[Un] Unangband 0.6.3a released

[Derakon]

Hi!

You seem to be quite confident for a newbie in an UnFamiliar and UnForgiving variant. You also seem to take a lof of V feature and balance decisions for granted, while Un takes similar problems and solves them differently (though perhaps UnPerfectly or with Unnoying bugs). I'm afraid, even if you are good at V, just to survive in Un you have to think hard, not only hack and slash. :P I'll try to answer all your questions, marking when I can't give a good answer.

This is just my feedback; things I'm thinking of while playing through the game as someone new to Unangband but not to Angband in general. I fully expect that some of it will be disregarded entirely.

Sure, but you gain stats from the start and you can choose which requirements are most important for your early survival strategy and which to raise later on. e.g., you may choose to totally disregard the stat that decides how many spells you get and settle on 50% failure on magic missile, but pump enough spell points to cast it at will. Or something (haven't played in a long time, but it's been tested with different strategies).

Not really. In Un you really have a lot of different, good choices. E.g. CHA is not a throwaway, SIZ is rarely useful to mages, while warriors may rather ignore CON and choose SIZ because of charging multiplier, etc.

The other stats may be useful (I haven't seen any spoilers for what they do, though), but are they as important in the early game as the ability to kill things and survive being hit in melee? Take a look at what an early-game warrior needs to survive: he needs STR and DEX for multiple attacks, CON for some extra health (or maybe SIZ, but then you start worrying about your AGI for speed reasons), and a decent light weapon. He can try to pump his other stats, and he might get boosts from them that are useful in the long term, but in the short term, the warrior is very much a "make it fall over before it makes me fall over" character.

In comparison, the mage doesn't need hitpoints so much, because he won't be in melee nearly so often, but he needs to be able to kill his opponents before they get into melee range. That means being able to reliably cast enough spells to kill his enemies before having to run off to rest and recover. Especially in the early game, "running off" if you haven't killed your opponent often means fleeing the level, since you have no reliable way to get away from enemies otherwise (phase door and hope you land in a nearby-but-disconnected room?). So he needs plenty of spellpoints, and as low a failure rate as he can manage. 5% failure rate is still very high in these situations, since each failed spell is a bit hit to his ability to finish a fight with very limited mana.

Basically my point is that mages in the early game have a much harder time with their core competencies than warriors do. Maybe this is intentional.

You say that SIZ is rarely useful for mages. Why is this? Improving your hitdie gives massive increases to your overall hitpoints.

Everybody can play everything. At least in the adult mode. Greyed out choices just show that some stats will be _very_ low, which requires nontrivial character design decisions.

Okay, what is "adult" mode, then? I'm certainly not being given the option to play certain race/class combinations that I think would work perfectly well.

Both [CON and WIS] do [determine spellpoints].

It'd be really fantastic if this were communicated in the documentation.

Sure, but they [smart, frail races] also tend to have good skills, e.g. ranged attack or magic devices skills (think: abundant cheap low-level wands), which is yet another source of survivability.

So in exchange for a permanent reduction in spellpoints and hitpoints compared to other races, I get better ranged attacks (that I can't use effectively anyway because I'm a mage) or better magic devices (which I'd wager still don't scale in the endgame...but this is the early game I've been discussing, so fair enough).

Wretched apprentice wizard fate. I don't remember exactly which macro I did use (probably 'm1d0'?) nor how to define this one safely. I only remember I used to target an enemy and then just press one key repeatedly, being sure that when I'll pummel him as long as it takes to kill him, instead of alternating between enemies, as our distances change. Also, when he was dead or out of sight or I had HP warning, I was interrupted, so even leaning on the key wasn't that disastrours.

Ehh, I can accept that including myself in the area of effect of a ball spell is a bad idea. I just don't like being able to shoot myself with a bolt spell by targeting my own square. I can't think of any non-suicidal situation in which this would be helpful, and suicidal players already have plenty of options available.

Could you compare their content in the ~ screen? Some have similar titles but different content. Or it's a bug...

Oh, they're the same all right.

Is it [the overhead view not redrawing] good or bad? If bad, why?

