ToME-SX is back!

[AmyBSOD]

After an 8 year hiatus, I've finally decided to get back into developing ToME-SX, my variant of ToME 2.3.5. It's been a lot of work, but playing it is a blast, especially compared to earlier versions. There's a screenshot Let's Play thread on another forum that I'm running: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?thre.../post-25207604 - when the time comes and my current run ends, I'll want a character suggestion for the next one

For reference, the project's Github page is at https://github.com/AmyBSOD/ToME-SX and a complete changelog is available here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Am...%20history.txt

And my biggest pride is the dungeon randomizer! Its source code is found at https://github.com/AmyBSOD/ToME-SX/t...edit/mkdungeon and it's really fun, a little utility that can be run to create randomized d_info.txt files for ToME-SX to, well, randomize the various dungeons After all, I got really really bored of having to see the same boring barrow-downs every time, and then mirkwood, old forest or orc caves depending on my current mood... Now, it's fully possible for the Barrow-Downs to be replaced with the layout of e.g. Erebor, Dol Amroth or even one of the various god temple quests! It's lots of fun to play

[Sky]

dumb question but, is there a help file with commands, keybinds / macros, etc ? maybe some ability spoilers too?

also, have you dont any major rebalancing? i've only ever played warriors in TOME2, but i remember hearing how certain (and by certain, i mean Alchemist) classes were grossly overpowered.

[AmyBSOD]

Well there's the help files in the lib/help folder, just like in regular ToME, command.txt for example has the various commands but I might at some point add an "Amy's list of commonly used commands" file

As far as rebalancing goes, I've tried to be thorough. Not just alchemists, but basically everything that was grossly unbalanced in the player's favor has been revamped. I'm afraid that if any master ToME player were to try my variant, they'd go straight for something that was totally OP in regular ToME (thaumaturgy, possession, maybe even runecraft... there's much more though, e.g. the Melkor warrior or Antimagic piercing shots archer etc. etc.), find out it was nerfed to the point where the game no longer automatically ascends itself, and stomp off in disgust because they'd have to actually play the game in order to win Because I despise power creep. It's no fun to me to play if I only need to struggle through the game until I obtain one of those uberskills/abilities/items and then that's it, the game becomes so easy that you no longer need any strategy since you can just "cast black hole for 50 9d49 inertia balls" (thaumaturgy), "bump into a monster to instantly obliterate it" (possessor in watcher of the water form with three superpowered melee weapons), "bump into a monster to instantly reduce it to -60 speed from +70" (Melkor-worshipping warrior with high prayer), "point in the approximate direction of a monster horde to kill them all at once" (high-level archer with piercing shots) or whatever the OP skill happens to be doing.

Of course, I'll also never get any feedback on the balancing I've done for ToME-SX since no one is ever gonna actually play it but oh well, it's there; I guess I should update the binaries or something in case there's players who actually want to play Tried to make a release version for Windows here: https://github.com/AmyBSOD/ToME-SX/r...tag/tsx-230624

[Nick]

My rule is if one other person plays your variant it's a success

[Cryomaniac]

Some observations:

-You've added monsters from other variants, but their symbols don't match up with ToME's; for example, Steamband's beastmen get mixed up with standard *band bats/birds
-Your sentient footwear monsters don't have a consistent symbol/race flag - they can be represented by pretty much any symbol and their race feels randomly picked as well. Shouldn't they be represented with ']' glyph (used to display footwear items)? And it probably would be proper to add a separate racial flag for them, but ToME source code is probably messy enough to make that a major pain
-Monsters imported from other variants might not be that balanced; water elementals in Steamband aren't that bad, water attacks in ToME are bad news, so that's already a notable jump in danger level
-Why are shops selling cursed items? And why are they priced so high?
-'Dual-wielding' skill - is this just for possessors/mimics? You still can't wield two weapons at once like in Hengband?
-'Spell-learning' skill boosts monster drop - is the skill name correct?

