Bay 12 Games Forum

Wow... herb 1 on a troll. That's vicious, especially if you're berserking. Poor thing.

That being said, I freaking want his hat. That is a bloody awesome hat.

Really shouldn't have chased Nikky, though. Those rocks you had probably woulda' killed him. Large rocks hit like a mack truck. Or your disen wand. Or the wands of fire. And if you were in that bad of a situation, blink then teleport. Blink could have gotten you out of bolt range.

Conservation is good, but does nothing for you if you're dead. One of the harder things to get used to in a roguelike, it is.

So yeah. Singleplayer still works fine, so I've been meandering around. Was out prospecting for reeds -- I wanna' grow somethin', and my underground tree farm hasn't taken off yet -- when I promptly crashed my boat staring at...
I'm not really sure what to do, here, since I've already started setting up somewhere else. First time I've seen floating islands on a regular map. Quite awesome.

Higher tier canine summons also seem to last longer than normal, though it might be a conincidence thing. When I'm spamming them around in sprint, the jackals usually disappear long before the war dogs do.

As for the rest of the initial summoning book:
Spammels -- Good, but should be replaced with butterflies eventually.
Call Imp -- Good, but eventually Demonic Horde wins out. Can kill hydras, orc warlords, and similar such nasties... if you have enough of them (Sif MuSu.)
Call Canines -- Excellent, but jackals are crap. Only really shines if you can call up a horde before combat; in-combat, ice beasts, imps, or spammels is probably going to be a better bang for your buck; those spells are less random, and dependability can be absolutely vital in dangerous situations.
Summon Scorpions -- Can call up more critters than anything short of butterflies, horde, and haunt -- for that alone, it's potentially useful. Poison stacks like a beast when you're pulling up 3-4 scorps a casting. Formula for hostility is 4 in Spell Power, if the wiki was accurate. Hostiles are generally outnumbered (and poisonable themselves, so not much of a threat.). Don't cast in a corridor if you're running from something, but do cast in the open in the same situation.
Ice beast -- Are beasts. ~20 damage, 3/4s unblockable via AC. I've seen beasts solo hydras, and it's easy enough to call up 4-5 by the time you can cast it well. Mixing a few beasts into canine/scorpion swarms is a vicious combo in the early/mid game.

In general, spending a few mana points to diversify your summons on the ground rarely hurts, and is generally a major boon. Keeping a screen of expendables (I.E. spammels, butterflies, imps) to keep the harder hitters (Upper tier canines, beasts, scorps) from going down as quickly can exponentially increase your swarm's potential damage.

All in all, my raw summoners generally get the whole book. At most, they'll skip scorpions until they've had a chance to spam mephetic cloud or something a bit, to boost poison magic and reduce hostility chance. It's a solid starting book.

I'd be kinda' interested to know how that went down, m'self. Dosbox is apparently open source, but I couldn't find information on what license it's under during a cursory search of their website an'wiki, so gods only know if th'steam folks were required to toss money back at the dosbox folks.

<Moments later>
Seems it's GPL3 'ccording to the forum. Guess I missed something on the front page or whatever. Either way, I can only guess steam isn't doing something legally fishy by charging something involving a free program. I'd assume they're charging for the game instead of the dosbox emulator.

So I guess the answer to the question "Does the dosbox folks get a cut" is... probably not? Don't really know my way around all that license rigmarole.

S'only two more base AC than leather. Probably the best casting dragon armor is steam; it's got no EV penalty at all and still gives an extra AC point vs leather, matching base ring mail. Nice robe of resistance (or useful artifact) is probably preferred, unless the dragon armor's enchanted or an artifact.

That's a pretty solid piece, though. rF++ is nice. -1 EV isn't really noticeable re: casting success, in my experience. Can usually get away with ring mail (-2 EV), too, if you resistance needs require it.

re: Glamour -- according to the knowledge bot "An ability grey elves recieved in old versions of crawl at xl 5, it tried to confuse, paralyze, charm, scare nearby humanoids. Sucked."