It's bad, mostly because it means that after I cast Detect Monster spells, I have to use the L look command to take a look around and figure out where those creatures on my visible monsters list actually are in relation to myself.

Hard to say. I guess it would paralyse you if you didn't have Free Action of good save throw.

Oh, I'm not arguing about the spell effects. Just the language is...weird.

[andrewdoull]

In comparison, the mage doesn't need hitpoints so much, because he won't be in melee nearly so often, but he needs to be able to kill his opponents before they get into melee range. That means being able to reliably cast enough spells to kill his enemies before having to run off to rest and recover. Especially in the early game, "running off" if you haven't killed your opponent often means fleeing the level, since you have no reliable way to get away from enemies otherwise (phase door and hope you land in a nearby-but-disconnected room?). So he needs plenty of spellpoints, and as low a failure rate as he can manage. 5% failure rate is still very high in these situations, since each failed spell is a bit hit to his ability to finish a fight with very limited mana.

Forget about INT - you don't need it to start with, and it only usefully increases the number of spells when you get to higher levels. Stick with either DEX and either CON or WIS, depending on whether you want better hit points or saving throws.

You say that SIZ is rarely useful for mages. Why is this? Improving your hitdie gives massive increases to your overall hitpoints.

Both CON and SIZ increase hit points at roughly the same rate (remembering you need to invest in AGI if you increase SIZ and don't want to be slowed down). But the side effects of increased SIZ is greater damage while charging, whereas increased CON also gives you more spell points. Out of the two, I suspect mages need mana more than melee damage.

Okay, what is "adult" mode, then? I'm certainly not being given the option to play certain race/class combinations that I think would work perfectly well.

It's a birth option. Hit = when you next generate a character and you can change whether you are in beginner, intermediate or advanced mode.

It'd be really fantastic if this were communicated in the documentation.

Agreed. Volunteers?

Ehh, I can accept that including myself in the area of effect of a ball spell is a bad idea. I just don't like being able to shoot myself with a bolt spell by targeting my own square. I can't think of any non-suicidal situation in which this would be helpful, and suicidal players already have plenty of options available.

This UI improvement is on my to do list. However, what easier way of figuring out if you're fire resistant than hitting yourself with a fire spell that you cast?

It's bad, mostly because it means that after I cast Detect Monster spells, I have to use the L look command to take a look around and figure out where those creatures on my visible monsters list actually are in relation to myself.

It's a bug.

Andrew

[andrewdoull]

...what? So the prettier you are, the less willing your opponents are to try to smash your face in, even though they're trying to kill you anyway?

Charisma != prettiness. Think of it as your ability to taunt cowardly ranged weapon users, encouraging them to attack you in hand to hand... or something.

Farmer Maggot's cellar is levels 2-6, but in practice seems to be significantly more dangerous than the same levels in Bree's sewers / the Barrowdowns. The Dunnlending Agent is also insanely badass for his dungeon level. It just doesn't make intuitive sense to me that Farmer Maggot's cellar would be more dangerous than Bree, given that in the stories, Maggot is just a farmer, while the hobbits did encounter some actually hostile characters in Bree.

Just a farmer with viscious dogs that the hobbits refused to go anywhere near... and Bree gets worse later on...

The insane badassedness of the Dunlending Agent is a deliberate early optional challenge... with some nice rewards.

So, what -- does the store learn the spells in the book you sell them, and then make some of them available as services?

Exactly right.

The annoying thing about this compared to old-style pseudo-ID is that now I have no way of safely getting more information on these items other than spending an ID item of some type.

The key word here is safe. If there was a safe way of getting ID, then there'd be no point having the ID system at all, as you correctly point out. The ID system as it is designed in Unangband is deliberately risk/reward driven based on the decisions you make. It is also, in the later game, effectively optional, once you find the right kit.

Andrew

[Derakon]

Well, I'll keep dreaming about not needing to ID equipment, if you don't mind. I've downloaded the Vanilla source, so we'll see if anything comes of that.

About mage stats: INT is the classic mage stat; it seems very strange to me that it would not really be required by mages. Pretty much any time you think "mage" you think "smart". Now of course you're free to break the trope...but that increases the learning curve for just about anyone familiar with fantasy stereotypes.

