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Odddzy posted:I've got a question about desktop dungeons. How do you get good at it? Are there good youtube channels that explain how to go over strategy? I just dont get the game and i've really tried. desktop dungeons is a game about playing dirty and eking out every single advantage you have. everything is a finite resource to be used, including unexplored map space, monsters you've out leveled, and equipment. leveling up in the middle of a fight with a powerful monster is an extremely common tactic. using slowing, petrification,, and other less common tools to boost xp gain is often required. fighting the most powerful monster you can see and take on without crippling yourself is SOP. fighting monsters at your level is a waste of both bonus xp and future xp popcorn, with the exception of one strategy. the game is balanced such that you have to "exploit" it to win as it gets harder, and it is entirely intentional. learn all of the "exploits" and try to use them when they're available
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Nov 24, 2016 21:30
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Odddzy posted:I've got a question about desktop dungeons. How do you get good at it? Are there good youtube channels that explain how to go over strategy? I just dont get the game and i've really tried. I suggest playing the puzzle levels and looking up solutions if you can't figure them out yourself after a few tries, they teach some core concepts both in general and in specific (for gods etc). Also the strategy articles on the wiki are useful.
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Nov 24, 2016 21:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Disgaea. I'm thinking of the first game in particular since that's the one I've played, and I've heard secondhand that the later ones close a lot of the loopholes that let you level through clever shenanigans instead of brute force. From what I recall of the first game, grinding in it was a matter of finding the level that had a 3x3 grid of enemies, hitting them with a 3x3 AoE attack and then yanking back your units so the enemies wouldn't move, and repeating until they died. You do that over and over until you can one-shot the enemies, then you start passing the Harder Enemies bills in the game's Senate so the enemies give more experience, and you keep doing that until you're capped out on Harder Enemies bills. Later games actually make the grinding easier. In particular, in Disgaea 2 there's a level with catgirls that level up 10% each turn (that is, on turn 2 their levels will be 10% higher than they were on turn 1). And you can capture enemies, turning them to your side, by throwing them into your base. So you capture a low-level catgirl, then let the next one level up a bit higher and capture it, then use that one to capture the next one, etc. until you have a level 9999 catgirl. She'll be a lovely level 9999 catgirl but she'll still mop the floor with everything outside of the hardest fights in the postgame. I mean, the Disgaea series' postgames are all about getting bigger numbers, and if that's your idea of a good time, go nuts. But they're still very grindy. When I played them, I mostly ignored the "correct" grinding techniques and just played the Item World over and over again because it generates level-appropriate random maps.
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Nov 24, 2016 22:42
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Disgaea sounds totally unappealing, like an anime body pillow mixed with Rutibex's Progress Quest fever dreams.
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Nov 24, 2016 22:48
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Later games actually make the grinding easier. In particular, in Disgaea 2 there's a level with catgirls that level up 10% each turn (that is, on turn 2 their levels will be 10% higher than they were on turn 1). And you can capture enemies, turning them to your side, by throwing them into your base. So you capture a low-level catgirl, then let the next one level up a bit higher and capture it, then use that one to capture the next one, etc. until you have a level 9999 catgirl. She'll be a lovely level 9999 catgirl but she'll still mop the floor with everything outside of the hardest fights in the postgame. In the first game there are a series of bosses that you can capture and turn into playable characters that let you leapfrog up to 9999 in an hour or two.
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Nov 24, 2016 22:57
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packetmantis posted:Disgaea sounds totally unappealing, like an anime body pillow mixed with Rutibex's Progress Quest fever dreams. I played the first game as a Fire Emblem/Final Fantasy Tactics-alike, ignoring all the insane grinding stuff & the postgame nonsense, and it was pretty fun. Pity the writing went up its own rear end after the halfway point. Tuxedo Catfish posted:There's only one game that's managed to make "grinding as a puzzle" even sort of interesting and it's not a roguelike, which isn't a coincidence. That being said, surely the right answer to this is 'dota'?
