Sil 1.0.2

[debo]

Aren't there places where you give bonuses for using light weapons? Ergo heavy weapons are penalized by not getting those bonuses.

I don't think light weapons give any explicit bonuses -- they're just more likely to critical, but do badly against monsters with crit resist.

On the other side of the spectrum, heavy weapons do more consistent damage but are harder to hit with. They don't do as much extreme damage as light weapons (harder to crit), but they pretty much always do something if you hit.

There aren't many monsters in the game who will live if you hit them in the face with a forceful mattock blow.

Charge/assassination will change or exacerbate these qualities a bit, I guess. But I don't think light or heavy weapons have any explicit "binary switch" penalties/bonuses that apply anywhere. Everything is derived from the numbers AFAIK

(I guess I could have just saved my words and waited for someone who actually knows what they're talking about to speak )

[Derakon]

Aren't there places where you give bonuses for using light weapons? Ergo heavy weapons are penalized by not getting those bonuses.

[Scatha]

Yes, it seems so. At some point there was a penalty for melee of some sort. I'm not sure if there should be -- it only seems to come up with Mattocks.

Although there is no longer an explicit penalty to melee, we still have quite a lot of ways of getting across that "Heavy weapons are unwieldy and shouldn't be used by low Strength characters":

- Heavy weapons are unwieldy -- they almost all have a penalty to hit built in.
- Heavy weapons get fewer criticals, so you tend to prefer them as light as lets you get your full strength bonus.
- Heavy weapons tend to have more damage dice with fewer sides, which means they give good damage for strong characters but not for weaker ones.

I think having an extra penalty to melee based on weapon weight would be too much overlap, making it less clear what each part is representing (and less clean). I guess such a mechanic could replace the first of the three points here, but then we'd need to rebalance all of the weapons, and it's not clear that it would be a better system at the end than it is now ...

[half]

Sil just rolled up a Noldor character who awoke on the shores of lake Cuivienen but was 44 years old. I'm not a big enough Tolkien buff to know exactly, but it seems that there should be some kind of a canon age range for lake babies, and Elves in general.

Good point.

Oh, that's just the [+1] from the other weapon, never mind. Looking at the code, I can't seem to find any explicit penalty for very heavy weapons besides slower digging. Is this correct?

Yes, it seems so. At some point there was a penalty for melee of some sort. I'm not sure if there should be -- it only seems to come up with Mattocks.

[WaveMotion]

Sil just rolled up a Noldor character who awoke on the shores of lake Cuivienen but was 44 years old. I'm not a big enough Tolkien buff to know exactly, but it seems that there should be some kind of a canon age range for lake babies, and Elves in general.

Edit: How does the penalty for very heavy weapons work? Just wielded an 18-pound mattock on a strength 3 character, and it seems I'm getting a -1 to Evasion.

Edit2: Oh, that's just the [+1] from the other weapon, never mind. Looking at the code, I can't seem to find any explicit penalty for very heavy weapons besides slower digging. Is this correct?

[nryut]

I can't reproduce the first one though.

Yes, this one is odd, because it seems to have only _some_ effects of turn advancement.
Start a new character and do ^x, then load it. You will see that "Game Turn" in the @ screen has increased to be 1 (or however large number, if you ^x/load several times,) although your torch still has 1999 turns of light.

Exiting via the window's close button doesn't have this effect.

[half]

1) Exiting by ^x seems to advance the game a turn.
For example, my character was stunned when I pressed ^x, which produced "You are no longer stunned" message. Also, the turn count increments.

2) Choosing by pressing a letter key doesn't work in the smithing 'enchant' menu. Like, if you take boots, then go to the enchant menu and press 'c' for the Boots of Speed, it will select 'a' (of Softest Thread) instead.
---
I looked through the "cmd4.c" source file and it seems that create_special() is never called after the "Choose by letter" bit is executed in enchant_menu_aux(). So it always selects the option that was highlighted previously.

3) There are similar irritating issues in the smithing 'artifice' menu that are presumably harder to fix:
3.a) If you choose an ability bonus and then choose a stat bonus, the ability bonus disappears (and it also disappears if you choose it and re-enter the artifice menu.) It will re-appear, however, when you go to any 'abilities' sub-menu.
3.b) The most annoying one is that the name of artifact is reset each time you re-enter the artifice menu. I often want to switch between 'artifice' and 'numbers' to tune the price of my artifact, so I often end up with yet another "The Helm of nryut" if I don't pay attention.
3.c) "Choose by letter" doesn't work in sub-menus.

Thanks, I've made a note of these now. I can't reproduce the first one though.

I don't use any online code repository, but I am prepared to hand apply small diffs if they are sent to me -- I apologise for my old-fashionedness.

[nryut]

half,

I'd like to report some minor bugs that I've encountered playing Sil (hope this is the right place to do this.)
By the way, do you accept source patches? These bugs are kind of mundane, so you may not have time for them... But if they get sufficiently bothersome for me, I might want to do a proper source dive and try to fix them one day.

Here's my list:

1) Exiting by ^x seems to advance the game a turn.
For example, my character was stunned when I pressed ^x, which produced "You are no longer stunned" message. Also, the turn count increments.

