FrogComposband 7.0.peppermint

[Antoine]

Speaking as Quickband originator, if you bring back Quickband mode to Pos, can you please call it something else, just to avoid confusion? What's wrong with simply 'quick mode'?

A.

[ShadowTechnology]

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

I think coffee-break mode might be an interesting alternative to "Quick mode", although I'm not sure I like the forced ironman stairs. I would certainly try it. What both of these have in common is you still start with normal stats and speed and limited gold, and have to earn your way through the dangerous early levels (but with fewer keystrokes). Munchkin personality, on the other hand, is just silly. I went back and started a Munchkin ordinary human warrior in PCB 6.0.2 just now. In 10 minutes @ was at DL 30 and CL15 with over 400 HP and AC 76. The +3 stats and +5 speed helped, but the virtually unlimited gold (10,000,000 GP) allowed @ to buy the best of everything in town, enchant stuff, and then use the store service to buy teleport directly to DL 30 (or whatever level I wanted to start at) where @ kicked butt until he ran into Sir Lancelot. It's nothing like a normal game, and rightly should not be counted as a real win.
Again, I'm not looking for an easier game. I'm wondering is there a way to reduce the number of hours and keystrokes in the mid-game grind. The first and last 5 hours of a normal game are most challenging and rewarding. The many tens of hours in the middle are relatively tedious, in my opinion, and could benefit from acceleration (either as an option, or as a tweak to baseline performance). Instead of killing 6000 enemies and sorting through 12,000 items, could one get to CL 50 with an equivalent kit by killing 3000 enemies and sorting through 6000 items (in half the time)? The difficulty of the game would not necessarily change.

[caruso]

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 see

About stat scrambling: In Quickband, the scrambling is permanent, but only a few points at a time. That could be an alternative to deactivating it entirely.

[Destro]

Thanks for this variant.

Minor bug report (? maybe): Decreasing tile width gives me a blank screen. Is there any way to reduce the default tile width so that my game world doesn't take up my whole monitor? I don't have this issue in chengband, poschengband or composband. And, here is what I see for reference: https://imgur.com/a/wF1kB

[Sideways]

I'm not sure exactly what is happening there, but I'm seeing the same behavior in Pos and ComPos too. What you can do is make the game window smaller and select a smaller font size (and a font that supports the smaller font size) so you still get the rows and columns you need.

[Destro]

I honestly never have to do anything special. My default size is more compact in all three games compared to FrogComposband: https://i.imgur.com/R2piyoF.png

Here is a comparison of the composband and frogcomposband for me: https://i.imgur.com/ELur0yM.png

I fiddled with the font as recommended and had no luck. I also checked my various settings between the game and made a fresh character in composband with no luck (https://i.imgur.com/quZYp9K.png). Finally, checked the graphics setting, because I thought that maybe it is a tileset thing? (the ASCII character for walls is a solid block in poschengband, but a # sign in FrogComposband) with no luck. Also tried lining of the windows to make sure it wasn't just a resizing issue and had no luck.

Not quite sure what is different :S. Any ideas?

[Sideways]

I fiddled with the font as recommended and had no luck.

To be clear, I wasn't suggesting that fiddling with font size would make Decrease Tile Width work; the idea was that by decreasing font size and manually resizing the game window (the same way you'd resize any Windows window) you should be able to get the desired result in a different way, without ever touching Decrease Tile Width.

If you're really seeing a difference between FrogCompos and ComPos (and Pos) here, the only idea that comes to my mind is that somehow it's caused by me compiling the game, which would explain why I don't see the difference since my copies of the other variants were also compiled by me.

[Destro]

Gotcha.

Yeah, I went back into the font again and this time the default was NOT Courier. Instead, it was one of the two Lucida fonts. So, I switched to Courier and problem solved!

I had switched the fonts around when I first installed and there was no effect, so once again, no idea what happened there! But, the problem is resolved now, so that's good! Thanks! Can't wait to CRUSH this variant! Muahahaha.

[Breaker_Asylum]

Good job mate.

Hello, I have been watching this variant... cautiously. But so far looks like a nice fun variant with more content than you should wave a stick at! Anyway, I am looking forward to the lawyer class, There is only on other game I know of where you can be a lawyer... it is a multi user dungeon. Anyway, I like the changes, please keep up the good work. Oh and if you lack an idea for a monster class... I would recommend this. Ants. Odd I know, but they have been something I have been interested in for awhile. Essentially think spider -webs, and ability to grow either fire "firey sting with bite" or a Army ant 'Ant with no stinger but with multiple mandible attacks' You start as a little black ant. and grow up to be these things. I don't know if these mobs exist this is just my little opinion. Anyway, Good work on the variant!

