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Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
It's a roguelike dungeon crawl game that's constantly updated by volunteer developers. You can choose from a huge variety of species, classes, and religions, and the dungeons are almost completely randomized to make it have a crazy replay value.
I have to say I love what the devs did with player ghosts. So much so that often when I encounter a ghost vault in a run, I'll stop and just remark on how great a job they did with game design here.
They maintained the unique and fun element of having this vaguest of multiplayer interactions, while removing any of its accompanying frustration. The vaults themselves are also extremely well made, IMO -- the examples in the blog post are only scratching the surface. Really thoughtful approach, and really well executed.
Also a big fan of the spellbook change. I've been playing DCSS for nearly a decade I'd reckon, and it's incredible to see how the devs continue to make it better with each new release.
I suppose FTL is a rougelike-like, as stated on its website. If you are interested in roguelike then DCSS is really good. It's well maintained and has a very good tutorial mode, unlike many other major roguelikes.
Anyway FTL looks so cool! Can't wait to get a hands on.
It's good to see writing about crawl!
I don't think this is a very accurate depiction of meleebug, unfortunately. Somethingawful alone is not at all a good source, and there's a bunch of factual inaccuracies here that are important, the biggest of which is that the bug was patched after one week (halfway through the tournament), not two. In general, strong players definitely noticed that something was up very quickly, and the increase in winrate showed up in automated stats very quickly; it took a few more days after that for someone to figure exactly what (I would put this delay on the game, not on the people). For the very basic facts about what happened when, please refer to: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/crawl-0-16-1-bugfix-release To get a better sense for the history, I do recommend looking through dev channel communications and tavern posts at the time, again, not SA.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. A community run rogue-like. I've put so many hours into this game and still learn new things nearly every time I play.
If you havent tried a rogue-like game, try the tiles version and you'll be blown away...
Yep, you have - they made spellbooks much less present in the game. When you pick one up, instead of getting the book, its contents get added to your spell library to learn whenever you want.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-and-0-22-release-and-tournament-info
> Trog no longer has a Burn Spellbook ability. It’s not really viable to make spellbooks as items for one god with this UI and….you know what, I’m going to drop a book bomb here….Trog is strong enough to take a nerf!
I'm a huge fan of a single player game called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and it runs well on my netbook and older machines. If you like diablo or nethack this game should be fun. DCSS is a rogue-like game where you can play tile graphics version or ANSII from the terminal. You can also play the game from your web browser and chat with other players.
I also like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. You can also play on http://crawl.lantea.net:8080/#lobby.
I'm a bit spoiled by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's tileset. Is there a good tileset for nethack?
If you want to try a real-deal roguelike for a change, I recommend downloading Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup:
This is a proper roguelike, but it's the most gentle introduction to the hobby out there. The Crawl developers have worked really hard to make it accessible. For example, there are many fewer keys to memorize than classics like Nethack and ADOM, and you rarely need to "cheat" by looking things up online - everything can be figured out pretty easily in the game.
It's free, so it's easy to get started. It has both the traditional ASCII mode and several tile sets - pick whichever version you like.
I'll make a safe suggestion: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS). Other than overall quality and its fairly frequent updates, I really like the auto-explore feature.
A magic system is simply one component of an overall game. As a general philosophy for game design I believe everything should be focused towards non-overlapping, non-obvious choices. Far too many games out there have a glut of very obvious choices (linear upgrade paths with built-in obsolescence). What's the point of having a choice if one option is always better than the other?
One example of a rather well designed magic system is that of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It features many spells, divided into schools, with very little overlap. Any overlap that does occur is mitigated by the fact that you cannot reasonably master all of the schools with one character. The spells are extremely varied in their costs, utility and rarity. There are also many different ways to utilize the natural synergy that exists between a lot of the spells.
Dungeon Crawl. Another roguelike with a greater focus on character customization than item choice. It's more forgiving and accessible than Nethack (it has a great tiles version and a mouse interface), but, let's be real here; you'll probably never beat it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is pretty awesome if you can get past the non-graphics. I've undoubtedly played it hundreds of hours by now.
Come join us in /r/roguelikes if you like it and want to play more games like it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is pretty much the best rougelike imo. There's a lot of classes and races to mix and match, and the interface is really easy to use.
I don't know how much minecraft you play, but I still find myself in awe of some of the landscapes it creates, and to build a full minecraft world by hand would be ridiculous. It's totally unecessary. It's a big sand box you get to play with. It doesn't need or want the kind of detail like something like Zelda certainly.
Procedural generation can be excellent, and needed for some games. There is a tile, turn based roguelike called Dungeon Crawl In which you pick a species and a class and make your way through a dungeon to find the orb of zot.
This game is ridiculously hard and everything in the game is great at killing you. The idea behind the game (and rogue-likes in general) is that every death is a lesson, but if the game was just a structured linear level then the game wouldn't be about learning how to react, it would be a game about rote memorization, which isn't nearly as fun.
Not really directed at you fine sir. I'd just like to add that if you liked dungeons of dreadmor and wanna try your hands at other roguelikes games, I'd suggest Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's free and the game is pretty easy to get into plus it has tiles.
