Differences between Composband and FrogComposband?

[swim]

Can anybody shed light on the differences between ComPosband and FrogComPosband?
I know the history of how they both forked from each other. I can see the basic differences in the announcements of their initial releases. But they have both been updated several times since then, so how similar / different are they now at this point? How would someone decide which one to play?

[smbhax]

My extremely basic impression from what I've seen, read, and the very small amount I've played, is that Frog has received more updates in the past few years and perhaps due to that now has more stuff in it.


Composband author Gwarl talked a little about both of them recently here: http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpos...02&postcount=2

[Nick]

Poschengband author Gwarl

Composband author

[smbhax]

Composband author

Gah! Thanks. Urk. I'll no doubt be making that mistake at semi-regular intervals.

[Gwarl]

Here are some composband exclusive features, I'm sure the list of frogcomposband's features is much longer

• Castle rebranded as painted castle - all the monsters from anime have ended up there.
• New dungeon Monster Island - Godzilla is the boss, seven new unique kaiju from godzilla franchise
• New class hexblade, making the hex realm a realistic option
• New race silver draconian and new monster race silver dragon; breathes and resists inertia
• Many many new prefab interesting dungeon rooms - around twice what was there before
• Instant pseudo-ID; spot magical items and artifacts from a distance, as in other roguelikes
• Chaos patrons will respond to many different actions, besides simply levelling up
• New class chaos mage
• Eagle's nest replaced by Glacier with unique ice terrain
• Several new quests
• Several new uniques

[sudtrap]

I've been trying to answer this question, myself. I wasn't able to find exactly the most detailed list of differences.

tldr; Composband has autoid and you can see skill %. Both have different races and classes. Balance is somewhat different. Different dungeons. Frogcomposband has an additional town. Content is probably 85-90% similiar.

Both versions are pretty close; I believe they diverged in 2018; and some updates have cross pollinated. We're talking ~13 version updates of differences between the two. Most changes were small bug fixes or minor rebalancing updates.

They share a fairly similar world map. Dungeons are in somewhat different locations, there are different dungeons between the two. I saw an extra town in frogcomposband. I didn't go dungeon diving so it's hard to say exactly how different the same dungeons are between the forks.

They share fairly similar classes; however each has some unique classes and races. This is probably like 80 - 90% similiar.

Both share many of the same quests.

Both authors have different views on balance. Gwarl mentioned auto-id in composband. He also lists the exact number of points each skill is at, or each race/personality/class offers, so there is no mystery exactly how good your is.

Each have done different bug fixes.

Finally, since I also tried out the most recent PosChengBand, I can saw that the worlds are the biggest difference between it and both Composbands. I hate the worldmap in PosChengBand. You have to manually explore it, which is tedious. Also quests. Gwarl brought back quests, which mostly let you go to unique short dungeons. I like the quests too. Dungeons have bosses and you gain a level up for completing them in the Composbands! However, there is one thing PosChengBand appears to have going for it over the ComPosbands. I'd swear that the dungeons all felt more unique in it; like Camelot having almost only Paladins and knights; the orc dungeon have rivers in it and giant chasms... Each dungeon felt wildly different.

[swim]

Thank you everyone! The explanations so far have really helped my understanding of this.
The only thing left I'm still not 100% sure what the autoid system is / isn't. Could somebody explain that in terms of comparing to how it functions in Vanilla Angband?

[Gwarl]

Thank you everyone! The explanations so far have really helped my understanding of this.
The only thing left I'm still not 100% sure what the autoid system is / isn't. Could somebody explain that in terms of comparing to how it functions in Vanilla Angband?

in Composband, you can instantly see from a distance the approximate quality of an item - namely, is it average, good, excellent or an artifact - but you cannot tell which items are cursed without further ID'ing them. This saves some tedium in exploring levels - you don't have to walkover every single item to find out whether or not it's worth your time. Some people find this makes the game easier.

One other thing I forgot to mention - generally speaking, 'D' monsters are a little harder to kill in Composband.