FrogComposband 7.0.peppermint

[Sideways]

The new version is available here, with the source code, precompiled Windows full game (without the source code) and precompiled Windows .exe. (Windows users who download the .exe should also download the source code, but not the full game, which would be superfluous. Windows users who download the full game won't need to download any other files.)

Save files are unidirectionally compatible between 7.0.strawberry and 7.0.peppermint; that is, you can upgrade from strawberry to peppermint mid-game and not experience any weirdness, but you can't downgrade from peppermint back to strawberry. (Lite-town players may experience some moderate weirdness in upgrading; but given what a mess lite-town was before, they'll almost certainly experience more weirdness if they don't upgrade.)

Many thanks to everybody who played 7.0.strawberry! Whether positive or negative, your feedback makes the game better, in ways that wouldn't be possible without your help. And even just playing without saying a word helps; there's no substitute for looking at a game or a dump, and seeing what people do and how things work in practice.

Changes in FrogComposband 7.0.peppermint:

* Totally revamped the no-wilderness town, and fixed quest descriptions so they're accurate with both wilderness and no wilderness

* Introduced a V-like system for tracking and describing object origins (e.g. "Dropped by the Variant Maintainer on level 19 of Orc Cave."). This system can be turned off (or expanded further) in the text display options

* Added back the no_selling birth option. In no_selling mode, selling items is disabled but gold drops are increased to compensate. The intention is that selling players and non-selling players will accumulate gold at roughly the same pace, but since this was calibrated based on my own games, it may not hold for players with different playstyles. No_selling mode does not have any effect on gold drops in the wilderness

* Added a new option (easy_mimics) for players who really hate mimics, cloakers, death swords, wall monsters etc. and want to reglyph them. Turning on easy_mimics makes these monsters use the 'x' glyph instead of their normal glyph (the monsters will retain their normal color, unless that's pitch black, in which case it's changed to a slightly less black black). It also makes monsters with the ATTR_CLEAR flag possible to see. (Note that easy_mimics does not affect tree monsters or weird fumes, which can be recognized through their color, nor does it affect creeping coins or death scythes)

* Made easy_id stronger (it now *identifies* all items on walkover)

* It is now possible to request a new quest immediately after receiving the reward for the old one, without the need to exit and re-enter the building

* Added a never_forget birth option for the ellipos types, which essentially protects the player from amnesia and also gives ellipos's easy labyrinth

* Added two new birth options (no_chris and no_scrambling) that prevent dungeon teleports and stat scrambling, respectively. (Both cause different bad things to happen instead; they are not intended as easy-mode, but as options for players who find chrissing and/or stat scrambling unfun and think the game would be better if those effects didn't exist.)

* Added new monsters and tweaked existing ones

* Adapted some changes to artifacts that Gwarl made for ComPosband 7.0.4

* Added a new quest in Zul that enables teleporting between Zul and other towns if successfully completed
[A fair warning about this quest. It's not *that* hard if you have great stealth, but if you have poor stealth - or worse, aggravation - things can get... entertaining. This is true of most quests of course, but particularly true here. Doing it with both aggravation and low speed is not recommended, and Sexy characters should treat it as an endgame quest and approach it with extreme caution.]

* Rings and Death Swords are no longer limited to 1x free action or see invisible

* Fixed a bug in Thalos that made the library inaccessible in late game

* Fixed a bug with lawyer *identify* (it cost zero mana and allowed the player to also do normal identify on a different item)

* Fixed a bug that caused items in the home display to be sometimes shown with a value of zero

* Fixed an old bug that caused some timed effects to be decreased on game load, allowing the player to cure fear by saving and loading repeatedly. (Something similar may still happen with other things, the code needs closer scrutiny)

* Fixed an old PosChengband bug that allowed hidden information about immunities to leak to the player through the character sheet

* Fixed an old PosChengband bug that sometimes caused the game to crash on mangy leper attacks due to division by zero (thanks to Hugo for spotting and reporting it)

* Fixed an ancient bug that made quests uncompletable if one of the target monsters evolved or got polymorphed (this should now be impossible), and tweaked monster evolution code (all of which is now in time_lord.c, instead of being needlessly duplicated)