I agree with potatoyogurt; Don't abandon Oka for TSO in a 3 runer. You had the orb in sight at 13:49. If you have managed to get that far, then you definitely aren't lacking anything in your toolbox to get a win. All you need to do is to take things slow and use the Knowledge Bots to look up any monsters you aren't familiar with.
However, I noticed that your playstyle is very risky. There were several instances in that video where you could have been dead in the next turn (due to torment, ranged spell damage, or just plain bad luck). That is probably just due to your inexperience with the game, but given that many opportunites, the RNG will kill you sooner or later.
In my opinion you needed to try to lure the orb guardians out and fight them one by one instead of trying to take on 3 of them + an ancient lich(!) and it's summons all at once. Once you realized you were in over your head (about 5 turns too late IMO) you correctly tried to teleport out of there and landed in a decent spot. From there, you should have headed to the nearest up stairs and rested on a level that you had already cleared out. Instead, you tried to keep fighting and some extremely unlucky teleports just kept landing you in worse and worse situations.
See the Zot:5 wiki article for more strategies on how to deal with it, but I think you can definitely win this one! Just take it slow, bro! :)
No, because it's not grid-based and it's real-time.
For instance: This is a standard roguelike.
As is this though some people only consider ascii based games as "true" roguelikes.
I talked to Kornel (who hosts the site) and he said the host shut down the site because of performance issues. Kornel said he might only be able to upgrade and host the wiki on a different server in January.
In the meantime, you could use the knowledgebots which will have most of the info but in a different format.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-29-august-2021
> Summoning Changes
> For a long time summons have applied an XP penalty, stealing up to half of the XP reward from each kill. This was used as a balance tool, because allies in crawl are very powerful. However, over the past many versions a lot of the sources of ally power (summons attacking out of LOS, sources of permanent, very long lived, or cheap and powerful allies) have been removed.
> Summoning spells were still extremely powerful, owing to the large number of creatures that could be brought to bear on a problem. In trunk summons and allies are changed in the following way, to enable removing the XP penalty.
>Summon caps are reduced:
>* Summon Small Mammal, Summon Hydra, and Monstrous Menagerie are capped at 2. >* Haunt is capped at 8. >* Summon Horrible Things and Dragon’s Call keep their old summon caps. >* All other summon spells are capped at 1.
> Summon-capped summons all time out uniformly and disappear after 10 auts.
> Shadow Creatures is made a monster only spell.
> The XP penalty is removed from all temporary allies.
> Permanent allies from Beogh and Yredelemnul currently retain the XP penalty, with a hope to change their design in the future in a way that allows us to fully remove the XP penalty.
I was going to wait until they released a mac version, but whatever. It's not easy if you've never built anything before, as you have some installing to do.
- Install XCode.
- Open XCode. Go to the downloads tab in its preferences (in the menu bar XCode>Preferences). Make sure to download/install the command line tools. (If its not here, you can also get it on the right hand side of this page).
- Download the dcss0.14.0 source tarball from this page. Make sure to get the one with deps (dependencies).
At this point, you should have XCode installed, the XCode command line tools installed, and an archived copy of the dcss source, located at somewhere like ~/Downloads/stone_soup-0.14.0.tar.xz (the tilde means <your home directory>).
Open up Terminal.app and enter the following lines:
cd ~/Downloads tar -xJf stone_soup-0.14.0.tar.xz cd stone_soup-0.14.0/source make APPLE_GCC=y NO_PKGCONFIG=y CONTRIB_SDL=y TILES=y
That's for a tiles build. For a console build, replace the last line with
make APPLE_GCC=y
This will take some time. Ignore any warnings that happen. Hasn't finished yet for me, so I can't say exactly where the .app file will be located but it shouldn't be too hard to find.
Hope that helps!
EDIT: nope this doesn't build a .app, it builds an executable file named crawl. THis will be in the /source/ folder and will run if you double click on it, but can't be moved. That should hold you over for now, at least.
The docs don't say how to build an .app bundle for crawl, so I can only assume it's using the included xcodeproj, but I don't feel like building it again.
Depends on exactly what you're looking for.
If you're looking for another challenging game with permadeath, randomization, and varied starting options I would suggest Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's a rouge-like based around playing well rather than around simply knowing secrets like many rouge-likes, and it has a major emphasis on removing tedious scumming aspects.
You haven't played many roguelikes, have you?
Try a game called Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It is very much a proper roguelike, where you can, if you're unlucky enough, stumble upon an ogre on the first floor, or maybe you'll get teleported to Satan by a teleport trap.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is pretty good, and still under active development. It has hi-res icons if you are ASCII challenged.
It's worth a go.
Screenshots. Scroll down for included basic tiles.
Nethack - can't believe anyone has mentioned it, it's a classic, chances are you've already played it if you've played DF though.
Generally, all the rougelike games out there are pretty good. I lost interest in Nethack and a lot of other because they haven't been updated in years.
