KickStarter Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM) - now available on Steam and GOG

[Johannes]

If you don't get herbs somewhere, half the races have like 8 toughness, which translates to about 50 hp at level 12 or so, or in other words, getting one shot by all sorts of shit. Alternately, 8 willpower makes ball spells worthless and leaves you horribly vulnerable to confusion.

And I'd be pretty fucking pissed if I went through a sidequest and got rewarded with something like a corrupted piece of crap that is only useful for an ending I can't get.

And if you sipped from a pool, you weren't relying on skill jackass. What if you'd gotten doomed? How is the fact that you didn't get doomed or teleportitis etc. 'skill'? You just felt the RNG vibes? I assume that is also why you didn't get fucked by door traps, pure skill, nothing to do with conveniently not having an explosion go off and wrecking your shit. Preserver drop also far more lucky than the wish tbh. There's no way in hell you have a decent winrate playing this way. You mention a 'most promising pc before this', but no mention of the actual number of times you had to run though the SMC before getting this character. There's certainly no skill involved in not having blink dogs spawn in the big room while you wait for herbs to grow enough to get crowned, and once they are there, getting rid of them is basically impossible unless you burn like 20 charges on a teleport wand to hunt them all down while they're blinking around. Good luck leading stuff to the stairs if 2-3 summoners show up at the same time near the stairs while you're at the other end of the cave dicking with herbs. Of course, I'm sure you controlled what spawned by pure skill.

Edit: Grey elf duelist without raising toughness. Let me know how that works out for you. I'd lay money that you die to either a vortex or some sort of breath weapon.

Of course you burn through characters like hell when going for a speedrun! The whole point is to take risks that pay off, not have a decent winrate. And the reason to do challenges like this, is because beating the game normally is easy. Going against the odds is more thrilling than going through the game safely.

Blink dogs aren't a huge issue really - a drake barbarian with good play can likely fight them off, I'd see that as a boon for the teleport control their bodies give. You don't have to kill them all off necessarily, just gather your herbs while fighting them. You'll always get swamped by something there, be it from summoners, blink dogs, or just plain normal spawns.


What's so hard to believe in that there's a lot of players who can consistently win the game without resorting to stairhopping, mass pickpocket, wish factory, or the like? Hell, maybe I'll do a playthrough on sunday if I feel like it.

 

[baturinsky]

Ah, ADOM. Reinstalled it recently. Went two steps from starting village, was raped by a mob of three or so dozens of barbarians. Uninstall.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The thing is, the only thing attracting me to ADOM is the assortment of lategame sidequests and stuff to do, but 90% of that shit is irrelevant if you don't save Khelly, and saving Khelly requires either retarded amounts of luck or some extreme farming bullshit so you can do places like ToEF before he dies. And if you're going to do all that shit, you also need to put off being crowned because it requires alignment dancing bullshit.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

This all sounds about as fun as scraping your nuts with a cheese grater. I'll take Zangband thanks!

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Don't know about ~insane difficulty~ everyone talking about. I first encountered mention of ADOM in russian (paper) game journal, Навигатор игрового мира, one of the first issues. IIRC, it was in late '97. So when I first got my internet connection, in '98, first thing I did was to fire up a FTP client and, going by trial and error, to download ADOM. Don't even remember what version it was, but I really liked it. To learn it I savescummed with my first three or so characters (I don't remember why I didn't come to ADOM forums, either I wasn't confident in my english, or some other reason). After I did that (I savescummed only to a point, not even 'till midgame), game became hard, but doable when starting with new chars.

Still, I only finished it once, but that's not because it was insanely hard, more like because I'm a both procrastinator and completionist. While I try to complete all available content in a game, it's often becomes tedious and then I abandon it.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

This all sounds about as fun as scraping your nuts with a cheese grater. I'll take Zangband thanks!

It has nothing to do with the game though. It's just one player reading tons of spoilers and treating doing stuff he shouldn't even know about as the goal of playing the game.

Edit: Grey elf duelist without raising toughness. Let me know how that works out for you. I'd lay money that you die to either a vortex or some sort of breath weapon.

