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[Robsoie]

Didn't wasted ressources in building laboratory , and instead went for bigger library (hoping it has an influence on mana gathering speed) , upgraded my humanoid breeding program up to Ogre (while having summoned 5 gnomes for the workshops and get my trap and weapon/armor industry working).
And while they're expensive (80 mana each), they seem to be really really strong.

Here after them crushing an early invasion, i decide while still possessing the leader of that squad to immediately following up by invading the elf village, here we destroyed a few elf and started to get a look at what's inside their home.


And while my Ogre legion is in the village brutally explaining to the elves to not invaded a keep , i have an announcement of another village launching an attack, and immediately after another one launching a "final attack".
Then 4 seconds later, the game over screen with my keeper apparently having been killed by an elf lord.

Can't say if it's the same bug as the Duke unique one, as once the popup of the endgame appears you can't scroll the screen back anymore , so i couldn't see if indeed some elf lord dodged all my traps and killed everyone that was still inside of my keep.

I didn't took my keeper in that retaliation squad as i wanted to keep him gathering all the mana to summon more ogres.

edit : it looks like if you're experiencing the pause bug, even if you play a new game, space bar or clicking on pause will never pause the game again.
You have to completely quit the game and relaunch it.

[Frumple]

Yeah... as a general tip at th'mo, if you're looking to ease things a bit, set your training room up just past your entrance (leave a few squares for gas traps or whatev') and get a handful of iron+ golems (I've seen clay+stone+iron+3 lava flat wreck a final attack, losing only the clay) running around. They default to training (as do undead and I guess the upper level humanoids, so they'd work, too), so when invaders come they have a nice hoard of angry critters waiting for them on the other side of the door/before they get to the squishy bits of your base. Easy mode is definitely easy, though. It doesn't take much to build up a pretty vicious group of high tier critters. Core it around golems (who more or less can't use equipment) to kit up your dudes off of dead enemies and you're pretty golden.

Only downside to using lava golems is they can and will set the forests on fire if they chase someone into the woods. It's kinda' amusing, but can have you lose out on some easy lumber. Also potentially imps if they go after stuff laying around in the forest fire.

Also, to (tediously) speed mana generation, you can possess your keeper, cast haste self, and then release it and let it work. It'll speed up the generation for a little bit. Bit of a shame the keeper won't auto-buff itself, but eh.

[Robsoie]

A similar trick to what you can do in Dwarf Fortress is to build long corridors filled with gaz and boulder traps.
Trap gaz fill a large part of a corridor, while a boulder may crush everyone in line .

The only problem is that the gnome are not that often interested in building traps, they're more interested in building weaponry and sometime armor.

I didn't noticed having lots of library tiles improving the mana gathering, it may probably allow some summons that may or may not (as i have not tested) require more library tiles, but for mana there does not seem to be any difference. Your haste trick sounds very usefull, thanks

Funny you say easy mode is easy, i just got a game in which i had summoned 8 ogres, by the time the first "final attack" happened most of them were at more than level 3 , one (the first ogre) was at level 7 and an elf lord with some archer came, benefiting from the fact all the traps had been already triggered by the previous attack from another village a dozen of seconds before, and the elf lord , all by itself massacred -all- the ogre without even being wounded.

I don't know if there's a stat randomisation in the unique generation (if an elf lord is an unique as unlike the Duke Something, he was just labelled "elf lord) , but unlike in my previous game in which the elf lord was crushed in seconds, this one was a monster like my own monsters never saw before.

So yes, in general easy mode is easy ... until you get that kind of unique

[GreatJustice]

This game is incredibly fun, and it has a great interface too. I lost my first few games due to dumb mistakes (for example, opening up a literal back door from the villages straight into my undefended library with my Keeper), but then easily won through liberal use of 100 mana summoned creatures. A few questions though:

-How do I accumulate more minions to attack a village? I kind of took one guy to clear out a village and he almost succeeded, but most of my creatures just chilled out at the guard post.

-What's the difference between 'easy' and 'hard' modes?

-Are there always two enemy villages?

[Robsoie]

To get more minions in a squad and lead them, you need to :

Click on the button for your troop list (the one that looks like a 8 )

Click then on the [gather team] option

In the troop list , select a monster category (or the  keeper) and in the popup, the 1st guy you will select will be the squad leader), continue to select as much monsters as you want (you can mix multiple monsters category) then click on the [command squad] button

You'll then be in possession of the squad leader and all the squad will come to you and follow you in battle

for the difficulty, i don't know yet, same as the amount of villages, i thought i faced 3 of them at a game though, but with those random names i can't remember

edit : but careful when attacking villages, there's not enough time between attack waves and you can get in serious trouble if you have only few defenders left in your keep and get a "final attack" coming quickly

edit 2 : got a game crash while my squad of 4 fire golems and 6 mummies were hammering an elf lord.