My favourite one at the moment is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup because it is updated regularly and seems to be more complex than most other roguelikes out there, apart from DF becuase DF is insane! Also, Stone Soup has a ton of race/class choices and combinations, which I love.
Great thread though, love nearly all the games mentioned here. URW rocks, been playing that for about 10 years now! (Whoa...I'm getting old...)
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto has a list of the 'official' servers (Maybe there's a few that aren't listed there) most of them are pretty reliable.
You have two options:
* connect to one of the servers via ssh (connection details here); on windows you'd probably need to use putty or the like, but other OSs have this built in. Almost all servers support this, but a few don't.
* use tile_display_mode = glyph in your rc and play in webtiles.
Dungeon Crawl stone soup or DCSS. Personally I like the tiles which is a graphical interface, op was using text based. Here is a great starter website. If you start playing welcome to the addiction :)
yup
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto
On that topic, you might want to look into text fiction. No genre can be as good as making it look like you are accomplishing something when you are not...
Pull up half a dozen command prompt windows.
Ping things in five of them.
Play an ASCII roguelike in the sixth.
You'll be making keypresses and seeming techy and busy, all while trying to collect the Amulet of Yendor or whatever.
Hey zingrook! Great questions.
One big thing that sets Vagante apart from other roguelike-type games is our desire to embrace the complexity of old-school roguelikes, rather than simplify it. I've personally played a great deal of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and I love the possible interactions between game elements, as well as the huge number of ways you can play the game. We want Vagante to be a complex world where interesting stories can emerge.
Another thing about Vagante that we think we've done pretty well are the platform mechanics. Our team has a huge breadth of experience playing platformers (ask Kyle about his RBO Super Metroid runs sometime). We have a pretty good idea of what works well, and what doesn't. The core of our game are the mechanics of the player's movement, and I think we've done a good job of tweaking it to feel tight.
I'm finding it difficult to come up with a list of defining traits for Vagante, mostly because we're still so early in development! I don't want to define Vagante yet, I want it to continue to grow and evolve into the perfect game. Maybe you could help us out with a list of things you like about the game? :)
The tiles version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup displays your armor, cape, weapon, helmet, and shoes as well as your race. There's also an option to customize your appearance by forcing the game to display any of the various choices even if you aren't wearing what's shown.
It can be pretty neat when you die at one of the later levels, then make it back there on a different character just to see the scary-ass ghost of your past self strolling around in the same gear you had, ready to annihilate you at a moment's notice.
As a bonus, enemies always display the weapon they're wielding so you know you're not safe at a distance from spears (2 tile reach) or that you're going to get demolished by a wight with a greatsword as opposed to a rapier or something.
As a bonus, it's a good free roguelike in general, though there's a good chance you've played it already given its popularity as an accessible entry in the genre.
RogueShell may be just what you're looking for; it supports ADOM, Brogue, Cataclysm, Nethack, and more.
There are also a number of DC:SS servers listed on the Crawl website that you can play on through your browser; just click on any of the WebTiles links on that page I linked.
Here's the blog post about it. TL;DR: Mountain Dwarves are too similar to Minotaurs and Hill Orcs, so one of them had to be removed.
Want a game that takes forever to win/play?
An RPG you said. No internet required. Well, I'll tell you this -- you won't win on your first playthrough. Or your second. Hell, not even your third. You'll start this damn game thinking "Oh, I can do this! It's not that hard!". And then you'll die. Again. And again. AND AGAIN.
And cost? $0.00. That's right, it's free. Want a game that will rip you to bits, eat you, and then shit you right out, and still make you want to play? Yeah, that's Crawl.
You'll ask "Why is it so hard?" Because you're a weak gamer. That's why. Mass Effect? Not hard. KotoR? Not hard. Hell, Demon's Souls isn't hard compared to this game.
Step on a trap? Yeah, you're dead. Open the wrong door? Room full of orcs. Dead. Small snake? Poisoned, then dead.
You will die. You will have fun dying. You will come back for more pain.
Nah, enhancers are calculated completely differently than skill levels. Each enhancer multiplies your spellpower by 1.5, before the high end is reduced (look up "spell power" on the knowledge bots for the exact formula).
Roughly: archmagi will provide the best spell power boost, +int will provide a smaller spell power boost, but also help spell success and spell hunger, and resistances are usually more important than just about everything else if you're in a branch where those resistances will be useful.
It's because they're made by small indie devs and writing good netcode is a lot of work, especially for super lag-sensitive things like bullet hell type games.
As a side note, they're not roguelikes. Roguelikes look like this or this -- they're turn-based, 2d games, sometimes/often using ASCII letters in the console instead of graphics.
Gungeon is a real time sort of bullet-hell-ish game, which has some roguelike elements with the random generation and start-over-when-you-die stuff. But calling it a roguelike is like calling Far Cry an RPG because of its progression mechanics.
Also, if you play online, and go onto the irc channel (look on this http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Trunk page for the channels and servers of irc) you can ask people for help, while you play. (You can spectate games being played, and ask questions, and people can look at you play).
DC:SS also has a badly maintained wiki: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/ and some knowledgebots: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots (just ask about any term you want to know more about)
If you don't enjoy single player... Don't play it!