So?

 

[spectre]

If you don't get herbs somewhere, half the races have like 8 toughness, which translates to about 50 hp at level 12 or so, or in other words, getting one shot by all sorts of shit. Alternately, 8 willpower makes ball spells worthless and leaves you horribly vulnerable to confusion.

Dwarven trainer is your friend and aye, training is good for ye.
Though if it bothers you, play tougher races (dwarves maybe) until you get comfortable. You can choose a class+race combo and answer the starting questions so as to maximize the stats.
I don't get the whining, yes, elves are supposed to be weak. Some classes get a +5 chainmail to mitigate that, but you should either learn to run away from things that kill you or actively work to mitigate that weakness.

The thing is, the only thing attracting me to ADOM is the assortment of lategame sidequests and stuff to do, but 90% of that shit is irrelevant if you don't save Khelly, and saving Khelly requires either retarded amounts of luck or some extreme farming bullshit so you can do places like ToEF before he dies. And if you're going to do all that shit, you also need to put off being crowned because it requires alignment dancing bullshit.

So uh... maybe that ADOM thing isn't really for you then?

I think you're making a big noob mistake here, spoiling yourself too much and wanting to do an ultra ending before you even grasp the very basics of the game. It doesn't work that way.
Just to set some perspective, people have been known to win this game for the first time only after playing in for a decade, and I am not saying that you should play it for an absurd amount of time before you can win this,
what I am saying is, there is a lot to learn about the game, don't expect to read the walkthrough and tank like a mofo. It's all a process and totally unlike the spoon-feeding games of today when hard difficulty is really medium, you should actually beat it at easy then move to medium and then go in hard.

ADOM is very OCD-unfriendly, in my experience, most people (me included) get tangled in beating the game in some sort of an imaginary "perfect" way and get lost grinding it for hours.
Oh, so I just got a ring of djinni summoning, let me grind the infinite dungeon for 10 hours so I can get two more.
In reality you should just pick a dwarven priest, pick some sidequests if you feel like it, go down to the caverns of chaos and kick some butt with whatever spell and artifact weapon you can get your hands on.
If you can't enjoy that kind of ride, why bother with ultra-endings?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

<raxvulpine> Anden: I have decided (I'm farming in my current game) that pudding farming absolutely sucks and is mind-numbing.
<raxvulpine> It's so boring I've stopped doing it at work.

 

[Johannes]

I haven't actually ever done an Ultra ending, too many things you have to align just right for a notion that doesn't really seem that interesting. I've gotten to the Chaos Plane once though doing an Ordinary Chaos God ending though, which actually makes for harder fights since you corrupt at a faster pace then, per being crowned chaotic. I think I died there fighting Andor Drakon, but I can't remember too clearly.

But if you want to play the game and enjoy it, you gotta be down with the basic exploring of dungeons - that going around and killing things and gathering their loot is fun in itself already. And honestly the most interesting fights in the game are all already included in the normal ending path - the Chaos Dragon and Emperor Moloch aren't that interesting in the end, Chaos Plane is cool I suppose to the extreme time restraint, but still the basic Elemental Temples, Greater Vaults, D50, and such, or just interesting scenarios you encounter in ordinary dungeon levels, are mostly more interesting - at least if you haven't buffed your PC to the levels where even those are trivial fights.
The more recklessly you push forward (adjust for your skill level ofc), the more interesting fights you will have. I don't really feel bad about losing a character at all, even if it was far down the line. Getting to tough, interesting situations is more important than winning.

I really don't get what's the lure of endgame quests you've never personally even seen, just read about on the internet.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Aaaaaaand she died. Stunned and killed by a critically wounded flesh golem :D . What's next. Maybe a Mindcrafter?

 

[Damned Registrations]

I just don't get the appeal of not even trying to win. Why not just wander in the wilderness until you starve? Think of all the interesting fights you can have against swamp hydras trying to arrow them to death before they catch up to you!

