeeealer]

Here's a good suggestion for that Rogue variant: let enemies trigger traps on themselves.  Also it might be good to make traps break after a certain number of activations.  That way it's not too exploitable and it fixes the problem of a teleport trap blocking a room.

Squeeealer, have you spent much time with other roguelikes yet?  What do you think of them?  Two more that you may want to try out are ADOM and Ragnarok.  Both are hacklikes, which mostly means that they're full of complex interactions between items, monsters, the dungeon, etc. and that success is more about what you do to prepare for an encounter rather than what you do during the encounter.  ADOM has optional tiles and Ragnarok is tiles-only if you care about that.  Also, do you have any interest in action games?  I think you've got the right personality for arcade 1CCs.

No, I've spent very little time with them. In fact, just a couple weeks of Brogue, now. I'm wondering if I'd even enjoy more complex/immersive roguelikes. I do like Rogue for the reasons mentioned - you can have a quick game or even a few games. There's no expectation going in and there's no time commitment issues. What are arcade 1CCs?

What's weird is that the other roguelike I play is far more of a time commitment - you can complete most runs, even challenge runs, about 50% of the time and they take about ten hours. There's lot of preparing for encounters like you mentioned - swapping equipment around, getting your equipment right, etc. So who knows what I'd like. I think I'm just overwhelmed when I first start a game because I want to know everything and I know so little. Also I have not improved at Brogue, so kinda frustrating.

[Vanguard]

1CC stands for 1 credit clear.  It's where you play an arcade or arcade-style game, and you try to beat it without using any continues.  The levels of depth and challenge you can find in some of them are even higher than roguelikes, and a lot of them feature in-depth scoring systems if you want to play competitively.  In my opinion it's the pinnacle of single-player gaming.

Brogue is one of the more hardcore roguelikes.  It's an excellent game, much deeper and more fair than Rogue, but it's also gonna be really rough if you're not familiar with the genre.

I've been playing roguelikes for more than 20 years now, and despite my repeated failures in Rogue, I'm pretty good at them.  If you want I can write up descriptions of different roguelikes to try to find some that appeal to you.  I'd also be willing to throw together some guides if you want help getting started in anything.

[Squeeealer]

1CC stands for 1 credit clear.  It's where you play an arcade or arcade-style game, and you try to beat it without using any continues.  The levels of depth and challenge you can find in some of them are even higher than roguelikes, and a lot of them feature in-depth scoring systems if you want to play competitively.  In my opinion it's the pinnacle of single-player gaming.

Brogue is one of the more hardcore roguelikes.  It's an excellent game, much deeper and more fair than Rogue, but it's also gonna be really rough if you're not familiar with the genre.

I've been playing roguelikes for more than 20 years now, and despite my repeated failures in Rogue, I'm pretty good at them.  If you want I can write up descriptions of different roguelikes to try to find some that appeal to you.  I'd also be willing to throw together some guides if you want help getting started in anything.

Ahh, I see on 1CCs. Part of my fascination with roguelikes is my fascination with random. I'm not a very big fan of memorization. I recently watched a couple minutes of a Mega Man 5 (?) speed run and I hated that it reduced the game to a series of memorized button pushes and such. I'm still having fun with Rogue and I'm still working on Brogue, but I'll definitely come to you when I'm ready for a new challenge.

[Vanguard]

If you're not interested, it's fine, but just for the record, there are tons of action games that use small amounts of RNG in things like enemy AI to make them fairly memorization-proof, and there are also non-random action games that have a sort of butterfly effect, where extremely minor differences in player input lead to very different outcomes, so that even world record-level players need to improvise.  The megaman series is generally very susceptible to memorization though.

Anyway, good luck with Brogue.  Since you can beat Rogue, you'll definitely be able to handle it.

[Squeeealer]

My favorite arcade game is Bubble Bobble. But I don't know how to MAME. 

[elwin]

@LazyCat: I think you're right about the elemental staves.  I'm going to run it through the debugger to make sure, but the fix should be online soon.  Thanks for reporting this.

@Squeeealer: Ever tried HyperRogue?  The geometry is counterintuitive, and the mechanics are very different from Rogue, but the overall gameplay has some similarities.

[Squeeealer]

I had a run tonight where I think I made the most of what I had. Once again, I found no rings. I found one wand, and it was a measly wand of magic missile. I did have a two handed sword with one enchantment, and I got my STR up to 20. Trolls were no problem. But anything tougher was a major ordeal. I had to use monster confusion against a Griffin to beat him. I never did see a Medusa. If I had a wand of slow monster I could have taken this a lot farther.

I think one thing that was a drain on my finds was that I was finding a ridiculous amount of food. If you are finding food does that necessarily mean that you aren't finding something else?

I died on Floor 22 after reading another scroll of monster confusion but not being able to connect against a Black Unicorn in three tries.  I had waterproofing, but couldn't improve my armor class past 6. It feels good to have performed well, but I can't help but wonder what if...

Also, Rattlesnakes have been plaguing me recently. I have strength-sapped induced deaths 3x in the past couple days.