Some more items:

* I found a rune, and, lacking any better ideas, tattooed it onto my hands, which immediately became unsuitable for spellcasting. I could maybe see an argument for magical conflict here, but if so this should definitely be warned against. More likely it's just a bug in that tattoos are "gloves" that don't give DEX or FA. Fortunately, I thought to try "taking off" the tattoo (which isn't intuitively possible), and you can apparently freely destroy tattoos, so the upshot is I just wasted an earth rune.

* Wizard Light at +5 to light radius is pretty insanely awesome, given that with it, my starting Staff of Light, and apparently an innate light (is this a High-Elf intrinsic or something?) I have a light radius of seven. This is probably too good. +3 would be fine (putting it on par with what I assume are still the same artifact light radii). I noticed that fully-fueled Brass Lanterns also have a light radius of 3. If you want a Gandalf-style photon storm, you could save it for a later spell that has an even bigger radius (at which point, presumably the player isn't so dependent on light to see enemies). Maybe it could damage enemies or something.

* Stores don't restock when you're on the surface; this is documented, but I don't think it's a great idea. Going into the dungeon to wait is a pain because a) you have to travel overland to it, and b) you don't spawn on top of the staircase in most "wilderness" sectors. I was townscumming because I was completely out of WoR scrolls, incidentally. Even when the stores store WoR, though, they don't seem to have more than one or two scrolls. This really needs to be bumped up; WoR is a basic utility item that should be guaranteed to be available. I know TOME hacked things up somehow so that the alchemist always had e.g. 99 scrolls of ID and 99 scrolls of WoR; something like that would be nice.

* Using WoR in Bucklebury town is a waste of a perfectly good scroll.

* What happened to the autosave options? Relatedly, why can't I rest more than 999 turns? I'm used to the 1000-turn autosave frequency telling me when the shops have restocked. Okay, so maybe it's a bit metagamey, but when you're resolved to townscumming anyway (because frankly, exploring dungeons without an adequate supply of WoR is just a pain), it's nice to not have to waste your time.

* Nobody in Bucklebury wants to buy mushrooms.

* Despite the fact that travel requires extensive amounts of food, you don't recover spellpoints while traveling (or presumably heal, though I confess I didn't check).

* Old Man Willow is impossible to fight properly. As long as he isn't in LOS of you, he has excellent odds each turn of teleporting himself away, at which point, you get to try to chase through the dungeon to find him again. Once you do get into LOS, he'll waste his spells trying to drain your mana or cause status ailments, but getting there is almost impossible. I note his monster recall says he casts "teleport to", not "teleport self"; looks like there's a bug there as he was definitely casting the latter. A tree that can't move but can force you closer makes a lot more sense than a tree that keeps magically bopping all over the place anyway. Looking at his melee attacks in monster.txt, I see he has a paralyzing touch; is that really such a great idea? That basically requires players to have Free Action by 500', which is a full 500' earlier than I'm used to seeing it be required by. A boss with teleport to and paralyze is a really nasty combination, and at this depth is pretty much a guaranteed kill on any player who hasn't read the spoilers and hasn't encountered him before.

* Enemies are able to pull the "ball spell from out of LOS to hit around corners" trick on you. This seems vaguely unfair, especially when the spells in question are darkness storms (causing blindness) and they cast them repeatedly (nominal cast rate 1 in 3, fast mover). I shouldn't be expected to have resist blindness at 500' just so I can deal with dark elven cultists.

* Bolt spells cannot hit creatures in trees.

* Why the crap is Tom Bombadil hostile?! And he's Draebor the Imp, I see, a monster that is nominally native to around 1000', if I recall correctly; certainly not 550'. That's massively out of depth. And quite deadly; I was one square away from the down staircase when he fatally cut me; unable to read scrolls to get away because I was terminally blind, unable to move properly because I was terminally confused, unable to reliably recognize which square was what because I was terminally hallucinating, unable to keep my hitpoints up because he hits three times for 3d4 damage and moves quickly (average damage if all strikes land: 45/normal-speed turn. I had about 120 hitpoints).

