ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

"Dark Spirit 'MadnessOnlyBTW' has invaded your world!"
Can't wait.

I've also updated the OP with a download link.

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A little bit of a starters guide written by yours truly here.

Looks interesting so far. I'm looking forward to the day I won't see Sun Infusions anymore.

About the whole Weapon Mastery thing, will the weapon damage % values be slightly increased to make up for the lack of physical power or is it just a global nerf to weapon damage?

Also I keep hearing about 1.6 being the end of drowning but I don't see anything about it, apart from this



which seems like a terrible change (And how exactly does this affect drowning? Do all NPCs get infinite air or something?). I'm all for giving players more incentive to use tier 1/2 equipment (it's in the game after all, there should be no reason to skip it), but shops in AoA are already a huge chore (5+ towns to check for gear, it just takes forever), and having to go shopping every 10 levels just seems way too painful. I'd rather turn every enemy in Trollmire into a randboss if I want to get hurt.

Oh and I'm kinda sad to see no changes to the ID (something really needs to be done to adress the lack of good inscriptions in the early levels, and with all those new ones added in 1.6 it seemed like the perfect time to do that) :/

The AI update means that NPCs will now try to move out of dangerous terrain, like water. That doesn't sound like it will actually remove drowning, just make it super tedious for classes without ways to move NPCs around without hurting them. Still, I haven't yet played 1.6, so its possible that there are some other relevant changes I haven't heard mentioned.

Town NPCs just don't generate as rares, bosses, etc. any longer, as far as I can tell. You could still drown the folks, I think, it just won't gain you anything.

Wow, Sawrd dropped from Undead Starter Boss . Is there like increased drop rate for purposes of testing or something? Also is being able to redistribute all stat points instead of just 4 for purposes of testing as well?

PS. New Virulent Disease seems to work pretty sweet with Retch, finally Ghoul gets some love I though Acid Strike was about to be redesigned as well, am I wrong or has it not been implemented yet?

You should inspect that Sawrd more closely. It's a joke item right now, and is being removed entirely. The drop rate was massively increased so that testers can see the joke before it disappears.

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Let slip the toast of war.

Yeah, I remember I once stumbled on discussion about AI scripts in DCSS - I never thought about it before and it seemed to me that "better AI ---> better for game".
In that discussion was revealed that DCSS devs made AI arcing semi-randomly on intent, because yeah - assymethrical game, you are the one, they are the many.
So, better scripts is a thing you need to watch closely for...

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English isn't my native language.

I general I like these changes but I do have a point on the new AI. Basically it creates a situation in which you're always playing against enemies that are disciplined and aggressive enough to always seek to hit you as hard as possible and never make an error. I find this odd...

How would an enemy know that you're poison resist until they try? I know why the player does (game play would be insane without it) but why not have most enemies throw out a few attacks before correcting for immunities? Maybe a few enemies would know but why would they all? It's odd. Surely an enemy built to stun would still naturally throw out a stun attempt and only adapt after it becomes clear that you're immune.

Otherwise the strategic improvements are fun, albeit annoying at times... especially for melee classes.

My biggest disappointment is the lack of variance in the ID. One problem is that the maps keep growing bigger and bigger which really slows the game down. Why not have variance in map size? Also, a light radius 4 to start would be extremely helpful. I've literally managed to be stuck with a radius 2 for as long as 40 of 50 levels, albeit just the once.

And finally, can something be done about the Necromancer? It's better than it was but still, the ice category is a frustratingly lazy (in my opinion) addition instead of a thematic category as well as the lack of any thematic generic. The class is bloated and starving at the same time while lacking a coherent theme. The parts don't work together and parts that make thematic sense keep getting added to other classes. It's ALMOST a good class but it really only shines in the ID because of the scaling on the minions. Otherwise it's just an inferior Archmage.

Update: I played a bit on Nightmare and Insane... it's punishing. 1.6 exposes the weakness in class design badly. High damage output classes and high mobility classes can probably do fine but everyone else is doomed, no pun intended. Defense is essentially irrelevant because you'll be swarmed so quickly. Often there's no chance to even engage in dull strategies like carving out zig-zag tunnels. Mobility is insufficient now on almost every class.

There seems to be some confusion in the conceptualization of this. The enemies are supposed to be dumb because there are tons of them and the level designs are necessarily simplistic. The sheer volume and random nature of the a "punchers chance" creates the difficult. "Smart" enemies destroys that balance.