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Nov 24, 2016 23:03
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:In the first game there are a series of bosses that you can capture and turn into playable characters that let you leapfrog up to 9999 in an hour or two. This does not sound familiar to me at all. Maybe they added better grinding in one of the rereleases? When I played it on the PS2 the go-to technique for the bulk of grinding was as I described. packetmantis posted:Disgaea sounds totally unappealing, like an anime body pillow mixed with Rutibex's Progress Quest fever dreams. The underlying tactical combat and character customization system is very solid for the story missions (which require no grinding to speak of, as I recall), but the games tend to devolve into rocket tag in the postgame. Of course, nothing requires you to stick around for the postgame; it tends to consist of a few dozen bonus maps with ridiculously high-leveled enemies and not much else (i.e. no plot). Speaking of, the plots tend towards goofy-anime, which isn't really to my tastes but I'm usually willing to tolerate it. If you want to get a feel for how it plays and what the plots are like, there's a Let's Play of Disgaea D2 (a sequel to the first game, as opposed to Disgaea 2, which is the second Disgaea game but involves different characters).
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Nov 24, 2016 23:06
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Disgaea. I'm thinking of the first game in particular since that's the one I've played, and I've heard secondhand that the later ones close a lot of the loopholes that let you level through clever shenanigans instead of brute force. Pfft why would I play that trash when Final Fantasy Tactics Randomizer exists? It actually is a rogue-like! https://github.com/abyssonym/rumble_chaos_crashdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YikZ9HXd-g Rutibex fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Nov 24, 2016 |
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Nov 24, 2016 23:28
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Rutibex posted:Pfft why would I play that trash when Final Fantasy Tactics Randomizer exists? It actually is a rogue-like! Because putting grinding and permadeath in the same game is stupid and redundant. Grinding and permadeath are both mechanisms for extending playtime and squeezing more use out of the same content. Permadeath does it much better, because it scales inversely with mastery -- the better you are at a particular challenge, the less likely you are to die, the less time you spend on it, which is good because challenges you've already mastered are boring. It's not perfectly self-regulating (especially in games that are longer overall) since early content will also be seen again and again even if you pass through it quickly while endgame content will be seen more rarely thanks to the selection process, but that problem is endemic to gaming in general. The worst part of permadeath is that it encourages over-cautious play -- indulging in below-the-curve challenges, and thereby making the game boring because boring is statistically the best way to win. Grinding fills in for permadeath in mainstream titles because people hate the sense of loss that comes with permadeath, but people who've mastered roguelikes know they can just roll another character with the same build and get there soon enough. (And roguelikes, in general, are a far more mastery-focused genre than traditional RPGs.) Grinding squeezes more time out of the same content by making you do it over and over by fiat, which at best means deliberately encouraging the player to disengage mentally from your game (which is relaxing, but already you risk losing their interest) and at worst represents a tedious obstacle to the parts they actually want to play. On top of both mechanics serving the same purpose, implementing grinding on top of permadeath makes the worst aspect of permadeath worse by enabling it. Good permadeath games either don't give you the option to repeat low-level content, or (I've rarely seen this done, let alone done correctly, but in theory it would work) make the rewards of high-risk play so tremendous that the risks are worth taking. Or both*, ideally. * Once again DoomRL is the gold standard of roguelike design principles Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Nov 25, 2016 |
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Nov 25, 2016 01:16
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Uh excuse me Angband is the platonic ideal of roguelikes and it has both 
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Nov 25, 2016 01:20
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Arivia posted:Uh excuse me Angband is the platonic ideal of roguelikes and it has both https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9y5KR7_MNs
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Nov 25, 2016 01:21
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Dunno why people consider the Disgaea games excessively grindy in general; you can get through the main story just fine with minimal or no grinding, and there's sidequests and optional stuff to let you ignore even that. There's certainly postgame ridiculous content, but you can ignore that easily, and the main way to level up is by stacking experience boosts and other things, and not by grinding for dozens of hours.
