Roguelikes enjoyed by Sil players

[half]

I'm curious as to what other roguelikes are particularly enjoyed by Sil players, and why.

I'll start with my picks. I don't play many roguelikes these days (or computer games at all), so there aren't many. I've enjoyed NetHack in the past (and ascended an illiterate vegetarian tourist...) but wouldn't really enjoy playing it now. I played a lot of Angband in my youth, winning once or twice, but I've captured the things I liked about it in Sil and wouldn't go back. I never quite got into Adom, though I respect it a lot. I find Crawl to be pretty interesting and fun, though I've never finished it.

I like Smart Kobolds and I would play that and Vicious Orcs a bit more if they weren't Windows only. There are probably other Jeff Lait games I'd enjoy too. In my view he is clearly one of the best roguelike designers.

I very much enjoyed 100 Rogues, which is a bit more stripped back than Sil, but still with lots of fun gameplay (like Sil's Abilities). I won it twice, but don't find myself going back to it again. I'm not sure why. One thing might be the flavour/theme. I'd prefer something a bit less silly!

I have enjoyed playing a bit of Zaga 33 and Ending in the past year on the iPad. I particularly like the graphics and interface of Ending, and the crispness of the gameplay of both, but I'm not sure how much I'll go back to either of them as I don't find myself being drawn into them. Perhaps because they are *too* simple or because they don't have enough progression or because they don't have enough theme/flavour?

I've downloaded Brogue on the iPad and look forward to trying it more when I've go the time. I haven't really got into Brogue yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm the target market.

[debo]

- I like brogue on principle but I actually hate playing it

- I really like crawl but it's too long for me, I'm sure there's a mode in there that suits me better

- I am horribly addicted to DoomRL

- I love Shiren the Wanderer

- I really liked TSL but it's too hard and broken and it has floating penises as monsters, barf

- Most angband variants I like for about 1hr, but are simply too long for me to pay attention to anymore

I'm sure others will come to mind

[HallucinationMushroom]

The only other roguelike to absorb me as much as Sil did in 2012 is FAangband. Especially the first releases. My first experience with glorious O-style combat, O-difficulty, but also the nearly impossible wilderness chocked full of death. Nothing still excites me more in a roguelike than finding a stupidly sick damage dice weapon... like a 2d17 lance, or 1d21 storm hammer, or 1d23 pike... or... oh man I gotta fire up FA now.

[wobbly]

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.

ADOM I also loved but it also frustrated me a lot. It's a majorly scum-able game & at the time I didn't have the mindset of avoiding boring but effective play. Also it had a lot of good ideas that didn't really work when it came to game play. I was pretty excited to hear Thomas was working on ADOM II, but the beta's I've played of it have been disappointing to me. It kinda feels like the exact same game.

I played Sangband a lot, till it finally got too frustrating. I'm pretty sure the way I liked to play (with a fairly rounded character) & the way to win (heavily specialized character) didn't match.

Crawl I never really liked. Though to be fair I probably didn't play it enough to give it a real go. It just seemed too stripped back to me. Press autoexplore, fight, press autoexplore, fight - kinda thematically dry, perhaps? To me when they stripped away the "drudgery" they also took away a lot of flavour.

Poschengband I like but haven't got around to playing much. I love the zany-ness, the ridiculous range of character choices & the fact that playing a beastman ninja reminds me a lot of ninja scrolls.

Oh & I almost forgot, Omega & Ragnarok were quite fun & distinctly different from most other roguelikes.

[Infinitum]

Nowadays i just tend to pick up a variant every now and then, play it exclusively until I win with a sufficiently broken character and then fiddle a bit, pester the associated forums with my ideas for improvements and eventually lose interest. So, I wouldn't say I have favourite variants that I come back to time and again but here's a comprehensive list of those Iäve played and my thoughts on them, anyhow:

ZAngbandTk: The game that drew me into the genre (I read about it in a games magazine). Must've played this on and off for years before finally ascending (with a Death Knight Golem; quite possibly the easiest combination possible - lots of HP, AC, Resists and lategame invincibility and a 300 HP spammable drain life). That said it burned me out completely on *Band variants until I picked up Sil; scumming non-permanent floors gets old quickly.

Crawl SS: Picked this up on a whim a couple of years after finally beating ZangbandTk and quickly decided to bruteforce a Naga Transmuter of Cheibriados (this was back when Chei users had to gimp their own gear in order to access the God bonuses as well). Thankfully, the lessons learned from Zangband were applicable so managed to 15-Rune ascend within a month or so. Earlygame Crawl is kinda fun, but I dislike most mechanics not tied to the wonderful interphase (the dysfunctional food clock, the way all lategame characters look the same, the limiting race system, lategame difficulty only consisting of monsters that cast Torment etc).

ToME 4: Kind of a dirty pleasure I suppose? Basically it's a maximalist clusterfuck (the lore, the classes, the mechanics - everything) but a pretty enjoyable one at that. Or rather was; Normal Roguelike is too easy for me nowadays and I cannot into Nightmare and above (because the opposition consists of 90% trash mobs and 10% potential one-shots at that point, and having to replay the starter dungeons because a boss critical hit is not my idea of entertainment).

DoomRL: Wonderful fun until you learn how to abuse the LOS and Speed systems, which essentially breaks the game in half. Seriously, the best players can waltz through Nightmare! difficulty without being hit once due to the wonders of the wait command and cornershooting. Not much hope for the future either, since the game is pretty much built around using them at this point. Anyhow UV Conqueror YAAM YAVF within a couple of weeks playing for bragging rights.

Brogue: I love everything about this game. The graphics, the interphase, the replay function, the contests, the simple and transparent combat system, the minimalism, the way everything in the game can be used in several imaginative ways without feeling cluttered, the elaborate traps, the vaults, everything. That said I kind of stopped playing it once I ascended? Maybe its because of the admittedly dry backstory or it being all but impossible to explore different character concepts without resorting to replaying the same seeds over. I still kind of suck at it and I do wanna explore the post-amulet depths so I guess I'll get back to it eventually (whether that may be).

Sil: What I play now. It's nice. I like the atmosphere and how it uses simple, well designed systems that still allows for tactical diversity in gameplay. I pretty much dislike the remaining *band influences (most notably the non-permanent floors and aggressive vermin), and after experiencing the glory that is the Brogue map generation algorithm its hard to go back to the usual fare. I've also yet to actually kill Morgoth though so there's that keeping me invested. Soon..

[emulord]

Im not too fond of Sil, but I'll mention my favorites.

Moraff's World. OMG oldschool. what a brutal game

(Z/Pos/PosCheng/M)Angband. Obvious reasons.

Alphaman. Post apocalyptic but silly. 90s references all over

DoomRL. Cornershooting makes so much sense. You're blindfiring around corners, and I love that feature exists. Its what id do if I was being fireballed by demons!

Some 7drl are fun for a play or 2.
A quest too far. I love how your character is a OLD man.
Smart Kobald. Being ganged up on by a bunch of weaklings is a fun death.
(idk, a bunch more. I forget their names tho)

[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!!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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".

[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.