Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[Patashu]

Perhaps the player could select from a range of time limits at the beginning of the game, then? And of course these would impact their score. So you could have a leisurely time limit, then the current limit, and then a strict one.

99.9% of players would choose the absolute more lenient time limit, because you don't care about score until you win regularly.
Once you do care about score, you're good enough to be able to play quicker than the toughest time limit, so the time limit choice is irrelevant to you expect 'I pick the one that gives me more points'.
I think this is not the correct approach.

[Derakon]

Okay, fair enough. I admit to not having a strong feel for how the time limit affects gameplay, since I still haven't tried the game yet. Sorry guys!

[emulord]

Forges (including enchanted and the artifact forge) and artifacts can be generated any time you reload a level, making scumming until you have a full set of artifacts optimal play if there is no clock.

Perhaps if you're above the "mindepth" There is a message that says "This area looks boring. The treasures of Angband are found deeper" and forges/artifacts/(food/torches??) stop dropping.

[Patashu]

Okay, fair enough. I admit to not having a strong feel for how the time limit affects gameplay, since I still haven't tried the game yet. Sorry guys!

Darn it, get around to playing Sil!

Perhaps if you're above the "mindepth" There is a message that says "This area looks boring. The treasures of Angband are found deeper" and forges/artifacts/(food/torches??) stop dropping.

How is this not mechanically equivalent to the forced descent clock?

[BlueFish]

99.9% of players would choose the absolute more lenient time limit, because you don't care about score until you win regularly.
Once you do care about score, you're good enough to be able to play quicker than the toughest time limit, so the time limit choice is irrelevant to you expect 'I pick the one that gives me more points'.
I think this is not the correct approach.

I agree. Score is essentially meaningless in roguelikes but for those who compete on public ladders. An insignificantly small percentage of players.

The combination of the time limit and the smaller dungeon (in breadth and depth) squeezes out more roguelike gameplay goodness that, in vanilla Angband, only exists for players experienced, skillful, and masochistic enough to play Ironman by choice. In vanilla, ironman, for all its cultural cache, doesn't appeal to many, because it's so frustrating, compared to the gameplay they're accustomed to, while they learned the game. (Which was already hard!)

The shorter playtime of Sil makes its enforced "ironman" style of play acceptable to most rogelike players, I think. Certainly, such a concept could never work in a new game which must be learned from scratch, and which had the breadth and depth and playtime of vanilla. The simplicity of Sil allows it to contain things that more complicated games cannot.

[BlueFish]

Okay, fair enough. I admit to not having a strong feel for how the time limit affects gameplay, since I still haven't tried the game yet. Sorry guys!

That's hilarious.

[BlueFish]

Perhaps if you're above the "mindepth" There is a message that says "This area looks boring. The treasures of Angband are found deeper" and forges/artifacts/(food/torches??) stop dropping.

I've mentioned before that Sil, without a time limit, would be much easier than vanilla, and would need to be entirely re-balanced. This may be slightly obscure from most players, but I think they'd notice it soon enough if the time limit was removed. Even with such a restriction as you propose. Healing consumables are very important and unless you restricted those too, such a design would not make the rationally cautious player dive before they were "ready" (i.e. impervious). At some point you open up a playstyle which is doomed to failure - a player cowering at a depth which is, by definition, incapable of allowing them to progress in the game.

As Half alluded to earlier, divesting vanilla Angband of its core conflict - that of the human player's boredom vs their desire to win - opens up lots of roguelike gameplay goodness. Even if it also opens up lots of sentiment to close that right back up.

[taptap]

Throwing weapons once more. Played around with them a bit and am a bit unhappy with their current state.

Throwing axes lost a lot of power with the changes to the STR bonus system, daggers lost only 1 point, throwing axes went from 2d7 (with STR 3) to 2d5, spears are more or less the same unless you are really strong. Momentum is not only very high in the skill tree, it is also quite useless for chars of middling strength otherwise.

The other problem is the inventory nightmare. I would love to have a quiver type of equipment, but doubt it will happen. It is good that they don't vary in weight like other equipment but even the different fine items have attack bonus, damage bonus or attack+damage bonus and all these combined with different slays makes it possible to have a dozen different slots used up only by one throwing weapon type. Unless I am lucky to find 4 of a special-type I end up throwing away the good weapons just to keep the larger stack. The consolidation of the slays to Nargothrond / Gondolin / Doriath was probably already made partly for this reason.

Would it be possible to consolidate the fine items for throwing types in a similar way. Say instead of having -1, 1d10 and +0, 1d9 spears, +1, 2d4 and +0, 2d5 axes only one type of improvement for a throwing weapon with a single improvement, say damage sides are always the first improvement, second improvement goes to attack bonus (they are simulating what is possible with artistry aren't they?). This would already help a lot, you could hold on fine items with a more reasonable hope to build a stack of them.