You (and everyone who has hobbies) should always occasionally take a step back and ask, "am I enjoying this? If not, why should I keep doing this?" You might just be playing these because you feel you have to, because everyone else is and they're talked about all the time. Make sure you actually want to play alone, and it's not just a grass-is-greener kind of deal.
Why do you like multiplayer? You honestly might just not like single player, and that's perfectly fine! You might be competitive, you might like being social, you might simply like challenges where you have a 50% chance of failure (opposed to single player campaigns, which are designed to let you win eventually.)
Figure out what you don't like about single player that multiplayer offers. Reading your post, I'd guess you like challenge - defeating the obstacles put forth in whatever way possible. You like spontaneity - things happening that weren't planned. These two things have been lacking in modern AAA games, which are designed to keep people from being stuck via elaborately scripted sets.
If you want to get back into single player, find a game that fits your needs - and that might mean leaving behind AAA titles. Have you tried dark souls? Have you tried Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup? Have you tried Fire Emblem? Have you tried piling a million mods onto Skyrim until you're stuck wandering the streets, running from guards and stealing apples so you don't starve?
If something isn't fun, forcing yourself to do it isn't going to magically make it fun.
edit: close parens are hard
I would also say DCSS is pretty friendly as well, in the grab a walk-through and just experiment. and IMHO will get dull less quickly, after you have played the same area 18 times in tome it kinda gets boring.
He's referring to Dungeon Crawl which is very -very- commonly referred to as just crawl.
So commonly, in fact, that you can apt-get install crawl on debian-based linux distros and it will install it.
The game is hugely popular, and has been around for a long time. Most posts over at /r/roguelikes are about crawl (tagged with DCSS)
I had a post like this earlier. Lets see....
Those off the top of my head right now. Might know more if you have more specific's on what you like.
Electrocution will do more damage and the minimum delay on a falchion is .6, so you will get an extra attack every 4.2 ticks. Check out this search feature for questions like this. Entering eletrocution, flaming, delay, etc, would answer your question for you.
Also, for future reference, stat weighting for damage is so small you should never really care about your strength or dex when considering damage.
I just really didn't want to get into another huge extended discussion about Mountain Dwarves. Have you seen these?
- http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/q2vnl/lets_get_too_serious_about_dcss_development/
- http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/whisper-farewell-when-you-leave-gimli
- https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2938
Edit: Probably I should have just linked to these in the first place rather than being snide. Sorry about that.
Changes:
- Fix missing portals to Zot on D:27 with restart_after_game after Sprint.
- Fix most large special maps not being generated.
- Fix mad amounts of divine gifts in certain cases.
- Don’t duplicate monsters when exiting the Abyss.
- Fix a lock-up on selecting a random character.
- A number of crash fixes.
- Some documentation amendments.
- Don’t stop butchering on unimportant messages.
- Add a command “show runes” (‘}’) that was documented but not implemented.
Linux/Windows/OSX downloads up here.
I don't know if its indie or if people consider it a true RPG, but I would recommend that people play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It is a rogue-like, distinguished largely by permadeath and extreme difficulty. In this it is similar to the recommended Dungeons of Dredmor, but most people consider DCSS the epitome of the genre. It is completely free, incredibly deep (there are something like 30 different races, from sentient cats to mermen) and rather fun if you're remotely into hardcore dungeon crawling. I highly recommend it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Probably the most polished of the rogue-likes, a lot of breadth and depth and fairly well balanced. Great UI and tileset and an active development and player community.
You don’t need to memorize but it is a good idea early on to look up all uniques here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots , as their difficulty ramps and they all should take into consideration using special tactics.
I'm not sure why you think it's complicated or lacks documentation. There's the wiki page which is rather vague, but pasting 'box of beasts' into the Knowledge Bot linked me to 'mutant_beast' which gave a pretty detailed explanation.
Basically, the higher your Evocations, the bigger the beast, but there's always a one in three chance the box will break after use.
One where the devs commented specifically on why they thought the removal was necessary, and explained their logic in great detail:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/whisper-farewell-when-you-leave-gimli
Pretty much everything you're asking for fits the description of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, indeed Crawl is the kind of game that "roguelike" used to mean before it was co-opted by some more recent games (The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, etc). Crawl is a turn based, very difficult dungeon crawler. Permadeath, procedural dungeon generation with multiple distinct and themed dungeon branches each with their own challenges, high focus on player skill and meaningful choices, very difficult. Crawl has a strong design philosophy guiding the gameplay and is under constant re-evaluation and development (ie: there are commits to the development branches hourly).
In short, it's an excellent game.
It has its pitfalls though, while Crawl is one of the more approachable/accessible roguelikes it still requires a lot of experimentation / learning to become competent at. Players often take several years of play to get even the easiest win condition. Difficult is an understatement, mistakes in Crawl are punishing.
That being said, if you find it to your liking, Crawl is one of the best games out there and offers nearly endless rewarding gameplay.
