ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

.. is really tedious. It's alright early game, but by the time you get to middle game you are inundated with a flow of largely crap loot that you still need to look through to find the non-crap stuff to upgrade your equipment. Is there an addon that helps this -- aside from Enhanced Compare, which I already have installed? Or some other strategy? It really makes ToME pretty unfun.

Two things I can think of off the top of my head.

First, drop items off in vaults. Items left in there never vanish, so for instance, drop all stat boosting gear in a Trollmire vault and just write down what you put where. And when you need to get that Willpower prodigy with only 35 base Willpower, just head there.

Second of all, the obvious transmogrification. Don't just wait for the end of a level, as soon as you get items check your chest and see if it's any good. If it's, say, a longsword with no "when wielded" bonuses and you're an archmage, delete it right there. That should save a lot of clutter, at the cost of being a little tedious.

Those are pretty good points for reducing clutter, I definitely wasn't aware of the thing with vault storage. I should have clarified though -- I'm not much bothered by clutter -- I tend to do what I imagine most players doing: sort the transmog chest, get a few items out; 5-10 levels later, if it doesn't look like that item will ever be useful to me, I transmog it.
Rather, it's the process where I get the items and have to sort them that induces dread.

Can you also drop items in Sher'Tul Fortress safely, do you know?

In terms of an addon, I was thinking improved sorting -- for example, if you're a mage, all the antimagic stuff should go together so you can easily skip it; or if you're antimagic, the mage stuff should go together. There are probably other heuristics that could be used (heavy weapons char like Berserker usually won't give a damn about daggers and mindstars... Mages aren't usually gonna bother with armor that isn't reasonably light (low fatigue))..

I guess this potentially could turn into a rerun of Angband auto-squelch/destroy, thinking about your second point on destroying useless stuff ASAP.

The fortress has a storage room.

^ The Items Vault? Eh. Playing ToME hasn't yet convinced me that it deserves a donation (== is about as good a game as DCSS or Brogue). So far, my experience of it involves large expanses of tedium occasionally interrupted by interesting bosses or loot.

I guess I'll just have to test whether dropping items on the floor works, though that was really just a side question provoked by Red's vault-dropping comment. The main topic was intended to be 'how to sort through the masses of loot without falling asleep or getting eyestrain'

No, it literally has a storage room. The little room a bit south of the portals. You drop something in there, it'll auto-sort into piles.

Ah, my mistake. Thanks greyswandir and HousePet.

(I do want to reiterate that my central question is about being forced, as I exit a level, to sort through increasing piles of mostly-irrelevant items in order to locate the few useful ones, and how the tedium or scale of this task can be reduced. Since Sher'Tul Fortress is not contained in the Transmogrification Chest, it does not appear to address this . So far, Red's advice about transmoging ASAP where possible has been the only advice I have understood to actually address this.)

tilkau wrote:^ The Items Vault? Eh. Playing ToME hasn't yet convinced me that it deserves a donation (== is about as good a game as DCSS or Brogue). So far, my experience of it involves large expanses of tedium occasionally interrupted by interesting bosses or loot.

Could it be?! Someone who actually isn't scared of giving their true opinion on the game? Even though my opinion is somewhat different, good job for not being afriad to say what you think of something. Though I guess it helps when it's over the Internet.

Considering how highly I think of this game, tilkau, my question to you is this: what are DCSS and Brogue? Because if they're on par with ToME, I may have to find two more games to play.

Though as a note on why it seems, to me at least, that ToME gets such acclaim is that it is a roguelike in the Nethack or ADOM vein (if much easier), but is far, far more intuitive. Having played both Nethack (for small amount of time) and Elona (for a lot longer), I can easily say that ToME is the only roguelike I know of that someone could pick up, play for a few hours, and have a decent idea what was going on. In Nethack or Elona, it's basically impossible to play without an outside guide or tutorial of some sort.

amuletofyendor wrote:

tilkau wrote:^ The Items Vault? Eh. Playing ToME hasn't yet convinced me that it deserves a donation (== is about as good a game as DCSS or Brogue). So far, my experience of it involves large expanses of tedium occasionally interrupted by interesting bosses or loot.

Could it be?! Someone who actually isn't scared of giving their true opinion on the game? Even though my opinion is somewhat different, good job for not being afriad to say what you think of something. Though I guess it helps when it's over the Internet.

Yeah, well.. I figure, when you make it clear it's -your experience-, not the final word worldwide, anyone who's gonna try to argue with that is either a fool who thinks they can know more about what your experience is like than you do, or someone who doesn't care what your experience is and is quite simply just trying to shut you up. Everybody should be free to describe their experience as accurately as they can, if their intent is simply to do so, rather than to vent their annoyance or troll.
Programming-wise, I'm impressed with T-Engine; I'm not currently equally impressed with ToME itself as a game. This could be because it's actually not as fun as I was hoping, in some objective sense, or it could be because I am playing it in a way which is unfun. Or even that my current general mood makes it unusually difficult for me to have fun.