[dennislp3]

ptw

[IronyOwl]

From what I can tell, weapons, armor, and traps are made at the workshop by the gnomes. And does anyone have some tips to stay alive?

Not just gnomes. Any humanoids, as far as I can tell, will go forge or brew things from time to time.

For survival tips, I'd rank up one of your skills a few times, then get a few minions from there. Maybe massing gnomes is effective since they craft their own gear and beds are cheap, but I suspect it's easier to just pay the initial mana to get the good stuff. Mind you, I've been playing on default, which is I guess Easy.

If you're really having a hard time, remember that while the AI is pretty decent about upgrading their equipment, they're not perfect. You can manually possess your critters and order them to pick up and equip stuff, and unequip and drop their other garbage, if they still insist on using those +0 Acc, +5 damage knives while you've got a +5 Acc, +8 Dmg elven sword sitting right there.

On a related note, your imps will only harvest items dropped in your dungeon. If you kill enemies outside, their corpses and possessions will remain outside your grasp until you manually fetch them. Also note that corpses are too heavy for most creatures, so if you're hoping to spawn vampires you may need to dump all of a critter's stuff.


Finally, remember that guard posts are a bit of a double-edged sword. They're very handy for low-level attacks, but they'll distract things, especially golems, from training.

At some point i was wondering why my vampire was missing so much and taking damage, i had equipped him with a very good elven sword (taken from my stockpiles on which the imps dropped the dead invaders items too).

I looked at his equipement and noticed he had nothing equiped, despite previosuly i had equiped the sword he picked up. And then i noticed on the top of the screen :


Makes sense, and reading again the top screen log during the battles i saw that combat is really brutal in a Dwarf Fortress ways, limbs are flying around, and that's then what happened, one of the invader just cut my vampire hands.

This is amazing. I'd noticed a lot of limbs being hacked off and lying on the ground, but I didn't realize they had a practical effect like this.

I didn't noticed having lots of library tiles improving the mana gathering, it may probably allow some summons that may or may not (as i have not tested) require more library tiles, but for mana there does not seem to be any difference. Your haste trick sounds very usefull, thanks

More library tiles are requires for more spell/skill rankups. If you've only got a few tiles, it'll give you the same "You need a bigger library!" message when you try to improve one of your skills as you do when you try to summon more humanoids than you have beds, corpses than you have graves, and so on.

[Robsoie]

Thanks for confirming the amount of libraries and etc... i'll have to test how much are actually needed for specific amount of monsters so i don't waste ressources in building too much.

I just gave a try to the Adventure mode, and wow, that's incredibly brutal.
At first i was told to get to the mountains as there would be helpful dwarves there, then before leaving my town, i talked to the leader and he asked me to clear the castle cellars that were haunted, i went down and a ghost just hit me (he was close to the stairs)
I directly went red from that hit.

I retreated immediately and applied a 1st aid kit (5 uses) , then i went wandering in the wilderness, followed a road (nice CTRL+direction to move automatically on roads) and ended into an elven village, i went to the elf lord and he asked me to clear a bandit hideout on the northwest, using the map i managed to reach it, i went down , a cyclop was there and killed me in 2 turns.

[Azrayel]

OP ambitiously assumes what I come to Other Games board for.

OP turns out to absolutely right.

[mainiac]

Thanks for confirming the amount of libraries and etc... i'll have to test how much are actually needed for specific amount of monsters so i don't waste ressources in building too much.

I just gave a try to the Adventure mode, and wow, that's incredibly brutal.
At first i was told to get to the mountains as there would be helpful dwarves there, then before leaving my town, i talked to the leader and he asked me to clear the castle cellars that were haunted, i went down and a ghost just hit me (he was close to the stairs)
I directly went red from that hit.

I retreated immediately and applied a 1st aid kit (5 uses) , then i went wandering in the wilderness, followed a road (nice CTRL+direction to move automatically on roads) and ended into an elven village, i went to the elf lord and he asked me to clear a bandit hideout on the northwest, using the map i managed to reach it, i went down , a cyclop was there and killed me in 2 turns.

You should have gone after the ghosts again.  Normally their attacks tickle you, it seems you got bad luck.

The bandit lair is above ground.  You wandered into the cyclops too soon.