Here are some screenshots of a game of Crawl I was playing recently. I'm playing a Formicid (race) Fighter (class) of Okawaru (a god). Formicids have a bunch of special abilities, most notably they have more arms than a human (they're ants) so they can use a 2-handed weapon with a shield and they're so attuned with the earth (an effect called Stasis) that they're prevented from using most forms of speed boost and teleport. Tradeoffs like this make each race unique and interesting.
http://i.imgur.com/lJkEQiz.png http://i.imgur.com/Z2KanPu.png
This is the official DCSS technical support forum thread. Posting there would probably be the best thing to do.
Also, including what Operating System you're on, what version of DCSS you're using, and what exactly it does instead of starting normally will all speed you on your way to killing Sigmund again.
In the meantime, hopefully your work web filter will allow you to play online.
I was going to say, DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) includes this as standard, and keeps track of your games with detailed statistics...
If you're curious about roguelikes or a vet, give DCSS online play a try:
Main site: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
play online with graphical tiles on the CSZO server: https://crawl.s-z.org/#lobby (there are several servers linked together for statistics, this is the one I play on, you may prefer another one that may be closer to you)
Example page of player statistics: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/tasonir.html
Look at those sexy 20 wins! Go Me! I am so awesome! <.<
It highly depends on the roguelike. DCSS has very few unsurvivable that isn't somehow the players fault. On the other Nethack can kill you on the very first turn due to random chance or spawn enemies with instadeath attacks before you could possibly have defenses for them (aka the Gnome with the Wand of Death).
Since you don't seem adverse to spoilers, I would highly recommend that you look up any monster, item, or branch you aren't familiar with in the Knowledge Bots.
The walkthrough on the wiki, although slightly outdated, does contain some general info that is good to know as well. Just heed the warning at the top: "Some of the advice might be outdated. Proceed with caution."
Roguelikes are one of my favorite things!
I usually play NetHack or, when I'm not up for quite that much difficulty, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
I've tried to get my family and friends into Roguelikes, but I'm afraid they don't really see the charm of the genre. I guess ASCII 'graphics', permadeath, and literally dozens of keyboard commands are a bit off-putting.
Roguelikes such as Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup will give you a pretty good challenge. They involve a bit more luck than DS when it comes to items, but believe me, you will need some skill to survive for more than 15 minutes.
Yes. From the knowledge bots:
> Assuming you aren't monstrous, you get five facets, each consisting of three mutations (which usually just stack together). You will get one scales-type facet, one body-slot facet, two tier 2 facets, and one tier 3 facet. You will never get both an ice facet and a fire facet.
> The scales-type facets are icy blue, iridescent, molten, rough black, rugged brown, slimy green, thin metallic, or yellow scales, or alternatively thin skeletal structure, large bone plates, or a distortion field.
> Body-slot facets: claws, horns, antennae, hooves, and talons. Tier 2 facets: PbD, PbP, MR, mapping, demonic guardian, nightstalker, spiny, and ice (rC+, potion conservation, and then either icemail or passive freeze). Tier 3 facets: +30% HP, rN+++, rTorment, and fire (scroll conservation, rF+, hellfire).
> If you are monstrous (1 in 10 chance), then you get 3 body-slot facets but you don't get scales. You still get 2 tier 2 facets and 1 tier 3 facet, for 6 facets total.
MiFi is usually considered one of the easier characters, or MiBe if you want to go with trog.
If you meant literally "how do you start dcss" here's the page with info on how to play online: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto
It appears that the username Lynn has been used across multiple servers (CAO, CDO, CXC, CUE. Couldn't say if it was the same person, though. It's a known issue. It appears you're registered on CAO (Akrasiac) and someone(s) else's accounts are combined on the scoring page.
Some players register a (hopefully unique) username on all servers even if they only/ primarily play on one.
If you like to play DCSS online, you can hit Share > Add To Home Screen in mobile safari and it will create a dedicated app icon.
I recently made a pr that means the app icon will open as a separate app than Safari, without tabs or the nav bar. This allows for a nice fullscreen experience if you're using a keyboard with your iPad.
Check this:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots
Maybe same info as beem.
Usually more accurate than wiki but less verbose.
Anyway, the only God that has suffered major changes lately is Nemelex. The rest have not changed that much in a couple of versions at least, so even if outdated the wiki the info will probably often be relevant.
The best source of information is the ability menu. You get there by pressing "a", by pressing "!" or "?" you can toggle between ability use and description
It was actually the last pre-DCSS version, Crawl 4.1-alpha, where centaurs etc. tried to maintain range from the player. Crawl 4.1 was notoriously difficult, so much so that DCSS was based on the version before that, 4.0, with only a few changes taken from 4.1. One of my favourite quotes from the learndb:
> <elliott> what's really overpowered in 4.1 > > <rwbarton> elliott: monsters
You can play 4.1 on crawl.develz.org: SSH only, since webtiles and even local tiles came much later.
Orb spiders were not inspired by 4.1, but rather by the desire to allow their orbs of destruction to hit at full power. It was only after I implemented orb spiders that a long-time player said to me, "Oh, just like centaurs in 4.1".
