Bay 12 Games Forum

Iirc, it's generally because spears aren't a "hero's" weapon -- they, and most polearms, are the weapon of the peasantry and the 'craven' in (at least western) heroic fiction, not the knight, lord, or 'chosen one'. It's not terribly surprising the trend has infected the gaming world to a large extent, considering.

It's a pretty easy thing to see. Just go make a general survey of main characters in fantasy or medieval-based fiction, and see how many of them use polearms. You can expect to see at least three-fold that number using other weapons -- even the axe and blunt weapon are going to see more usage. The sword, of course, is the ultimate phallic symbol hero's weapon, and will have a majority's control over the numbers.

S'kinda' sad, really. I know if I was some schmuck tossed into the middle of a world changing conflict, I'd really like a long stick with something sharp on the end, for better poking idiots with short pointy things from a safe distance.

What's this about MoW being free? Link?

Several hundred

We've had that discussion elsewhere, heh. There's a lot of really crappy games out there. A great number of them are worse than release-day Oblivion. I've personally saw a couple cases where user-intervention was needed to even get the game running, and it happened before the game's devs could manage to pull their collective appendages from their various crevices and do anything about it. Fun times!

Is there anyone here that doesn't use diagonals regularly? I remember speccing someone during the tourny and they weren't using 'em at all, which just seems ridiculously counter-intuitive. Diagonal movement doesn't take any more time/energy than cardinal movement, at least in 0.7.0.

According to my RSS feed, there hasn't been any changes to diagonals (other than burrowers being able to dig along them.) since at least last February.

Both would be a wonderful solution. I can rarely stand .pdf files, m'self. Text files use up so much less comp resources (and I keep a text editor open. I, uh, don't keep foxit reader open.)

PS:  Everyone saying that you can't win with a melee user without spells, I posted a KoBe win literally three pages ago.  I used evasion-based melee, stealth, scrolls/pots/wands and Go Berserk/Brothers in Arms.  And in the Orb Chamber it was tricky to get much use out of the last two.  And that was my first win.

Hello, you little berserky hybrid, you. Now try that without Trog.

Th'thing I'm harping on isn't that you can't win with a pure melee/tank build -- though if there's been a straight up melee + armor and/or dodging atheist/spell-less victor, I'd love to see that produced (I suspect it's not possible ) -- it's that everything outside of the gods and spellcasting doesn't get the same sort of progression that god-gifts and spells get. Gods, spells, and invocations have emergent behavior. Everything else does not. This could be made otherwise without noticeably impacting balance. For example, there's various cutoffs in the melee abilities after which th'speed boost literally does nothing -- stop pointlessly reducing speed delay and toss in some sort of appropriately themed ability instead. Or just toss in the ability anyway, whate'er.

It's an unnecessary asymmetry that prevents victoriously running thematically interesting builds (re: atheist non-caster tank). It's also showing that less love and attention is being given to the non-casters and godless (or god-limited) builds, which is both somewhat disappointing and a waste of potential. The devs could be fitting a lot of interesting mechanics in there, that meaningfully add to the breadth and depth of Crawl's gameplay. It's always kinda' disheartening to see potential wasted.

TA (Tactical Annihilation)

Total. Total Annihilation. Not tactical. Warglefwarglefrothatmouth.

SC is indeed a sort of spiritual successor to TA, made with the aid at least one of the original BullCavedog* team.

Anyway. Have SC, can't play it. Barely runs (multiple-second stutters, constantly, and nearly unresponsive controls, all on the lowest settings, all while jacking my CPU usage to "electrical fire" level) on this computer. Wishing best of luck getting something together, 'cause SC's always sounded pretty interesting.

*Yes, I just momentarily combined Bullfrog and Cavedog. Whoops.

We've seen this before, many times. The reason there's a semi-violent hullabaloo over pirating games (and other digital "objects") is because it's not like pirating <anything physical>. The digital age is the first time the human species has ran into anything that can be flawlessly copied a functionally infinite amount without any noticeable degradation to either the copy or the copied. It's the reason that laws appropriately dealing with such things didn't exist when digital information came about, and we're having such a culture clash (such as it is) trying to fight it out to get ones that are reasonable.

To wit, you can steal a blender. You cannot steal code. You can copy it, and then delete the original, or steal the physical object the code is on, but the code itself? It's no different then the information being transmitted by the text in a book, except that it can be copied effectively infinitely with little to no effort and functionally no loss of quality. Etc, etc, so forth, so on. We've seen this dozens of times already