Making V play more like Sil

[half]

Empirically, this is two in three games just considering DL1 through DL3 for Sil 1.0.1. That's what turned me off to Sil.

I'm a bit confused here. As debo said, this is clearly not with perfect play -- many of us can do much better than this (which actually reinforces Scatha's point about Sil rewarding skill). You must be making a choice or choices which are dramatically lowering your survival rate. Quite possibly this is in character generation, rather than in play, but it could be either. Perhaps this is our fault as game designers for not pointing new players in the right direction. Posting such a character to the ladder could help us diagnose what was going wrong.

the way the dungeon generator works the plausibility that at least one is instant death is over 50%.

This is also clearly not true for others, so I'm puzzled by why you were having such a hard time of it.

It can't be differences between 1.0.1 and 1.1 (or any other pair of versions) as there has not been much relevant change to early survivability.

[zaimoni]

If this is what is happening to you, then it can only be because you have skill points invested in the wrong places (or are letting yourself get surrounded). If you put the majority in melee and evasion and forget about abilities etc, then that will see you through until you find some armour and a shield.

The majority of chars I lose at the start is when I have invested 2800 of my 5000 initial allocation in smithing and had to go in with minimal combat stats.

No, 1000 pts in smithing is all that's tolerable to make the DL 1 death rate practically zero at CON 4. Remainder is split relatively evenly between melee, ranged, evasion, and stealth; melee and evasion are overweight relative to ranged and stealth.

[Scatha]

No, 1000 pts in smithing is all that's tolerable to make the DL 1 death rate practically zero at CON 4. Remainder is split relatively evenly between melee, ranged, evasion, and stealth; melee and evasion are overweight relative to ranged and stealth.

I think I see what might be going on here. While Con does help a little bit, it's far less important than Dex for surviving the early levels. Try starting a Feanorian with 5 Dex and put at least 1500 into each of Melee and Evasion at the start. With a little caution I think you'll see 250' over 95% of the time.

[Timo Pietilä]

I can't remember if Timo has tried v4's new squelch system - it's very close to flag-based and does almost exactly what he described. Unfortunately it can't be ported to V separately from the affixes. Ho hum.

If I have understood v4 system correctly it would remove two of the three issues I mentioned: ID-by use would actually be useful and squelch would become more specific.

It's too bad that V4 is a bit too far away from vanilla to be used as playtest platform. Maybe a test version of vanilla with this is in order (even if wildly unbalanced at first). Something like 3.5.test1.

[Timo Pietilä]

Ok, so let's say you don't have the time to learn and hack at the code. After all, there is a significant time investment to be made here, especially at the start.

Not having time is one point, another is that I simply lack the passion to learn coding. Or to be more precise to learn any more than I really need (I have some scripting experience). Which is kind of sad, because I would really like to do my own version. Unfortunately pretty soon after I start to look at the code, I get bored. It's like reading some dull legal contract paper to me. Maybe, if I had the skill, I could get interested, but getting past that initial boredom has proven to be too much this far for me.

[Magnate]

If I have understood v4 system correctly it would remove two of the three issues I mentioned: ID-by use would actually be useful and squelch would become more specific.

The latter, certainly. ID-by-use is still painful in v4, just less painful than in V - but I think that's more to do with pseudo (which we have decided v4 doesn't need, so it's just a matter of time before it comes out). With v4 you rarely need to use things to ID them though, because you recognise runes and many things will be fully IDd on pickup. Ah, I see - yes, if you mean that ID-by-use is useful for learning runes (i.e. has a high reward), yes it is.

(Forgive me, but I can't remember the third of your three issues.)

[Timo Pietilä]

(Forgive me, but I can't remember the third of your three issues.)

Third is not a gameplay issue, but UI. There is a "new" visual editing system which can be accessed thru "~" (monster, feature, object), but you can't save anything from there. Saving is made from options "=" and then "visual editing", which can be used to dump the settings in pref-file, but you can't actually edit anything in that menu.

Also in visual editing menu there is "cycle lighting", but it doesn't show you which lighting setting you are currently editing, so it goes to guesswork to edit something and test it later to see if you managed to edit the right setting, say you want to change permanent walls to bright blue when in torchlight, a bit dimmer blue when in LoS, but not in light and darker blue when not in LoS (I think those are the three settings there are).

It's a feature that is partially implemented.