[AmyBSOD]

Oh cool, feedback! Thanks a lot! Yeah sometimes the symbols for monsters don't make that much sense; while it would be possible in theory to reorganize them, I feel that it's okay if glyphs sometimes contain "out of place" monsters. The sentient footwear monsters in particular have intentionally been distributed over a wide amount of glyphs to provide "surprises" for the player; rather than, say, troll pits containing nothing but trolls, they can now have the occasional different type of monster to (hopefully) force a change of tactics

Water is indeed a very dangerous element, and stuff like water sprites can be really difficult if they appear early on. But on the bright side, water resistance is a thing now; it's rare, but occasionally appears on equipment. Probably quite useful too since water is an annoyingly common element

Cursed items in shops are there to provide more variety; as far as pricing is concerned, sometimes cursed items can be rather powerful, although obviously in many cases they aren't so the high prices are just there to make sure that players don't get the occasional powerful item for just a couple dollars. Not sure about how to better balance the prices, I'm afraid.

The dual-wielding skill is only useful for those characters who are (e.g. via possession or mimicry) capable of wielding several weapons, yeah. It doesn't enable characters to suddenly wield more weapons than they normally can. And spell-learning was present in ToME but didn't do anything and I also couldn't find info about what it was supposed to do - maybe it predates the current ToME spellcasting system and governed the # of spells you can learn, like in vanilla Angband? Anyway since ToME in its current iteration doesn't have such a system for learning spells, and I felt like making the skill do at least something, I came up with the effect of increasing the amount of stuff dropped by monsters. Yeah, so the name doesn't really make sense, but I also don't feel like renaming the skill Maybe if someday I can come up with an effect that fits the name better, I'll then move the improvement of loot drops to some other (to-be-added) skill.

Anyway thanks for playing, and have fun

[Cryomaniac]

I'm leaning more towards Hengband forks than ToME 2; running a standard RK warrior right now. It's kind of hard relearning gameplay specifics for different variants - for example, I was used to Hengband giving bonuses for holding a heavy weapon without a shield, looks like ToME retains the old Vanilla mechanic favoring light weapons.

Would something like 'Multi-limbed-combat' be more fitting for Dual-wielding skill - along with moving it to Monster-lore tree? Dual-wielding sounds like something an ordinary person could do, your skill is relevant specifically to monster lore users. (Also, can ToME 2 handle spaces in skill descriptions? It looks a bit awkward with dashes everywhere)

Is there a character level threshold for avoiding ambushes in ToME? My CL29 character got ambushed in Bree (and sudden ambushes in town doesn't look quite right)

Finally, there's 980 random quests now; are the 100+ ones reserved for postgame bonus dungeons aside from Void/Nether Realm? Is it like Heaven/Hell in Hengband - postgame content with dungeon levels measuring in hundreds with no purpose aside from making your winner char even more powerful?

[AmyBSOD]

Hmm, actually I want dual-wielding to be a sub-skill of combat (so that it boosts combat when increased), although I guess I should definitely improve the description so that it says it only works when your character is actually capable of wielding several weapons. And maybe it'd be a good idea to add some new playable race(s) with several weapon slots? Although those would need to be balanced somehow so that they're not an insta-OP race As far as the dashes in skill names are concerned, I'm not sure either; in ToME all the skills seem to use those if their names consist of several words so this was just me trying to avoid any potential bugs that might exist if I use spaces in skill names.

As far as ambushes are concerned, every type of terrain has a "level" and if your character is below it, you're more likely to be ambushed, but even at XL50 there's still a low floor value for the chance of an ambush. So the ambush chance never goes to zero, although I guess as a high-level char you won't have trouble with low-level ambushes And being ambushed in towns is intentional; occasionally the town residents try to mug an adventurer Speaking of town residents, I'm not sure whether you've run into Marike yet (white I glyph)? She starts showing up randomly in towns at a certain point (XL20 in Bree, XL10 in Lothlorien, and in the other towns she can spawn from the start of the game) and should just be avoided since she has lots of item-trashing breath attacks and --SPOILER!!-- also has a special flag that, among other things, causes her to not die permanently if you kill her while Sauron is still alive.

