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Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup questions/thread

Dirk Diggler

Scholar
Joined
Aug 24, 2009
Messages
4,946
Sludge Elf Stalker was VERY good up until he ran into an Orc Wizard that turned invisible and whupped his ass with a stick.

It seems that I run along with no challenge until I find one BAMF who I can't even touch. I think I'm going to change something radical next time, this is getting frustrating.
 

Castanova

Prophet
Joined
Jan 11, 2006
Messages
2,949
Location
The White Visitation
Spriggans seem to be wonderful for speed runs. I was watching hyperbolic speed run a Spriggan Enchanter. He got the Shoals rune within about 3,000 turns when I tuned out to play my own game. I checked back, though, and he died trying for the Snake Pit rune, I think it was. Being able to not only run away from just about any enemy but also run THROUGH a crowd of dangerous enemies is just incredibly powerful.
 

Malakal

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Messages
10,266
Location
Poland
I tend to avoid low hp chars as they demand extreme caution and attention. BAM one crystal spear late game and You are dead from full hp. This means no spriggans or deep elves for me. And no kobolds, halflings, high elves are borderline.

@Unicorn
Try running away. You dont have to defeat every single enmy on the level, often You will simply have to come back later with more exp. This is a good tip and very important in crawl. Orc warrior on DL2? Dont fight him!
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Yeah, definitely. My 3-rune halfling hunter ran into Ijyb, the weakest unique there is, on his way back out of the dungeon because I'd originally left him alive and sleeping to descend past him. I just plain won't fight any unique, ghost or OOD monster in the first 3-4 DLs unless I have a really nice trick of some kind. There's too much chance even the weaker uniques are packing a nasty wand, among other reasons.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
Part of the problem is being ABLE to escape them though. That's why I'm so drawn to the spriggans; when you see a orc priest/wizard/centaur/imp/snake you don't want to mess with, you can just run the fuck away. Try that with most characters and you get your ass bitten all the way to the stairs, which they follow you up anyways. :roll: Most other roguelikes let you escape with teleport scrolls, but crawl's have this giant delay just made to fuck you over.

If you want an easy early game, try an enchanter. Confuse does wonders for escaping enemies until everything becomes enchantment immune later on. And for a measly 2 mana you can one shot anything sleepable with a stab skill of 5 or so and a plain dagger. You open the hydra like a pillowcase!!! +2000 xp. :cool:

For something completely different but also early game raping, try a troll. Their unarmed combat is just beastly. I still want to get a slime worshipping troll going, seems like it'd be a blast, melting everything on the level and mutating yourself into some horrible abomination of melee doom.
 

Castanova

Prophet
Joined
Jan 11, 2006
Messages
2,949
Location
The White Visitation
On that note, what IS the late game for a flimsy Enchanter? I can't imagine you can Hibernate/Confuse an Ancient Lich... but then winning morgue files don't show much branching out into Conjurations typically. Does a late game Enchanter play just like a magically buffed stabber? Do you sneak past the Orb Guardians? :lol:
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
It took forever for orb guardians to wake up and attack my halfling, who just did halfass stabbing with a long blade and like 16 stealth. I bet they can be pillowcased!! more often than not.

Whenever I watch someone playing a late game spriggan on akrasiac they seem to be stabbing stuff off of normal sleep until something wakes up then falling back on summons/mystic blasting them to mop up. There's a 15-rune spriggan winner on the recent games list at akrasiac right now that apparently went Kikubaaqudgha for Haunt, which is probably the most powerful 6th level spell in the game (although it looks like he didn't kill any of the Hell bosses or unique Pan lords, so it's not a super powerhouse 15 rune run).

Have any of you messed with Petrify at all? I know it makes stuff vulnerable to both Rapid Deconstruction and the heavy damage stabs, is it any harder to resist than hibernation? Plus, it builds earth levels for shatter in the super late game.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
I always pictured branching into necromancy for undead form and keeping up an ungodly amount of things with extension.

Just started a naga fire elementalist (Ok like 6 before one got to the temple) and he's doing great. Only 3 pieces of armor so far, but I got a nice stock of wands this time, and to complement my spell slinging I have a staff of fire and ring of wizardry, along with the blink spell and tele control. So I'm no longer worried about my movement speed. :)

Going through lair now, I cleared out a pile of humans and some hill giants in the main dungeon before backtracking here so I got some xp to blow levelling my invocations and whatever else I want. Found a scroll of acquirement and asked for armor but it gave me a fucking +2 helm of see invis. :evil: Oh, also picked up a dwarven buckler. Nagas suck at shield skill, but I figure I'm going to have 30 str/dex soon anyways, a shield will kick ass, and this doesn't hinder casting.

