Roguelikes enjoyed by Sil players

[Patashu]

Auto-explore does seem like a very strange design ethic to me. I've played a few hours of Brogue and it certainly never struck me as a super cool feature.

The auto-explore in brogue is actually a newbie trap, at least the last time I played it. You really need to be moving manually in Brogue or else you'll trigger traps, starve, lose track of your needy allies or be in poor tactical positions to face monsters. It's mostly useful for doing level 1 for you, where the monsters basically can't kill you and there are no traps or secret doors yet (hmm!).

[taptap]

If auto-explore is viable, positioning isn't important enough. Sil builds differ in their reliance on space but for the more space-sensitive ones (archers, polearms, stealth) it would be a death trap as well.

[evilmike]

Brogue might be a bad example for autoexplore what with it being something of a deathtrap due to the severe foodclock. I find it indispensable in games without such time restrictions though (Crawl, ToME etc) since I don't find the act of pushing direction keys overly engaging it itself (not to mention having to backtrack should you realize you've missed a room at the other end of the map, ugh). Not needed by any definition of the word, but oh-so-very-convenient at times.

The brogue autoexplore is a death trap, although I don't think it's so much because of the food clock. It's more that it's just too stupid/limited to actually search for traps, and you can't really direct it in any way (DCSS one is largely usable because you can place "exclusions" that tell it not to wander into certain areas). There's no way to do that in brogue, so it will happily wander into sight of a dragon, or into a room that's obviously full of fire traps. The only place autoexplore is that useful is on the first level, which is basically impossible to die on.

[Infinitum]

Brogue might be a bad example for autoexplore what with it being something of a deathtrap due to the severe foodclock. I find it indispensable in games without such time restrictions though (Crawl, ToME etc) since I don't find the act of pushing direction keys overly engaging it itself (not to mention having to backtrack should you realize you've missed a room at the other end of the map, ugh). Not needed by any definition of the word, but oh-so-very-convenient at times.

[Therem Harth]

I agree (very much) with Nomad. If we start needing auto-explore, that's probably a good indication that there's too much empty space in the game.

[BlueFish]

Auto-explore does seem like a very strange design ethic to me. I've played a few hours of Brogue and it certainly never struck me as a super cool feature.

[Infinitum]

So does anyone have any experience with Crawl Light? Looking through the changelog there isn't a single implemented feature I don't agree with, but the thread containing info hasn't been updated in oveer a year. Is the variant still alive? I don't really want to get into crawl again if it means having to learn a discontinued beta.

[Nomad]

FYI you can make auto explore end instantly.

Open crawl.rc:

# travel_delay = 20
# explore_delay = -1

And uncomment these lines.

Hmm. Not sure I'd like that either, though, because then you're basically just blinking around the map with no sense of travelling around it. I think both options disconnect you from the gameplay a bit. After all, autoexplore is pretty much a "send the computer off to walk through the empty bits that are too boring for a human player to need to make any decisions" and it seems like the better solution to that empty space is either "add more stuff" or "make levels smaller".

[Patashu]

It's useful, but I don't like having sections in any game where I'm just sitting watching and not hitting any keys.

FYI you can make auto explore end instantly.

Open crawl.rc:

# travel_delay = 20
# explore_delay = -1

And uncomment these lines.

[caruso]

OT: Those of you who find Stone Soup too lengthy might want to try Crawl Light, which is based on Stone Soup 0.8.

[Nomad]

I played nethack to death way way back then lost interest after I beat it. It's one of those games that's impossibly hard till you win once & then your winning pretty much every time.

Ditto. After Nethack I got into Vanilla Angband, and it's the main game I keep coming back to. I've tried quite a few different variants, but Sil's the only one I've kept playing: the others have driven me away either with an interface that's much less polished and more irritating than V and/or too much wilderness wandering, which I find dull and not to my taste.

I played Brogue for quite a bit a few iterations back, until I got lured away by other things. (I believe it was Sil, in fact.) I did quite enjoy it, but I heard they removed the EXP/level up mechanic in later versions, which killed my interest in trying it again.

I've played a bit of Crawl and drop back in occasionally to check it out (it always seems to have leapt forward about three versions since I played last, which can make it kind of hard to keep up with) but I get frustrated with it because I tend to die at the same point and therefore get stuck playing the same dungeon branches again and again and again. I also have a kind of love-hate relationship with auto-explore. It's useful, but I don't like having sections in any game where I'm just sitting watching and not hitting any keys.

So now I mostly alternate between Vanilla and Sil, playing one until I start to get frustrated with it and then switching over.

[Psi]

I played uMoria obsessively in my teens - so much so that I broke my escape key rerolling characters. I always seemed to get killed by Big Blue Icky things... I also enjoyed Larn back then.

I played Hack briefly at Uni and then discovered Angband in my early 20s and became obsessed with that.

When I got a Pocket PC, I started playing NetHack, but never really got into it. I also played kMoria and got down as far as the Balrog for the first time! I then updated the AngbandCE port with a better UI before Nick got in touch and I ported FAAngband to WinCE and so started another period of obsession...

...and then came Sil. Needless to say that obsession is ongoing.

[taptap]

Nethack. I spent some time with it, but never liked it. ("You should have read spoilers, you are dead!") This was my only exposure to more traditional roguelikes until I discovered Sil.

Dwarf Fortress. First game I played with ASCII tiles. (Fortress mode) I played it obsessively for two months, but then I realized that once you get the basics down difficulty is basically self-imposed, which was disappointing given that it is advertized as "impossible fortress defence". I still can have fun with it, but I do so in a highly restricted way to experiment with design, logic and logistics, it is really more engineering than playing.

Sil. The first roguelike I enjoyed as a game and keep doing so even now as a reasonably good player.

Unreal World. Fascinating setting, but I ended up reading research papers on the fur trade + iron age metallurgy instead of playing it much.

FTL. I never played it, but I watched a few complete playthroughs on youtube and decided that I don't need to play it myself.

[locus]

Sil has made most roguelikes pretty hard to get into for me, because I get frustrated that they're not as tightly designed. I used to play a lot of Crawl, which I still respect for having a lot of content and not having any major design flaws, but it's too slow paced compared to Sil.

Do roguelikelikes count? I like Spelunky (though I'm real bad at it) and FTL was fun to play for a bit.

[debo]

wow i was going to mention moraff's world and I didn't have the guts <3 lol

Moraff's Revenge and Dungeons of the Unforgiven were p.fun too!!