[Announce] Tactical Angband 0.8

[tom]

Hey fellow @s,

Tactical Angband 0.8 is out:

https://github.com/tomm/tactical-angband/releases/tag/0.8

What is Tactical Angband all about? It aims to be: Vanilla Angband with more pace (50 small levels not 100 huge levels), and with tactical depth not limited by 1 turn escapes, excessive monster summoning, & insta-deaths.

This release rebalances stealth, to make it less of a license to safely kill stuff one-by-one, but hopefully more interesting and challenging to use. Here's what's changed:

* Now based on Angband 4.2.5
* Melee, archery, throwing, using most offensive magic items, and casting most offensive spells now creates noise that can wake up monsters.
* Ring of mouse is reworked: -d4 STR, +d4 STEALTH, +d4 INFRA (this is so RoM is not as anti-melee, give that stealth now works differently...)
* Rogues gain +100% to-hit bonus against sleeping monsters
* Rogues can silently attack sleeping monsters
* Rogue hit-and-run power can now be triggered by attacking, as well as by stealing
* Melee criticals go down with weapon weight, not up
* Plus-to-hit has more (positive) effect on criticals
* Some small stabby weapons gain +might when used against sleeping monsters
* Rogue item theft chance tweaked, making the power useful into the late game
* Teleportation rings are now generated down to dlvl 100
* Sleep monsters works against more monster types
* Staff of sleep has fewer charges
* Recharge scrolls are less common

[Nick]

Very nice. I need to make some time to actually play this...

[ewert]

Weapon crits going down with weight? As in rate? Or damage? Other than damage dice, heavy weapons are quite disadvantaged, so curious on the numbers/why of the change.

[tom]

Weapon crits going down with weight? As in rate? Or damage? Other than damage dice, heavy weapons are quite disadvantaged, so curious on the numbers/why of the change.

I was aiming to give light weapons spiker damage, and heavy weapons more level damage. Actually overall all weapon types get more criticals (since +hit is weighted heavier in the criticals calc), The penalty to weight was needed to prevent heavy weapon damage exploding. Here are some stats of the change:

## HT warrior, lvl 50, maxxed stats
			Vanilla TA-0.8
			damage  damage
1d4 (+0,+0) dagger 	139	149
1d4 (+100,+0) dagger	145	160
narthanc        	218	241
forasgil        	292	325
crisdurian      	339	364
ringil          	380	422
glaive'o'pain   	517	543

Without the weight penalty, the glaive of pain was ~900 damage.

In time, I'd like to flavour the base weapon types more extensively. The +2 might when hitting sleeping monsters that dagger & main gauche have gained is a start to this.

[Sacksquatch]

I've been enjoying playing this on angband.live. I was joking with MITZE that the level size is autist friendly lol. Also enjoying this rod of wind heh.

Are you planning on sticking close to V? If not would you consider giving Rogue the trap ability? It's been discussed before to add it to V. The code already exists for FAangband 2.x. I was just thinking that with the level size, adding traps to hear the lamentations of the hounds would be fun.

Up to you. Thanks for making this.

[Sacksquatch]

I think I have found a bug. I'm playing a Gnome Mage on .8, and the frost bolt spell (from the book) seems to do 0 damage no matter what I cast it on.

[tom]

I think I have found a bug. I'm playing a Gnome Mage on .8, and the frost bolt spell (from the book) seems to do 0 damage no matter what I cast it on.

Oops, how did I manage to do that! I've pushed a fix to git, and will probably make a release soon since that's a prety major and embarrassing bug

[tom]

I've been enjoying playing this on angband.live. I was joking with MITZE that the level size is autist friendly lol. Also enjoying this rod of wind heh.

Are you planning on sticking close to V? If not would you consider giving Rogue the trap ability? It's been discussed before to add it to V. The code already exists for FAangband 2.x. I was just thinking that with the level size, adding traps to hear the lamentations of the hounds would be fun.

Up to you. Thanks for making this.

Yeah trapping might be fun. I haven't played a variant with traps since oangband. Is the faangband implementation anything like that?

Did you get to the mid-to-late game, dlvl 60+? I'm curious if you like it at those depths. That's where it's most different to vanilla

[tom]

The things I'd like to keep close to Vanilla are: the monster list and their powers (though breath attacks & summoning have been scaled down), the artifacts. Probably the things I'm most willing to mess around with are dungeon generation, basic utility items

[Sacksquatch]

Yep. You hit + like you're going to mine, but chose a floor and it lays a trap. You can then pick what kind of trap. You can set up to three.

No dlvl 60 yet. My first char died on dlvl 50ish, my second character was a mage, so I've been playing faangband in the meantime.

Thanks for the fix. I'll either recompile it locally or bug Gwarl to put up the new version.

[tom]

Here's the bug fix release, with one other little tweak:

https://github.com/tomm/tactical-angband/releases/tag/0.8.1

[Gwarl]

Available to play online