The knowledge bots are always up to date even all the way up to trunk, and they're basically a wiki, just in a different format. If you need to look it up, you can look there.
Thank you for putting in the time to do this!
I've just registered accounts on several servers at http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto , as Neil recommended below, but what should I do about the servers where the griefer already has an account with my name? Is it possible to get control over those accounts---who should I talk to? I'm not in a rush, but for my own part I care more about this person having this over my head in the future than I do about this particular streak-break.
(Neil recommended registering widely; I hope it's okay that I'm asking you, or whoever reads this and knows, instead of asking him directly. It sounds like he could use a break.)
Antimagic usually blocks "innate magic", like against demons or orb of fire.
For some reason - I suspect a bug, or a left over of some sort - Gargoyles do have AM resistance. You can check this things yourself querying the bot in the IRC channel or via http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots - the latter isn't always updated.
DCSS is great! Regularly updated, consistent design philosophy, online play in both ascii and graphical tiles.
Anyone that gets into DCSS should know about the learndb and the knowledge bots. Both contain spoilers.
We're making plans for 0.16.1. With any luck it will be released in the next few days; usually we wait until the tournament is over but I think this is an exceptional situation :)
Edit: 0.16.1 is out now.
See also Darshan Shaligram's history of DCSS, and Erik Piper's announcement of the fork.
Dcss has a tiles version that scales at http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/downloads Link me: Dweller, Legends of Yore, Ananias, UNNethack, Angband, Angband Variants, Cardinal Quest 2, Hoplite, Shattered Planet, Wazhack, Delver, Quadropus Rampage
Mountain dwarves were not removed for being 'too strong'. http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/whisper-farewell-when-you-leave-gimli
In general, we certainly do try to fix things rather than just remove them; the changelog ( http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a=blob;f=crawl-ref/docs/changelog.txt ) is full of examples, but I'd point to the Nemelex Xobeh rework (in trunk) as a great example of this. Just because something was removed doesn't mean it can't return later in a fixed form, too - formicids are, in part, an attempt to make a "more interesting" version of mountain dwarves. (They were codenamed "dwants" while in development.) But if we can make the game better by removing something, we aren't going to shy away from that.
dcss is a pretty developed roguelike with full tiles support and a lot of fancy stuff like autoexplore, tons of races and gods, really too much for me to explain but heres the website http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
still gets a bunch of development
You mentioned Tales of Maj'Eyal so you should definitely take a look at Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's arguably more difficult than ToME, but the combat mechanics, the talents and skills, the magic and the god system make this game the favored roguelike for many people.
/r/roguelikes
Dungeons of Dredmor, Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl and TOME are exceptions to the "use ASCII text based graphics" trend of roguelikes. Modern games all, but still true roguelikes.
My two games are tagpro http://tagpro.koalabeast.com/ (see also /r/tagpro)
and a roguelike called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ (see also /r/dcss and /r/roguelikes)
Rogue was basically a text version of the game diablo, and most rogue-likes are similar. Turn based action game where you level up a character to try and complete the final quest, all in an extremely low-fi interface (generally ASCII symbols, but tilesets are available). DCSS and Nethack are both maddeningly difficult, largely because they follow a one life = one game principle. You can always save, but if you die, then you start over. Brutally addictive.
In a comment here, someone suggested it is a side effect of removing the weight limit. I'm guessing the rational is something like, since you can now stack any number of items, a necromancer could just carry around a ton of corpses, giving a game-breaking advantage.
I think I like the idea of removing the weight limit: I did find item juggling and stashing to be very tedious and I think the limitation on the number of items should still impose enough difficulty. But I never carried around corpses (probably because I obsessively play conjurer types), so I may not know what I'm missing. I haven't played this new build yet, so it's too early for me to say!
We have a lot of resources and information here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ on the right-hand side under "Development."
My suggested steps:
- Checkout a local copy of the repo
- Make sure you can build dcss from source (after you get the checkout, there are a couple of README files regarding installation / building)
- Review the code-style documents and other README files in the checkout
From here, if you want to dive in and contribute, look for simple bugs in mantis that you want to tackle. Once you have a fix, TEST! Make sure you're sticking to code style and aren't introducing any regressions (new bugs). Don't change formulas or other things which affect game balance. Chances are, your patch will never be applied. Once you have a fix, build a patch file for it and attach it to the mantis ticket. If a few days go by without anyone else commenting or whatnot, go to the irc channel ##crawl-dev on freenode and ask someone politely to take a look at it.
The official Android version of DCSS is, sadly, out of date: the last official build was for 0.13.1, and I have no idea whether it even compiles on Android still. Our main Android developer has been inactive for a year and a half. Maybe we should recruit some folks :)
barbs has put up a console version of DCSS for Android on Google Play. That one appears to be 0.14.0, but I don't know how well that works (particularly without a keyboard).
Webtiles might be another possibility, but I haven't tried that either (not having a mobile).
Edit: To answer your question, there is no iOS version. It would be difficult to get into the App Store for several reasons (and I suspect at least some copyright holders would oppose that because of GPL issues), but if someone wanted to make a version for jailbroken phones (and/or developer accounts), that would be cool.
