I have returned... (warning, possible spoiler talk)

[nppangband]

No, everything is correct. For some reason, which I can't begin to fathom, Sauron's tile is that of a genie emerging from an 'Aladdin style' lamp. I'll correct this in UT32. Until then, it's easy to remap a tile.

1. Open angband/lib/pref/graf-dvg.prf with any text editor (notepad).
2. Navigate to Sauron (Ctrl-f, sauron).
3. Change his address to 0x95:0xC9 (or any other tile you find suitable).

Yep, that particular tile is already used by another deep unique. But what are the odds that they'll show up on the same level at the same time .

I agree Sauron's tile is rather strange. I guess that was intended to represent the fact that, in the times that the hobbit and LOTR took place, Sauron did not have a true real physical form.

Sauron of the first age would have a humanoid appearance.

I also find Morgoth's tile to be a little underwhelming as well. It is too multi-colored and kind of resembles a clown. I think he should look more like he does in the picture in the top left corner on the main page of this site.

@Buzzkill - Let me know what you think. I will be happy to send you a draft of either tile.

[PowerDiver]

1) experience became meaningless for my dunadan mage, around 3500' deep... this is actually a huge problem for the fun factor of the game as level advancement was thrown out the window for the latter/harder portion of the game...

2) the AI needs to be tweeked... make pathfinding much larger for certain monsters....

3) i think i ended the game with like, 10,000,000 gold or something... i'm not sure but if the gold coins were the size of an american little dime, i think i was carrying about 500,000 pounds on my back, the latter part of the game....

4) round and round and round i go.... yeah... pillar dancing... i think i killed like, 1/4 the uniques by doing this.... and why wouldn't i?

(1) There's little that can be done within the current framework. I've suggested before that you only receive experience for the first monster of each type that you kill. In that framework, I believe you would not have been able to reach CL 50 until much deeper.

(2) Current pathfinding sucks. Funny given that all-pairs-shortest-paths is trivial. The reason I've never bothered to fix it in my own games is that monsters' ESP ability sucks too, and I figure they counterbalance. Now that you bring it up, it occurs to me that you could use proper pathfinding also to compute the distance through empty spaces to use for detection range. There might be a workable solution.

(3) Every time you visit home, you drop off your money treasures. The strange thing is that thieves can steal the loot from home when you are in the dungeon. I guess you carry a stack of one-use debit cards with you.

(4) When I first started playing rogue, sometimes arrows would come from traps with uninitialized +hit and +dam. Those values could be huge. Wield the right arrow, and kill everything with one hit. I considered that to be cheating. Others did not. It is a personal choice which game flaws you choose to exploit. So -- why would you choose not to pillar dance -- for the simple reason that a win without pillar dancing is sweeter than a win with pillar dancing.

[meJustmeNotyou]

2 replies in 1...

ON Sauron tile etc, cool... i'll just wait for the fix and see it next time i play instead of realign the tile map. Thanks. Anything but a Genie, haha.

On depth/exp... I get your point. I guess, after thinking about it, I'd say, "oh well" and do it anyway...

Whatever drawbacks you see for others... i think are minimal because we're only talking the final 5 or ten Clevels... and at depths of 4000' feet or so, and deeper.

For any player that just insists on being level 50 at 3800' or 3200' etc... again, too bad.... consider it your guild not giving you the title for killing a bunch of lice.... they want you at least going a certain depth.

But in the end I just wonder how many more/less people would want exp to be meaningful the whole game, as opposed to status quo "means nothing" too early.

Oh well, just a thought.

I only even bothered thinking about it because exp/gold/levels/hardness was such a big part of why i played sooooo long to finish.... and at the latter part (20% or so) of the game the game design just completely eliminated all that (due to banish, clevel cap, billion gold etc).

it becomes a different game style altogether at the end and it's, an inferior style.... it doesn't replace those former fun aspects with new things it just eliminates them altogether.... the first 80% of the game is by far just better than the latter 20% (which becomes 100X easier, as a banish mage at least... i know it'd be harder as a warrior class). It's all fixable tho.

sorry if i come off as rambling... just typing thoughts as they come to mind.

I like this game... i just wish the reasons (all of them) i liked the game in the first 80% of playing it, remained throughout the whole game.

But yeah, without any consensus none of these things will be changed... and that's ok too.... angband as a democracy is best... better than risking a horrible dictator messing the game up forever.