* Tom can "hit to space out you" and "sing to do you no effect", both of which constructs seem odd. I suggest "hit to cause hallucination" and "sing to no effect".

* In general, I would expect Tom to be friendly and basically unkillable; forcing you away with teleport-level spells if you attack him. He's a friendly, poetic little gnome, not a spellslinging badass.

EDIT:

* While rolling up a new character, I decided to pick the "Have played Unangband before" option instead of the "Have played Angband" option. This is apparently necessary to unlock free chargen. I find that a bit dubious myself; certainly the relationship between available race/class combinations and your putative skill level is not made clear.

* Why do all of the races suck so much? That is, the vast majority of them have more minuses than they have pluses. We have 4 races with net 0 stats (3 variants on humans, and the Ents), 4 races with net positive stats (Hobbit, Dunadan, High-Elf, and Maiar), and fifteen with net negative stats. I think the game's hard enough as it is!

[Arralen]

The Vampire bat is damaged.
You failed to use the rod properly.
You hit the Vampire bat.
You have destroyed the Vampire bat.
You see a Vampire bat Corpse (charging).

WTF ?!?!?

[ekolis]

It's charging up its "super come back to life and turn into Dracula" attack, of course! Quick, get the holy water!

[andrewdoull]

It's charging up its "super come back to life and turn into Dracula" attack, of course! Quick, get the holy water!

*** Spoiler space ***














Ekolis is correct. IIRC any water will do for skeletal remains.

Andrew

[Pete Mack]

Ouch!
That just means one more silly thing you need to carry.
And one more meaningless action you need to take.

This is exactly the kind of thing that turned me off on UnAngband.

Also: surely fire (oil, torches, brands) and wood (polearms, axes) should work too?

[ekolis]

Heh, really? I thought I was just joking :P

[andrewdoull]

Ouch!
That just means one more silly thing you need to carry.
And one more meaningless action you need to take.

This is exactly the kind of thing that turned me off on UnAngband.

*** Some more spoiler space ***










This is no worse than having to deal with breeders or summoners. Using water to destroy the skeletons of dead but regenerating monsters is more of an Easter egg than a requirement. IIRC not every killed vampire drops a body, so you're not dealing with an infinitely unkillable creature here.

Also: surely fire (oil, torches, brands) and wood (polearms, axes) should work too?

Fire works... wood... hmm. Would be trickier (I'd not only need to distinguish the effect type, but also start to associate melee weapon damage with effects - which is probably too much effort for something which only affects regenerating monsters).

[andrewdoull]

Well, I'll keep dreaming about not needing to ID equipment, if you don't mind. I've downloaded the Vanilla source, so we'll see if anything comes of that.

I will be adding a birth_ident option for people such as yourselves. Not sure when as id is relatively invasive a change.

About mage stats: INT is the classic mage stat; it seems very strange to me that it would not really be required by mages. Pretty much any time you think "mage" you think "smart". Now of course you're free to break the trope...but that increases the learning curve for just about anyone familiar with fantasy stereotypes.

I've just added code to character generation that displays the primary stats for each class. Hopefully this will make it clearer what you need.

Some more items:

* I found a rune, and, lacking any better ideas, tattooed it onto my hands, which immediately became unsuitable for spellcasting. I could maybe see an argument for magical conflict here, but if so this should definitely be warned against. More likely it's just a bug in that tattoos are "gloves" that don't give DEX or FA. Fortunately, I thought to try "taking off" the tattoo (which isn't intuitively possible), and you can apparently freely destroy tattoos, so the upshot is I just wasted an earth rune.

Will fix this as it gives mages something to do with their bare hands.

* Wizard Light at +5 to light radius is pretty insanely awesome, given that with it, my starting Staff of Light, and apparently an innate light (is this a High-Elf intrinsic or something?) I have a light radius of seven. This is probably too good. +3 would be fine (putting it on par with what I assume are still the same artifact light radii). I noticed that fully-fueled Brass Lanterns also have a light radius of 3. If you want a Gandalf-style photon storm, you could save it for a later spell that has an even bigger radius (at which point, presumably the player isn't so dependent on light to see enemies). Maybe it could damage enemies or something.

