Roguelikes: I never met@progression I didn't like

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Roguelikes: I never met@progression I didn't like

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

I just started playing Caves of Qud and found a build that I do pretty well with: Apostle with Beguile, Teleport, Esper and Unstable Genome.

My current character has also learned light manipulation, clairvoyance, temporal fugue and force bubble. I've got this awesome snapjaw warlord buddy who has leveled up so much he can tank a slumberling while I kill it with lasers and bullets. I made it to that named goat shaman and got him to wounded pretty easily but then the game froze. Kinda sucks because I found so much great loot between him and the village, which was the last place I saved. One of those goat man hornblower parties took out a merchant caravan for me. Some questions:

1) What do temporal clones have access to? It seems like they can use your equipped items and mutations, but I can't seem to get them to use my missile launcher, do I need to get it fully identified? I also could have sworn I've seen one pull out a freeze grenade, which I had in my inventory.

2) Is there anything I can do to make the game use less ram? It hits nearly 2 gigs right when I start it up.

3) What does the disable permadeath option actually do? I enabled it because I was afraid of losing a character to a crash, but I haven't actually died since I turned it on.

4) Is there any way to make the tiles larger? I have kind of a hard time noticing stuff like young ivory and chaingun turrets and I think it's because the tiles are pretty small.

5) Is there a way to locate the randomly generated notable locations on the map (merchants, snapjaw forts etc) without just wandering around and running into them?

Thanks

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 16:19

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 10:51

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Unormal posted:

Are you using the Steam version? You should use the Steam version if it's an option.

Yeah, this is the steam version.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 17:45

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

uPen posted:

I think I'm done with Qud for now. Between the menus being borked slowing down play and the insta-kills it's more frustrating than fun. Just lost a level 18ish character to a leering stalker after rounding a corner, never had a chance to respond. It's extremely annoying to lose a game with no input on the result, I rounded a corner and the stalker just happens to land 28 attacks in a row with no misses through 34 agility and went from full hp to dead before without a single input. Proper play seems to be taking time rewind and clairvoyance and peeking around any corner you encounter in the wilderness which is beyond tedious.

Ranged enemies should not be able to kill the player on the turn the player walks into line of sight of them. Melee enemies are fine, you know when you're walking into a room/corridor in such a way that an unseen enemy could melee you but with ranged enemies it's impossible.

I think i'm done with it until it becomes more stable. I had crashes right before killing Mammon and now right after beating Golgotha, and now my save file has been corrupted or something. It says it looks like it's from a previous version, but I don't think that's right considering the previous branches can't load it and I can load an older game on the current branch just fine.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 19:33

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Floodkiller posted:

They made CLONES OF HIM? HE CAN JUST SHOW UP ANYWHERE?!?

I've seen him just chilling in a fairly shallow level of the rust wells. There's no enemies there who will release him unless you get really unlucky so it's a pretty cool find.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2015 23:23

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

I really like the new ADOM graphics for 2 reasons.

1. They look pretty good.
2. They look like a Farmville style facebook game and will probably open up the genre to grannies.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 15:04

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

FerretDev posted:

Mid-rest encounters do happen, but yeah, they're pretty rare by design. You pretty much nailed the why of it too: I do want the occasional "oh crap!" moment out of it, but I don't want to turn it into something like old school DCSS item destruction where the mechanic feels so oppressive you feel obligated to go through an odd interface ritual like dropping all your potions or scrolls (or in this case, walking back to the previous level to rest) to defend yourself against it.

Woah, do you not have to drop all your potions and scrolls in crawl now? I wonder how long I've been doing that for no reason.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 20:21

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Awesome! posted:

renowned explorers has quite a bit of depth with picking your team to accomplish your strategy and then synergizing your research and followers and whatnot and choosing your route based on all these things. the combat is easy to grasp but is actually deeper than i thought at first since the mood system and emotions (basically buffs and debuffs) are really powerful and your enemies will try to turn the tables on you so you have to constantly be thinking ahead. you start with 2 resolve and get like 2 more after each successful expedition. each time a character dies in combat you lose 1 (all characters start with a revive spell to pick up downed friends) and if you hit 0 its game over. some events can also take resolve from you.

i feel like if you found ftl replayable this will be similar. you will be going through the same expeditions repeatedly but the layout in each one will change each time, like the sectors and nodes in ftl. and at least here the scottish highlands map feels different from the desert map as opposed to ftl where all the zones look the same.

I like Renowned Explorers but the boss fights in 4 star and 5 star areas are way too loving difficult, in my opinion anyway. It doesn't really feel anything like a roguelike to me, until I lose the game from 1 bad encounter. I kind of wish they had just made Reus 2, although I'm not sure where they'd go from Reus.

Angry Diplomat posted:

That's one thing I have to give ToME: even if the second half of the game is pretty much a massive slog, the final zone can be a brutal shitstorm and carelessness around the High Peak bosses will get you loving killed. The final boss fight is typically pretty challenging as well, unless you have some kind of insane Fears Doomed build. Even my most helldozery Cursed characters had to fight tactically and rely on Paladin Whatsername to take pressure off at least once.

The weird thing about the ToME final encounter, at least back when I was playing a ton of ToME, is that Elandar makes up 90% of the fight's difficulty, the portals another 9%, while Argoniel is a big mound of HP. I feel like if she was removed entirely it would just make the fight a bit shorter. Unless she's been buffed since I last fought her.

