State of the update

[wobbly]

So having played a bunch of this over the last week, I have a few comments.[LIST]
[*]Smithing did remind me how absolutely much I loathe traps in Sil. The only traps I actually like are Webs and Roosts, since they are the only remotely dangerous ones. Everything else is a joke, or an immense annoyance (false floors on a smithing character are just bad gamefeel). Have you considered deleting them/reworking the traps which are in-game?

Some of them like alarms, pits, locked doors fill a need for pure sneakers to get some perception other then throwing everything in to stealth. Not that I'm against reworking traps, just make sure they fill that niche which is probably the main one where traps are important.

[wobbly]

Tried forewarned & it has a strange cut off point. I took an extra pt of evasion without thinking & ended up losing 2 evasion instead till I could get more perception

[Quirk]

[*]New forging stuff turns out to be great. Definitely a win over vanilla. I wish there were a way to bring up the guaranteed forges in-game though. Maybe a message as you enter guaranteed depths like "You hear the echoes of a hammer clanging on steel."

Great to hear it!

[*]Smithing did remind me how absolutely much I loathe traps in Sil. The only traps I actually like are Webs and Roosts, since they are the only remotely dangerous ones. Everything else is a joke, or an immense annoyance (false floors on a smithing character are just bad gamefeel). Have you considered deleting them/reworking the traps which are in-game?

I am also dissatisfied with them at present. Longer-term I want to have dangerous/trapped areas which require caution to move through, plus possibly putting alarms/caltrops etc round barracks and armories. Shorter-term I have made them a lot easier to spot, made the nastiest ones easier to disarm and made it possible to leap over them.

[*]Really don't like the new Silcutting mechanics. After actually going through the source code I think that they are too hard to explain to the player concisely in-game. They remind me a lot of nethack, a game where most things are fun and interesting exactly once. I kinda see what you were going for, but I am not a fan.

I take your point, but I am also not a fan of the original mechanics, which rely greatly on being able to brutalise the crown with some kind of Sharpness. I would be very much willing to listen to alternatives if you have better ideas.

[*]Removal of deathblades is a huge blow for Subtlety as an ability/build (which was already not too strong). They probably need a replacement high-end 1dx weapon like how bows have dragon-horn. Possibly flavour them as dragon fangs or meteoric steel blades?

Subtlety is only really strong with daggers and shortswords, which are both quite weak. Bringing down the crit requirement by another 1 is probably not actually broken, having run the maths; it does make Subtlety stronger than before, but you need to be consistently beating enemy evasion by 11-12 to score better average damage than a good two-handed battleaxe.

[*]I brought this up on github, but untying consumables/staves/horns from depth and just making them roll on a rarity table when trying to create items of that type would reduce spoileriness (i.e. you know this stack of 5 pots early is probably antidote).

This is true, but will presumably make valuable potions harder to acquire later. I'll have to think about this.

[*]New orc duo is cute. Happy to see that Lug has gone down another notch since last I played.[/LIST]

Yeah, Lug went from "hah, new orc unique is weak, he can't deal damage with that shortsword" to "Lug scares me" when I pumped him a little and added Cruel Blow. He's gradually reducing to a more manageable monster.

I like that it's a big boost, my main qualm is that it's too easy to get, but that could work too.

Finding skills for the lowest point on the tree is a little difficult, but done well in most of the other branches (Channeling apart, which isn't really an early game skill). Something needs to be first.

You should email pav and ask him to set up a ladder for Q if you plan on continuing.

Good idea, definitely needed if I'm going to plunge ahead into more substantial redesign.

[Quirk]

Tried forewarned & it has a strange cut off point. I took an extra pt of evasion without thinking & ended up losing 2 evasion instead till I could get more perception

This is a hazard of a skill that wants you to keep your perception ahead of your evasion. Is the bonus about right, or a little stingy?

[HugoVirtuoso]

Wrt Forewarned, it should give a bonus or no bonus, but NOT penalize the player's Evasion. (I hope that's the way it works.)

[wobbly]

Currently at a forge & smithing abilities on hammers display doesn't line up. It gives the options:

Artiface - displays enchantment
Expertise - displays Masterpiece
Masterpiece - displays Expertise

I'd like masterpiece on my hammer & picking the wrong option would be expensive so I'm stuck here for the moment.

[nikheizen]

@Quirk:
re:Sil-cutting
I think that the whole "wailing on the crown with sharpness" is infinitely preferential to "having to carry ,Emptiness with you" and "I didn't even notice this test because I always raise will." Another good mpa-sil change was easing sil-cutting difficulty.

re:Rout
Well, I mean active open-source development makes it easy to try new things. I will test out some runs with rout at +3 instead of +5 and see how it feels. Presumably, I'd still want to take it on low archery characters, but I don't want to pick up a bow+arrows and go, "Welp, time to spend the 300 points on rout ASAP." Nothing else really works at the bottom of the tree without careful shot or something else though. I see your point there.

Currently at a forge & smithing abilities on hammers display doesn't line up. It gives the options:

Artiface - displays enchantment
Expertise - displays Masterpiece
Masterpiece - displays Expertise

I'd like masterpiece on my hammer & picking the wrong option would be expensive so I'm stuck here for the moment.

This was patched.

[wobbly]

Angband.live is still on an earlier version, so I'm still stuck if you know which was which?

