[Announce] FrogComposband 7.1.salmiak released

[Sideways]

I noticed Recall works during pre-surface Thrall-mode. In FAAngband, pre-surface-Thrall mode recall doesn't work until surfacing and making at least Gondolin a home. Maybe FCPB's Thrall-mode should be disallowed until after at least surfacing the hard way?

What Frog allows (recalling out of R'lyeh and landing in the middle of a level 60 deep-sea wilderness directly next to a perma-awake, teleport-immune warp demon) is pretty far from recalling from Angband to the safety of Gondolin. It's more like recalling from Angband to Anfauglith 56.

There seems to be an inconsistency with the state of the innate Hold Life that player Pumpkin Men/Death Pumpkins get; as far as I can tell, the flag for the character sheet is turned on from the getgo, but the actual bonus doesn't come into effect until evolution.

(On a side note, hope you are well rodent; we've gotten a bit worried about you on the webserver. Well wishes!)

Thanks, MITZE. I miss hanging out with you guys, I'll try to be back at some point.

Don't worry too much, if my health had taken a sudden turn for the worse I'd have been sure to update Frog on github

[MITZE]

Player Pumpkin Man/Death Pumpkin Flag Inconsistencies

There seems to be an inconsistency with the state of the innate Hold Life that player Pumpkin Men/Death Pumpkins get; as far as I can tell, the flag for the character sheet is turned on from the getgo, but the actual bonus doesn't come into effect until evolution.


(On a side note, hope you are well rodent; we've gotten a bit worried about you on the webserver. Well wishes!)

[HugoVirtuoso]

I noticed Recall works during pre-surface Thrall-mode. In FAAngband, pre-surface-Thrall mode recall doesn't work until surfacing and making at least Gondolin a home. Maybe FCPB's Thrall-mode should be disallowed until after at least surfacing the hard way?

[Bostock]

Option to include item weights in dumps

I'd like to request an option to include item weights in dumps. The reason for this isn't because I really love looking at item weights dumps, or expect anyone else to, but because including them would enable the Optimiser (which is now being maintained again) to take them into account, making it possible to set equipment weight as an Optimiser condition (great for mystics, etc.).

[scrarth]

Are you sure its not just the body you're inhabiting now? Some forms you possess have a max level so you have to find a stronger body to ride in when that happens.

Thanks, that turned out to be what was happening. I somehow managed to completely miss that mechanic.

[ThatFishNemo]

Are you sure its not just the body you're inhabiting now? Some forms you possess have a max level so you have to find a stronger body to ride in when that happens.

[scrarth]

I've encountered a bug playing a Possessor, I no longer get experience for killing monsters. Savefile attached.

[Sideways]

Yes, caawses are one of the four monster races with the KILL_EXP flag. (The others are the Plain Gold Ring, the unique babble, and the regular babble.)

[Thraalbee]

Caaws?

Having fun with Thrall mode. Was quite excited to find Caaws in a room all by itself. But no matter what I do -- e.g. You do 100 damage -- I get zero xp. Is it all or nothing with this beast? 3465 hp is a lot to shave off for my weak hero.

[Sauken]

General Feedback

(This was originally posted on the angband subreddit, someone recommended I post it here as well.)

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=24211

I have finally accomplished my long standing goal of beating FCB. Let's start with the positives:

I love all of the uniques. Killing a unique always feels good, and they are frequently very interesting and have often have unique mechanics which demand different approaches.

I love all the different possible race and class combos, there's so much to try out and explore and experiment with, I've only tried a small fraction of the classes so far and look forward to trying out more.

I really like the different artifacts you can get. Getting an unrandart (Something that is hard coded) is a great feeling, especially if it's a direct upgrade.

I like the character progression, and class progression. Growing stronger and unlocking new skills, mutations, abilities, perks, forms, is a really good feeling.

Now, for the bad.

Item destruction still sucks. It doesn't really serve a purpose in the game. Players are already heavily punished for missing resists (Since you will just straight up die after a certain point), and having your gear destroyed, stolen, or damaged always feels awful without it adding anything to the game.

The late endgame gets kind of ridiculous. The uniques leveled 90-100 just feel too strong, and the player is basically just forced to stockpile healing potions for this part of the game, and skipping as much endgame content as possible is optimal, otherwise you will burn through your healing and not have enough for the final boss. The final boss himself just feels like he is overtuned, and while I recognize that the final boss is supposed to be strong, it just feels unfair, which is a due a large part to:

Summons. Monster summoning almost singlehandedly ruins the game for me. Summon cyberdemons, uniques, amberites, kin... it goes from an interesting tactic to something that makes you groan everytime it happens. It seems that the general strategy that is implemented to make a fight more hard is to just give the monster summoning capabilities. And for some awful reason, summons are also allowed to summon, leaving the player character mired in a flood of summons. And then the game manual tells you that its bad to create anti-summon hallways, as the AI will not engage you if it detects you are in one. Summons are awful. Either reduce the frequency, remove it from a lot of monsters, or make it so that summoned monsters cannot, themself, summon. Or make the anti summon amulet more frequent. I have never seen one of these things in over 100 hours of combined gameplay. Really cannot overstate how awful this mechanic feels.

And my next point: Enemy AI. A lot of enemies like to teleport when they are low on HP. This is especially bad on thieving type enemies, who will attempt to steal from you then teleport away. I'll keep this brief. Teleporting feels awful, either remove the behavior or make it less frequent. Spending 15 minutes chasing down some unique is not fun or interesting.

