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[Robsoie]

Luck's pretty helpful but there's a lot less of it then seems at 1st. There's a lot of subtlety in the mechanics as to where you position yourself in a fight & how to explore to maximize stealth (sticking to walls, closing doors etc.)

The main offender of "you need some luck" in Sil are the stairs, they're the only thing in the whole game that your character abilities and skills makes no difference it's just the game making rolls for the stairs every turns until the bad stuff happens (convenientely nearly always happens when you're hunted ).

Anyway I've been playing a bit again so I put this feanor through. Fairly straight forward heavy armour, bow & sword.
http://angband.live/user/wobbly/sil/Deleb.txt

wow, i wish i had a fighter type of character enduring that long, the only types of character i ran long enough were all based on stealth and trying to break line of sights when i got noticed.
Bows are amazing there.

[blkholsun]

I played a ton of *band back in the late 90s and early 00s but haven't played since then. Decided to give 4.1 a try. I really like the "rune" system of identifying, I think it is far more interesting. I think the trap-related changes, to put it mildly, suck. It should be renamed Trapband.

Which got me thinking... I can't remember EVER enjoying the implementation of traps in any game that I've ever played.

[Nivim]

The main offender of "you need some luck" in Sil are the stairs, they're the only thing in the whole game that your character abilities and skills makes no difference it's just the game making rolls for the stairs every turns until the bad stuff happens (convenientely nearly always happens when you're hunted ).

I second wobbly here in that it's not so based on luck as it seems, and add that ability selection matters a lot too— sadly, in the default game there's a number of abilities almost never worth buying, and a few that are completely vital depending on your strategy. For instance, you can have a Beor consistently survive till 500-600ft by taking Parry and more evasion than melee, followed by getting Riposte.

Of course, if you intentionally pick strategies that are bad early on, like throwing everything into smithing, then luck in that case really does play a large role.

Which got me thinking... I can't remember EVER enjoying the implementation of traps in any game that I've ever played.

Think about the games where you're the one setting the traps, or where they have complicated physics or a clever designer.

[Robsoie]

You're talking about mid-game, so yeah luck is mitigated a lot by the abilities and the tactics that complement those.
But until you get those awesome abilities, stairs are player killer generator that if you're not having luck will spawn bunch of orcs when you are in need to rush to the stairs.

After you get some vanish, sprinting, listen and etc... you certainly pick your luck-based poison with a lot of ways of survivals, even better once you reach a good level of songs and can sleep your enemies (except of course a couple of sleep-immune monsters, fortunately very few).
Like by example in a recent game on mine in which i survived my character long enough to get sprinting and listen


I could know that going in that room is a big no and carefully backtracking to area i "listened" none was a much better idea.

Or earlier  depth when i managed to escape a group of out-of-depth werewolves that spotted me despite my stealth, only thanks to sprinting so they couldn't had the time to circle the area and ambush me from the 2 sides of a corridor before i reached the escape

[Retropunch]

I tried to get into Sil but I found it a bit complex and obtuse even by my very, very forgiving standards. Most of the complexity seemed to come down to UI design and lots of relatively niche use case skills/actions - I'll get into it one day I'm sure, just need to take it as a business trip game sometime.

Anyway, what are the recommended *band variants these days?

[Robsoie]

Sil has one of the best stealth based roguelike gameplay actually , most of the time you'll move around rooms trying not to hit enemies in order to not attract more of them, as while if you're lucky you can get away at first with a melee type of character, you'll get quickly overwhelmed because the AI is much smarter in Sil than in most roguelikes i played and can divide their bands , move into adjacent rooms and finally block both side of a corridor, or simply wait out of reach from your arrows when you're in a corridor and started to rain them on enemies.

And the fact you can get XP from seeing an enemy (with disminishing return, the more you see an enemy type, the less further ones of the same type will give you XP, same for killing) helps to play a stealth character.

A good idea in Sil is to dive in more lower depth instead of just clearing one then move, as going down more depth help to find slightly better items and go back up to finally kill things more easily (and get the killing XP on top of the spotting one), as oing to new depth also gives XP you'll have more XP to get more abilities and increase stats that way.

Of course this practice is limited by the invisible timer that lower the minimum depth regularly so you can't always climb back up to the top, as with time that "top" gets lower and lower, helping to avoid too easy grinding and forcing you to actually get into dangerous situation.
But at least you'll have more survival chances.

There are several things i don't like in Sil, but overall it's a very good roguelike that has some refreshing ideas.

[Nivim]

You're talking about mid-game, so yeah luck is mitigated a lot by the abilities and the tactics that complement those.
But until you get those awesome abilities, stairs are player killer generator that if you're not having luck will spawn bunch of orcs when you are in need to rush to the stairs.