My suggestion, if it's possible, is to make some percentage of enemies smarter but leave the majority of them dumb.

People were discussing Hex grids vs Chebyshev grids in previous page of responses. I recall that someone actually did the initial work of adapting T4 to hex:
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=38983&hilit=tome+hex+grid

I do dearly love Hex grids. Reminds me of one of the very first RPGs, Melee, when I was growing up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melee_(game)

Literal kiting centaurs and smart AI in general are a feature in Brogue and it's one of the best received roguelikes sitting there right with Tome, Qud, Adom and DCSS
It's just a design choice, not anything that objectively breaks the game.

I got a dwarf brawler to High Peak on insane in 1.6 beta.

Game difficulty was really uneven. It was easy T1, followed by a really hard - harder than 1.5 - midgame, followed by ridiculously easy prides and eruan, followed by ridiculously hard High Peak, where I gave up because...well, a combination of enemies teleporting on top of you out of LOS, stuff constantly running away to screw with melee, broken save system, AI changes that made it almost impossible to run away from anything - it just isn't fun, and by that time I've had enough.

Before that I played a reaver to Dreadfell 9 where I gave up. Didn't find that fun either. The whole gameplay of reaver revolves around diseases that more often than not won't land even on trash mobs. The whole game revolves around using abilities. If that doesn't work half the time, might as well only make characters that focus on bumping/nuking and nothing else.

Suggestions:

I'd start with reverting the save system. The whole premise that any amount of saves should be useful is wrong in my opinion. What ends up happening is that most of your abilities that can be saved against become highly unreliable. Not to mention that Dwarves end up being immune to almost everything that can be saved against from early midgame until High Peak, even on insane. The numbers are wrong in the context of the game, one way or another.

I'd make some changes as to how effective enemies are at chasing you and calling other enemies to their aid. What happened to me more than once is you'll have one enemy in LOS when entering a level, and 5-6 turns later, you'll have something like 3 randbosses/uniques that are impossible to run away from (and one is dangerous enough). In previous versions what tended to happen is that enemies whose path got blocked by other enemies would get somewhat stuck, so there was a chance to run away and recover. Not anymore. Enemies are pretty good at using phase door and movement infusions to get to you, they don't get stuck, and sometimes they teleport through walls. Eventually you'll end up in a situation where you'll be dead whatever you do. This is especially bad in dungeons with lots of corridors that don't branch that much (Maze, Dreadfell, High Peak).

It's hard to say what to suggest here. Everyone seems in love with the idea of making enemies smarter, so making them dumber probably isn't an option. I'd suggest either a) make them give up chasing you after some time or b) make them stop calling their buddies so aggressively.

Finally I'd suggest losing the behavior where enemies run away from you after level (20? 30?). It screws just with melee which has always been harder than ranged and in most cases makes the game way longer and frustrating without accomplishing much in the way of difficulty. If you try to leave them alone, they'll follow you around and move in and out of LOS until you kill them.

As to my general thoughts on these difficulty changes...

Thing is, unlike a lot of other roguelikes, in ToME it takes a very long time to finish a run, has a single staircase for going up, one way unskippable dungeon, and a huge amount of randomness. It used to work well because even if the random number generator eventually screwed you, you could choose to not kill a difficult enemy or run away from them. Knowing when to fight and when to run was an interesting stategic choice. Now it doesn't seem to exist anymore.

So yeah, I really, really don't like 1.6 in its current state. Maybe it's just me, I don't know. I'm a glutton for punishment generally, I'm happy to start 100+ characters of one class until I win, and I lost quite a few 40+ hour runs on High Peak/Elandar and thought the whole experience was still fun. This wasn't.

There are a lot of other things that need discussing, testing and fixing (weapon mastery changes made the end game melee damage you take downright anemic, for instance), so I'd encourage everyone to download 1.6 beta and test it. If nothing else, it needs more people testing it.

/rant

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<darkgod> all this fine balancing talk is boring
<darkgod> brb buffing boulder throwers

Well, I went to Discord, found a beta-download-link, discovered it was windows-only. I'm not looking forward to getting copies of unreleased libraries with just the right version to compile things on linux. Are there any precompiled 1.6 beta linux binaries?

You can probably just download the module folder from the git repo and use the 1.5 files, if you aren't using windows.

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My feedback meter decays into coding. Give me feedback and I make mods.