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[wobbly]

I think he just wanted to do the rebalancing stuff 1st.

[00:03] Quirk: So the current idea I'm playing round with
[00:03] Quirk: you begin in a part of the cave system adjacent to Angband
[00:03] Quirk: maybe where a river exits underground
[00:04] Quirk: cave system at the top has little holes here and there where sunlight pokes through
[00:04] Quirk: some unpleasant vegetation, birds, spiders
[00:04] Quirk: you travel through this to reach the start of the fortress itself
[00:04] Quirk: which has well-trafficked central roads full of fights you don't want to start
[00:04] Quirk: surrounded by barracks and armouries and kitchens to plunder
[00:05] Quirk: which you skirt round to get to other parts of the cave system to head deeper
[00:05] Quirk: crossing back and forth through the stronghold as you descend
[00:06] Quirk: finally you descend the last couple of levels through the stronghold to the throneroom
[00:06] Quirk: going to need some new terrain types, obviously
[00:07] Quirk: at minimum water, probably magma; some kind of half-height tile for bench/bed/whatever so the occupied rooms look like rooms
[00:07] Quirk: this is somewhat ambitious, so we'll see how easily things fall in place
[00:07] Quirk: I may bail for some lower-hanging target

[Robsoie]

Very interesting, that join a bit Tolkien's concept of his story : the travel is as important as the endgoal.

That's what i hope to see one day from a Tolkien-inspired RL , giving the feeling the player is actually travelling instead of just generic dungeon cleaning, and i think with his multiple terrain idea it may very well helpt to achieve that.
 
Though i understand that's going to be lot of work to get that idea translating nicely into a game genre that is based on randomly generated content.

But even if this idea never makes into Sil, it's already great to have a Sil fork with gameplay improvements and active development.

[Robsoie]

Didn't noticed before, but a couple of weeks ago, Angband 4.1.2 had been released, lots of bugfixes of several of the 4.1.1 problems.
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8771

[RoguelikeRazuka]

Played quite a bit of Angband sometime ago (scoring maybe 60+ hrs in total), last time it was the vanilla version, and I'm still wondering why the game is actually considered one of the best and greatest roguelikes of all time, and while it actually may be so (considering its influence on other roguelikes etc), I was unable to discern its goodness whatsoever, for I can clearly see there are many flaws in Angband which make the game not fun for me presonally, mostly concerning design and content, just to name a few: the classes are boring to play (except the spellcasters of course), the races lack interesting traits and talents (differing mostly in attributes), the mobs are numerous and easy to kill (except the uniques, which I found to be absurdly overpowered, they hit hard and endure long, but themselves are very forgettable, I like how unique monsters are handled in DCSS a lot better), the levels are just featureless rectangle rooms connected with long corridors etc. Maybe I'm missing something, but it plays extremely dull, and it seems like it's a type of roguelike supposed to be difficult not in terms of not losing your character as most roguelikes, but rather in terms of overcoming its tediousness, learning to be prudent and patient so to speak. Whether it is the case or not, could someone enlighten me on why I should like this game, or it's really just not for me?

[Robsoie]

It is very likely the reason why there are so many variants of Angband available and being made, people trying to change what they think needs to be changed to make it a better game (by example variants that gives larger world, gives more things to do and quests or change the setting to a better Tolkien following), or people that see it as a code basis for making their own game .

I think it's more because of that activity and development surrounding the "vanilla" Angband that it's considered one of the best roguelike more than its own merits.

To me Angband is a good roguelike, i like several of the features and having long and replayable runs with the same character, but it's not in my list of best roguelike ever, several of the flaws aren't up to my taste.
And it's extremely lacking in the atmosphere as despite the name and the supposed setting the game use, it never feels like my character is in a Tolkien world, it's just a generic dungeon crawl like DCSS (just with worse dungeon design) with creatures that sometime happen to use a name from one of Tolkien's work.

[wobbly]

Also it's open source and been around a long time. A fairly decent size proportion of the playerbase are programmers,  hence all the variants.

The classes are being reworked a little for the new version & there are test builds with the new druid & necromancer up. Hard to link from my phone but it's not hard to find on angband.oook.cz if anyone is interested.

[Robsoie]

It's located there for those interested :
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8777

[Abalieno]

If someone's curious I made a while ago a build of the last Tome 2.3.5 (it's essentially 2.3.10) before the overhaul, so it's closer to the classic Angband format but supposedly with a TONS more content (and it includes Theme, that was a big expansion on top):

http://cesspit.net/drupal/node/2145/

[wobbly]

I want to like tome 2, but the tactics setting... some classes wont hit without setting berserk but then you can't pick locked doors. switch, switch, switch...  Maybe 1 day I'll get passed that.

[Robsoie]

Angband necromancers gather and cast ... Thread Necromancy !