(at least Sauron will get a face change

goodbye

[meJustmeNotyou]

(1) There's little that can be done within the current framework. I've suggested before that you only receive experience for the first monster of each type that you kill. In that framework, I believe you would not have been able to reach CL 50 until much deeper.

(2) Current pathfinding sucks. Funny given that all-pairs-shortest-paths is trivial. The reason I've never bothered to fix it in my own games is that monsters' ESP ability sucks too, and I figure they counterbalance. Now that you bring it up, it occurs to me that you could use proper pathfinding also to compute the distance through empty spaces to use for detection range. There might be a workable solution.

(3) Every time you visit home, you drop off your money treasures. The strange thing is that thieves can steal the loot from home when you are in the dungeon. I guess you carry a stack of one-use debit cards with you.

(4) When I first started playing rogue, sometimes arrows would come from traps with uninitialized +hit and +dam. Those values could be huge. Wield the right arrow, and kill everything with one hit. I considered that to be cheating. Others did not. It is a personal choice which game flaws you choose to exploit. So -- why would you choose not to pillar dance -- for the simple reason that a win without pillar dancing is sweeter than a win with pillar dancing.

on pillar dancing, yeah... if you can why not... i just think they need to eliminate it somehow (i gave 1 suggestion)... force more real confrontations.

I don't consider it the same as like, an arrow glitch

[Scatha]

(1) There's little that can be done within the current framework. I've suggested before that you only receive experience for the first monster of each type that you kill. In that framework, I believe you would not have been able to reach CL 50 until much deeper.

You may already know, but Sil does something very similar to this. It doesn't actually cut off at 0 after the first (among other things we thought this would be a bit too dissatisfying for the player), but you get 1/2 the amount for the 2nd, 1/3, for the third, and so on, with a realistic total amount of experience per monster type of between two and four times the amount you got for the first (it also splits the experience between encountering and killing, but that's a separate matter). This does indeed give much tighter control over how much experience characters accrue, as well as rewarding the player for seeking out new challenges. We think it works pretty well.

[Fendell Orcbane]

You may already know, but Sil does something very similar to this. It doesn't actually cut off at 0 after the first (among other things we thought this would be a bit too dissatisfying for the player), but you get 1/2 the amount for the 2nd, 1/3, for the third, and so on, with a realistic total amount of experience per monster type of between two and four times the amount you got for the first (it also splits the experience between encountering and killing, but that's a separate matter). This does indeed give much tighter control over how much experience characters accrue, as well as rewarding the player for seeking out new challenges. We think it works pretty well.

I actually think that Sil is kinda cheap with exp. points. But then again I consider Sil to be a much harder version of Angband,so I guess it makes sense from that point of view.

[Jay]

I am apparently a slow learner, but I only figured out recently that Mass Banishment doesn't require line-of-sight to work. I think that makes it way too powerful — you can teleport just outside a graveyard, read your scroll, and go grab the loot. Before then, I either cleaned out graveyards using melee and ranged attacks — extremely time consuming but possible — or I either hasted self as much as possible and either dug or phase doored into the graveyard to use mass banishment, which made me really consider the risk vs. reward ration before I jumped in.

Does anybody else think Mass Banishment is too powerful the way it is now?

[Therem Harth]

Uh... Yes!

Actually I've never liked Banishment/Mass Banishment (or whatever you want to call them). Seems like giving the player too much power over the game.

[Derakon]

The problem with using Mass Banishment to take out a graveyard is that usually you have better things to do with your scrolls, like use them in actually tactically significant situations. Using them to grab the loot out of graveyards, when there's lots of loot elsewhere in the game, isn't so great unless you already know that there's an item you want in there (e.g. you see an Arkenstone or an unidentified ring). Or unless you're a mage with enough levels (and the spellbook) to cast the spell.

EDIT: and if you're a mage, being able to cast the spell at will is your reward for making it to the endgame as a mage.

[Starhawk]

Considering how few Banishment/Mass Banishment scrolls I see in a game, I think the power level is justified.

Then again, I don't play mages -- so I don't know what it's like to be able to cast such things at will...

[fizzix]

This is actually very easy to fix (although I'm not sure my fix is nice and neat enough for the hackhaters). I added this function to melee2.c in DaJAngband to address that problem:

That's actually somewhat reasonable. I had struggled with this for a while, and attempted to solve it by making a secondary flow grid for pass-wall monsters. That didn't seem to work to well. I'll look into importing these changes into vanilla (and v4 too I guess). It may be hackish but it's certainly better than the current behavior.