I've reduced the radius as suggested.

* Stores don't restock when you're on the surface; this is documented, but I don't think it's a great idea. Going into the dungeon to wait is a pain because a) you have to travel overland to it, and b) you don't spawn on top of the staircase in most "wilderness" sectors. I was townscumming because I was completely out of WoR scrolls, incidentally. Even when the stores store WoR, though, they don't seem to have more than one or two scrolls. This really needs to be bumped up; WoR is a basic utility item that should be guaranteed to be available. I know TOME hacked things up somehow so that the alchemist always had e.g. 99 scrolls of ID and 99 scrolls of WoR; something like that would be nice.

The theory is you should be able to complete many dungeons without requiring WOR. I'm going to include the ability to order additional stock of stuff when I include quests - you'll be tasked with getting the ingredients of what you want in stock.

* Using WoR in Bucklebury town is a waste of a perfectly good scroll.

Will fix.

* What happened to the autosave options?

There never was any autosave code. Unangband makes a backup copy when you enter a level because the generation code wasn't particularly reliable. I presume you're talking about another variant - is it worth trying to implement this?

Relatedly, why can't I rest more than 999 turns? I'm used to the 1000-turn autosave frequency telling me when the shops have restocked. Okay, so maybe it's a bit metagamey, but when you're resolved to townscumming anyway (because frankly, exploring dungeons without an adequate supply of WoR is just a pain), it's nice to not have to waste your time.

The reason you can't rest more than 999 turns is a weird user interface bug that I've never tracked down... didn't realize it was important.

* Nobody in Bucklebury wants to buy mushrooms.

They're a higher class of hobbit...

* Despite the fact that travel requires extensive amounts of food, you don't recover spellpoints while traveling (or presumably heal, though I confess I didn't check).

Travelling (and the whole campaign mode for that matter) was quick hack that took on a life of it's own. I would make it more interesting, but given that there is a much better solution (FAAngband's wilderness maps), I try to avoid doing much to it in the mean time. Think of this as encountering random beasts in the wilderness that exactly consume as much healing and mana as the amount you recovered.

* Old Man Willow is impossible to fight properly. As long as he isn't in LOS of you, he has excellent odds each turn of teleporting himself away, at which point, you get to try to chase through the dungeon to find him again. Once you do get into LOS, he'll waste his spells trying to drain your mana or cause status ailments, but getting there is almost impossible. I note his monster recall says he casts "teleport to", not "teleport self"; looks like there's a bug there as he was definitely casting the latter. A tree that can't move but can force you closer makes a lot more sense than a tree that keeps magically bopping all over the place anyway. Looking at his melee attacks in monster.txt, I see he has a paralyzing touch; is that really such a great idea? That basically requires players to have Free Action by 500', which is a full 500' earlier than I'm used to seeing it be required by. A boss with teleport to and paralyze is a really nasty combination, and at this depth is pretty much a guaranteed kill on any player who hasn't read the spoilers and hasn't encountered him before.

I've fixed the teleport bug (missing break; statement). In Unangband, paralyzation is non-cumulative similar to blindness caused by light and darkness. This should make it marginally less risky to forgo Free Action. Given that, I will give him Sleep attacks instead of Paralyze attacks.

* Enemies are able to pull the "ball spell from out of LOS to hit around corners" trick on you. This seems vaguely unfair,

Isn't it great. It's like there's some kind of AI system letting them think the same way the player does. (Thanks to the Jeff and Diago or Leon - not sure which of these geniuses coded that particular bit of the 4GAI).

especially when the spells in question are darkness storms (causing blindness) and they cast them repeatedly (nominal cast rate 1 in 3, fast mover). I shouldn't be expected to have resist blindness at 500' just so I can deal with dark elven cultists.

This does relate to the 'too frequent casting of spells' bug you saw previously. Monsters should only LOS abuse if you LOS abuse. However the flag that tells them to do so is getting set too frequently. Still working on this one.

* Bolt spells cannot hit creatures in trees.

I suspect this is actually a manifestation of the 'weird projection' bug that I've just fixed.