[emulord]

I guess the problem is "ironman" has clearly defined rules. unmentioned invisible descent clocks do not.
I was like "no I want to go up, why do all the stairs crumble? >.<"
"Ok i died because the game wouldnt let me do what I want!"
"Oh thats a design feature"

Maybe it lets you < but says "The guardians of angband are aware of your presence in this area" and all enemies are awake and more numerous / deeper.

It doesnt make ingame sense right now, and clearing the same dungeon level never made sense for me in vanilla because logically they should get a army of dragons/balrogs and go kill you.

[evilmike]

I would love to have a quiver type of equipment, but doubt it will happen. It is good that they don't vary in weight like other equipment but even the different fine items have attack bonus, damage bonus or attack+damage bonus and all these combined with different slays makes it possible to have a dozen different slots used up only by one throwing weapon type. Unless I am lucky to find 4 of a special-type I end up throwing away the good weapons just to keep the larger stack. The consolidation of the slays to Nargothrond / Gondolin / Doriath was probably already made partly for this reason.

Seconding this. The inventory managment aspect is why I tend to avoid using throwing weapons. It's not only because of the stacking issue, but because it takes a relatively large amount of effort to throw items. The archery interface is just so much better, in every possible way. And while arrows also have different types, there are only a few, so you don't deal with many stacks of them in general.

I don't think I've ever seen a roguelike do throwing *well*, to be honest. Plenty of games do a good job with archery type stuff (including sil), but throwing always seems really clunky. A quiver-like option probably wouldn't be enough to fix it either, because you're not going to have massive stacks of throwing weapons like with arrows.

Macros help a lot, but imo that's a case of the user fixing the interface, instead of the built-in one being good in the first place.

All I can really suggest right now is a "quick throw" feature that just defaults to your "best" throwing weapon (potions would have to be selected the manual way, and so would anything that's useful in melee). It would at least control a bit like archery that way, although it wouldn't be perfect. That way if you have a stack of throwing axes and a stack of daggers, "tt" (for example) would throw one of the axes, and then when you run out of those it would throw daggers instead.

[debo]

I don't actually care about the quiver part anymore, but to build on the 'tt' proposal -- instead of having the game make a value judgment for you, it might be neat if it just used the inscription index sort ordering.

So e.g. if I have throwing axes on @t1 and spears on @t2, tt would do 't1f' until I ran out of axes, and then go to spears

[half]

This would already help a lot, you could hold on fine items with a more reasonable hope to build a stack of them.

Yes, this is planned. I think I already agreed to something like this that debo suggested earlier in this thread.

[half]

Yes, this is planned. I think I already agreed to something like this that debo suggested earlier in this thread.

Actually, maybe I only agreed to restricting the special types and to making stacks more common. I think the only real thing against your proposal is that it is useful to be able to find spears of both fine types. Even then, I guess that damage sides first is fine. So thanks for the improvement.

Note that we don't feel obliged to make throwing weapons all that good. We have heard of them historically and in fantasy, but not all that much in Tolkien's works. Since it was easy enough to allow them, we did, but this doesn't mean that we also need to balance the rules to make them competitive with, say, bows or swords, which are really key weapons in his works.

[half]

That way if you have a stack of throwing axes and a stack of daggers, "tt" (for example) would throw one of the axes, and then when you run out of those it would throw daggers instead.

I've thought of "tt" many times and then realise that it will throw the item in slot 't'. This would only work if you made it so that manual throwing takes three keypresses (which might be the best option). Another idea is to use control-t for quick throw. I'm imagining that the main thing you want is something like "ff" that selects both the item and the target automatically?

What I do at the moment is to inscribe spears/whatever with @t5. Then I use "t5" to throw one of them (if I don't care which). Since I have one hand on the numpad this comes quite naturally. I realise I've basically never done throwing with a slot letter.

Further ideas on this interface for throwing are welcome!

[debo]

Actually, maybe I only agreed to restricting the special types and to making stacks more common. I think the only real thing against your proposal is that it is useful to be able to find spears of both fine types. Even then, I guess that damage sides first is fine. So thanks for the improvement.

Note that we don't feel obliged to make throwing weapons all that good. We have heard of them historically and in fantasy, but not all that much in Tolkien's works. Since it was easy enough to allow them, we did, but this doesn't mean that we also need to balance the rules to make them competitive with, say, bows or swords, which are really key weapons in his works.

I think all we agreed to was just making the stack size larger. ie. in situations where you'd expect to find X throwing items of some type in a stack, you'll now expect to find Y where Y > X

The only reason I suggested this was because a lot of times I'll find 1 or 2 spears of awesome, and there's no reason for me to hang onto them if I can just stack 8-10 vanilla spears. However, if I find 3-4 spears of awesome in one stack... that's at least an interesting tradeoff to make. (For me, of course. Others may disagree.)

I'm not sure if throwing weapons get generated by two routines right now (like 'generate one thing' and 'generate stack'), or if everything gets generated the same way and certain things are permitted a stack size. If the former, increasing the probability that you're going to get a stack given that a throwing weapon is being generated might be good.

In either case, I'd like to see the expected stack size be larger though.