On petrify: it seemed a lot harder to get it to stick than confuse (Although that's probably due to the split schools sucking away all the power). It also didn't last all that long once they actually petrified, and if you petrify anything with decent AC, you can forget about stabbing it, your weapon will bounce right off. It's a pretty shitty spell for stabbing, especially when you can confuse anything you could petrify, and the enemy is going to spend way fewer turns bashing the shit out of you while confused than they are while petrified (Petrify just slows them at first.) It's only real use is probably with the shatter type spells for taking down big scary shit, but most of that stuff is enchant immune anyways, or close enough it doesn't matter.
 

MisterStone

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2006
Messages
9,422
Kaiserin if you're only just starting to play this game, you should try a sludge elf transmuter; learn the distillation spell to make potions (use it on funkier corpses to make confuse and poison postions) and the ingite spell early on to gas things with these potions. Skip the sticks to snakes and ice form, try to go straight to blade hands. If that's too hard maybe learn poison form. It's a pretty fun build and not too hard IIRC.
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Spider and Ice forms actually have a lot of good uses. Ice form is better than blade hands for a good chunk of the game until you have a lot of nice equipment you don't want to meld and it gives poison resistance and the ability to move in deep water. Spider poisons on hits, has a big evade bonus and I think centaur speed. Just turn off poison and ice when they hit level 1 skill and you aren't gonna dump too much XP into them just for some nice situational casts. Sticks to snakes is also kinda nice really and it would be a solid spell in any other book. The book of changes is insanely good.

Distill/Evaporate is massively overpowered though, going transmuter just to start with the book of changes for that combo and blowing off every other transmutation spell is completely viable also. Even when the confusion and poison bombs stop being so nice in the late late midgame decay bombs will poison+slow most uniques and water bombs are even useful for blocking line of sight to smiting/tormenting enemies. And if you're a vampire for some goddamn reason potions of blood explode as fire bombs. A level 1 spell and a level 2 spell, yeah.
 

cutterjohn

Cipher
Joined
Sep 28, 2006
Messages
1,629
Location
Bloom County
pfft still Linley's Dungeon Crawl to me whether or not some faggots made some MINOR changes to it or not and called it stone "shit"... still boring as fuckall as far as roguelikes go...

My personal preference nowadays is T-O-M-E or Mordor/Demise(well, it's nice to see some halway decent 3D graphics in a roguelike once in a while...).

(nethack is for trannies, and most of the rest of the roguelikes are for effete faggots... and Torchlight/Fate for the drooling unwashed masses...)
 

MisterStone

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2006
Messages
9,422
Being all edgy about what has the be the dorkiest subgenre of video games in history does not cancel out your dorkiness. Just wanted to point that out. :smug:
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Never played ToME (Angband descendant... does not augur well) and I probably need like a year to recover after this Crawl bender before I risk consuming another roguelike down to the bones and viscera. It does look like it's being actively developed though.

Nemelex needs some interface stuff, like allowing you sac only corpses out of a pile of junk instead of having to manually move the weapons and armor off. The decks of destruction are relatively crappy and you only need a couple of stacked decks of escape so just sacrificing corpses and the stuff for decks of dungeons/changes is the best strategy.

I need to collate all my petty complaints and post it on their bugs/balance/wishlist tracker.
 

Malakal

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Messages
10,266
Location
Poland
Nemelex is a weak god, only good later for legendary summoning and Trowel card (edit and portal, forgot portal).

Anyone here had good run with Slime god? I tried it once and had a full page of mutations but they seemed to be not that good. I couldnt cast his remove bad mutations well because before I worshipped Okawaru and of course didnt train invocations, my bad.
Anyway that run ended with death from Okawarus wrath when he surrounded me with a shitload of giants when I was fighting two ancient liches in Abyss. Another problem with Slime god - his altars are very late and either You sacrifice early god benefits or have to suffer penance.
 