Multiplayer Angband could kick ass, although the planning could be an issue.

Like, say, Mangband? Never played it, but it's there. There's a few more multiplayer roguelikes meandering around, but I can't remember any at the moment. There were also a couple of MUDs that was basically roguelikes, Pits of Angband or something? Angband map/item generation with standard hack'n'slash MUD combat. The one I managed to play any was pretty impressive, but they all seem to be defunct these days. Was a bit of a downer when I got around to checkin' on 'em and they had all went up in smoke.

I've spent far too much time on angband variants, though. I started roguelikes on one of the very early versions of zangband, iirc, and I've at least died a few times on most of them, which is actually vaguely ridiculous. There's a junkload of *band varients.

Steamband, cthband, Portralis (Actually a PernAngband -- ToME, these days -- fork, and radically different from Angband's playstyle, but still...), and Furyband are more-or-less my favorites among the ones I've played. Furyband and an older version of Steamband (When water naturalist regen was flipping insane) are the only ones I ever won with... and even then, only once a piece, both ridiculously cheaply (Around the corner morgoth kill in the former, lightning-storm (iirc) artillery from the other end of the map in the latter. Good stuff.). Hengband -- and whatever it is that it was based off of -- was also awesome. *bands need more stuff like Heng's classes. Ninjas were flipping awesome.

There was one that I keep forgetting the name of... ah! Kamband. That one was vaguely awesome, but absolutely ridiculously hard -- item damage is in by default, and the more damage you do, the worse the item comes out (Certain race/class combos, golem/werewolves ferex, could destroy their starting weapon in something like two hits). There's even an option to have artifacts operate under the same rules; imagine disintegrating Ringil or something on a cave lizard's skull and you get the general idea. Lots of other neat stuff; multiple town maps, randomly generated wilderness, multiple quest lines... it had a lot going on, with the caveat that it's even more brutally difficult than normal Angband.

As for base angband, the original? Meh. Kinda' boring Awesome considering the time it came about, the same with rogue and moria and junk, but so much more has been done by now...

The last time spiderweb software got a thread.

The couple of geneforge games I managed to play were... pretty solid. RPG-style thing, plenty of dialogue, things to check out, etc. Could draw parallels, in a general gameplay sense, with baldur's gate, arcanum, so forth. Kinda' an indie/low-key entry to the genre. Not terribly graphically impressive, exactly -- the fellow's been using the same engine more or less for all the games -- but plenty to do in pretty much all of 'em. Been too long since I've played the thing to really give anything besides a general recommendation.

Fellow also did the avernum and exile stuff.

Bugger necromancy (though you've certainly got a lot of it already...). Go vacuum a few levels (if you haven't already) and spam those plain decks to get better ones. You're basically running the exact same thing I did for my first win. Go spew card summons at snake:5, stack five that legendary dungeon deck for trowel cards, stack five/draw three that change deck into oblivion (Keep XP + helix cards), then take your hopefully new set of legendary summoning decks into the vaults. Wear that buckler, keep it worn, and turn dodging back on.

Haunt would be pretty awesome if you can get necromutation too; the sickness is especially annoying for low-hp critters. You'll probably want to pick up extension from somewhere for that, though. Better players could advise on that particular strategy.

Anyway, as long as you're careful about the guardian snakes and top tier naga critters, whose name I forget, you're set for snake:5. Airstrike would let you clear out the hall of blades, I think, which would probably be pretty decent for XP -- and hopefully a better weapon. Keep an eye out for Nikola, his sabre would probably be pretty helpful. You probably want to dump the scimitar -- it's a long blade. Find a nice sabre or quickblade. Go clean out elf, you can probably handle everything except the bottom without much trouble.

All I can think of at the moment. You're bloody close to set for a orb run, especially if you're using one of the versions before they put statues into the orb room to block apportation. Keep an eye out for summon butterflies; that would seriously increase your chance of survival in general, and in zot:5 especially.