Sil-Q final beta release before 1.5.0

[bron]

Also - is the 900' forge now not a guaranteed thing? I've had a couple of runs that didn't have a forge when I entered 900' for the first time. OTOH, I have been consistently finding a forge at 300'. What's the truth about guaranteed forges in the latest version?

[bron]

Here's an underhanded trick that occurred to me after I finished the game: If you know Masterpiece, you can begin Smithing something that takes 3 more skill than you have. But you also sing Delvings (or anything else you know), and carefully arrange for your voice to give out just before the piece is finished. This interrupts the smithing just before the end. Now you quaff a Grace potion, and finish the piece. This allows you to stretch your supply of Grace potions, using one one per piece, rather than needing to serially quaff a bunch of them the whole time. Note that I didn't actually try this so I don't know that it actually works.

Note that I think you *should* be allowed to boost your Smithing by quaffing Grace potions for the (full) duration of the work, I just think the thing described above is somewhat out of bounds. Note that it's not just singing; anything that interrupts you will do the trick- your light going out for example. I don't have a good answer to this. It's niche enough that it could just be ignored for now.

[bron]

infinite arrow production

Yes, it seems to be consistent.

I stumbled over this by accident, and then tested it to be sure I understood the conditions. It seems to happen when the arrows in the second slot are dropped on the floor; the arrows in the first slot are less than 99, but are increased to 99; and there are still some arrows left over that hit the floor. Under these conditions, the arrows that get added to the first quiver slot are not subtracted from the arrows that hit the floor.

[Quirk]

The "final form" of Morgoth is very hard. It was pretty frustrating to get him down to two stars, but then only barely be able to finish the job. It seems like the power jump is too much. I used a poison branded glaive as my weapon of choice; what do other people find effective against Morgoth?

I think you are right that Vengeance would have helped, though perhaps I should increase Morgoth's power a little more smoothly. I am impressed that you managed the kill with a 50K character at all.

Morgoth is balanced with two goals: that kills should be rare and much harder than three sil victories and that the fight should be relatively short and brutal to avoid player frustration.

I was surprised to find that the "infinite arrow production" bug is still in the game i.e. have 80 arrows in the first quiver slot, and 70 arrows in the second quiver slot. Now drop the 70 arrows directly onto the floor. 19 arrows get added to the first quiver slot from the group being dropped, bringing the first quiver slot up to 99, but nevertheless 70 arrows (not 51) hit the floor.

I too thought this had been squashed though it was some time ago it was last brought up, and I have a hazy recollection that the replication may have been different for the last instance. Is this reliable every time?

Song of Delvings seems to be inconsistent. Despite my earlier reports, it does seem to work ok in the lower-left corner. But it doesn't always find traps and/or staircases. I don't quite understand the conditions that cause this. But it does seem to be pretty good at locating forges at a distance.

Thanks to your earlier post I looked into it and found a quite embarrassing bug caused by a typo misplacing an x for a y. This is fixed in my master branch and will be sorted for release. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

[bron]

I just finished a high-smith, 50K, no-artifacts run on Angband Live, and thought I'd give a few thoughts:

The Smithing game is a bit different, and a bit less powerful. Since the only +Smith items available are +Grace items, and you can only make so many of those, I had to invest a lot more points in the skill. A 16 point investment can yield 27 smithing skill, which seems like a good compromise number; I could make a lot of good stuff, but within limits. And the occasional enchanted forge can help. I assume serially quaffing Grace potions can also temporarily increase your Smithing - I didn't try this.

A regular (not 50K) character seems like it would be hard to run as a high Smith. Sure, you ultimately get another 25K experience points, but you don't pass 50K until pretty late in the game, and so have a lot less time to hunt for forges in the "fully buffed" state.

The "final form" of Morgoth is very hard. It was pretty frustrating to get him down to two stars, but then only barely be able to finish the job. It seems like the power jump is too much. I used a poison branded glaive as my weapon of choice; what do other people find effective against Morgoth?