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Nov 25, 2016 01:35
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I'm maybe remembering the wrong NIS game, but I thought basic power leveling in Disgaea was as simple as finding the right map with geo pyramid things to set off massive Chain combos wiping out practically the entire map in a few turns for crazy quick clear bonus?
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Nov 25, 2016 01:54
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You can get through it with little grinding. If you FUKKEN LOVE GRINDING jesus.
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Nov 25, 2016 01:57
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For specifics: I beat the original Disgaea playing mostly one story map after the other. I don't remember how long it took exactly, but let's lowball and say 20ish hours. I took a two-hour break in there once, to level up some reclassed characters. I ended the game at about level 45, and the final boss was 60ish; a notable but not insurmountable difference in the system.
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Nov 25, 2016 02:17
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Odddzy posted:I've got a question about desktop dungeons. How do you get good at it? Are there good youtube channels that explain how to go over strategy? I just dont get the game and i've really tried. Desktop Dungeons is a game with a sky-high skill ceiling. I've put in well over a hundred hours and while I've beaten the main storyline, I'm still slowly working through the hardest Vicious dungeons. Here is the most general advice (other than the obvious 'play the game a fuckton and learn all of the fiddly little optimizations') -Use your blackspace efficiently. In the early game it's usually appropriate to explore 25-30% of the map to set yourself up so that you're capable of fighting higher-level foes (getting glyphs, items, boosters, and maybe a god), but afterwards you ideally want to have as little exploration wasted as possible. It's good to have a way of getting resources from mana, either collecting slowed enemies via WONAFYT or WEYTWUT or farming piety through glyph use if you have an appropriate god, so you can make sure you're not wasting mp exploration. I generally have trouble being similarly efficient with not wasting health regen, but that's also a consideration. -Pick your fights carefully. As mentioned by others, fighting enemies your level generally yields no bonus experience, while still being relatively expensive in terms of resources. However, you usually have to be somewhat picky about which higher-level monsters you're more suitable to fight. For instance if you're a monk you want low-damage enemies and you want to avoid magical attacks, mana burn, poison, and curse, so you should go after higher-level Meat Men while generally ignoring Serpents, Bandits, and Wraiths. However, Serpents are easy fodder for a paladin with HALPMEH, Bandits are easy targets for any character not reliant on resistances, and Wraiths are vulnerable to Berserkers, Priests, and any fireball specialist. -If you can manage to level off of higher-level kills, you'll end up with a large pool of lower-level monsters that you can kill in one hit for free. Essentially, those 'popcorn' monsters are a resource you can use to level up in the middle of hard fights. In some cases (using slow/learning/assassin/goblin/yendor) you can set up several level ups in a row to get multiple free health/mp refills. Viewing enemies as a resource to be preserved and exploited is an important perspective shift. The closest I can think of to a good video series demonstrating reasonably high-level play is this playlist, which might be helpful. There are about ten runs starting from a basically blank kingdom. I think it was intended to be longer but it should probably a reasonable sample of what to do. FreeKillB fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Nov 25, 2016 |
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Nov 25, 2016 02:31
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So I picked up WASTED in the sale, and it's pretty cool, but why can't I bind SHIFT to anything?
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Nov 25, 2016 02:59
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John Lee posted:For specifics: I beat the original Disgaea playing mostly one story map after the other. I don't remember how long it took exactly, but let's lowball and say 20ish hours. I took a two-hour break in there once, to level up some reclassed characters. I ended the game at about level 45, and the final boss was 60ish; a notable but not insurmountable difference in the system. Yeah, like I said you don't need to grind to beat the story in Disgaea. It's just that the thing the game is most famous for is "level up a character to 9999, then reincarnate them and do it again and again because every time you reincarnate you get a bonus based on all the levels that character has ever gotten so this is necessary to make the theoretically strongest possible character." And that involves a poo poo-ton of grinding. So, to be frank, do a lot of the postgame missions. If you come out of the story missions at level 50, and the first postgame mission has enemies at level 200? You're gonna have to gain those levels somehow, and since it won't be by playing the story missions, it's gonna be grinding by at least some definitions. It's like, the story missions are Dragon Ball, and the postgame is the Buu Saga.