If I wanted to play the same few hours of gameplay over and over again, DoomRL is far better at the concept, because it doesn't involve things like door traps of pure bullshit (unless you grind two skills to detect them.) And I don't need a fucking webpage open to avoid getting oneshot by something completely mundane looking. My character will also acquire more than 1 useful perk before kicking the bucket.

Besides which, the list of stuff you can do in ADOM is pretty small. Without herb farming, altars, or any meaningful use of skills (weaponsmiths LOL), it's basically just a slog of easy combat. Do you really consider killing a hundred zombies in the graveyard to complete that quest an interesting situation? Whatever kills you won't be an interesting situation, but some random crit/berserk/door trap/confusion etc. Where does the excitement come from? The random wish or artifact you get once every 20 games?

I didn't find anything about the ToEF especially interesting, I just lured everything through the tunnel I mined in so it was a 1v1 fight while chugging healing constantly. Would it have been more exciting if I knew I had 50/50 odds of dying to the ACW outright because I still had 50 hp and absolutely nothing I could do about it? I don't see how.

 

[Johannes]

I just don't get the appeal of not even trying to win.

It's not about not trying to win. It's about trying to win in as cool a fashion as you can.

Besides which, the list of stuff you can do in ADOM is pretty small. Without herb farming, altars, or any meaningful use of skills (weaponsmiths LOL), it's basically just a slog of easy combat. Do you really consider killing a hundred zombies in the graveyard to complete that quest an interesting situation? Whatever kills you won't be an interesting situation, but some random crit/berserk/door trap/confusion etc. Where does the excitement come from? The random wish or artifact you get once every 20 games?

I didn't find anything about the ToEF especially interesting, I just lured everything through the tunnel I mined in so it was a 1v1 fight while chugging healing constantly. Would it have been more exciting if I knew I had 50/50 odds of dying to the ACW outright because I still had 50 hp and absolutely nothing I could do about it? I don't see how.

It's pretty easy to avoid dying to random traps or crits on most PCs, as soon as you have any amount of HP. Don't let your HP get low and don't get into melee if you can't handle it.

I'll agree that the first half an hour (or more, if you play slowly) of a game can be pretty straightforward, but pretty soon you'll have an assortment of potions, wands, scrolls, different weapons/armor/missiles you can switch to suit your needs, possibly spells, tactics settings, movement patterns... Judging what resources to use when.

I wouldn't recommend to fight the ACW with 50hp probably ever, even a GE wizard or the like will have more than that fast. Higher double digits is still doable if you've gotten some good spells or potions (like blindness), and you use good tactics to avoid ever being in a spot where the ACW could properly attack you. It's more about whether you go into fights with a 90% chance or 98% chance of winning, not 50/50 odds.

 

[garren]

New ADOM title score:
http://www.reverbnation.com/soundwizard/song/22407260-khelavasters-prophecy?1336410755

I kinda like it

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2015/02/announcing-adom-r56.html

Announcing ADOM R56...

Hi everyone! We are approaching the ADOM Steam release... R56 hopefully will be one of the very last releases before Steam (I still expect one or two more but right now we focus only on fixing serious technical issues and stabilizing features for Steam - sadly the devil remains in the details).

ADOM R56 thus offers lots of fine tuning... especially in the graphical department... as well as many bug fixes. Details can be found as usual in the change log.

ADOM R56 is available to both the closed circle of prerelease testers - from the usual place - or for the Steam prerelease testers (ADOM should automatically update there).

Please report all irregularities and bugs you see! Hopefully we soon are finally on Steam and can return to a more aggressive development pace!!

I understand from this that the game has some kind of hidden Steam beta version. Is there anybody here who Indiegogo'd ADOM back in 2012 and owns it? I'd be interested in learning its AppID.

 

[MaskedMan]

333300

 

[Infinitron]

ADOM R57 has been released

Hi everyone!

We are proud to announce ADOM R57 - yet another closed prerelease test version. It's available from the usual download site for anyone in the closed prerelease tester circle. You can find the change log here.

This release is another bug fix release while we are preparing for the Steam release. Our current plan is to:

• have maybe one other closed bug fix release (if any serious problems are found in R57)
• have a public ADOM release (ADOM 1.2.0p23 is more than a year old and there is so much new stuff that we want to have some public feedback on all the new features before going to Steam).
• then have the Steam release.