* Fixed a problem with using the '-' key to select a floor item in the inscription menu

* Fixed an old bug that caused the game to crash with quest_unique off if too many target monsters were killed in a random Angband quest

* Fixed an old bug that allowed skeletons to double their food pile by eating from it

* Fixed an old bug that caused the wilderness to not generate properly (potentially causing crashes) if the player saved and loaded the game inside the arena

* Fixed a minor bug with using an unidentified device of detect traps, which didn't mark grids as trap-detected even in cases where the effect's obviousness meant there was no need to avoid spoiling (thanks to nikheizen for reporting this)

* Plugged a number of old loopholes that allowed doppelgangers to retain their demigod powers in forms other than Human and Demigod (thanks to murphy for reporting this)

* Plugged an old information leak when uppercase keys were used in the object prompt (thanks to murphy for reporting this as well)

* Objects thrown at a wall now land on the last square before the wall, rather than attempting to land on the wall itself and ending up placed on a random square adjacent to it (potentially creating the impression of an object flying through a wall - thanks to bostock for reminding me of this)

* Destroying high-level law books now gives XP where appropriate (thanks to bostock for this too)

* Slightly lowered the max power of ultra-strong deep dungeon randarts

* Slightly changed how the reforge cap is calculated to compensate for it now being easier to acquire fame (due to the increased number of quests). The cap now increases slightly slower in the fame range 128 to 223 (early late game), with no effect on either midgame reforging or very-late-game reforging. Essentially, the idea behind this change is to keep midgame reforging viable and keep late game reforging strong, but still make it somewhat harder to reach the late game reforge power

* Removed rogues' class life rating bonus

* Mine and Heaven now have bottom guardians

* Made the black aura worse

* Amulets of anti-summoning can no longer be generated on a shuffle

* Snotlings and doppelgangers can no longer shuffle for mushrooms

* Added a new deep cloak ego

* Added new artifacts

* Added more race-specific rewards for unusual races

* Made the Death realm's Vampirism True spell considerably more expensive

* Nerfed the Law realm's Expert Trap spell

* Made lawyer melee slightly weaker

* Improved savefile compatibility when new uniques are added

* Reduced the number of non-town monsters, and especially monster groups, that appear in areas near towns

* Some early random Angband quests have a 20% chance to generate a bonus reward (to compensate for an earlier change by Chris in PosChengband that affected these quests negatively)

* Made melee attacks slightly more likely to break a glyph of warding

* The Hideout entrance, while still in Outpost, has been moved south; and the player now starts the game on the Warrens entrance, not the Hideout one.
[Copied from ComPosband 7.1.0a]

* Imported new random artifact names from ComPosband 7.1.0a

* Potions of cure critical wounds no longer cure poison
[they were never intended to in ComPosband, and it was weird that they did when potions of healing did not]

* Tweaked the walls of Crystal Castle
[Copied from ComPosband 7.0.4]

* Introduced a new flag that gives confused monsters a chance to shake their confusion off super-fast before they move. (Currently, no monster actually has this flag, apart from Utgard-Loke)

* Monsters should no longer generate on top of enclosed 1x1 dark pits

* Made the Temple more likely to stock potions of cure serious wounds during the early game

* Corrected a minor issue with fear message grammar after a throw attack

* Improved the oook data in HTML character dumps (it now gives max exp rather than cur exp, and also gives the player's true race rather than a race they were temporarily polymorphed into or mimicking)

* Moved the Volcano, Dragon Slayer and Demon Slayer quests much deeper

* Updated the in-game FAQ

The major items on my to-do list for 7.0.mango are 1) adding new personalities (and bringing back the removed Lazy personality), and 2) looking into importing content from PosChengband-R (requested so far: coffee-break mode and the Alchemist class). All requests, suggestions, bug reports and constructive criticism are very welcome.

[TheQuest]

Thank you, Sideways, for your time and efforts making new version!

[Derakon]

Regarding stat scramble: Vanilla now has a temporary stat scramble effect. It might be worth stealing that to replace the permanent scramble effect from nexus breath.

