Competition 146

[PowerWyrm]

So, now that this comp is over, I thought I'd pontificate on what I see as the point of it: what felt like the most important improvements that are in the current versions as compared to frog-knows. Somewhat remarkably (to me at least),
there were only a handful of things that I personally thought made the game significantly worse to play that current Vanilla, and most of them would be easy to fix. No doubt others would have a different list.

So, these are the main things I missed:
1) Targeting. You have to waste several turns trying to "line up" with the enemy, giving them a number of free actions.
2) No way to cancel a "recall" once you read the scroll.
3) No way to turn off haggling in the stores.
4) Missiles do not stack even if identical, e.g. (+0,+0) arrows.
5) Wands and Rods do not stack, making them too expensive in terms of inventory space.
6) No warning message at % injured.
7) Too many, and too verbose, messages.
8) Lanterns and the Phial only have radius one light, not radius two. And a Helm of Light does not add to the light radius.
9) No 'I'nspect command to tell you the properties of items after they are identified.

Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't a thousand other things that I like better about current Vanilla (like say, the way speed is handled), but these are the things that IMHO made frog-knows particularly annoying and frustrating to play.

The comp character was unnecessarily weak (it could have started with a higher IQ which would mean more SP), and this certainly colors one's perception of the game as being too hard.

1) Fixed in PCAngband 1.3, also based on FK with a few improvements from 2.5 -- this is why this version should have been picked for the comp
2) Not really a biggie no?
3) There's an option available by pressing "=" which turns haggling off (that's the first thing I did along with turning roguelike keyset off when playing the comp)
4+5) Indeed that makes using devices and shooting out of question in this version
6) Not really a biggie
7) NO AUTO MORE!!! This makes the game unplayable (killing a plain orc in 10 hits takes 20-30 keypresses).
8) In fact, light radius is limited to 1, whatever light you carry -- this makes exploring a PitA
9) No *ID* at all!!! This means each time you find something, you need to unequip EVERYTHING, equip the object and quaff a potion of self-knowledge (which you have to CHEAT to get some, because they're so rare you'll find 1 or 2 in the whole game)

I'd add:

10) Preserve off -- this means you have to clear any level with "special" feeling completely, because oterhwise you'd make artifacts unavailable
11) Maximize off -- this means that your HE mage is the same as a HT warrior stat-wise when you have max stats

The comp char was not designed for a comp. In FK, if you want to play a mage, you NEED to start with higher INT, otherwise you will waste days of play on the first dungeon levels for gold and items to buff your char.

[bron]

3) There's an option available by pressing "=" which turns haggling off

Well, maybe in the PC executable version. But this does not exist in the source I built from.