Angband 4.2.0 has been released, a big update as it has new magic (Nature and Shadow), classes and a lot of rebalancing (+bugfixes and code improvement) :
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9537

Sounds interesting, maybe time to get a new character as it's been so long i didn't played, hopefully it will feel a bit less generic and more Tolkien this time.

Edit : played a few levels and nope, it's still the exact same boring dungeon generation big empty room, very long corridors of nothing , no special dungeon features or etc... some monsters here and there that do nothing interesting, etc...
I guess after playing all those roguelikes that can do some very interesting dungeons and explorations, vanilla Angband is not for me anymore, entirely too generic with nothing special.

Probably time to see what variants there is currently, too bad most of them are based on older version of Angband without all the interface and other quality of life improvement 4.x has

[Cthulhu]

Vanilla angband really is my favorite roguelike, though I've never beaten it.  The only variants I've enjoyed are Sil and ToME 3. 

What I think makes Angband special is the kind of... surgical strike element, I guess I"d call it.  Nethack and Crawl both typically work around full clears of each level, whereas Angband you spend a lot of time diving way out of depth, using detection abilities to zero in on high value monsters and treasure and grab them while avoiding the stuff you can't handle.   It's a different style that I enjoy a lot, and I'm fine with the general lack of variety in levels and stuff.

Crawl is my second favorite, though I didn't like the shift the devs took towards minimalist design and cutting out everything they thought didn't add to the game.  Lots of fun stuff has been removed, I don't like the new abyss and I miss some of the weirdo classes like the potion flinger guy.

Sil is good, of course, keeps the essential Angband feel without going completely off the rails like some of the variants.  ToME 3 was back when I didn't know what the fuck I was doing in roguelikes but I liked the multi-dungeon aspect and some of the weirder options like the demonblade guy and Mandos, where you started on D:99 and had to work your way up.

[Robsoie]

If you like Sil make sure to give a try to its continuously developped fork, Sil-Q , latest version at the time is 1.4.2 :
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9414

[wobbly]

Robsoie I reposted your comments on angband.oook as I agreed with most of it. As far as variants go I'd suggest either FCPB or CPB which are the modern descendants of variants like Z-band & Hengband. The interface isn't quite as nice as V but still pretty good.

FCPB:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9505

CPB:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9445

[Robsoie]

No problem, the generic feel of the dungeon has always been the low point of Angband as i follow many discussion boards related to roguelikes it's the part that come out the most often when people tell why they don't play angband, in this thread already you can see some people mentionning it.

It's sad because the Angband gameplay and the ruleset are very good but the bland dungeon makes it very hard to keep being invested in the game until you reach the interesting parts and the challenging enemies that add this level of pressure on you that involve you into the game instead of boring you (the most fun i had in the past with Angand was when i started to dive in deeper floors, it was like a very different game from what it was in the 10/15 first floors as the blandness of the dungeon started to disappear in front of the challenging encounters you had there, a bit what Sil-Q is from the very first level).

But more variety in the dungeon could sure be helpful in breaking the blandness, looking at the early game of Brogue dungeon generation that is filled with different terrain and tons of dungeon feature could be a good idea as that keep the player interested from the start .

Thanks for pointing those variants, there are so many of them

EDIT

started to play a bit of Composband, it reminded me a lot of zangbandtk , that's a good thing
Completed a couple of the easy quests and after getting the 3rd done (a pack of wargs in one of the depth of the dungeon) i got rewarded by a very good and at the same time a very horrible weapon

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

the aggravate wasn't really that scary as i was only level 12 and so far was butchering everything coming my way, it would be a bigger problem later, assumign my guy survived of course.
But i overlooked the "Ancient Foul" words when reading about Curse so i just thought about the switching weapon problem.

And that was really really horrible.
While adventuring more i started to be sometime teleported around and losing stats points out of nowhere.
I went back to town the hard way (as i completely forgot to buy more word of recall as i had none left) , meaning a few more stats points were lost.

As it was cursed i couldn't switch weapon of course, this i understood when i equipped it as i remembered the "Curse" word, but "Ancient Fool Curse" isn't that kind at all, as after buying a remove curse scroll to be able to switch weapon, it didn't worked the way it should have.
The thing teleported me outside of the town, landing at some distance in the wilderness, right inside of a river (so i was drowning) while being surrounded by a lot of spiders and a "greater hell beast" (no idea if it was the same inside joke that greater hell beast was in zangband)
Died very quickly to that.

Lessons to learn, when you read "Ancient Foul Curse" , do not overlook the words "Ancient Foul"

[wobbly]

Yeah ancient foul curse is not good.

See how it also says heavy curse? That means you need a scroll of *remove curse instead of the basic remove curse. There's also a few permanent curse items like the one ring.