[knaveightt]

Having played a good deal of PCB in the past, this variant is a breath of fresh air, especially with the Quests and such! Excited to dive deeper into this!

Sorry if this is a noobish question, but what are the differences between FrogComposband, and Composband? Just different branches of development or different goals entirely?

Thank you for this next version!

[Sideways]

Having played a good deal of PCB in the past, this variant is a breath of fresh air, especially with the Quests and such! Excited to dive deeper into this!

Sorry if this is a noobish question, but what are the differences between FrogComposband, and Composband? Just different branches of development or different goals entirely?

Thank you for this next version!

There's more than one way to look at that difference. The change logs here and in the 7.0.strawberry release thread show one kind of difference, though not all the changes listed are differences since there's been a fair bit of cross-pollination between Composband and FrogComposband.

That's the small, detailed picture - "this variant has this thing and this thing that the other one doesn't, at least yet" - but in the bigger picture, too, there are certainly differences in design philosophy between me and Gwarl. We both add new content that's inspired by all kinds of things - mythology, other games, popular culture, unpopular culture etc. - but Gwarl is usually more faithful to the original content, whereas I like to give things my own angle, use parodies, mash-ups, hidden references and added jokes, and only seldom and grudgingly go for the straightforward copy.

I'm much bigger on adding new options than Gwarl is. We also have very different views on game balance; Gwarl likes to make big changes that tilt game balance - almost invariably in the direction of making the game easier - which is a direction I try to avoid. Almost all of my balance tweaks have been (and will be) attempts to stop either players or their items from being too powerful; I think overpowered things make the game both unbalanced and less interesting. (I also buff monsters a lot more than nerf them, whereas Gwarl now actually feels some of his own creations are too tough and wants them nerfed.) Very few of my changes have been in the direction of making the game easier; even the options I've added that let players avoid some types of negative effects (like never_forget, no_scrambling or no_chris) are quality-of-life options rather than difficulty options.

Gwarl's much bigger on adding new dungeons than I am; I've tweaked existing dungeons and added dungeon guardians, but I haven't added any completely new dungeons and don't have any immediate plans to (right now, of course, both variants have the same number of dungeons anyway). Gwarl is also more interested in things like vault and room templates, and more likely to change them or add new ones going forward.

Gwarl, I'm sure, would give a different account of the differences

[knaveightt]

There's more than one way to look at that difference. The change logs here and in the 7.0.strawberry release thread show one kind of difference, though not all the changes listed are differences since there's been a fair bit of cross-pollination between Composband and FrogComposband.

That's the small, detailed picture - "this variant has this thing and this thing that the other one doesn't, at least yet" - but in the bigger picture, too, there are certainly differences in design philosophy between me and Gwarl. We both add new content that's inspired by all kinds of things - mythology, other games, popular culture, unpopular culture etc. - but Gwarl is usually more faithful to the original content, whereas I like to give things my own angle, use parodies, mash-ups, hidden references and added jokes, and only seldom and grudgingly go for the straightforward copy.

I'm much bigger on adding new options than Gwarl is. We also have very different views on game balance; Gwarl likes to make big changes that tilt game balance - almost invariably in the direction of making the game easier - which is a direction I try to avoid. Almost all of my balance tweaks have been (and will be) attempts to stop either players or their items from being too powerful; I think overpowered things make the game both unbalanced and less interesting. (I also buff monsters a lot more than nerf them, whereas Gwarl now actually feels some of his own creations are too tough and wants them nerfed.) Very few of my changes have been in the direction of making the game easier; even the options I've added that let players avoid some types of negative effects (like never_forget, no_scrambling or no_chris) are quality-of-life options rather than difficulty options.

Gwarl's much bigger on adding new dungeons than I am; I've tweaked existing dungeons and added dungeon guardians, but I haven't added any completely new dungeons and don't have any immediate plans to (right now, of course, both variants have the same number of dungeons anyway). Gwarl is also more interested in things like vault and room templates, and more likely to change them or add new ones going forward.