* Why the crap is Tom Bombadil hostile?! And he's Draebor the Imp, I see, a monster that is nominally native to around 1000', if I recall correctly; certainly not 550'. That's massively out of depth. And quite deadly; I was one square away from the down staircase when he fatally cut me; unable to read scrolls to get away because I was terminally blind, unable to move properly because I was terminally confused, unable to reliably recognize which square was what because I was terminally hallucinating, unable to keep my hitpoints up because he hits three times for 3d4 damage and moves quickly (average damage if all strikes land: 45/normal-speed turn. I had about 120 hitpoints).

And you wonder why Peter Jackson cut him...

* Tom can "hit to space out you" and "sing to do you no effect", both of which constructs seem odd. I suggest "hit to cause hallucination" and "sing to no effect".

Will try. That text is procedurally generated so sometimes I have to do weird sentence constructions for it to work at all...

* In general, I would expect Tom to be friendly and basically unkillable; forcing you away with teleport-level spells if you attack him. He's a friendly, poetic little gnome, not a spellslinging badass.

Good monsters are almost in. I was going to wait on implementing quests, but I think with the ability to interact with monster inventories (which I just added yesterday) it may be possible to jump the gun on this. I'll be adding a birth_evil option for those who want the current behaviour.

* While rolling up a new character, I decided to pick the "Have played Unangband before" option instead of the "Have played Angband" option. This is apparently necessary to unlock free chargen. I find that a bit dubious myself; certainly the relationship between available race/class combinations and your putative skill level is not made clear.

I didn't want to overwhelm new players with the amount of choice available (see e.g. comments by d_m for an example of why some people don't play Unangband).

* Why do all of the races suck so much? That is, the vast majority of them have more minuses than they have pluses. We have 4 races with net 0 stats (3 variants on humans, and the Ents), 4 races with net positive stats (Hobbit, Dunadan, High-Elf, and Maiar), and fifteen with net negative stats. I think the game's hard enough as it is!

And the fact that the races are unlockable is also because they are more challenging. They should be putatively balanced by having better abilities as well as some with intrinsic abilities ('A' activate '@' yourself to use these). Specific suggestions are always welcome. Don't forget you get stat boosts much earlier than Angband (used to - not so sure anymore).

Andrew

[thorgot]

Detect Power is impossible to learn (from the Magic Book of Conjuring) unless I get a Book of Lore, which also has the spell. Either remove it from the book of conjuring or give it another, more reasonable, prerequisite.

Technically, a book of Craft has one of the prerequisites (Sense Magic), but it still seems unfair to rely on a rare drop for something as important as Detect Power.

Acid Bolt would require me to have a book of Acid Magic to learn (that's the only place I can learn Acid Spit and Minor Acid Ball). Pointless, because that book has Acid Bolt.

I posted this back in May of 2008. There are several possible books that will allow one to learn Detect Power, but it's still a tremendously low chance and it is strange that it is in the second spell book but only available at some uncertain point between level 10 and the end of the game.

Can it have a reasonable prerequisite? If you think it is too powerful to have so early, then remove the prerequisite and make it available at a higher level.

[andrewdoull]

I posted this back in May of 2008. There are several possible books that will allow one to learn Detect Power, but it's still a tremendously low chance and it is strange that it is in the second spell book but only available at some uncertain point between level 10 and the end of the game.

Can it have a reasonable prerequisite? If you think it is too powerful to have so early, then remove the prerequisite and make it available at a higher level.

Sorry for having missed this. I'll remove the pre-requisites.

Edit: You can remove the P: line in the entry in spell.txt in the meantime if you want...

Andrew

[Storch]

Documentation?

I tried to play Unangband because it seemed to be different. It has so many features and is very interesting. BUT, does some documentation exist?

Perharps it is your intention but I find it extremely annoying that I do not know what stat has which effect, that have to blindly try use this on that to see what happens etc.

If the doc exists can you please provide me with a link? If it does not, I suggest to write one, I think even you would be surprised what you created :-)

[thorgot]

Sorry for having missed this. I'll remove the pre-requisites.

Edit: You can remove the P: line in the entry in spell.txt in the meantime if you want...

Andrew

Thank you very much.