Actually with recent trunk updates, apparently cross-trained skills now just level up directly, albeit more slowly. So if you trained daggers, you'd have a bunch of levels in long blades when you switch.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/trunk-updates-15-june-2014 Cross-training now gives a direct bonus to skills, rather than providing an aptitude bonus.
I upvoted zxc's comment and want to add: Either you don't understand how LOS works in DCSS, or you are not controlling it well, if Grinder and Orc Priests are killing you often.
Basically, LOS is mutual : an enemy can see you if and only if you can see it. This has implications for positioning -- as a normal speed character, on most levels, you can move such that if an orc priest or other smiter appears, you can immediately break their LOS on you. Basically by staying near walls and favoring tight corridors.
This is especially effective against an enemy who also blinks (Grinder or any imp), since blinking can also effectively break LOS.
If you are not already aware, enemies will not follow you up/downstairs if they are not immediately adjacent to you when you take the stairs. This makes stairs very useful for escaping ranged attackers, to the point you may want to remember where the nearest one is. (if not, you can find the nearest one using Shift+X followed by <)
If you are saying "I know the first thing I should do is run away", that's a pretty clear indicator you are not running away enough. Only Naga and Chei worshippers are slow enough that running away is a bad proposition. Stealth is pretty much irrelevant to running away, as long as you make sure to run towards already-cleared areas and in a way that maximizes your opportunities to break LOS.
I may have mentioned this before, but if you want help on tactical problems (like Grinder and Orc Priests are here), it's a pretty good proposition to play in Webtiles and ask a few people to spectate. (various webtiles servers are listed here in the sidebar 'Playing online' section; CAO is a popular one). Unless the occasional lag bothers you.
DCSS is a very expansive dungeon cawler along the lines of nethack: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
Basically, DCSS is playing a randomly generated Temple of Doom, as a first level character. you will die 99 times for that 1 time where you manage to achieve something noteable. And then you die anyway. 99 of those deaths may net you a basic win, but that just means you took the pussy way out, there is like 20 times more content to explore. You cannot save either, so it is not like Dark Souls where you die a lot with one character. If your guy dies, you make a new guy and start over.
To replicate DCSS as a pen&paper, I think you can use the D&D mechanics fine. I would advice not being as balls to the wall insane with the difficulty thou, if only because creating a new character in a pen&paper takes a while. Also you will have to put a lot of work in to add all the extra bits that DCSS has, like mutations, gods that grant boons to their followers and so on.
Glad I found this by ctrl-f'ing. DCSS isn't exactly a casual game, but it possesses extraordinary depth and a surprising amount of polish for an open source roguelike. After you figure out what's going on (something that may be easier to do with the offline client, which features mouse support), you'll find a game that epitomizes "difficult but fair."
As for the time sink part, well, getting a first win takes some players weeks or months, and given the huge range of gods, species, backgrounds, and playstyles, it's absurdly replayable. New players will do well to check out the manual, use the knowledge bots and the (sometimes outdated) wiki, and consider asking questions in webtiles spectator lobbies or /r/roguelikes or /r/dcss.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
Not so much in the graphics department. But nothing has made me rage as hard as this. You think beating a boss is a good feeling in DaS? Just wait until you kill the 4 hell lords in this game, nothing compares. (Not for casuls)
From the knowledge bots:
0.13 order: Lair -> D:13 -> Orc -> D:20 -> Vaults (but not Vaults:5) -> D:27 -> get three runes -> Zot.
0.14: D -> Lair:8 -> Orc:3 -> D:16 -> Snake/Spider:5 -> Vaults:4 -> Depths:6 -> Swamp/Shoals:5 -> Vaults:5 -> Zot
Do some research on various branches (especially Vaults:5) before you just jump in there.
Extra branches (elf, crypt, Pan, Slime, Hell, etc.) are more likely to get you killed than their rewards are to help you. Avoid them unless you are trying to with the game with 15 runes.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a modern, frequently updated version of a venerable roguelike called Linley's Dungeon Crawl. It's more in the tradition of Nethack and the original Rogue than Angband/Moria or ADOM, is very easy to get into, and even has a nice graphical version.
Firstly, you should use the knowledge bots at all times (search "order"). You get:
Lair -> Orc -> D:19 -> Crypt -> V:7 -> D:27 -> get three runes -> Zot
It depends on your character build though, you generally get the runes as late as possible because you want to do the entire game in order of easiest levels first. It's strongly influenced by what items/spells/resistances you've acquired, so look up each branch in turn and try and judge which will be easiest for your current character.
I would strongly recommend Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup out of these. Free, easy way to burn time , and is a lot less cruel than the others such as NetHack. Also, it has a lot of variations so there's tons of different ways to play.
Whenever I see a new enemy, or aren't too sure about how deadly something is, I always look it up in the Knowledge Bot. This helps a great deal to let you know how to prepare for a challenge.
The Wiki is a great source of information. They have a page specifically for easier/beginner builds: Background And Race Combinations For Beginners. I've tried the first and second builds and have found them to be pretty simple and easier to stay alive with at the beginning. A Merfolk Crusader is another build that is pretty good, though more fragile.