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Nov 25, 2016 03:06
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Ok, things I've learned in an evening of playing WASTED: - The hangover that makes enemies explode when killed is hilarious, but mostly, is a hilarious way to die. - gently caress the S.O.B. so hard. If I ragequit this game before finishing it, that's probably what's going to do it. It hasn't even killed me yet and I hate it so much. Questions I still haven't answered: - - Can I increase my stats? How? ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Nov 25, 2016 |
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Nov 25, 2016 04:01
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FreeKillB posted:The closest I can think of to a good video series demonstrating reasonably high-level play is this playlist, which might be helpful. There are about ten runs starting from a basically blank kingdom. I think it was intended to be longer but it should probably a reasonable sample of what to do. This guy is pretty good. I've just watched the first video, which covers some things I already knew, but it's super helpful. I can get about a third to halfway into the game before I stop being able to really progress with any kind of consistency, and it's clear to me now that I had fundamental misunderstandings of the strategies to take.
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Nov 25, 2016 04:11
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Jordan7hm posted:This guy is pretty good. I've just watched the first video, which covers some things I already knew, but it's super helpful. I can get about a third to halfway into the game before I stop being able to really progress with any kind of consistency, and it's clear to me now that I had fundamental misunderstandings of the strategies to take. Same, I just watched his run through the first dungeon and was impressed at his efficiency. Of course he spent the entire run complaining about how rusty he is and how non-optimally he is playing.
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Nov 25, 2016 06:49
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andrew smash posted:Same, I just watched his run through the first dungeon and was impressed at his efficiency. Of course he spent the entire run complaining about how rusty he is and how non-optimally he is playing. yeah, but he did a decent job pointing out how his play was non-optimal
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Nov 25, 2016 06:57
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I played streets of rogue all afternoon. Pretty fun
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Nov 25, 2016 12:47
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Axu with another big update, this time to improve the very start of the game in particular alongside a bunch more crammed in overall as usual: https://sites.google.com/site/axudev/changelog
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Nov 25, 2016 14:13
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ToxicFrog posted:- Can I increase my stats? How? As far as I know, nope, it's all equipment (and temporary buffs from meds). I didn't get that far but I never saw any stat-raising Boozes.
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Nov 25, 2016 17:21
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A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:As far as I know, nope, it's all equipment (and temporary buffs from meds). I didn't get that far but I never saw any stat-raising Boozes. There are stat raising boozes, but they are in the deep levels only (and relatively rare). The most OP booze is the one that lets you move faster while in stealth mode, since you can get the drop on everything much easier without wasting time moving through the level.
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Nov 25, 2016 19:15
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Combine it with the light foot booze and you're super fast until explosions chain fling you against the wall or you run into the SOB's minigun fire. Has there been any updates to Wasted recently, I played it religiously over the summer, but kinda burned out.
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Nov 26, 2016 15:01
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Just made it to floor 6 for the first time  I'm getting better at this, but it's really aggravating that you can't save and quit during a cooler run -- individual levels aren't that long but the cooler as a whole is big enough that I'd expect between-floor saves like DoomRL, at least. It helps that you're guaranteed an exit every 3 floors, but I don't often have large uninterrupted blocks of time in which to play. Cryptark's rogue mode has the same problem. 
