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Stryke11 said:
Ok, it's pretty clear that many people here dig the Rogue-likes. While I have become addicted to Dwarf Fortress (albeit with a graphics pack) I can't seem to get into Roguelikes, and since they are so popular I know I'm missing something.
I have played a few, but of the main ones I have Slash 'em, a Nethack variant. I use a graphical 2d tileset. I have heard about the depth of the programming and how basically anything can be done, but I'm not seeing any of that. I usually die between floor 2-3, I don't know how to use stores, and its pretty basic repetitive move around, search, kick open doors, pick up random stuff, and fight stuff.
Since these games get so much praise I know I am missing something or doing something wrong. Please help me get the full experience! Is there a tutorial? Tips? Did I pick the wrong game to start with? I've played a relatively new roguelike called Drash and that one is pretty fun, but it doesn't claim to have the depth of Nethack and Slash 'Em.
Anything y'all who like these types of games can share to increase my enjoyment and understanding of the genre would be well appreciated. I have seen how imposing DF was until I learned it and so I'm expecting a similar epiphany once I understand the true Rogue-likes.
Thanks!
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For me, the fun of roguelikes (Nethack in particular) is unraveling the mysteries of the items:
"Nearly every item in the game interacts on some level with another item or object in the game. For instance, if you find a wand and you don't know what it does, you can use one of the charges of the wand to draw on the ground. The game will give you a message such as, "The floor is riddled with bullet holes" indicating that you have a wand of magic missiles. If flames shot from the tip then you'd have a wand of fire. Sometimes nothing obvious happens. Maybe you have a wand of invisibility and you can't see what you drew on the ground. You'll have to find another way to discover what it is. If you find a potion, you can take a sip of it to try to figure out what it is, but you don't want to drink the whole thing. It might be a potion of polymorph and turn you into a lizard! Or maybe it'll turn you into a red dragon... Every item can eventually be determined through experimentation or by discovering what other items are and using process of elimination."
The problem with roguelikes is the extremely high opportunity cost of getting into the game. For instance, in order to really get into Nethack you have to memorize ridiculous amounts of game data. You need to know all the in-game messages that give away what a wand is when you engrave, plus you need to know which wand it might be if you receive no message at all.
You also need to memorize the relative costs of items so that you can ID them by buying/selling them at shops. You also need to account for your charisma modifier and the random chance of a 25% or 33% markup. It goes on and on. The only real way to learn these things is by dying. Over and over and over again. So it's tough to get into these games.
If you'd like to try something a little easier, you can try Lost Labyrinth (
www.lostlabyrinth.com) or maybe Incursion (
http://www.incursion-roguelike.org/index.html). They're still complicated, but the opportunity cost in learning these games is somewhere in the neigborhood of hours rather than days.
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Back to MoM for a second, the manual is wrong. Retreating flyers rarely if ever get killed. Sprites themselves may not be that good, but the idea is to stack flying ranged attackers into the same army. You get a highly mobile force that 80% of the monsters in the game can't even attack. Sprites are just the lowest level of that concept. Eventually I put Chaos Channels on all my ranged units and group the flyers together. But our play styles are very different. I'm just in it for the fun, I like to get as many goodie huts as possible before the AI.
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