The Moon Monster fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jan 3, 2016

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 03:48

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Big Sean posted:

I've gotten pretty good at RE (although since stopped playing after I unlocked the Halloween treasures, ugh). A few combat tips:

Glass cannons tend to be a bad idea in my experience. You don't pick up that much damage output, and having more hp and defense is what allows you to tank the few more rounds you need to kill a few more enemies and get inbound damage beneath what you can tank / heal a turn

The most important weapons are the emotion books that give +20% to a given emotion. It's not intrinsically obvious, but the +20% applies to the base 25% that you get for heals on friendly abilities. I.e. you get basically double power heals, which is a big upgrade

Defensive items are important as well; I tend to think speech defense is more important (although having 0 armor is bad, so if that is the case deal with that first). Ranged physical damage is pretty rare, and its pretty easy to bottleneck melee physical damage. Also, 2/3 damage types are speech, so just more common generally.

Make sure to bring at least one healer. Hildegard is a great healer as she also heals herself, and the cooldown is reasonably short

AoE disable / debuff abilities are very helpful as well

On the tougher boss fights, particularly the final fight, being able to break up the enemies and quickly eliminate a few while falling back to a choke point is critical. The game is balanced such that getting mobbed is basically a death sentence, but normally you can move towards a more defensible position

I tried a few more games using this advice and have come to the conclusion that the secret to winning is to simply never go on the 4 and 5 star expeditions. Even with the best gear available and a beneficial fight mood I eventually find myself in some area where there are 8 enemies who can only take out 1 of per turn and just get ground down into defeat.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 16:13

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Rutibex posted:

To be perfectly fair, if Alpha Centauri or HoMM3 had Ascii graphics instead of tiles, no one would question if they where Rogue-likes. I mean Dwarf Fortress counts, right?

I think it's fair to call adventure mode a roguelike, but I doubt anyone would call fortress mode (which is what I assume people mean when they say "Dwarf Fortress") a roguelike if it weren't ascii. It's closer to The Sims.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 03:10

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

LordSaturn posted:

The real reason you hug the hallway is basic Thermopylae poo poo - you want to reduce the number of enemies that can reach you at once, since most enemies can only attack you while adjacent. If you enabled me to move four spaces in the time it would take to make one attack, I still wouldn't be wading into the room unless it was to dash to more cover. You need to disrupt that paradigm first.

Depths of Tolagal actually has a really fantastic tactical system, although the game is a bit simple-and-hard besides that.

Sil does a good job of this. You're often better off engaging a squad of orcs in a large room rather than trying to fight them one at a time in a hallway. Not always, though.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2016 02:17

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

I decided to try Renowned Explorers: International Society again and it finally clicked with me. Very fun game, the graphics sort of bely how hardcore it is, at least on the default "classic/roguelike" difficulty setting.

Has anyone here managed to beat the 5 star expeditions on the default difficulty? I usually go 1/2/2/3/4 or 1/2/3/3/4 depending on how strong I feel like my team is. Even on a run where I had over double the renown needed to win, the 4 star expedition boss fight felt very challenging. It seems like you'd need to build a team with extremely good encounter prowess and then focus your expeditions around maximum gold efficiency so you can outfit everyone with top tier gear.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2017 00:16

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

I feel like in general use the term "roguelike" has pretty much been reduced to "run based game where you develop a character and maybe has permadeath or kinda/sorta/not really permadeath". It's kind of like how in the late 90s/early 00s every game with progression beyond "you picked up a shotgun and now your dude has a shotgun" was an RPG or had "RPG elements".

# ¿ Jan 17, 2019 23:26

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Jack Trades posted:

Ye there was enough said about that forum that makes me not wanna touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Didn't it start as an offsite CSPM? Nuff said.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2020 00:54

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

LordSloth posted:

Well, my joke was sad, and now it�s dead.
$6.69 for the price would be nice.

Since it was in the mega itch bundle, anyone been playing Midboss? I�ve had it for a while but I�m wondering if I should set aside the time to beat it now that I have the excess of free time. I�ve played it before but other roguelikes and lites were a priority at the time.

I played it a bit but it suffers from The Dredmor Problem where attaching an animation to every action slows things down too much for a roguelike. Maybe there's an option to turn them off, I dunno.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2020 00:09

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

goferchan posted:

What really makes it work (and what turns some people off) is that unlike classic Minesweeper, every level is not necessarily solvable without guessing.

FYI you can absolutely get minesweeper levels that are unsolvable without guessing.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 14:18

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 10:51

The Moon Monster: Dec 30, 2005

Aside from the meta-progression Necrodancer ticks pretty much all of the boxes. It's a rhythm game which isn't exactly normal for a roguelike, but you can even turn that off if you want.

Impermanent posted:

Imo the reason people are pedants about the term roguelike is bc games like dungeon crawl stone soup are a niche of a niche of a niche and imo it's defensible to be defensive of something so small.

Although it's not like the bandying about of roguelike has withered the genre at all. Caves of Qud and (arguably) dwarf fortress are close to mainstream, and there's so many new roguelikes it's hard to keep track of them, Even moreso than the days of infinite *bands. Hades is bringing a lot of attention in to a kind of repetition-and-discovery playstyle that is very close to the roots of the genre.

Yeah, it's just kind of a bummer since its use as a marketing term for indie platformers/ccgs with some amount of randomization has completely eclipsed the actual roguelike scene. 90% of the time I hear someone use the term it's "I hate roguelikes" referring to stuff like Rogue Legacy or Slay the Spire from someone who has never even heard of a "true roguelike". To be fair they probably wouldn't be super into ADoM either...

The Moon Monster fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Oct 11, 2020

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 14:07

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