[Announce] FrogComposband 7.0.cloudberry released

[emulord]

I think the filthy rag is FAR too weak right now. I played it a whole bunch to try to get the feel for it. Only make it up to about level 30-35 at best with any character because Im not the best player. The speed at getting to that level was very noticeable however.

Compared to the death sword levels 1-30
Less damage
Similar HP
Better AC
Similar skills
Less resists, abilities due to essences being split across slots and not being able to absorb as many egos as death swords.


Compared to a random character 1-30 (Chaotic Nibelung Wild talent)
Less Damage
Less Skills
Less HP
Less AC
Less Resists
Less utility (Activates from equipment, spells)

I think they'd be balanced if they upgraded in body type like the death swords do. Only needing 1 essence at Filthy rag for a pip would help early game, and then you can increase the requirements as the armor type improves to give a smoother gameplay like the Death sword.

Also, to get to level 30 it took 2 death sword attempts, about 11 filthy rags, and 1 normal character. Yes being overpowered late game is a balancing factor, but if its that difficult to actually get there is it still overpowered? You wouldn't win any competitions in speed

[Sideways]

What I'd like is for filthy rags to be not-easy, but also not-grindy in a way that encourages playing at the limits. I am not sure how to go about that, any ideas would be welcome; I will likely need to play them more to figure it out; but for now I need to play different characters so development doesn't get bogged down entirely.

[clouded]

My issue with rags is that they are very challenging without any potential power boosts from finding items (literally only devices matter) and no unique abilities or mechanics. To me it's just very uninteresting, too much so to play even for bravado.

Just to throw an idea out there: they could destroy all armour types for their bonuses and be able to wield a number of aux armour types increasing with level. Jelly slots so you could have your base rag and gloves and boots, or gloves and helm, or two gloves etc.

And then throw in some abilities. These could be symbiosis themed or if going with the above idea you could unlock abilities based on what aux armours you have equipped, for example wearing many cloaks gives you some stealth things, helms defensive things, boots evasive things, gloves offensive things.

[Nivim]

What I'd like is for filthy rags to be not-easy, but also not-grindy in a way that encourages playing at the limits.

I think it might be easier to accomplish this by stepping back, not playing Filthy Rags, and avoiding getting to attached to their current implementation. Rags, like the other two item mimic races, are based around grinding from the ground up, and removing the grinding means re-designing them. The fact that they are weak exacerbates the problem, but isn't the cause:

1. Unlike a Weaponsmith, they do not get choices with regards to using essences that may be optimized to go deeper, or to get boosts at parts of the game which are being difficult for them.
2. The rate at which they can dive is still largely defined by HP, damage, and Speed, and all of those come slowly, and only steadily in the case of HP.
3. Even the luckiest single equipment drop, such as strong Slaying gloves or early boots of Speed, is not very meaningful to them, often only affording another 2-4 DLs of depth. Averages and raw quantity are what count, so only sustained runs of lucky equipment drops tend to be lucky in practice*, and the only way to make that kind of luck is with the Personality or sustained diving well beyond the depths the character can currently handle— the former only takes about 20% off the grind rather than getting rid of it, and the latter is still slow, and can be even slower than shallower depths due to fewer creatures that can be killed in a timely fashion, which means you're spending lots of time at those depths, which means on average you make a mistake or get unlucky and die.
4. Rags lack mechanics that might distract from the grind or disincentivize it; they do not have a racial boss they can make a goal to hunt down, do not have any abilities that might let them ignore their bonuses and devices in even narrow circumstances, and do not have any pseudo-Ironman that would force them to stay at the depths they get good loot and die by law of averages.

Longer than I'd thought I'd write, but I was suspicious there was some detail in there you were missing while I lacked any idea which one it could be. I think you even brought up one or two of these at some point?


*One reason I tended to not use the in-built armour-detection ability they have is because I usually considered armour less valuable than devices, and so I was going to be using Detect Objects regardless.

[Sideways]

[*]Rags lack mechanics that might distract from the grind or disincentivize it; they do not have a racial boss they can make a goal to hunt down, do not have any abilities that might let them ignore their bonuses and devices in even narrow circumstances, and do not have any pseudo-Ironman that would force them to stay at the depths they get good loot and die by law of averages.

Yes, this is my problem really. I've been trying to think of a good mechanic that would accomplish this, but it isn't clear what that would be. My original idea was to have bad things happen if the turncount got too high, but you've proved that turncount isn't a good proxy for grinding.

Coffee-break mode is this mechanic to some extent, I suppose, though like wobbly has said it's still possible to grind in coffee-break mode. Certainly I feel like coffee-break rags aren't that dull, and that's one reason I've resisted redesigning rags from the ground up. Though before I do anything dramatic like forcing rags to always play in coffee-break mode, I'd like to actually get beyond the mid-thirties on a coffee-break rag...

My issue with rags is that they are very challenging without any potential power boosts from finding items (literally only devices matter) and no unique abilities or mechanics. To me it's just very uninteresting, too much so to play even for bravado.

Rag melee isn't half bad once they've got going. I would expect endgame rags to kill things in melee more than with devices. (Certainly they are very device-heavy in the early game, even with combat-happy personalities, and more without them.)

Possibly I should reduce the rag stat maluses a bit to make early-game melee more accessible with non-combat-oriented personalities.

[Thraalbee]

How about always making rags lucky regardless of personality? That and a bit more gold initially or through drops if possible. Or perhaps, e.g. every 5 or 10 levels, would help a lot.