I was surprised to find that the "infinite arrow production" bug is still in the game i.e. have 80 arrows in the first quiver slot, and 70 arrows in the second quiver slot. Now drop the 70 arrows directly onto the floor. 19 arrows get added to the first quiver slot from the group being dropped, bringing the first quiver slot up to 99, but nevertheless 70 arrows (not 51) hit the floor.

Song of Delvings seems to be inconsistent. Despite my earlier reports, it does seem to work ok in the lower-left corner. But it doesn't always find traps and/or staircases. I don't quite understand the conditions that cause this. But it does seem to be pretty good at locating forges at a distance.

[Quirk]

Despite my earlier statements, smithing is still interesting and fun. It's just (a little) different. Making a really powerful character via smithing now seems to demand more forges, but that's not an unreasonable limitation. My winning chars would make a lot of gear, and lastly a Masterpiece weapon at the 900' forge.

I'm very glad to hear this, and appreciate how open-minded you have been here.

A couple of specific points:

You can *decrease* the "special" bonus of a War Hammer of Crushing, allowing one to make a 4d3 War Hammer as an ordinary (non-artifact) object, at high but not impossible cost. I suspect that this is an oversight (?). Other objects (notably Shadow Cloaks) do not allow you to decrease their bonus. Admittedly, you can make a 4d3 War Hammer by starting with the Hador Enchantment, but that increases the smithing cost quite a bit.

So it is actually Shadow Cloaks which are the special case here - the Shadow Cloak base item has the stealth built into it, and so it doesn't have a special bonus. If you take a Mithril Corslet of Resilience or a Longsword of the Feanorians you can decrease the special bonus there also.

21 Smithing is quite an investment so I don't think a 4d3 warhammer is necessarily too good.

Song of Delving doesn't seem to work in the extreme lower-left corner of the map.

This is on my list to look into, but thanks for adding precision to the report.

The ascent seemed harder, despite the shafts. Have the "3-sils" monster bonuses gotten bigger? Or is it just my imagination?

Morgoth himself will get tougher the more Sils you have and be positioned closer to you on the escape, but the 3-sil curse is the same as always.

"Smite" is an interesting mechanic. It's certainly useful against high defense enemies (serpents, Kemenrauko), but the fact that you lose a turn even if you miss on the initial attack makes it dangerous. Particularly against Morgoth, where a mis-timed Smite can kill you.

Yes, it adds a lot of damage against highly armoured enemies and the front-loading of damage can kill an enemy without response, but you are effectively committing up front to making two attacks instead of one. This requires different risk management. Most of the time you want to Smite but doing so at the wrong moment can kill you.

I am happy with the skill though precisely because it changes the experience of play. For me the flagship skill of Sil is Flanking, precisely because taking it has such an impact on how the player approaches melee; my hope with Smite was that it would add a new tool yielding a dimension of fresh challenges.

[Quirk]

The way the game thinks about the damage is that it is "mixed" damage i.e. if a Balrog hits you with a flaming whip, you're taking damage both from being hit and being burned. This is analogous to the way branded weapons work.

I agree that poison presents differently: you take all the damage as poison damage, not partial immediate damage and partial poison damage. This is somewhat easier for the player as some of the damage that should be done immediately is pushed into the future but it clouds representation of it as mixed damage and makes it look like more of it should have been resisted.

In terms of enemies that poison the player, I would be inclined to say that werewolves are definitely mixed damage, but spiders and serpents could possibly be represented as having more pure poison damage. I note though that sword spiders do not poison players but pack quite a punch so I am not sure of the consistency here.

[bron]

Yes, you are right; unresisted poison (or fire or cold) gets an extra die in melee, so in that sense you get (some) protection (by not taking extra damage). But poison protection does not halve the damage, and multiple layers of protection do not stack. You can still get hit for 20 or 30 points of poison, even wearing double poison protection.

Whatever - just chalk it up to me whining ...

[Infinitum]

Wait, what? According to the manual unresisted elemental damage equals 1 extra damage die added to the roll, which matches my experience ingame? Did you do some code diving or something?