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Nov 26, 2016 21:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Disgaea. I'm thinking of the first game in particular since that's the one I've played, and I've heard secondhand that the later ones close a lot of the loopholes that let you level through clever shenanigans instead of brute force. My thoughts on this are kind of scattered but Elona+ is a game where the grind is interesting and feels like an essential part of the design rather than a way to gate content. I think its partly the huge variety of things you can do to advance your character that are all rewarding means you can switch to a different task if it's getting repetitive. A few of the important ones (farming and restocking your shop) are timing based things that you can check in between dungeon diving sessions, simpler activities like cooking your whole harvest are pretty quick and pretty significant over time. (fishing on the other hand sucks and I refuse to do it) The sheer weirdness of a lot of the progression, like rerolling shoe materials into meat so you can eat them and increase your Speed, is a big part of the fun too. There's something really appealing to me about an RPG power curve where you have to spend the early levels being a vegetable farmer and courier service because you're not really strong enough to fight. It's like, you have to live a full and varied roguelike life, whereas in Caves of Qud for example your full degree of interaction with the world is horribly murdering everything and very occasionally getting people to like you enough that you don't have to kill them (usually by killing people they don't like) then dying suddenly and explosively. The moment to moment gameplay in Qud is definitely better but there's something important to me about being forced to just inhabit the world for a while. I haven't beaten the main quest yet so I can't speak to the insane late game grind but at least where I am I think the grind gives you a reason to do all the huge variety of things available in the game and gives them an importance they wouldn't have if you could just tear through the game in combat in ten hours.
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Nov 26, 2016 23:12
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I just caught up on the last 3000 posts and my big takeaway was: Holy poo poo IVAN is being developed again??
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Nov 28, 2016 19:58
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The win rate was creeping up too much, Something Had To Be Done.
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Nov 28, 2016 20:00
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Wait, it's actually possible to win in IVAN?
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Nov 28, 2016 20:55
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Angry Lobster posted:Wait, it's actually possible to win in IVAN? Well, you're still playing IVAN. It's all relative.
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Nov 28, 2016 20:58
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Jedit posted:I am not donating to the Hunger Clock, it not being convenient in the UK and because I want none of the games, but I have pimped it on multiple Twitch streams so hopefully a few people signed up. Stop the Hunger Clock ended up convincing all of 40 actual human beings to go forth into the wilds to fight hunger and get a game. That number is lower than I'd hoped. That said, a streamer by the name of LiveByFoma ran a roguelike marathon on Wednesday in support of the event and raised $4k for food charities, so that feels good. There we some stories of adventure too: Noble Charitable Nicemans posted:This donation was an adventure. It began simple at the start of the day, well, it was more of 10 O'clock but it still counts. I drove to my local Weiss and searched for a thanksgiving donation bag. Unfortunately they didn't seem to have it. I turned my sights to the next closest grocery store and yet again no luck, so I continued. No grocery store near me had this promotion nor any promotion going on for the Thanks Giving season. So, eventually, I decided I'd do it my dang old self. I'll admit openly that the site's presentation was sub-optimal -- I could joke about it being a roguelike themed event so the UI had to be bad, but still. That, and as said before, asking people to go out into the wild makes it an order of magnitude more difficult than push butan -> receive game. I'm not really sure if this was a good idea, though I have a year to think about if I'd do it again.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:07
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Stop The Hunger Clock prompted me to buy two prepackaged $10 parcels when I was grocery shopping last week. I don't want a game so I didn't submit my receipt, but consider that there may be one or two other weirdos like me who didn't add to your tally but were nevertheless influenced by the campaign.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:23
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A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:Stop The Hunger Clock prompted me to buy two prepackaged $10 parcels when I was grocery shopping last week. I don't want a game so I didn't submit my receipt, but consider that there may be one or two other weirdos like me who didn't add to your tally but were nevertheless influenced by the campaign. Well that's rad of you, and thanks. Are you sure you don't want a dmans key or something?
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Nov 29, 2016 00:42
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I didn't spend any of my own money but I did donate two turkeys I got from my job to a local food pantry last Monday, since Stop the Hunger Clock was the first thing that I thought of.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:56
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Have you posted a thread for it here? I'm sure the mods wouldn't mind.
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Nov 29, 2016 01:09
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Agean90 posted:Have you posted a thread for it here? I'm sure the mods wouldn't mind. Well the event is over, so maybe next time. As it was a roguelike themed food drive, I felt that all the updates that were necessary could fit in this thread.
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Nov 29, 2016 01:14
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Rutibex posted:Grinding is fun and good.
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Nov 29, 2016 01:26
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