Sil-Q final beta release before 1.5.0

[HugoVirtuoso]

I recently found a Curved Sword of Murder. Is this new? I thought the "of Murder" weapons were limited to exclusively one-handed weapons.

[Infinitum]

Orcs be all about murder. Curved swords don't really share ego types with non-orcish weapons. You can use the smithing interface to check it out.

[HugoVirtuoso]

I noticed that 'piece of dried meat' tastes foul, but yet doesn't hurt player, which is of course ok. But, shouldn't the text be changed to something other than 'foul'?

Was there a canonical reason why the meat is foul yet not hurting the player?

[Nick]

I noticed that 'piece of dried meat' tastes foul, but yet doesn't hurt player, which is of course ok. But, shouldn't the text be changed to something other than 'foul'?

Was there a canonical reason why the meat is foul yet not hurting the player?

Foul doesn't need to mean poisonous. Frodo, talking to Sam about orcs: "Foul waters and foul meats they'll take, if they can get no better, but not poison"

[Quirk]

Kill was mostly me skillfully finding Anguirel, Maeglin and Finrod on the same character. I had really good equipment finds in general. The 8+ staffs of treasure and recharging helped.

Thanks for the run-down. Obviously there was a bit of luck getting to a critical mass of evasion (good rings, silverhand adding another point, Maeglin and Finrod) which made you very difficult to kill, but still: 48ish Evasion with Dodging and Dex potion is exceptionally high. This close to blanks everything but Morgoth's final phase. This is game-breaking levels of Evasion, and currently the only things that really mess with Evasion are mostly contained by stacking free-action.

I think also relevant is the damage output - Oath of Silence going from +1 Dex to +2 Str adds a lot of damage here particularly with Rapid Attack (2 damage sides * 3 dice * 2 blows and possibly another 2 * 2 from a Vengeance die) - and I need to think a little bit about whether the Oath of Silence change tips the meta toward heavy weapons too much particularly as you took Finesse over Power, which I think is probably suboptimal for your final loadout. Giving up Songs like Freedom and Staying in the throne room is fairly significant, but with such high Evasion they're less necessary.

I say this because sufficiently high damage output means you only need survive Morgoth's final phase for a few blows.

On the one hand I don't want fights to drag out because the player lacks damage output, but getting to practically invulnerable defences should come with a tradeoff. I feel you weren't at much risk against Morgoth, and dropped him very fast.

Probably my main takeaway here though is that 40 Evasion is partially possible through only having 8 Will, and examining how to keep evasion builds honest probably involves making Will more directly relevant in non free-action contexts.

In any case while I may fret about tweaks, considerable skill is needed in any case to navigate an Edain to such a victory, so congratulations again, it's a notable achievement.

[Quirk]

I recently found a Curved Sword of Murder. Is this new? I thought the "of Murder" weapons were limited to exclusively one-handed weapons.

Curved Swords are one-handed weapons.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Found a bug I think: Thorns ('&') are visible when player is blinded

[wobbly]

Found a bug I think: Thorns ('&') are visible when player is blinded

This was a change made long ago. You can't see them, as far as accuracy is concerned, but the symbol stays as they are immobile.

[Infinitum]

In any case while I may fret about tweaks, considerable skill is needed in any case to navigate an Edain to such a victory, so congratulations again, it's a notable achievement.

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.

[Cuboideb]

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

bool supress_messsage = !!(flg & PROJECT_SILENT);

[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]

Thanks! My level of C is too K&R

[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.

[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.

[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.