Sil

[debo]

Hi http://angband.oook.cz/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=6

I think the obvious next step for Sil to take is to turn it into Sil X Street Fighter

[Infinitum]

They removed the incessant chunk-gobbling from Crawl? Good riddance.

[locus]

Can you elaborate?

Well, I don't want to get too heavy into other-roguelike politics, but there have been a lot of controversial changes to Crawl recently that have cut core gameplay mechanics in the name of streamlining (carry weight limits, item destruction, butchering corpses for food, etc). I come down on the "Crawl is ruined, thank God I can just play Sil instead" side of the controversy, so I really don't want to see Sil follow in Crawl's footsteps.

MarvinPA is one of the people on the Crawl devteam, which is why it's relevant. I'm not just taking this opportunity to whine as a non-sequitur.

[taptap]

I hope Sil continues to cherrypick the best ideas from MarvinPA-Sil while leaving the highly-rationalized stuff to those who want that sort of thing enough to seek out a variant. I would hate to see Sil go down the road Crawl is currently going down.

Can you elaborate?

[locus]

I hope Sil continues to cherrypick the best ideas from MarvinPA-Sil while leaving the highly-rationalized stuff to those who want that sort of thing enough to seek out a variant. I would hate to see Sil go down the road Crawl is currently going down.

[Patashu]

So when is marvinpa-sil getting merged into sil

[Zadok]

The stat you are probably having trouble with is their protection, which I think is 3d4. They're one of the earliest enemies who matter that have this much protection.

You want a lot of criticals (finesse + high melee, low weapon weight) or, more realistically just a big-dice weapon (battle-axe, bastard sword) possibly wielded 2-handed to punch through it.

I think a heavier longbow with high strength could probably make short work of them as well.

Thank you very much! Hope my next encounter turns out better.

[debo]

Why are Easterling Warriors so damn tough? What are their stats?

The stat you are probably having trouble with is their protection, which I think is 3d4. They're one of the earliest enemies who matter that have this much protection.

You want a lot of criticals (finesse + high melee, low weapon weight) or, more realistically just a big-dice weapon (battle-axe, bastard sword) possibly wielded 2-handed to punch through it.

I think a heavier longbow with high strength could probably make short work of them as well.

[Zadok]

Why are Easterling Warriors so damn tough? What are their stats?

[Tarrant]

Actually, I think that (in the case of Sil), the stash management issue already has a theoretical workaround in place. Monsters already move around the dungeon, and already pick things up. I'm not sure how much of that is happening offscreen, but if you could have, say, an orc pack wander through and pick up your early stash, it could create interesting effects.

One issue that I have is that if you create essentially one and only one level per depth per game, you limit yourself to a finite number of items, enemies, and therefore possible experience per run (barring worm mass explosions). If you conceptualize it so that each staircase only leads to one other level, then having monster packs wander in from the stairs (as they currently do) doesn't really make sense unless you have them coming from the level that staircase leads to.

One sort-of-interesting variation would be to make it so that every individual staircase leads to a different (persistent) instance of the same dungeon level- so each of the three down stairs on 50' (for example) would lead to a different, but persistent, version of 100'. Each staircase on each of those 100' levels would lead to a different, but persistent, version of 150', etc. That way you would end up with a "fully persistent" dungeon that was large enough to still feel like Angband, and still essentially impossible to explore the entirety of due to the turn clock- though there would probably have to be a point where the levels started drawing back in again so as to not have thousands of downstairs all leading to one upstairs in the throne room. Or you could just collapse that staircase on the way in and have the one off to the side be the only way up, or just have the upstairs you came down assigned to whatever downstairs you used, so that all roads eventually lead to the throne room. Not quite sure how this would interact with the new chasms.

Then the goal of a completionist would be to ... kill Morgoth and then explore back through every single dungeon level, I guess, which would take for freaking ever.

One side effect of a system like that would be that you could (in theory) generate the entire dungeon, all treasures, and all enemies on the very first game turn, which would make things like competitions where everyone is playing off of the same start slightly more consistent.

Having said all of that, I think that what I just outlined might be interesting, but is in no way actually necessary, and would take an enormous amount of time and effort to code. In some ways I kind of like the idea, but I personally enjoy Sil the way that it is. I also think that having connected stairs and persistent dungeon levels removes the only real escape from a terrible situation that Sil has- get the heck off of the level! If you could be followed by whatever you were running away from, it would be even easier to get in to situations that you really just can't escape from.


TLDR: I think that it would be possible to make a really cool persistent levels game heavily based on Sil, but it would be a different game, require non-trivial rebalancing, and be a fairly massive programming project.

[half]

So many of the design choices in Sil are built around non-persistent levels. If you prefer persistent levels that's fine, but I don't really think they'd work in Sil.

This is my view too. I find that there are several disadvantages of not having persistent floors (the OP mentioned most of them) and also quite a few disadvantages of having them. One that I don't think has been mentioned is that good play then requires stash management which many people (including me) find to be very dull. Sil has worked around many of the disadvantages of not having persistent floors and has ended up with much better balance than most games which have them. It would probably be more than a full time week to add them as an option (or the only option) and then to balance things back to normal. This is a *very* big ask of someone and it shouldn't be surprising that the answer is that it is not going to happen.

[locus]

So many of the design choices in Sil are built around non-persistent levels. If you prefer persistent levels that's fine, but I don't really think they'd work in Sil.

[evilmike]

No, he's asking for an option to enable persistent levels. I know he's voicing an unpopular opinion here but that's no reason to misquote him.

I was replying to this specifically:

Also, since Sil is pretty straightforward (no optional branches or quests), I think the no backtracking option would fit better than persistent floors. I think Sil should be played Ironman mode by default.

And the good news is, this is already implemented. In sil, it's under "challenge options" in the menu, which you can get to during character creation. And from that point on, if you load that savefile when starting new characters, ironman mode will indeed be the default.

[Derakon]

No, he's asking for an option to enable persistent levels. I know he's voicing an unpopular opinion here but that's no reason to misquote him.

Having said that, I suspect that structurally the code would require a lot of changes to support persistent levels, and of course balance-wise the game would be thrown completely out of whack. It's not a trivial change, especially if you want the contents of levels to be preserved in addition to their layouts. So short of having access to a programmer who agrees with you and has the time and expertise needed to modify the game, I suspect this isn't going to happen. Sorry.

[evilmike]

You are asking for a whole variant that forces ironman mode? Just enable it in the birth options before you start the game. I think it even saves the settings if you use that savefile for future characters, so there's no need to edit a config file.