[bron]

One more thing: It's embarrassing to admit, but I'd never noticed that "resist poison" does not in fact protect you from poison damage incurred in melee (e.g. being bitten by a Werewolf), only against "pure" poison damage (like poison breath). This just seems wrong. Armor of "Venom's End" is nothing of the sort. Admittedly, this is pretty clearly a deliberate decision in the original Sil that has been continued in Silq, and admittedly fire and cold work the same way (e.g. extra fire damage when a Balrog hits you in melee is not reduced by having fire resistance). But for Poison in particular, this just seems wrong.

[bron]

Rather than continue to shoot my mouth off about smithing in the abstract, I decided I should run a character so I could shoot my mouth off in the concrete. A few impressions:

I found that running a 50K "challenge" character was actually easier/better for a high smithing run, since I could make good use of any early forges, and could very quickly run down to the deeper levels which are bigger (and so generically more likely to have a forge somewhere), and also to find Revelations staves sooner.A standard run by contrast takes a lot more turns to build up the character leaving a lot less time to hunt for forges. More (useful) forges was more important than the extra experience points.

Smithing of 27 feels like a good compromise. I'd have 4 Grace, plus build a Smithing kit of items with +6 Grace, and 16 skill points. Plus one for the affinity. That's a big investment, but not an impossible one. And there's a lot of good stuff to be made at 27 smithing skill, notably +3 Evasion or Accuracy rings. A case could be made for 28 smithing skill,which would allow one to make a +2 Constitution Amulet (needs 31 skill) if you find an Enchanted forge, or burn enough Grace potions. But I decided against that.

Despite my earlier statements, smithing is still interesting and fun. It's just (a little) different. Making a really powerful character via smithing now seems to demand more forges, but that's not an unreasonable limitation. My winning chars would make a lot of gear, and lastly a Masterpiece weapon at the 900' forge.

Anyway: the changes are maybe not what I would have done, but probably every individual can say that about everything, all the time. And it's not like I'm actually doing anything about it, other than complaining. I really like Sil, and Silq, and am glad to see that it is under active development.


A couple of specific points:

You can *decrease* the "special" bonus of a War Hammer of Crushing, allowing one to make a 4d3 War Hammer as an ordinary (non-artifact) object, at high but not impossible cost. I suspect that this is an oversight (?). Other objects (notably Shadow Cloaks) do not allow you to decrease their bonus. Admittedly, you can make a 4d3 War Hammer by starting with the Hador Enchantment, but that increases the smithing cost quite a bit.

Song of Delving doesn't seem to work in the extreme lower-left corner of the map.

The "final form" of Morgoth is tough! I had characters that could get him down to 2 stars, but couldn't finish. This was a little unexpected (to me anyway), but is actually sort of a nice feature. Once I knew about it.

The ascent seemed harder, despite the shafts. Have the "3-sils" monster bonuses gotten bigger? Or is it just my imagination?

"Smite" is an interesting mechanic. It's certainly useful against high defense enemies (serpents, Kemenrauko), but the fact that you lose a turn even if you miss on the initial attack makes it dangerous. Particularly against Morgoth, where a mis-timed Smite can kill you.

[Quirk]

Hey, thanks! Dunno about "fixing" melee/evasion, but the quick and dirty way to increase endgame diffiulty is probably to remove Treasure, Foe and Revelation staves altogether. Not being able to hunt down uniques and vaults for fun & profit would put a serious hamper on 950'-900' scumming.

I was planning a big rework of staves and consumables but it turned out to be too much work for 1.5 - I don't have the time at present. However Revelations, or at least the Revelations effect needs to be available for the ascent in order to stop it dragging out too long I think. Treasures I have more issues with but the ideal would be to make scumming less optimal, not just harder, because making optimal play more tedious is frustrating for players I think.

One approach might be to make the turn clock tick a little faster when the player is far below min depth so rapid diving comes with some tradeoff. The balance could still be set to favour diving but to a lesser degree.

[Cuboideb]

Thanks! My level of C is too K&R

[backwardsEric]

This line in spells1.c looks strange (double negation):

bool supress_messsage = !!(flg & PROJECT_SILENT);

That's a C idiom to leave a value of zero as it is and to convert a non-zero value to one to match the expected range of a boolean.

[Cuboideb]

This line in spells1.c looks strange (double negation):

bool supress_messsage = !!(flg & PROJECT_SILENT);