State of the update

[Quirk]

I'm not sure about giving weapons unintuitive perks. Part of the draw of Sil is the simplicity and transparency of it's mechanics. See a short sword, see how it crits, now compare to an axe, see how it uses strength, and everything in between.

What do you find unintuitive about blunt weapons being good against armour? The entire reason for the late medieval shift away from swords on the battlefield and toward blunt weapons was because they work very well against heavy armour. This is not something that can be said of blunt weapons in Sil currently.

[bagori nd]

What do you find unintuitive about blunt weapons being good against armour? The entire reason for the late medieval shift away from swords on the battlefield and toward blunt weapons was because they work very well against heavy armour. This is not something that can be said of blunt weapons in Sil currently.

To be fair, Sil is trying to simulate a world where military technology hits roughly the level of 11th century Europe from about the moment anyone gets it into their head to make a weapon, and then stays put for the next 10,000+ years. The late medieval shift away from swords on the battlefield probably only happens way into the Fourth Age!

[Serephina]

What do you find unintuitive about blunt weapons being good against armour? The entire reason for the late medieval shift away from swords on the battlefield and toward blunt weapons was because they work very well against heavy armour. This is not something that can be said of blunt weapons in Sil currently.

I know perfectly well that blunt weapons where historically used against armoured opponents. This isn't a history simulator with 500 damage subtypes, it's a video game with dwarfs in it. There is nothing remarkable about warhammers in-game that would suggest they work by different rules than the other weapons, the way weapons work is described succinctly in the manual, and with the variations on weapon types being spelled out loud with multiple statements on who is proficient with what.

You could write a game where each weapon type is distinct; heavy blunt weapons do well v armour, swords slice flesh but slide off armour, spears penetrate but are unusable in close combat, daggers which snap in two when used with too much strength, etc. This would be a cool game! (And is probably called dwarf fortress) But for Sil, the game has a much cleaner flow with simple-yet-deep weapon mechanics. Adding unneeded fluff to complicate weapon rolls is antithetic to a lot of what makes Sil unique.

Honestly it's possibly making mountains out of molehills, write your mod as you wish, it's just feedback from the peanut gallery.

[Gwarl]

Sil is already the game that Sil is. Sil-Quirk doesn't have to be that. I think this has been an interesting project so far and he should keep on experimenting with things that make a cool game that isn't Sil

[Quirk]

But for Sil, the game has a much cleaner flow with simple-yet-deep weapon mechanics. Adding unneeded fluff to complicate weapon rolls is antithetic to a lot of what makes Sil unique.

I think your notion of Sil's simplicity is misplaced.

There are the obvious parts which are far from simple, of course: who wants to tell me how Cruel Blow or Crippling Shot are calculated? Which bonuses does Disguise affect (hint: it's not all of them) and does that translate directly into a fixed level of Stealth improvement or not? What factors impact Song of Lorien's ability to make monsters fall asleep? A number of the non-combat elements function in quite opaque ways.

But combat itself, which gives you all the numbers, is much less straightforward than it looks. How much average damage per hit do you need to gain to break even on a weapon with -2 to hit over your current choice if your Melee is 7, your current average damage is 4 and you're fighting orc warriors? How does that change if you increase Melee by 1? (This is calculable, but I suspect few people sit down and make the calculation, particularly when it comes to accurately calculating that average damage).

Or take damage dice - surely those at least are simple? If you're choosing with a strength 2 elf between one-handed wielding of a 1d11 spear and a 4d3 warhammer, which does more average damage ignoring criticals against an armour roll of 10 (hint: it's not the warhammer)? Which is the best pick against a serpent with a 4d4 armor roll? When you find yourself calculating overlaps between differently spread normal distributions, you're in a place where intuition alone is a terrible guide unless you're a probability whizz.

Sil gives the impression of a game where things are calculable by the player. Generally, they're not, not in any tractable sense. Knowing where the trade-off point lies for weapons and armour against the menagerie of enemies is something we learn by feel and personal experience. You were championing one-handed warhammers a little while ago; calculation would not have brought you there, and most people's experience leads them away from this as an option. Your experience has led you to feel they're reasonable weapons: this is not calculation, this is gut.

What we do have is broad heuristics. Weapons with more dice leverage strength. Weapons with low weight leverage high Melee. Now we can add to these that blunt weapons will always get some proportion of their damage through armour. The UI shows you how much bonus damage you're getting, so you can get a feel for it. The calculation is a little more complicated, but not much more than the already existing Sharpness makes it.

Why is this even necessary? Because there are a limited number of dice pools that can be made reasonably competitive with one another using the current dynamic, and currently, the blunt weapons fall short of being competitive (albeit the warhammer by less than most). We can ditch weapons from the game, cut down the options to only those that clearly have reasonable niches, but to me that feels bad. I'd like to feel that someone can have a sensible reason to descend like Gandalf with robe and quarterstaff, or that in some circumstance it's right to pick up a vanilla sceptre.

