Sil screencasting / let's play

[half]

(That's probably long enough to avoid spoiling those that care...)

Great work in that last episode! It was a bit shocking to see how powerful archery was. It reminds me of my first archery winner (pre-release), but we have limited archery a bit since then. We'll definitely have to do something about that. The trick is balancing regular archery when walking around the dungeon with archery against a specific target where you can prepare the field somewhat and are happy to use up some serious resources. I think that Crippling Shot is a particular culprit, as is Flaming Arrows.

Regarding a couple of your comments:

Morgoth radiates light because he is wearing the crown with three 7-radius light sources in it. When he drops it, he stops radiating the light, but the crown on the ground keeps shining. When you cut out the Silmarils, it stops, but they keep radiating etc. Hard to see this in an ASCII game!

Regarding Gorthaur, have a look at the lower depths in monster.txt. There is one 'level 25' monster: Morgoth. There are four 'level 24' monsters, all of which are uniques: Gorthaur, Gothmog, Glaurung, Ungoliant. Two of these are generated each game in the throne room on certain squares. So by default, you only see two of the four each game. However they each also have a greater vault where they can be found (and possibly slain), so you can even potentially kill all of them beforehand, making the throne room easier. You can also encounter them using multiple sources of Danger.

Regarding the effect of Concentration being broken by arrows that go too far, that is a (minor) problem and I've made a note of it.

[half]

You can also encounter them using multiple sources of Danger.

Scatha pointed out to me that this is incorrect: we specifically blocked this in the code for the level 24 monsters. It is only the greater vaults and the throne room. That said, danger will get you more of the level 23 monsters, which are also pretty tough!

[Scatha]

Note however that if you have a source of danger when you enter the Throne Room you can expect to meet all of the surviving level 24s!

[Patashu]

Morgoth radiates light because he is wearing the crown with three 7-radius light sources in it. When he drops it, he stops radiating the light, but the crown on the ground keeps shining. When you cut out the Silmarils, it stops, but they keep radiating etc. Hard to see this in an ASCII game!

Not necessarily. Ever win Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup? The Orb of Zot radiates a magenta-dark magenta light that 'pulses' in waves outward from you at a rate determined by in game time passing. Silmaril light could be a special colour/effect.

[clouded]

Nice one debo, you made it look ridiculously easy.

[half]

Not necessarily. Ever win Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup? The Orb of Zot radiates a magenta-dark magenta light that 'pulses' in waves outward from you at a rate determined by in game time passing. Silmaril light could be a special colour/effect.

That does sound fun. The colour for silmarils should really be white, but pulsing (somewhat like the flickering lantern) should be possible. I might bear it in mind. The radius 7 is already pretty startling.

[debo]

The trick is balancing regular archery when walking around the dungeon with archery against a specific target where you can prepare the field somewhat and are happy to use up some serious resources.

I was going to mention this exact balancing problem in my final video of the series. I don't know how you're going to keep archery viable for non-specialists while preventing it from being insanely strong for specialists in the general case.

Re: Flaming arrows, I think Morgoth should probably have a few resistances. Maybe everything but Cold, since that one is supposed to be high-value, but I'm guessing you guys thought of this and have good reasons for having kept him resistance-free.

Re: The rest of it, I am terrible at coming up with balancing suggestions, so I'll just leave it to the rest of you All I can say is that this is one of the easiest throne-room runs I've ever had, because a) permaspeed, and b) Gorthaur's absence.

Thanks for watching! I'm going to try to get the ascent video up this evening.

[Scatha]

Re: Flaming arrows, I think Morgoth should probably have a few resistances. Maybe everything but Cold, since that one is supposed to be high-value, but I'm guessing you guys thought of this and have good reasons for having kept him resistance-free.

I was actually wondering the same thing as I pondered why it looked like it was going to be so easy for my pacifist in the end game. One issue is that it's far easier to get brands on arrows than anything else (indeed people often have fire and poison brands, which is kind of crazy) combined with the fact that bows are single large-die weapons meaning that brands are particularly effective. (We are actually planning to change the way that elemental brands work which would remove this effect, but it's not a high priority change so will probably happen some time after 1.3.)

Flavourfully I don't mind whether Morgoth resists fire or not, and the same with poison (he is burned by the Silmarils, but I think that's light rather than flame). He probably should resist darkness (there is a case for making him light averse, but that would need a big compensating boost in his stats). I think he should not resist cold, because of Ringil. Balance-wise the main effect is on archers, but it looks like it's going in a reasonable direction.

[debo]

And here's the final Stealth/archer vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=976eVpqvXyc

Next up -- a Sil 1.1 run!

[fizzix]

Just watched the last video. Great job on the video, it was a lot of fun to watch. I'm looking forward to vicariously playing Sil 1.1 in your next one.

[debo]

Just watched the last video. Great job on the video, it was a lot of fun to watch. I'm looking forward to vicariously playing Sil 1.1 in your next one.

Glad you enjoyed it -- I'm looking forward to watching your series as well!!

[debo]

First video in a 1.1 series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFF55M6zm-U

[Edit: Fixed URL -- thanks fizzix!]

[clouded]

Hah. The great spear thing isn't really something I do as a rule or anything, I have just been trying to play around more with polearms recently. It's sort of hard to figure out what to do with them. Zone of control -> flanking -> whirlwind is an awesome progression, but it feels a bit like at the end there's not much reason to stick with them, unless you get a cool artefact. Otherwise, great spears get a pretty huge damage increase from criticals, which are fairly easy to get with (-1) and ~4lbs.

The bastard sword you make is a good idea which I will probably steal in the future.

[fizzix]

The link you posted seems to be broken.

[half]

Debo,

A couple of points re your latest video:

- Using stairs only takes a single turn (since 1.0.1 I think). When we moved the anti-stairscumming mechanic to trapped stairs we removed the extra turn wasting thing.

- The main point of violet molds (and related things) is not for the bit where you fight them (eat herbs etc), but because it is strategically interesting to sometimes be wandering around with drained stats looking for ways to restore them and it creates these situations. Players who don't like this should be able to mostly avoid it by playing characters with decent Will.