[Nivim]

@Thraalbee: I don't think so; that's just buffing them rather than making them more interesting, and there's a difference. You could give them all sorts of stat boosts or loot boosts, but that's just pasting over the hole in their general design rather than fixing it.

Now, Sideways doesn't want to completely redesign them (and neither do I want to do it), so we should instead be thinking of mechanics that can stapled on to draw the player's focus away from the slow/boring stuff or even make them ignore it completely. I'm a little low on ideas for completely new, never-seen-before mechanics (likely due to still technically being sick with a viral infection), but the frogcomelliposchengbands have no shortage of things that can be copied and then tweaked until they're almost unrecognizable:

• Beastmen and Wild-Talents are one design space; making Rag more of a gish to Ring's rider-mage and Deathsword's glass-warrior, with a selection of random and often-useless abilities, maintaining most of the weakness of Rags while giving the player more toys.
• Rags are already extremely bad Devicemasters, so why not make that more literal? Give them abilities useful for working with devices but at larger costs and from HP, or even give them the ability to eat devices like cheap-knock-off Magic-eater.
• To further emphasize 'Filthy Rag', make them into a trashy summoning class, where they can generate molds and mushrooms (perhaps even depth-boosted) to function as mediocre traps and walls.
  • They could also have a "Disgusting" ability as opposed to Ring's Glitter, which repels creatures instead of attracting them.
  • There's also the idea of making their summoning armour-mimic themed, or even animating armour instead of absorbing it, but their description fluff currently contradicts that.
• Reminiscent of Scout and Diggermaster, they could get bonuses for things in adjacent spaces, such as huge piles of junk they can hide in or get evasion from (although, that would have the hefty downside of making mogaminator usage more annoying). Which would allow them to prepare a place to fight (at least until something destroys the loot), and potentially make them strong in cases such as when they've already cleared half of a Pit.

Writing that, one idea from another game occurred to me; give them a bad copy of Cheibriados' capstone ability, where they can get Ninja-super-stealth or better at the cost of passing a bunch of turns while it's in use, potentially killing them but also potentially saving them.

[Antoine]

Shouldn't rags be super stealthy?

A.

[introsp3ctive]

Issues Launching

I just finished compiling on Linux Ubuntu as per the instructions in the readme. I'm familiar with the process as it was the same as for setting up Composband which I have had no issues with. When I go to launch the game, I'm getting an error that says "Cannot initialize random names" and I'm not sure what to do to fix this. Any help would be appreciated.

[Gwarl]

I just finished compiling on Linux Ubuntu as per the instructions in the readme. I'm familiar with the process as it was the same as for setting up Composband which I have had no issues with. When I go to launch the game, I'm getting an error that says "Cannot initialize random names" and I'm not sure what to do to fix this. Any help would be appreciated.

For the benefit of anyone else having these problems, the solution was as follows:

run ./configure using the --with-no-install argument

after running make, simply copy the executable from the /src directory to the root directory (don't use make install)

[HugoVirtuoso]

Found a 'bug' resulting from the 'g'et command: Picking up an object of one type mixed in a pile of different item types does not consume energy / ?gameturn. (To me, it doesn't seem to.)

e.g.
Take for example - there's a Broad Sword, some Scrolls, and other item types stacked in the same pile. If you pick up this Broad Sword and not the other items in the same pile near an alert Ancient Dragon for instance, you will always get a 'free gameturn' / 'free energy' against the monster(s). This happens even if the monster is faster than you. Whereas, if you pick up the entire stack simultaneously (Broad Sword, those Scrolls, and all other item types [everything] stacked in the same pile), you won't get the 'free gameturn' / 'free energy' against the monster(s). If you pick up a lone Broad Sword from the ground (and there are no other items in the same pile), the nearby faster Ancient Dragon can still get you anyway, of course. (I might need someone to spectate me to understand what I really mean.)

(Also, I can't remember if I experienced a similar issue in ToME or Sil/Sil-Q)

Or maybe all this is working as designed since the vanilla-PCB days?

[Sideways]

Yeah, that's a bug, though it's not a bug that can be exploited.

Which way do people think it ought to work - 'g'etting an item never consuming time, or 'g'etting an item always consuming time? It makes sense that picking up items would consume time, but then auto-pickup and always-pickup already consume no time anyway, so from a gameplay point of view there's a very good argument for the "no time" option.

[Nivim]

After some thought, I think it would be based on how many kills you want to get as a variant maintainer: making it takes turns will have people used to it not taking turns getting themselves killed as a result (as well as rarer cases like saving pieces of loot right before they get wrecked), whereas making it not take turns is convenient and slightly disincentivizes messing the Mogaminator.

Edit: If there's a way to make it more clear interface-wise you might go half-and-half; make it take half or less energy per item, so you still lose time by picking up a load of stuff, but individual objects aren't bad.

[Gwarl]

Yeah, that's a bug, though it's not a bug that can be exploited.

Which way do people think it ought to work - 'g'etting an item never consuming time, or 'g'etting an item always consuming time? It makes sense that picking up items would consume time, but then auto-pickup and always-pickup already consume no time anyway, so from a gameplay point of view there's a very good argument for the "no time" option.

This is a design flaw we inherited from moria. Although the mogaminator makes it worse/show up in other places. I am inclined toward no time.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Thanks rodent / Nivim / Gwarl for the commentary to my questions on oook from earlier today. I didn't check on how much / little 'energy' is spent on destroying individual items in a multi-item-type stacks in FCPB. Any additional commentary on destruction of / getting individual item(s) in such cases are appreciated - or could be moved into a separate oook topic for developer more feedback / expansion so these thoughts are not lost over time.