[Destro]

@Mocht

"The game could be further modernized by removing disenchantment and food"

Eh. I really dislike the term 'modernized' used in this case, because Kingdom Come Deliverance was released in 2016 and it has a hunger system: https://kingdomcomedeliverance.gamepedia.com/Hunger along with plenty of other games (Don't Starve, Minecraft and all of it's knockoffs like 'Survival Games'). So, it's pretty clear that modern games still implement hunger. (I only gave 4 examples but could do way more.) I think a better term would be 'casualized'

Hunger is typically very well suited to difficult survival-oriented games like the Angband series aims to be. I feel that from a game design perspective, people are most likely to be annoyed with having to manage hunger mostly because there is no convenient late game way to manage it. (Rod of Satiation Anybody?) But, that's just speculation, so I digress.

Anyway, I like hunger conceptually because it can cause some interesting situations. For example, imagine your words of recall being burned and your food being stolen, so you have to flee the dungeon before you starve to death? Sadly, such situations are quite rare, so the mechanic's 'good points' don't really get to shine.

As for removing disenchantment, ehh, I actually would prefer if there were ways to repair damage caused by disenchantment rather than flat out remove it. This way, its effects could be buffed and you would really feel the impact of disenchantment, kind of like when you get hit with foul curses. But, I mean there is disenchantment resistance so I'm not really against it because it has a counter.

In general, I actually like the very harmful negative effects in this game quite a lot and wouldn't mind more. But, then again, this is why I'm moving onto nightmare mode now in the hopes of squelching this hunger for a challenge. So, maybe it is already here for me in this mode. *shrug*

[Philip]

I have never actually thought of Angband as a survival game, because there is the core quest (Kill 2nd baddie, then kill 1st baddie). On the other hand, thinking of it as a survival-oriented game makes a lot of sense, since survival is the primary strategic and tactical goal, in contrast to games without permadeath.

Hunger in games is generally a way to institute a constant tax on player resources, for various reasons. Even at the very start of the game, the gold cost of food is negligible, meaning that the player resources actually being taxed is pack space, and to a certain degree also attention. This applies particularly to wilderness variants, where being caught in the wilderness without food can kill you, unless you set a recall point at dlvl 1 in a town dungeon and have word of recall with you. Setting the dlvl 1 recall point is a tedious affair and just make good play more boring. And I would prefer other things to tax player attention than the hunger bar. Given how easy it is leave the dungeon, and how important being able to leave it is even outside of hunger, there are very few meaningful decisions you can make around food. Basically just carry some Satisfy Hunger or Waybread if you can spare the slot, or go into the dungeon full if not.
There is a game which I think has a similar sort of power curve to Angband (start out as a loser, finish as a god), and is a survival game with a win condition far, far into the future. It is factorio, and it does not have (need) a hunger clock.

That said, I can imagine the hunger clock constituting a meaningful part of gameplay. Ironband and Sil both have interesting hunger mechanics, because there is no town. Hunger becomes one stressor among many. Same goes for the light clock. They can kill a slow character (or a fast digesting one), and they provide atmosphere. It would also be possible for hunger and light to be a part of gameplay even with a town, if there were some sort of limitation on how you could get access to more (kill a unique? get to a dungeon level? character level?), but I feel this would put an unreasonable amount of stress on some playstyles, and none on others.

In conclusion, I would say that hunger in V, O, Compos is useless, and should either be removed, or reworked into a mechanic with actual implications for characters (Compos comes close with some races having weird diets, but generally provides a way around that).

[Nick]

In conclusion, I would say that hunger in V, O, Compos is useless, and should either be removed, or reworked into a mechanic with actual implications for characters (Compos comes close with some races having weird diets, but generally provides a way around that).

I'm with Destro on this one, in that I think hunger is worth keeping for the interesting situations it can lead to. One of my most memorable V experiences was where I had found a GCV, but run out of food and was hungry; I had to quaff most of my carefully acquired stack of healing potions to make it through the vault to an unID'd ring, which turned out to be Narya.

That said, I also agree that these situations don't arise very often.

[Sideways]

Food management isn't just about hunger, but also about gorgedness. Characters with weak offense who take a long time to kill the Serpent of Chaos can easily end up spending much of that fight gorged from potions.

Disenchantment isn't going anywhere; I'm all for quality of life but I don't belong to the "bad things should never happen to the player" school. Bad things happening to the player if they make mistakes is a key part of the game!

Bad things can be a bad game mechanic, of course, if they have the potential to ruin a game through no fault of the player's; but that's not the case with things like disenchantment, which can be either resisted or (for much of the game) simply avoided. Some of the chaos patron punishments, on the other hand, cross the line into bad game mechanics, especially for non-chaos-warriors; low-HP classes can potentially be insta-killed from full health by a chaos patron. That will be fixed in the next version.

[Gwarl]

Food management isn't just about hunger, but also about gorgedness.

Considering your nerf to vampirism true, consider the difference in utility between vampiric drain and -vampirism.

Or I could, and also not copy the vampirism true nerf (endgame enemies are undead and demons, it doesn't work on them, and the odd dragon which are usually a lesser threat anyhow once you can handle the breath).

[TheQuest]

Sideways, have you disabled "issues" on your github intentionally? I was thinking to post something there.