[Announce] PosChengband 1.0.0

[Pete Mack]

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

And well-balanced damage if they toss non-elven 'h' characters.

[HugoVirtuoso]

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

It would be fun to see Giants throw yeeks or snotlings left and right.

[Nick]

Sounds like golems should get the "trample weaker foes" ability at some point.

What I would like to see is giants getting the ability to throw small monsters at other monsters for damage to both

[Derakon]

Sounds like golems should get the "trample weaker foes" ability at some point.

[chris]

Last release for a bit, I promise 1.0.33:

* Added new player monster race: The Golem. Yet another melee build, golems possess the awesome power of "Slow Walk". In fact they are so slow, that they never can get more than just a single attack per round. They prefer to fight with their massive golem fists, and strike powerfully enough despite their limited attacks. Another unique golem attribute is the presence of magic resistance, which reduces the effectiveness (damage) of their opponent's spells. The golem race has 3 subraces: Colossus (biggest and hardest hitter, but the slowest), Sky Golem (Resist Time, Breathe Time, weakest in melee) and the Spellwarp Automaton (Middle of the road, but very high magic resistance).

* Added new options to highlight pets when playing in ASCII mode

* Added new giant monsters, new giant evolutions, new giant powers and a whole new giant subrace: The Hru.

* Added new troll powers.

[chris]

It's *really* hard to tell what's going on sometimes, a high delay is unplayable so I was using 0 delay, and you can't tell what is friendly or not at a glance. How easy would it be to make all friendly monsters have a darkgrey background?

Display code is not my forte ... However, for displaying text, there is currently no mechanism to control the background color. Adding this would require:
[1] Augmenting z-term.*
[2] Changing the text hooks for all clients to support the added info.

And, this would only work for non-graphics. For tiles, the way the code is currently setup, a new tile needs to be painted for each monster. And new mappings ... Yuk! A better approach would be to pass "effect options" or what-not, again requiring a change to both z-term and all of the platform dependent clients.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that it is extremely easy to tweak the foreground color used to draw monsters in non-graphics modes, and this will work on all clients. So, I added a new pet option: Highlight Pets. You can toggle it back and forth really quickly. When turned on, all of your pets draw in yellow (TERM_YELLOW). When turned off, all of your pets draw normally. Perhaps this would be enough? Of course, this option only works for ASCII display.

Is it possible to have your Quylthulg able to control their pet while riding? I have no idea about riding mechanics.

Nope. Actually, I don't think Q's should be able to ride at all as it lets them circumvent their true weakness: horrible speed! But perhaps it is OK to let them ride seeing as they can't control their mount anyway?

Aside, to control your mount, you need a free arm. But Q's don't have any arms

[clouded]

My first Q died trying to do The Vault early, nasty troll king spawn. RIP. They seem completely insane to play, it is pretty fun though (in an appropriate to poscheng way).

Elves seem like the best early summon in my short playtesting, a fleet of mages blast everything to death and you can carry around a couple of named druids, who will quickly spiderflood enemies for you, after which you can dismiss all unnamed guys. It's *really* hard to tell what's going on sometimes, a high delay is unplayable so I was using 0 delay, and you can't tell what is friendly or not at a glance. How easy would it be to make all friendly monsters have a darkgrey background?

Is it possible to have your Quylthulg able to control their pet while riding? I have no idea about riding mechanics.

Edit: Also, perhaps unnamed summons should be dismissed when you leave their level; it's very clunky to have to dismiss everything when you go down stairs, especially in a place where you want to dive quickly.

Also, perhaps the final stage of giants could all be various titans. Pantheon of Titan uniques to go along with the Olympians.

[Nick]

Hru Dunnit?

Doctor Hru? Hru's on first?

I'll shut up now.

[Patashu]

Hru Dunnit?

[JohnCW9]

Greater Titans are quite a bit weaker than Hrus, though. I really don't want the single end form as it defeats the variety. Fire, Frost and Storm giants have unique elemental abilities than some players might want to keep, and Titans get confusion attacks as well as unique powers.

Something like:

                           | Fire Giant   --(40)-->Greater Fire Giant (New)
                           | Frost Giant  --(40)-->Greater Frost Giant (New)
Hill--(20)-->Stone--(30)-->| Cloud Giant  --(40)-->Storm Giant
                           | Lesser Titan --(40)-->Greater Titan
                           | ???          --(40)-->Hru

Is what I had in mind, which requires me to come up with 3 new monsters.