Realistically we are half a year behind our time plan and the Steam release probably will be happening mid-June.

In the meantime we are fine tuning the current version and I'm finally back to work on the ADOM RPG release to finally get this shipped. Other commitments of Team ADOM probably will prevent an earlier Steam release (as sad as that is).

Once the initial Steam version is out feature development will pick up speed greatly once again - right now we just are hesitant to introduce major new feature to prevent any new game breaking problems.

Another big change will be that I will end access to the prerelease tester circle at the end of April. All people who have bought access will naturally continue to have access to prerelease versions but we won't allow any new entries. This step will streamline the commercial future of ADOM (commercial via Steam, Gog and others, free for the rest). Prerelease versions will remain limited to the then current circle of testers.

Now go and play R57 - as always we are looking for feedback on its stability and any remaining major issues that might be a problem when releasing to Steam.

 

[moraes]

Why has the roguelike thread been unstickyed?

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2015/07/adom-r58-is-available-now-for-everyone.html

ADOM R58 is available now... for everyone!

Team ADOM is very happy to announce the release of ADOM R58 (version 1.15.0). This release is a very peculiar release in many respects:

• On one hand it's not that big as far aschangesgo. We are still fine-tuningsome annoying issues we want to get rid off before the Steam release and which are very hard to fix.
• On the other hand it's our biggest release ever: Jochen built 59 (!!!) different binary versions for both Steam and the public. This probably makes ADOM the most flexible roguelike game ever as far as platform support goes!
• Additionally it's our first public release since ADOM 1.2.0p23 (released on the 10th of May 2014 - more than a year ago). The amount of changes since then is mind-blowing - expect a very different and quite advanced game if you remember that old version: We have fixed hundreds of bugs and added at least as many exciting new details and feature - too many to recount here.
• It's ask the first release with two versions: the Deluxe version for prerelease testers and Steam beta program members on one hand and the Non-Deluxe public version. We are very curious for the reactions to the public version as source code management has become quite difficult and we hopefully didn't introduce any major problems here.
• Oh, and if you wonder about the difference between Deluxe and Non-Deluxe: Visit the new (well, kind of) of ADOM home page. It explains the differences and at some point we will do a version comparison chart.

ADOM is available from several sources:

• Prerelease testers can download it from the usual location.
• If you have a Steam access key the latest version will be updated automatically.
• We have provided download torrents for the various public versions.
• Very soon it will also be available from IndieDB (uploads running right now; they should be available in a couple of hours at most).

While we for the moment have lost some speed due town extremely busy real life (I never worked as much as this year), yet another tragedy on team ADOM and high quality ambitions we still are on track. I've also been wrestling with the final editing of ADOM RPG (finally, it's long overdue).

More updates to come... now play the game and provide feedback !

Thomas & Team ADOM

http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com/2015/07/adom-r59-available-as-public-release.html

ADOM R59 available as a public release




Directly on the heels of ADOM R58 (version 1.15.0) follows ADOM R59 (version 1.15.1).




We messed up the public release by introducing a bug due to an incomplete deactivation of the achievements system. This bug has been fixed and you now are free to go and play ADOM R59 with its awesome slew of new features!




For prerelease testers and Steam beta users nothing has been changed as the bug only applied to the public version (so you can and will continue to play R58 for the time being).




Find all the details in yesterdays post and enjoy the game. IndieDB has been updated first and all the other sources will be up to date within 24 hours (so many binaries to upload - we need to rethink our strategy there ;-) ). And here's theshortest change log ever ;-) Let us know what you think!

 

[nomask7]

Does anyone here understand the subtleties of the praying mechanic? Like is there some cool-down time between a certain amount of prayers, or is there a hard-limit to how many prayers you can do safely?

I thought I could just sacrifice monsters on an altar to increase my piety until I could safely pray again, but while that seemed to work for a while, it then suddenly no longer worked after all, and my hero got massacred. Made me stop playing, as I have no intention of testing this until I figure it out, but perhaps someone here can enlighten me.