I think that's a pretty good summary. Despite the fact that the bad section is longer than the good, I still overall really enjoyed my experience. I wish there was more documentation on a lot of the game mechanics, like for example, how exactly do rune swords get stronger? I hope you having some programming experience, because it seems like code diving is the only way to learn how a lot of the mechanics really work.

Tonberries are really cute and strong. Rune knights are pretty flexible characters that provided a lot of defensive utility. To get gamebreaking items in vaults, abuse genocide and banishment, then pick up the goodies

-------------------
I'm also going to copy the reply that someone (not me ) posted as I thought it had some great feedback as well.
-------------------

I agree 100% with everything you stated here (though I don't mind the item destruction). Really, the endgame in particular feels like it's still balanced for a game where Teleport Other, Genocide and *Destruction* are 100% reliable. While this is true for Vanilla, it very much isn't for Frogcomposband, and is a HUGE source of frustration and tedium.

Also, the manual lies about the ineffectiveness of anti-summoning corridors. If you dig one long enough, you can usually lure an enemy partway into the corridor, and then you can meet them halfway. They'll get a free round on you when you enter melee range, but it's better than being swarmed by summons.

The anti-summoning corridor AI is still bullshit though. That's the *one* technique this game gives to warriors for dealing with summoners that doesn't put them at the mercy of the RNG. And all the AI does is make it tedious.

Also I got the anti-summoning ego on a Barbarian Amulet once. It's not as great as it looks. I mean, it's nice, but it's not 100% reliable, and even one successful summon is usually enough to screw you over.

--------------------------

Thanks to all the devs for their hard work

[budswell]

Also - first ever piranah trap. That was awesome!

[budswell]

(Coffee Break) I have encountered Old Man Willow in the dungeon.
You can see in the dump he is dead but I had not done the quest yet.

==================================== Quests ===================================

  Completed Quests
  The Thieves' Hideout                               DL5   CL12  Day 2, 13:36
  Pest Control                                       DL5   CL15  Day 4, 19:27
  Kill King Mulu, the Chief of Southerings           DL12  CL18  Day 5, 4:11
  Crow's Nest                                        DL15  CL16  Day 5, 2:37
  The Orc Camp                                       DL20  CL27  Day 9, 7:28
  Kill Angamaite of Umbar                            DL21  CL26  Day 7, 18:13
  Tengu and Death Swords                             DL25  CL26  Day 6, 4:35
  The Mimic's Treasure                               DL25  CL26  Day 6, 6:50


  Arena:  0 Victories

================================ Monster Kills ================================

You have defeated 877 enemies including 14 unique monsters in total. There are 
374 uniques remaining.

  Uniques                                      Lvl
  Hagen, Son of Alberich                        24
  Angamaite of Umbar                            24
  Old Man Willow                                22
  King Mulu, the Chief of Southerings           16
  Ulfast, Son of Ulfang                         16
  The Variant Maintainer                        14
  Golfimbul, the Hill Orc Chief                 12
  Lug, the Grotesque                            11
  Orfax, Son of Boldor                          10
  Bloodfang the Wolf                             9
  Robin Hood, the Outlaw                         8
  Freesia                                        2
  Fang, Farmer Maggot's dog                      2
  Farmer Maggot                                  0

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=24224

I then did the quest and he was there so killed him a 2nd time.

A bug? Or just one of those things?

[Sauken]

Couple of interesting things.

1. This was on chocolate, so it might have been changed, but hrus will do their little destruct thing as they walk around, and this will destroy items in vaults. This seems pretty unfun and unintended, as is almost impossible to mitigate, other than genociding the hru before it can stomp around and break all of the shinies.

2. Killed the master tonberry as a tonberry, didn't get the tonberry gloves. What's up with that? I thought. So I took a look in the code, and saw this:

case MON_MASTER_TONBERRY:
if ((p_ptr->prace == RACE_TONBERRY) && (one_in_(14)))
{
a_idx = ART_MASTER_TONBERRY;
chance = 99; //Sauken comment. We'll still give you a 1% chance to miss it even if you hit the one in 14. We like to inflict pain.
}
break;

in other words, you have to roll a one in 14 to get the gloves? What? That seems so arbitrary and is actually very hard to roll. That means if you roll 9 tonberries, on the 9th successful run, you have about 50% chance to have received it on that kill or previous runs. Of course with the way probability works, you can kill him 20 times and still not get it. (About 23% probability).

This is really frustrating, as right below that in the code, it shows the demigod artifact chances, and every single one has 100% change to get a given artifact after killing their parent. (Zeus demigod character will always get special Zeus artifact after killing him, whatever that is.) Feels very, very unfair, especially given that tonberries are a more vulnerable than other races in the earlygame. Please increase the change or something. Hope this isn't too whiny. Thanks!

[Thraalbee]

The total result after looting was a huge upgrade to my melee which was far from end game class and 10 more base speed with similar resist except 3 immunities vs 1-2 pip of res

[Sideways]

That's an absurd drop! Though increased item drops in instant-coffee, and increased likelihood of rings from tailoring rewards for a dragon, do make the odds much better than they'd normally be.

The items marked as "dropped by level guardian" were your quest rewards for completing the Oberon quest; while the items marked as "dropped by Oberon, King of Amber" were just normal monster drops.