[Quirk]

Anyway, to avoid getting too derailed into a discussion of bluntness: what's coming next?

I have my Smashing Blow replacement ready to go with the next release; it's called Coup de Grace, and lets the player instantly kill on attack monsters with health lower than the player's strength + dexterity (this is a tiny bit awkward, but somewhere in the 6-12 range is where this is good without being too good; below that it's sort of underwhelming). This allows for a little more planning in tight combat situations, and has some utility against weak but hard to hit enemies.

Several bug-fixes are in, some from ebering-sil, one new.

Crowns, sceptres and daggers are now more likely to be special.

I'm probably going to work on making skeletons searchable like chests next. I'm contemplating making some rather terrible but probably better-than-nothing armour (e.g. Rusty Helm, [-1, 1d1]) that can be found on them in early levels; there's some room for manoeuvre at the weakest end, and this has more utility than Broken Swords). I'll listen to some opinions on this, and then either make them give typical level drops, or low-quality items with a chance of better drops.

[Infinitum]

I personally don't find strictly worse items all that interesting, but yeah worn/rusty armour pieces could prolong the meaningful drops phase of the game, no reason not to go for it. Removing Mewlip maprot is an easy change that people like to complain about, as is trap doors/acid traps.

Personally I don't think traps are all that sensical or interesting to begin with, and would could see perception being used for more interesting stuff but removing them is a pretty major change (conceptual, if not gameplay-wise).

[Serephina]

Rusty items to help smooth out the first 100' would be great; a lot of early game survivability is finding any old piece of trash to strap to the naked player's body.

[Quirk]

Personally I don't think traps are all that sensical or interesting to begin with, and would could see perception being used for more interesting stuff but removing them is a pretty major change (conceptual, if not gameplay-wise).

I agree and am probably going to in the short term boost Perception against traps.

I have more major changes to level generation in mind though which should make for a more balanced approach in the longer term. To explain briefly the notion is to make Angband more fortress like, adding new terrain features (benches, windows?) so it has barracks and slave pens and mines and cave systems infested with spiders... and the new concept for traps would be that you would have have very easy Perception checks when entering an area where the floor and ceiling are unstable or when spiders are hiding in webs above you to let you know harder checks are coming. You would get a message like "You notice thick cobwebs far above you" or "The timbers holding up this mine shaft look old and rotten" and that would indicate the need to proceed with caution; there should always be other options - at worst backtracking to the stair you came down - but it would also indicate the kind of traps you were facing. Traps of the same type would cluster to some degree. In more inhabited portions of the fortress traps should be strategic - guarding armories and places of interest - and designed to confuse or poison or slow.

However rewriting level generation is a big job and I want to finish off balancing Sil as it is first. Making everything useful in some niche is the first priority; rebalancing the throne room experience for combat characters to make Slaying more optional is next on the list. Smithing will get some patches for now involving folding in Artistry for free to make it a bit more useful in a less U-shaped fashion, but a complete overhaul probably will wait until I am redesigning fortress Angband to feel more like an Evil Dwarf Fortress; most items found will then be of local manufacture, weapons captured from men and elves will be rarer and Smithing will give readier access to these.

Not everyone will necessarily want to follow on the full journey but my ambition is to start with a smoother Sil experience so hopefully people can find a build they like; and if there is a split between traditional Sil and more simulationist fortress lovers I can hopefully maintain both versions in parallel.

[Quirk]

Rusty items to help smooth out the first 100' would be great; a lot of early game survivability is finding any old piece of trash to strap to the naked player's body.

Thanks. I know you don't like all my changes, but I appreciate you give both positive and negative feedback.

[seraph]

just had a random idea, i don't know if its actually worth implementing though.

what if bane gave an inner-will-like bonus (equal to the bane bonus?) when the chosen enemy is near? most rauko are not light sensitive. so this might help incentivise picking troll or wraith bane (or even orc, lol). or maybe this won't change player behavior at all and this will just nerf gwathrauko into the ground.

edit: spelling

[Quirk]

Sorry, been quite bad with keeping an update running of what's been going on in the code lately. Turns out: quite a lot! Smithing in particular has had many changes.

[Gwarl]

Updated on angband live

[Infinitum]

Oh, yeah. Haven't got around to playing much yet what with the high rate of releases you put out. Good job though! =)

[Quirk]

New release, Song-focused.

People asked for Morgoth to be harder to kill. He is now harder to kill.

There are probably not going to be many more changes before the first official Sil-Q release now; I'm hoping to mostly keep it to bug-fixing and maybe minor interface tweaks. I don't have anything else I badly want to add before I start overhauling items and level generation, and any major release based on that will probably be some months away. So feel free to get stuck into this one knowing things should be like this for a while, and I plan to support this mode of play into the future.