Dirk Diggler

Scholar
Joined
Aug 24, 2009
Messages
4,946
Mordor is a p. fun game, no doubt. It just takes much too long to make a satisfying character. I would rather there be perma-death and faster progression.
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Malakal said:
Nemelex is a weak god, only good later for legendary summoning and Trowel card (edit and portal, forgot portal).

Except you start getting fed legendary decks of summoning about halfway through orc mines (done before lair) and you can take out vault:8 with one deck. Stacked decks of escape also give you some I-cannot-possibly-die-while-this-is-in-my-inventory combos like controlled blinl+tomb card or instant teleports. And everything works off of evocations which is inherently useful too.

Edit - and hey I just got 80,000 XP out of a deck of wonders using triple draws

I haven't fucked with Jivya a bit. Seems like jellies eating your items stashes would be a pain. For speed running you can get the slime rune and the slime rune loot without having to fight anything in the slime pit I think.
 

L'ennui

Magister
Joined
Apr 6, 2009
Messages
3,256
Location
Québec, Amérique du Nord
Codexia, all this talk of Crawl has made me want to dive back into it's delicious, serpentine and never-ending mazes of doom. Is the 7.----something--- beta build stable enough or is it better to go with the 6.0ish stable release?

(Stone Soup)
 

Malakal

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Messages
10,266
Location
Poland
I have just discovered that in the 0.7 version slime pits have corroding walls and this corrosion goes through amulet of resist corrosion. Yup, just lost my +2 cloak of poison resistance this way. What the heck, like slime pits werent hard enough already.
 

MisterStone

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2006
Messages
9,422
Yeah, I think the interface is the best innovation they made in SS. Especially auto-explore, auto travel to branches, and the find object feature. At first I thought it was total nextgen popamole decline, but later I realized it doesn't actually make the game easier, just less tedious. Awesome.

(I'm not saying they necessarily invented this feature, but I had never seen it before in a RL)
 

Zomg

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
6,984
Auto-explore almost seems like it's more for the devs than the player, it lets them do shit besides classic Roguelike boxes+corridors maps and gigantic empty "arena" levels which work fine with repeat command+direction type movement. They can put serpentines and circles in there without burdening gameplay.
 

Castanova

Prophet
Joined
Jan 11, 2006
Messages
2,949
Location
The White Visitation
Auto-explore is like this meta-strategy decision lever - do I save my wrist from carpal tunnel syndrome and do I save myself time as a player? vs. do I micromanage my movement to keep my character safer and to use up far fewer game turns?
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
If you've never played ToME, it's skill, item and magic systems are pretty interesting, but once you've played a bit, going around collecting all the fixed arts/quests you need becomes very tedious, and sifting through hundreds of items to find a randart you actually want even more so (And that's with some means of area identify and a good automizer, AND only bothering with loot from stronger things like uniques or monster pits. God forbid you actually need to rely on IDing only your inventory.)

The way it uses traps is also completely banal and unnecessary. Nobody is going to get past the midgame without magical trap detection, which just leaves massive amounts of tedious repetitive disarming and recasting detection 8 times for every single fucking level you explore. There's nothing balancing or interesting about it.

And I loves me the functions MisterStone just mentioned. The ID'd item list is also actually useful, since blind reading/quaffing stuff in crawl is actually feasible, whereas in most roguelikes it's just plain suicide. ToME actually has a potion of death that simply kills you for quaffing it- some 5000 unresistable damage iirc. Reading a scroll of punishment early on in nethack is practically a death sentence.

My only gripe with SS's interface is the character status is spread out on like 4-5 different pages each accessed with a different key. ToME does this much better by simply letting you page through different parts of your status; resists, attributes, misc. effects, etc.
 

Malakal

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Messages
10,266
Location
Poland
And I buried my another merfolk enchanter. Level 24, three runes (from shoals, vault and swamp), cleared elven halls, died in Slime Pits to the Royal Slime which was on very very low hp after running away from me and getting teleported by the teleport trap somewhere on one level up. Had to look for it all over the place and overestimated my hp while underestimating those goddamn walls...

Still I blame Okawaru once again for raining shit on me. Lvl 24 and I havent got decent artifact armor, nor gloves, nor cloak, nor helmet, nor weapon, nor boots, nor rings or necklace. I got one awesome +5 shield with two resistances and thats it. Fuck, I need a better god for my enchanters, ideas?
(also elven halls and vaults were fucking devoid of any good loot)
 

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