2) Choosing by pressing a letter key doesn't work in the smithing 'enchant' menu. Like, if you take boots, then go to the enchant menu and press 'c' for the Boots of Speed, it will select 'a' (of Softest Thread) instead.
---
I looked through the "cmd4.c" source file and it seems that create_special() is never called after the "Choose by letter" bit is executed in enchant_menu_aux(). So it always selects the option that was highlighted previously.

3) There are similar irritating issues in the smithing 'artifice' menu that are presumably harder to fix:
3.a) If you choose an ability bonus and then choose a stat bonus, the ability bonus disappears (and it also disappears if you choose it and re-enter the artifice menu.) It will re-appear, however, when you go to any 'abilities' sub-menu.
3.b) The most annoying one is that the name of artifact is reset each time you re-enter the artifice menu. I often want to switch between 'artifice' and 'numbers' to tune the price of my artifact, so I often end up with yet another "The Helm of nryut" if I don't pay attention.
3.c) "Choose by letter" doesn't work in sub-menus.

And thanks for the great game!

[half]

A couple of low-priority UI requests, not really necessary for the upcoming version:

Trumpet failure due to insufficient Voice should not give the same message as that due to failed Will roll. How about "You are too short of breath!" or something for the former?

It's always disconcerting when things go dark due to my light source being low on fuel. It'd be better if the "Your $light_source is running out of fuel" message were guaranteed to trigger before the flickers start.

Done. There was an off-by-one error causing the latter. I've also made it so the first running out of fuel message disturbs running/resting, but subsequent ones don't, until it goes out.

[WaveMotion]

A couple of low-priority UI requests, not really necessary for the upcoming version:

Trumpet failure due to insufficient Voice should not give the same message as that due to failed Will roll. How about "You are too short of breath!" or something for the former?

It's always disconcerting when things go dark due to my light source being low on fuel. It'd be better if the "Your $light_source is running out of fuel" message were guaranteed to trigger before the flickers start.

[debo]

I'd like to point out here that having an obscene # of forges at the lower depths really doesn't help you _that_ much. Forging at deep depths is very dangerous.

I often abandon forges because e.g. a stubborn Rauko has bashed down all the doors between me and the rest of the dungeon, and any 200+ turn item I might forge is sure to trap me in there with some nasty critters. (This is even more fun when a Grotesque or two have followed behind it.)

This is balanced out by not being able to forge much of use at the early stages. By the time I have my smithing kit ready, the turnclock has certainly forced me past 600', which is a very uncomfortable place to be for a character heavily invested in smithing.

[Scatha]

As Patashu says, don't worry about 2. If you can forge on the way up, then you've probably killed Morgoth already, so there is actually nothing to gain. I did it just to see what I could eek out of the system. Infact given that the ladder favours lower turn counts, smithing actually pushes you further down the ladder, so there is no advantage over other players either.

This isn't so much a worry about smithing, actually, but about competitions. We realised, when the last competition was on, that if the given character wasn't able to kill Morgoth regularly, but could survive on the escape, then they could generally power up by hanging around on the way up until they could take down V. But this would be easy to address if we haven't found a better answer by using slightly modified scoring in competitions.

In terms of 1, how much of a problem is it? The long forging times already restrict how many forges you can use. Personally I drop as quickly as I can to give me the most time I can get to forge with. I haven't read every dump on the ladder, but I don't think I have seen any other characters who forge so prolifically. I wouldn't balance the game around my characters.

Fair to point out that we shouldn't be thinking of your characters as typical! (I have to say, with your new tricks I shudder to think what you would have pulled off in 1.0 ...) But I have also had experiences with what I think are too many forges at the end (I haven't tried to play one since the increases in smithing times for difficult items, though, so I'm sure that's doing some work). I think the biggest issue here is the spread between forging capabilities for characters with Staves of Revelations and those without. It's not a huge problem, though.

[Psi]

I'm not sure 2) is necessarily a bad thing. You already 'beat the game' if you get a silmaril and can scum the dungeon, why not let the player have some fun?

As Patashu says, don't worry about 2. If you can forge on the way up, then you've probably killed Morgoth already, so there is actually nothing to gain. I did it just to see what I could eek out of the system. Infact given that the ladder favours lower turn counts, smithing actually pushes you further down the ladder, so there is no advantage over other players either.

In terms of 1, how much of a problem is it? The long forging times already restrict how many forges you can use. Personally I drop as quickly as I can to give me the most time I can get to forge with. I haven't read every dump on the ladder, but I don't think I have seen any other characters who forge so prolifically. I wouldn't balance the game around my characters.

[Patashu]

I'm not sure 2) is necessarily a bad thing. You already 'beat the game' if you get a silmaril and can scum the dungeon, why not let the player have some fun?

[Derakon]

Yes, we will think about this. We've tried hard to have a balanced smithing system (which is often broken in roguelikes with it) and I think we've done well, though it can be very much broken by a couple of things at the moment:

1) Staves of Revelations
2) Staying in Angband after getting a Silmaril

Number (2) is because you stop being forced down. It is a bit hard to know what to say about this. Perhaps we should stop it somehow, but it is not clear that it is the forging system's fault.

It would make sense, to me, for monster spawning to get more and more aggressive the more time has passed since you got the Silmaril. Morgoth should be sending everything he has after you. Thus, sticking around to scum for stuff wouldn't be a great idea...unless you're powerful enough to survive even among hordes of monsters.