If you do make it to the dwarves and start exploring their tunnels, some of the alters down there are quite fun.  In particular I don't know what else I expected to happen to me when I repeatedly prayed the goddess of death...

[Frumple]

Note to self: Fire spheres (and maybe lava golems?) can set your training rooms on fire. The fire can spread to doors. Possibly imps. And definitely the library which your keeper is in.

And the keeper is like a frog. If the library slowly ignites, the keeper won't notice and gradually cook to death.

There went that dungeon.

[GreatJustice]

Well, I played a bit more and discovered that winning in Keeper mode is comically easy so long as you do things reasonably quickly and have a decent dungeon layout (3x2 beds followed by 3x3 training room followed by another set of 3x2 beds really can't be beat, as it lets your creatures train while guarding the front entrance). Anyhow, ways in which to win:

Easy modo:

-Build a "regular" dungeon layout. Rush for high level creature breeding. Get a few goblins and gnomes early on (they're weak, but can handle the early elves that show up). When you get the chance, start spamming the 100 mana named creatures. After that, sit back, maybe get a sandwich or some tea, and laugh as the heroes get completely demolished. I was so bored that I possessed a lone creature to massacre the survivors of the Elf village (after they rushed my dungeon and died) and discovered that it could easily kill everyone except for the Lord on its own.

-Spam gnomes. Only build a training room, library, beds and graveyard. Let absurdly high level gnomes kill attackers and then collect corpses. Focus on necromancy and get lots of Vampire Lords (regular vampires are acceptable, but substantially weaker). Victory is now inevitable because I think Vampire Lords are probably the strongest units in the game and you can pretty well spam them while training them to high levels.

-Spam golems as quickly as possible. Recruit more golems to replace the ones that die. They spend all their time training, so you don't really need to do anything after that. Clay and stone golems are sufficient for most enemies, and lots of lava/iron golems can beat everyone else in sufficient numbers.

Really, so long as you don't launch suicide raids, it's trivial to win on Easy once you know what you're doing. I even won with a suicide raid once by including about 6 mid-high level Vampire Lords, who wiped out an entire castle without breaking a sweat.

On hard, it's a bit trickier, but so far as I can tell the only differences are that you get attacked earlier, there are more enemies and they are slightly stronger. The main solution to this is to start with golems, then upgrade to Vampire Lords. Vampire Lords are able to destroy everything. Also, don't do anything fun like raid the villages because you'll probably be swarmed and get wrecked immediately after. So at the moment, Hard mode is Easy mode, but with an enforced boring strategy.

[IronyOwl]

Victory is now inevitable because I think Vampire Lords are probably the strongest units in the game and you can pretty well spam them while training them to high levels.

I don't even think they need the higher levels. A lone level one vampire lord with decent equipment (as in, an elven sword and leather chestpiece) single-handedly butchered almost everything that came near me in my last game. I gave him some friends eventually, but more to make use of them than because it seemed like he needed it.

Conversely, I tried defending myself with clay golems once; did not happen. Maybe because they were level one, but they didn't even come close as they were. A handful of stone golems (with training) proved functional but somewhat fragile in a later attempt.


In other news, I'm starting to see more of the bugginess. The most serious offender is that if you try to mine out the area outside the map, the game crashes. Dunno what happens if you click outside there with a different action selected.

[Aklyon]

PTW
This sounds awesome.

But buggy.

[miki151]

Hi Bay Watchers!

I'm the author. I wasn't expecting such a big response here. Apparently all the hits coming from the DF facebook fanpage made the game briefly reach top 6 on Indiedb. Thanks! 

I like that you post how you are playing the game, it really helps in development. I actually thought the game is more unbalanced and unplayable. The keeper mode is just 3 months old. Sorry for the bugs. I'm sure there are just a few of them, and I've fixed one already (the one with clicking outside the map). If you find any other bugs, and are able to replicate them, or at least guess when they happen, please send me a message or post them to github: https://github.com/miki151/keeperrl/issues. If I nail down some more bugs, I'll do a bugfix release.

Let me know too, if you have feature suggestions (but no Z levels please  . For the next release I'll try to make the dungeon building longer and more interesting. You can check out here what I'm up to now (though it's very dynamic).
https://github.com/miki151/keeperrl/issues/assigned/miki151?state=open

Cheers,
Michal

PS.

edit : it looks like if you're experiencing the pause bug, even if you play a new game, space bar or clicking on pause will never pause the game again.
You have to completely quit the game and relaunch it.

That's a weird bug. When you pressed space bar, did it change to "paused", but didn't pause or did the game just ignore the key press?