 

[garfield666]

Does anyone here understand the subtleties of the praying mechanic? Like is there some cool-down time between a certain amount of prayers, or is there a hard-limit to how many prayers you can do safely?

I thought I could just sacrifice monsters on an altar to increase my piety until I could safely pray again, but while that seemed to work for a while, it then suddenly no longer worked after all, and my hero got massacred. Made me stop playing, as I have no intention of testing this until I figure it out, but perhaps someone here can enlighten me.

maybe this will be of use http://adomgb.sweb.cz/adomgb-0-2.html#023

 

[nomask7]

Thanks, I actually managed to find some good info further down:

"In general the cost of a prayer or unanswered prayer is the base cost multiplied by a factor that increases incredibly fast according to how many OF THAT KIND OF PRAYER (or how many unanswered prayers) you have had with that character."

Why does this game want to rape me so bad?

Anyway, there's also info for calculating this stuff. But I guess the short answer to all this is: praying is a viable escape-from-death at first if you get lucky with altars, but then at least for a while you have to be pretty damn careful with it. Not sure what happens in mid-game or end-game, since I've never gotten that far.

 

[Elwro]

Getting an altar early in the game can be wonderful if you can sacrifice many monsters on it. While I never pre-crowned (not sure if that was the term), being able to see which items are cursed or not and to bless your water can be life-saving!

 

[nomask7]

That too.

I've gotten to Dwarf Town, but the game gets pretty rough around those parts. If I can no longer use prayers there I might as well give up.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

It has nothing to do with the game though. It's just one player reading tons of spoilers and treating doing stuff he shouldn't even know about as the goal of playing the game.

I can see your point, but isn't the heavy metagaming basically required if you want a snowball's chance in hell of winning? Last I looked (years ago) it was basically a decision to be a committed OCD player or simply accept that you have no chance (thus the cheese grater on the nuts).

 

[Infinitron]

Closing in to the Steam release: Indie Game PR agencies?


Hi everyone!

Things have been pretty silent in the past couple of months (except for two releases ;-) ) and we still are not on Steam. The reasons as usual are varied but we now finally are very close to the release as can be seen by the issues to be fixed that still are on our list. We expect one more public release for stability testing and barring any more important problems then should be ready to go.

One of the issues concerns press related stuff (press kit, etc.). I recently was wondering if any of you out there have had experiences with Indie PR agencies (or heard about such experiences). There seem to be a couple of companies out there that specialize on handling public relations for Indie Games and I'm pondering whether this might help the Steam release given our limited time in 2015. Visibility always is good and I might be tempted to invest some bucks in such an agency... does anybody have knowledge about costs, effectiveness, etc?

Thanks for any pointers!
Thomas

ADOM R60 released to the general public: Final release before Steam?


Hi everyone!

Team ADOM is happy to announce the public release of ADOM R60. It is available from the usual download sites, all summarized on our beautiful new download page.

ADOM R60 again is a major bugfix release and we by now hope to have closed all issues that prevented us from going to Steam. All changes and adjustments are listed on our also beautiful new change log page.

Personally I was someone shocked that two days ago we discovered that spell animations for ball spells had not been working for weeks. Neither we nor anybody out there seems to have noticed o_O

So our intention is to do one final (?) round of feedback. If no more major problems are discovered we intend to release R61 to Steam and finally pick up steam (pardon the pun) after that by returning to adding new features instead of just focussing on bug fixing and stabilization. Sadly one bug already has been found during the 9-hour-long deployment process for all 59 (!) versions of ADOM we (meaning Jochen) have to deploy for a public release: the (more) hint in tutorial mode is not working in the way intended.

So we have to ask everyone out there: Test R60 as intensely as possible and try out everything. And then please provide feedback in our issue manager regarding any problems that you might encounter. We really want the Steam version to be the most stable release possible and need your help in this! And we finally want to have it out in the open to restart adding tons of awesome features (which we currently dare not do out of fear of wrecking the initial Steam release).

And now go playing !