Gwarl, I'm sure, would give a different account of the differences

Sweet, thanks for the clarifications! I'm really digging how you and Gwarl work on these variants separately, but there also seems to be some healthy borrowing and/or melding of ideas. Excited to see what comes next

[caruso]

Regarding stat scramble: Vanilla now has a temporary stat scramble effect. It might be worth stealing that to replace the permanent scramble effect from nexus breath.

Personally I'd prefer that approach over deactivating stat scrambling entirely.

"no_chris", "chrissing"... To be honest, I find these denominations rather unfortunate. To avoid misunderstandings and bad blood, I recommend we just call it dungeon-teleporting, or DT.

Wish I had more time for playtesting all those forks and variants that recently got updated... edit: and Vanilla 4.1 as well.

[Sideways]

If I were to add temporary scrambling it would be in addition to, rather than instead of, permanent scrambling - the same way the game already has both temporary and permanent polymorph. Temporary scrambling in V is just a mild annoyance to the player, the same way monster-induced temporary polymorph in FrogCompos is; using it as an outright replacement for permanent scrambling would be replacing a dangerous attack with a nondangerous one.

Dungeon teleport is quite a mouthful I don't mean any disrespect to Chris, but his name takes a lot less time to say. (The option does already describe itself as "Nexus attacks never teleport to another dungeon.")

I'm not sure I'd consider ?crafting doing that an outright bug; but it's certainly a user-unfriendly mechanic to allow the player to attempt crafting when it's doomed to fail. I should probably either only allow crafting on single items (except with ammo) or allow crafting on multiple items and then destroy the spares.

[jupiter999]

I'm still quite confused about the differences between PosChengBand, ComPosBand, and FrogComPosBand. Sorry...
Is there any readings for these details?

[OmniNegro]

I'm still quite confused about the differences between PosChengBand, ComPosBand, and FrogComPosBand. Sorry...
Is there any readings for these details?

Nope. You can read the changelogs of each variant, and in most cases, of each release of each variant. But compiling a list of easy to understand differences between hundreds of different variants each having up to a few dozen releases is impossible to manage in a Human lifetime. (The amount of time required would be enough time for a thousand more releases to come out and the work would continue to grow with time.)

If this sounds like an exaggeration, click "Ladder" at the top.

[jupiter999]

Nope. You can read the changelogs of each variant, and in most cases, of each release of each variant. But compiling a list of easy to understand differences between hundreds of different variants each having up to a few dozen releases is impossible to manage in a Human lifetime. (The amount of time required would be enough time for a thousand more releases to come out and the work would continue to grow with time.)

If this sounds like an exaggeration, click "Ladder" at the top.

No no no, that would be tedious. I'm asking about the "design philosophy" of each from author's perspective, or player's perspective, or player's experiences regarding this topic. Sorry, I just curious

[OmniNegro]

No no no, that would be tedious. I'm asking about the "design philosophy" of each from author's perspective, or player's perspective, or player's experiences regarding this topic. Sorry, I just curious

That is a complex question too. All three are basically the same game to some extent. As for philosophy, each author has a different idea that they alone can best explain.

I am sorry that I have no better explanation. All three games are great games well worthy of playing.

[ShadowTechnology]

Is "Quickband mode" coming to Composband or FrogComposband?

There's more than one way to look at that difference. The change logs here and in the 7.0.strawberry release thread show one kind of difference, though not all the changes listed are differences since there's been a fair bit of cross-pollination between Composband and FrogComposband.

That's the small, detailed picture - "this variant has this thing and this thing that the other one doesn't, at least yet" - but in the bigger picture, too, there are certainly differences in design philosophy between me and Gwarl. We both add new content that's inspired by all kinds of things - mythology, other games, popular culture, unpopular culture etc. - but Gwarl is usually more faithful to the original content, whereas I like to give things my own angle, use parodies, mash-ups, hidden references and added jokes, and only seldom and grudgingly go for the straightforward copy.