Yeah those 980 random quests (which is the default setting and means there's a quest on every depth) are there so that you can still do such quests in the postgame: if you go deep into the Angband dungeon, you'll find a bunch of pink staircases leading to postgame dungeons which span every depth from 101 to 980. So you can be improving your character's skills for a looooong time to come if you feel like it And since the princess/fumblefingers quests can occur in every dungeon, you may also see some in the Void and Nether Realm. But the thing is that there's only one quest per depth, so if you e.g. complete such a quest on level 25 of Mirkwood and then go to, say, level 25 of Near Harad, you won't get another quest. If you were to visit level 25 of Mirkwood without completing the quest there, and then go to level 25 of Near Harad, you'd get exactly the same quest as long as it's not completed yet

[Cryomaniac]

I've seen Marike; luckily, I recognized that mechanic once my artifact weapon started getting disenchanted after a round of melee. Princess/FF quests in every dungeon is nice, since you can hit Orc Cave in early game to get more item/skill rewards without having to trek to Lothlorien/Mirkwood, and loot you get from Princess lottery might significantly boost your early game performance. Looks like princess/FF won't get displayed in quest log outside of main dungeons - is this a quirk of ToME source code?

Also, any reason for Mindcraft powers costs being increased? It's so painfully expensive now compared to alternatives.

[AmyBSOD]

There is indeed a bug where the princess/FF quest doesn't want to display unless you're in one of the main dungeons; I've not yet been able to figure out why that happens, but if I manage to find the function that causes it, I'll fix it Mindcraft is one of the skills that I felt were totally overpowered; you get so many spells (a total of 12 I think?) from just one single skill, compared to book spell schools that give only 4-5 spells, and mindcraft doesn't require you to lug around those inventory-slot-eating books but the biggest balance issue by far was, IMHO, the fact that mindcraft powers were extremely cheap. Unlike book spell schools, they don't even increase in cost as their effects become stronger! And they're so strong that they can make several spell schools almost entirely obsolete; precognition for example detects so many things, and in regular ToME for a fixed 1 mana cost (which is nothing if your high-level char has like 500 mana), so why would you ever bother with the various detection spells of the divination realm? As a result, mindcraft may now feel too expensive early on but that's mostly because I don't know how to give it scaling mana costs, since the functions for mindcraft spells are coded very differently from the book spells :/

Also, RIP :/ was looking forward to seeing more of your swordmaster but it seems that the dragons overwhelmed you. Was it an "It breathes--more--" death? In my experience, the monsters rise in power very quickly from dungeon level 40 to 60 or so, since every depth adds some new powerful monsters to the mix, and the princess/FF quests can roll monsters up to 10 levels out of depth so at the dungeon level you died on, they were pretty high level already Diving deep can work out and give you great loot, but when I'm playing I'm always scared of the deeper dungeons which often results in a rather boring midgame where I grind stat potions and stuff for a while during the 30s. But thanks for playing, it was interesting to see another player try out my variant

[Cryomaniac]

Mindcrafters are a holdover from the Zangband class that doesn't exactly cleanly translate to ToME mechanics; Zang's spellcasters could get a considerable amount of spells from town spellbooks, and their 3rd usually would eventually drop by midgame. Mindcrafter saves a couple of inventory slots, spellcaster classes get access to more powerful spells at the end. You could try to split their more powerful spells into separate ones, with high level effects being spells of their own with higher cost.

Yes, I got one-shotted by a Blue-Eyes White Dragon with a maxed out cold breath; I didn't expect it to have an elemental breath - the source material hinted for me at light or plasma at worst.