Keep in mind there are very flavorful bosses for at least 3 of the subtypes (Surtur, Ymir and Kronos), and you would lose that with a common end form.

Really, I think the long unbranched evolutionary chains in Posband are a mistake. Once you've played it once, why play it again?

How about Lesser Hru's??

[HugoVirtuoso]

Stone Giant is the logical pre-evolution of Hru, but the power levels don't work out.

Hrus are known to hit *really, really* hard in terms of power levels, right?

[emulord]

Greater Frost Giant should be named Ice Giant

Stone Giant is the logical pre-evolution of Hru, but the power levels don't work out.

Good point. However at branching levelups I tend to savescum and start characters at Level 29 a few times in a row just to see how they all play :P

[chris]

Maybe you should make it like:

                           | Fire Giant          |               
                           | Frost Giant         |               
Hill--(15)-->Stone--(25)-->| Cloud Giant--(33)-->|Storm Giant-(38)->Lesser Titan --(45)-->Greater Titan
                           | Hru                 |

OR move the merging to after storm giant. Having Titans be the strongest giant type at the end makes more sense. (Greater titan vs Frost giant huh?)

Greater Titans are quite a bit weaker than Hrus, though. I really don't want the single end form as it defeats the variety. Fire, Frost and Storm giants have unique elemental abilities than some players might want to keep, and Titans get confusion attacks as well as unique powers.

Something like:

                           | Fire Giant   --(40)-->Greater Fire Giant (New)
                           | Frost Giant  --(40)-->Greater Frost Giant (New)
Hill--(20)-->Stone--(30)-->| Cloud Giant  --(40)-->Storm Giant
                           | Lesser Titan --(40)-->Greater Titan
                           | ???          --(40)-->Hru

Is what I had in mind, which requires me to come up with 3 new monsters.

Keep in mind there are very flavorful bosses for at least 3 of the subtypes (Surtur, Ymir and Kronos), and you would lose that with a common end form.

Really, I think the long unbranched evolutionary chains in Posband are a mistake. Once you've played it once, why play it again?

[emulord]

Maybe you should make it like:

                           | Fire Giant          |               
                           | Frost Giant         |               
Hill--(15)-->Stone--(25)-->| Cloud Giant--(33)-->|Storm Giant-(38)->Lesser Titan --(45)-->Greater Titan
                           | Hru                 |

OR move the merging to after storm giant. Having Titans be the strongest giant type at the end makes more sense. (Greater titan vs Frost giant huh?)

[chris]

Something I liked about the original posband was the rapidity of the evolutions for Trolls and Giants. Maybe you should make those races like that again. It was a nice serotonin boost

Hmm ... I actually like the current troll evolution:

                             |Ice Troll             |                      |Ettin
Forest--(10)-->Stone--(20)-->|Fire Troll            |--(30)-->Olog--(40)-->|Storm
                             |Algroth--(25)-->Aklash|                      |Spirit
                                                                           |Troll King

I really dislike mixing the various elemental flavors (e.g., going Ice->Fire->Poison) and I think having subrace choices adds depth. Each of the final forms have distinct benefits (e.g. Ettins have two heads so gain an extra helmet slot, Storm Trolls are fast and have some offensive abilites, Spirit Trolls are slow, but have passwall, etc.).

So you get 4 or 5 evolutions, which is enough IMO. Posband has 8 evolutions, but it doesn't seem like some of them are very different (e.g Cave -> Water -> Olog ... They're just trolls!). But, while peeking at Posband, I do see some interesting powers (Berserk, etc) so perhaps I will "borrow" some of these ideas.

On the other hand, I think giants are a bit sparse:

                           | Fire Giant
                           | Frost Giant
Hill--(20)-->Stone--(30)-->| Cloud Giant  --(40)-->Storm
                           | Lesser Titan --(40)-->Greater Titan
                           | TODO: Hru

Again, I like the subraces over the single evolutionary line, but 2 evolutions might not be enough, though I am OK with 3. Perhaps Fire and Frost need some higher forms as well? Also, I've been meaning to work in Hrus at some point. Again, each final form offers distinct advantages and abilities, so there is more replay with Giants than a single evolutionary line would offer. Also, for the giants, each flavor has a different boss and a different reward.

I'm open to suggestions for new evolutions, but I'd prefer to keep the subrace flavors.