I'm much bigger on adding new options than Gwarl is. We also have very different views on game balance; Gwarl likes to make big changes that tilt game balance - almost invariably in the direction of making the game easier - which is a direction I try to avoid. Almost all of my balance tweaks have been (and will be) attempts to stop either players or their items from being too powerful; I think overpowered things make the game both unbalanced and less interesting. (I also buff monsters a lot more than nerf them, whereas Gwarl now actually feels some of his own creations are too tough and wants them nerfed.) Very few of my changes have been in the direction of making the game easier; even the options I've added that let players avoid some types of negative effects (like never_forget, no_scrambling or no_chris) are quality-of-life options rather than difficulty options.

Gwarl's much bigger on adding new dungeons than I am; I've tweaked existing dungeons and added dungeon guardians, but I haven't added any completely new dungeons and don't have any immediate plans to (right now, of course, both variants have the same number of dungeons anyway). Gwarl is also more interested in things like vault and room templates, and more likely to change them or add new ones going forward.

Gwarl, I'm sure, would give a different account of the differences

First, a big thanks to Sideways and Gwarl for their new and complimentary variants. Your efforts are much appreciated.

I was a big fan of the "Quickband Mode" option (Make the game much shorter and easier) that first appeared in PCB 6.0.3 and disappeared after 7.0.1. My gaming time is limited, so having an opportunity to try to take a new class/race combo to the endgame in a few weeks (instead of a few months) of real time is a big plus for me. Any plans to reintroduce the Quickband mode option into future releases of Composband (Gwarl) or FrogComposband (Sideways)? Or something similar?

Ideally this option would make the game quicker (more rapid character development) without making it easier (to win). Of course the trade off between quick and easy depends on your game play style. If you squander away all the hours you saved developing your character by scumming level 99 for super powerful artifacts and consumables, your battle with the big S becomes relatively easier at the expense of a quicker game.

[Sideways]

First, a big thanks to Sideways and Gwarl for their new and complimentary variants. Your efforts are much appreciated.

I was a big fan of the "Quickband Mode" option (Make the game much shorter and easier) that first appeared in PCB 6.0.3 and disappeared after 7.0.1. My gaming time is limited, so having an opportunity to try to take a new class/race combo to the endgame in a few weeks (instead of a few months) of real time is a big plus for me. Any plans to reintroduce the Quickband mode option into future releases of Composband (Gwarl) or FrogComposband (Sideways)? Or something similar?

Ideally this option would make the game quicker (more rapid character development) without making it easier (to win). Of course the trade off between quick and easy depends on your game play style. If you squander away all the hours you saved developing your character by scumming level 99 for super powerful artifacts and consumables, your battle with the big S becomes relatively easier at the expense of a quicker game.

One of my main plans for the next release is to look into importing content from PosChengband-R, including coffee-break mode (lite-town, ironman stairs, accelerated exp gain and loot) or my own take on it.

I will also bring the Munchkin personality back, which makes the game quicker without making it easier to win, because Munchkin wins don't really count

[Gwarl]

Okay here's one philosophy difference then;

I don't like the superfluity of options because how can you be sure if your win counts.

I think PCB's ID system is flawed, and implemented easy_id as a patch while I worked out something better. Now easy_id in frog gives you automatic *ID* from level 1 and it feels like too much.

I'm much more into the idea of fixing things so they aren't a problem rather than letting people have it both ways.

I would argue that there are lots of things I've changed that haven't made the game any easier - ologs throwing rocks, shadow fairies, orc warlords/bersekers/warlocks, meticulously buffed melee damage of all dragons. Gertrude was quite difficult to get right and the version of her copied into frog is absoloutely not worth the effort during the point of the game where you might want the reward. I do plan to tame rock throwing T's a bit because that is also too much, but I'll likely hand out smaller rocks to earlier T's.

Things like the riding changes don't IMO make the game any easier, they just cut out grind and offer variety in choice of tactics. Letting cure x wounds potions heal more damage gives you access to reasonable amounts of healing for the early game, but splitting out status effect relief into their own potions makes one think more about inventory slots and priorities in battle.

I don't agree with some of the details of the new distribution of quests and rewards in frog, I think ultimately there is less progression and more busywork in doing quests now, which you could easily have said about CPB compared to PCB.

There is a working alpha for CPB 7.1 based on strawberry frog but I have a fair bit of work to do rearranging and expanding on the rearranged expanded quest list.