Favorite games

[Baalz]

Hmmm, am I missing something WRT Dwarf Fortress? I've spent hundreds of hours on rougelikes, so the interface isn't too much of a barrier, but I feel like I'm playing Sims: dwarf. I guess I was looking for something more like Dungeon Keeper and less picking out the color or of chairs and cabinetry. Should I give it another whirl or is this one just not up my alley?

[lch]

Baalz said:
Hmmm, am I missing something WRT Dwarf Fortress? [...] I guess I was looking for something more like Dungeon Keeper and less picking out the color or of chairs and cabinetry.

Again, I can heartily recommend gardening. It's very therapeutic.

[sector24]

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!

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.

----

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.

[lch]

sector24 said:
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.

I always was under the impression that the closer you were to the edge of the battleground and the further away from your enemy, the higher your chance of survival when fleeing. So the best before fleeing would be to go for the shortest way to the battleground border with your units and flee then. True?

[Taqwus]

Stryke11 said:
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.

Modern roguelikes tend to be far more complicated than the original Rogue. (Which has its own irritations, e.g. Aquators).

Two fairly prominent families are the Nethack family and the Angband family. The Nethack games tend to be somewhat shorter, more purely dungeon crawls, more capricious (*lots* of opportunity for extreme fortune / misfortune)... and yes, very irritating if you're not either a veteran player or playing with a copy of the latest spoiler files.

The Angband family tends to be longer and more involved -- many include overland travel between towns (on the surface, no less) and dungeons and what-not. They both require and reward caution -- there's somewhat less arbitrariness, but it's also harder to save yourself by taking a bad chance. Casually entering a full graveyard is a -bad- idea no matter what you have...

You need to invest time in increasing stats, covering crucial resistances and the odd immunity, stockpiling those mana / healing potions -- easier to do than in Nethack, but slow.

Among the Angband family, PernAngband (now refocused a bit and called Tales of Middle Earth, IIRC) included quite the odd variety -- including a character type which could possess the bodies of slain monsters and so forth; there was an ability to forge new magic items; and so forth. Very funky.

[B0rsuk]

There are three other roguelikes worth mentioning here (alphabetical order):

A.D.O.M.
A roguelike that has a lot in common with RPG games. It has a story, quests, etc. It has a lot of interesting ideas, depth, and memorable places. It's just fun. It was my first roguelike. It has some cons, too: it's not being developed anymore (bugs are not going to be fixed, etc), story gets annoying after a while because you have to redo quests in almost the same order each time you start anew. It has some almost worthless skills, like bridge building. It's quirky and on many occasions plain unfair, without a chance to escape.

DoomRL:
The simplest of the three, but it's also refreshing. A breath of fresh air in the world of roguelikes. It's quite simple, but deffinitely fun. Not only it's the most notable Sci-fi roguelike around, but also one where ranged weapons (not spells) actually matter. Even better, ranged weapons pack a punch and it makes tactics important.

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (Stone Soup variant)
http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net
My favourite roguelike. First, it prides itself on being mostly a tactical game and has few quirks. Mechanics are mostly transparent to the player. Spoilers are of little help in Crawl. It's skill-based rather than class-based, meaning you can shape your character in any way you wish. It has a lot of interesting, innovative spells and items. It's technically more advanced than ADOM, has more gizmos, much more varied random levels etc. It has really good interface - for example you can travel between explored levels by just pressing a few keys, auto-explore long, dull corridors until something interesting happens, etc. Gods of Crawl are a lot more interesting than those in Nethack or ADOM. Each of them has its likes and dislikes and rewards (mostly) something different. Crawl has a lot of depth, a lot of variety (many enemies which require unique tactics, for example giant bats which are several times faster than you and use hit&run tactics), and is also quite fair. It rarely has instant deaths which you can't prevent by playing safer. Also, it's almost immune to scumming - there are very few ways to cheat the system, and you can't, for example, stay on the same level to grind forever (Nethack is infamous for this). Crawl has quite high difficulty, and wanting you dead is how it shows its love. Running away is a common survival tactic in Crawl. But, as said before, it rarely kills you without a warning.

[Endoperez]

I'd suggest that you go to rec.games.roguelike.development and try out the different 7DRL entries. They are roguelikes done in 7 days, and as such are much smaller, easier and simpler than the "normal" roguelikes.

Roguelikes are games where player skill matters as much, or even more, than character skill. Unfortunately, for most roguelikes this means that to have a chance of completing the game, you have to read some spoilers. Some are easier on this regard: all 7-day roguelikes, DoomRL, perhaps something like Dungeon Crawl where you need tactics and good equipment choice, and where you can choose what to tackle next to avoid things you can't handle yet.

[B0rsuk]

Endoperez said:
Roguelikes are games where player skill matters as much, or even more, than character skill. Unfortunately, for most roguelikes this means that to have a chance of completing the game, you have to read some spoilers.

You are confusing game lore / mechanics obscurity and skill. Skill and tactics matters in Crawl, and if you point out an area where Crawl is unfair, the developers will often try to remedy that. Case in point: I managed to get Scroll of Enchant Weapon III and Enchant Armour changed. That is, now their description (at least in trunk) should mention, that they can be used to make some weapon brands permanent, or transform hides into armour.
Nethack is often taken as an example where spoilers have extreme impact on success. Crawl tries to reduce the need for spoilers. Some essential things like racial skill aptitudes are now a part of the manual.