[Quirk]

Currently at a forge & smithing abilities on hammers display doesn't line up. It gives the options:

Artiface - displays enchantment
Expertise - displays Masterpiece
Masterpiece - displays Expertise

I'd like masterpiece on my hammer & picking the wrong option would be expensive so I'm stuck here for the moment.

Sorry, masterpiece is unavailable at the moment (I think Expertise displays Artifice?) - this bug is patched in the latest source but the patch is not released yet.

[wobbly]

So it'll give what it displays on the hammer itself? because it was there. Ah yeah it is artifice displayed. Artifact hammer of artifice, eh.. I'll have to build something else

[Quirk]

@Quirk:
re:Sil-cutting
I think that the whole "wailing on the crown with sharpness" is infinitely preferential to "having to carry ,Emptiness with you" and "I didn't even notice this test because I always raise will." Another good mpa-sil change was easing sil-cutting difficulty.

I think (quite hard) combat damage tests are still not ideal for non-combat characters, and also that there needs to be some difference between getting out with one, two or three Sils. Three Sils poses its own difficulties regarding exit, and this is fine; currently the difference between managing one sil and two sils is handled by a difficulty spike. Mpa-sil removes the difficulty spike but in doing so makes the difference between getting one and two sils more marginal; I tend toward disliking this.

Another alternative would be to impose some more minor burden that made getting out with two harder than getting out with one, and make the retrieval relatively easy.

[Quirk]

After some discussion on Angband Live today, I've gone with a different approach.

Cutting Sils is now relatively easy, 10d4 vs armour check.

However, Morgoth grows increasingly angry as Sils are removed, and so becomes more dangerous, hitting with increasing accuracy. Since he is now quite hard to kill, and he will chase you throughout the ascent, this makes the ascent that much harder (although it is much shorter than before).

[Infinitum]

Does there have to be a check at all? The interesting choice as I see it is going for the safe win (1 Silmaril) and the challenging one (3 silmarils). 2 Sil victories are neither exepdient nor interesting and could be done without. So, k'ing the crown once could remove one silmaril as prophesied and ordained, k'ing it again removes the remaining silmarils all at once (after the "are you sure?" prompt); triggering the curse, summons hordes of enemies, waking and pissing off Morgoth all at once. Also:

[...]But Ungoliant had grown great, and [Morgoth] less by the power that had gone out of him; and she rose against him, and her cloud closed about him, and she enmeshed him in a web of clinging thongs to strangle him. Then Morgoth sent forth a terrible cry, that echoed in the mountains. Therefore that region was called Lammoth; for the echoes of his voice dwelt there ever after, so that any who cried aloud in that land awoke them, and all the waste between the hills and the sea was filled with a clamour as of voices in anguish. The cry of Morgoth in that hour was the greatest and most dreadful that was ever heard in the northern world; the mountains shook, and the earth trembled, and rocks were riven asunder. Deep in forgotten places that cry was heard. Far beneath the ruined halls of Angband, in vaults to which the Valar in the haste of their assault had not descended, Balrogs lurked still, awaiting ever the return of their Lord; and now swiftly they arose, and passing over Hithlum they came to Lammoth as a tempest of fire.

This could be interesting gameplay. On being mortally wounded or seeing all Silmarils in the possession of the player Morgoth could cry out in rage and despair, destroying the surrounding dungeon and summoning all remaining balrogs to chase the player on the ascent (or come save him).

[Quirk]

This could be interesting gameplay. On being mortally wounded or seeing all Silmarils in the possession of the player Morgoth could cry out in rage and despair, destroying the surrounding dungeon and summoning all remaining balrogs to chase the player on the ascent (or come save him).

This would be interesting (though perhaps a little duller if the Balrogs are all already dead) - however, it would also be a good deal more work to implement. I'll try to remember this for the version with the revised level generation.

[Tyrael]

Managed to get my first sil win as a feanor smith with your fork, Quirk! One thing that really weirds me out was the generation of forges varied wildly between playthroughs. In one game I never actually found the 800' and 900' guaranteed forges (I even checked with wizard mode after making a copy of the save and they just weren't there, and the 950' ones were guarded by a bunch of silent watchers and on one occasion gothmog just chilling next to it, so I only used the 100' and the 500' ones by the time I reached the throne room!) while in my win I was finding at least one forge per level, sometimes even two, starting from 100' up to 500'. I got to the point where I just popped _revelations and ignored the level if it only had a 2 use forge since I couldn't smith artifacts in it and nearly all my gear was forged artifacts. It really felt close to one of those ubersmiths I saw in the ladder back when you could dual-wield +3 smithammers.

Since forge generation varies so much during a game and _revelations is kinda rare (but taking channeling and finding _recharging really makes it last a while) and song of delvings does not in fact show you where in the map a forge is (kind of a bummer considering the 10 song requirement!), how about either making spotting forges on a level require a moderate-to-high perception check every x turns (or maybe it could be tied to keen senses in some way, I could see those background rolls slowing down the game a bit) or having it generate after having spent 100 turns on a level? That would eliminate stairscumming effectively and it's a ballpark estimate of the time you need to map half the map with delving.
Also, that might be me talking but I found delving to be kind of slow.

Hope the bugs with chardumps are cleared soon so you can look at my smith and see if something fucky happened with forge generation considering the sheer number of forge spawned, or maybe it was just really really good RNG.