Try out trolls, because they are great at slaughtering stuff. TrMo is a very winnable combination, go Okawaru for the invocations.
Deep Dwarf Necromancer is a real great build, but its major idiosyncrasy (no natural healing) might be a bit offputting for the newest players. Just be sure to go Makhleb.
The best advice for new players is to play often, even though you'll die a lot. A whole lot. You'll keep dying, but you'll get better eventually, and still keep dying, even if you're playing a good build, because you won't understand the strategy. At that point it might be good to spoil yourself using the knowledge bots. Go on ##crawl IRC on irc.freenode.net and play games on the regular server or the webtiles (graphical) server, and watch other people who are better than you play, and let them spectate to help give you advice.
Since you have nethack experience it'll probably only take you a couple hundred games to win (I had 6 nethack wins before playing crawl, it took about 600 games to finally beat crawl).
Don't trust everything you read in the wiki. The wiki has traditionally had bad advice and outdated information on it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is everything I want in a roguelike and it's very accessible. Can use your mouse, simple but effective graphics (no asci unless you want to turn it on for some weird reason), deep gameplay with tons of classes, races, weapons, spells, and skills, tons of dungeons, difficult enemies. The game is great
DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) is a great start, then you can try Angband, ADAM, ToME, or even the infamous Dwarf Fortress (if you have plenty of spare time). For DCSS, I personally like playing under Xom because I suck at DCSS, and Xom always makes it fun.
I'll also take the time to mention Realm of the Mad God, which is a fun little thing. When you die, you're dead and lose your loot, and you create a new character. Can be very interesting. All online, and you play with (not against) other players to kill everything. Pretty simple.
- OpenTTD (http://www.openttd.org/) [Win, Mac, Linux] They basically rewrote Transport Tycoon Deluxe from scratch, if you liked it, you will love this. There are whole communities which are all about opimal design of railways/Coop play.
- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/) [Win, Mac, Linux] Pretty awesome rogue game, love it.
if you step outside your comfort zone, you may find that success tastes sweeter when actions have consequence
Hahah... a suggestion from way out of left wing, but if you can tolerate crappy graphics and dying horrible deaths over and over: real roguelikes (say for instance Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) can offer some hilarity and a lot of play time. Crawl is free and the tiles version is the best UI in a roguelike I have seen. http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
In terms of actually published games I would suggest Torchlight (hack and slash RPG, usually on sale pretty cheap, worth at least a play through). Fallout 3 / Fallout New Vegas are actually pretty enjoyable, and presumably a lot less buggy now.
I second someone else's suggestion of Mass Effect 1 and 2.
For turn based combat strategic games with RPG elements (AKA Heroes of Might and Magic formula-ish) I would suggest King Bounty Crossworlds, which is a huge time sink, though can get tedious.
Older games you might not have played Planescape Torment (available on good old games www.gog.com) Similarly Arcanum (likewise on Gog)
Alternatively since you are waiting for Skyrim replay the shit out of Morrowind, find some mod with the updated graphics and go at it.
Here's some more for you (that haven't been mentioned yet):
Battle for Wesnoth (free as in beer and otherwise), Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (roguelike, free), Spacechem (puzzle), AI War (4x/RTS), VVVVVV (~~jump~~ and run), World of Goo (puzzle), Darwinia (very unique RTS), Braid (jump and run featuring time travel)... if you are looking for something more in the shooter direction: Hitman 2 and Hitman Blood Money should run fine on your machine.
I'd also like to second some that have already been mentioned, you should definitely consider to give them a look:
Civ 4, Homeworld 1&2, Freelancer
Its called a dungeon crawler for a reason. There isn't supposed to be much plot. Just to get to the bottom of the dungeon and get back out.
That said, most dungeon crawls are characterized by many different classes and races, many different monsters and many different and unique ways to die. Obviously Torchlight really lacks in all of those departments. It really bothers me that games such as Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup can be so rich in all 3 of those categories, and more main stream games are content to implement 3-4 classes without a choice in race.
I understand that wonderful graphics are almost a must to succeed in today's industry, but i would much rather be compelled to play a game through complexity and challenge than pretty eye candy.
You probably won't max either all game long! (Maybe Spellcasting.) But you should emphasize them, yes. The best way to do this is by turning off Dodging and Stealth at first. Once the spells you want to cast are reliable, consider turning off your other magic skills. However, since turned-off skills still sometimes receive XP, the more you turn off, the less useful it is to turn things off. So don't go too far.
Remember when X * Y = Z (Spc * INT = hunger discount), the best way to raise Z is to raise the lower of X or Y. A character's Spellcasting skill is normally lower than their Int, so it's the big thing here.
For some cruncy spell hunger numbers, go here:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots
and type "spell hunger".
AFAIK tiles are unusually (for a roguelike) popular in Crawl, except of course the SSH players: 2009 DCSS Survey Results
>[The average Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup player] only plays Crawl locally (54%) because he prefers Tiles to ASCII (60% if playing locally, 38% total).