Red wrote: Considering how highly I think of this game, tilkau, my question to you is this: what are DCSS and Brogue? Because if they're on par with ToME, I may have to find two more games to play.

<offtopic>
* Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a community-built roguelike originating from Linley's Dungeon Crawl. Originally somewhat nethack-like, it's moved away from that and now probably qualifies as its own subgenre.
* Brogue is .. I guess you can say the most friendly and visually appealing ASCII roguelike you are likely to find. Have a look at the screenshots.Influenced mainly by Rogue itself.

If you have any questions about them, /r/roguelikes is usually a good place to ask. DCSS and Brogue each also have their own forums as well.

In a bit more detail: DCSS has a similar tactical orientation as ToME, but tries very hard to eliminate no-brainer choices and tedious actions, including any kind of grind. It originated many of the more recent roguelike ui improvements, for example auto-explore. In comparison with ToME, I would say that while ToME has done an outstanding job of optimizing access to frequent actions via the hotkeys -- I would like to see that in DCSS --, and its inventory system is definitely the most approachable I've seen, it could stand to adopt many of DCSS's affordances -- for example I frequently miss Tab (autofight, covering both melee and ranged fighting), Ctrl+F (find items with specific properties (and go to them where applicable)), Ctrl+G (autotravel across multiple dungeon floors to a particular floor of a particular dungeon), Ctrl+X (summarize everything interesting on the screen), and ` (repeat last action)

ToME and DCSS have a certain amount in common WRT to classes, in how classes are really just a set of starting skills (though ToME is more strict in that it has the concept of 'unlocking' skill trees, whereas in DCSS you just need to have equipment or spells that would benefit from training that skill in order to be able to train it.)
DCSS devs try hard to differentiate all races and classes (or 'backgrounds' as DCSS calls them) from each other, and my impression so far is that this is not a major priority for ToME. I believe the consequence for DCSS is that a majority of race/class combos that you can pick have their own individual feel, which I appreciate a lot.
DCSS is -incredibly- fair, which I also appreciate a lot -- If you died, 99.9% of the time, it's because you weren't thinking straight. The reliable feedback from that is great.

Since you brought it up: DCSS also tries very hard to avoid spoilers -- things do what they say they'll do, consistently. Brogue is the same only moreso in that respect.

Brogue has a wonderful simplicity -- there are no classes, or even experience points. You improve your character via Potions of Strength, Potions of life, and better equipment. Each type of monster has it's own particular thing that it does, that interacts interestingly with many other game elements. It's very easy to pick up as it does a great job of informing the player about.. well, practically anything that they would want to know, and the interaction of different game elements is very consistent.
The absence of experience points means that there are no required fights -- you might choose to fight something if it's in your way, or if you want it to blow something else up..
Overall it could be described as a very careful distillation of the essence of Roguelikeness, presented in a way that indeed like ToME, "someone could pick up, play for a few hours, and have a decent idea what was going on."

After writing the above, it occurs to me one thing that ToME wins over those in is id. Though both DCSS and Brogue make the classical roguelike id minigame as painless
as possible, they do still have it.

Both of the above are frequently recommended to newcomers on /r/roguelikes, especially Brogue.

Those are my thoughts. I make no pretence that they are objective, but hopefully they're informative.

</offtopic>

EDIT: I should really have mentioned gods. Gods have a heavy impact on your playstyle in DCSS; they provide the really heavy artillery (stuff that would be ridiculously imbalanced if it wasn't limited by piety expenditure). For example aoyendor's example of GhMo of Chei: among other things Chei boosts all your stats in proportion to your piety, up to +15 at max piety, and provides an attack that damages everything in LOS according to how much faster it is than you.

I'd just like to say thanks for that rundown! I'll certainly be checking both of those out. Although the DCSS page looks like it's down at the moment.

Lyoncet wrote:I'd just like to say thanks for that rundown! I'll certainly be checking both of those out. Although the DCSS page looks like it's down at the moment.

Heh, if you do play it, go for a DsMo of Chei. Good times.

Lyoncet wrote:I'd just like to say thanks for that rundown! I'll certainly be checking both of those out. Although the DCSS page looks like it's down at the moment.

Yeah, the main server's been having trouble for the past 3-4 days, not sure what that's about. You should still be able to try it through WebTiles (eg. this server), if your browser supports WebSockets. The only notable differences are a) people can spectate your game as it's happening (or you can spectate theirs) and b) there is occasionally some lag due to heavy server load.

EDIT: As of now (nov 3 11:52 in timezone +9.30), crawl.develz.org seems to be working fine.