I was referring to everything before 500-600ft, before the awesome abilities; with a Beor that's about the point I run into Balrogs, which are hard to kill without at least one of all the buff potions. The only time orcs are a problem around 12 evasion (or maybe 10-11 and some armour) is if they corner me on more than 2 sides, and insufficient numbers come from stairs do that in all but the smallest of rooms (and so I know to be wary of those, and maybe just use a different staircase for the same result).

After you get some vanish, sprinting, listen and etc... you certainly pick your luck-based poison with a lot of ways of survivals, even better once you reach a good level of songs and can sleep your enemies (except of course a couple of sleep-immune monsters, fortunately very few).

I think I'm beginning to understand your perspective... you play a lot of stealth characters, since that's what Sil does so much better than other roguelikes, and as a result you aren't familiar with how much easier things get when you can usually kill every problem you run into. I also guess you play Haleth Edain, since they're the only choice with a stealth affinity, so you usually don't have any other options if stealth fails.

At least you get a lot of tension and suspense, with the odds of that playstyle?

I tried to get into Sil but I found it a bit complex and obtuse even by my very, very forgiving standards. Most of the complexity seemed to come down to UI design and lots of relatively niche use case skills/actions - I'll get into it one day I'm sure, just need to take it as a business trip game sometime.

You should read the manual! =D It's very well written, and the mechanics laid out are a lot more straightforward than most of the major roguelikes. I agree that the UI can be bad, but I don't think I've encountered an Angband variant with entirely good UI.

The skills/actions are a different sort of subject; Sil focuses on making even the smallest mechanics more significant, so that each thing has consequences beyond the obvious. Keen Senses, for instance, might not sound like much, but it's one of the best early perception abilities due to how it helps you keep from getting cornered or from bumping into something nasty in the dark, and for archers, it allows you to get free shots at things that think they're safe in the dark. The bonus to detect things like Sulrauko or Shadows is nothing to sneeze at, either.

Flanking is another one of those abilities that sounds poor to a lot of players— "it doesn't even let me attack more than one thing at once? It doesn't give any accuracy bonuses? Ripoff."— when it's actually one of the best abilities in the game, capable of turning unwinnable battles into slaughters. It lets you dance around and manipulate enemy positions while simultaneous killing them, and the mere 3 points of evasion the prerequisite gives you in those battles can be the difference between only losing a few hitpoints and getting worn down to nothing or taking a critical hit.

Anyway, what are the recommended *band variants these days?

PosChengband is popular nowadays, due to the sheer variety and craziness it offers, but I would like to recommend a variant of that variant; elliposchengband. It's been regularly maintained and updated as vanilla PosChengband has been, and it focuses on making the game less annoying and tedious while trying to preserve the same level of difficulty (and a few jokes the vanilla maintainer didn't get). (If you see reference to an mpa-poschengband, that's the predecessor to elliptic's version.)


P.S. Also, there's something called mpa-sil, which does the same thing for Sil as elli/mpa-poschengband do for poschengband; it tweaks things a bit to cut down on annoyances, like upgrading Lore-keeper/master and making it so you can still drink potions while engorged. Generally considered not insignificantly easier than normal Sil (although your dump file will clearly indicate the variant anyway, so it's not like putting on the ladder is cheating).

Edit: For reference, where the source code for Angband.live interface is; https://github.com/OwenGHB/angband-webclient

[Robsoie]

I think I'm beginning to understand your perspective... you play a lot of stealth characters, since that's what Sil does so much better than other roguelikes, and as a result you aren't familiar with how much easier things get when you can usually kill every problem you run into. I also guess you play Haleth Edain, since they're the only choice with a stealth affinity, so you usually don't have any other options if stealth fails.

At least you get a lot of tension and suspense, with the odds of that playstyle?

Yes the stealth based gameplay is my favorite playstyle with Sil , i guess coming from other roguelikes in which stealth is done in a much less interesting way i got simply hooked to this style and much less to melee/shoot my way like i do in other RL .
It's what makes the game "atmospheric" to me as indeed the tension is permanent.

But it's true it can be very hard too because before stealth is running well (listen to avoid running into big bad in a corridor or rooms , and sprinting to avoid being slow everytime by example) it can be expensive in term of XP investment and i have to cut on other abilities and skills increase, making you having a very hard time if an enemy have a spotting roll to his favour.

[Robsoie]

As it had been years i didn't played Angband vanilla, i decided to give it a shot a couple of days ago.

I got a dwarf warrior running and decided to levelup a bit and more importantly find money as dwarves sense precious walls tiles (from beyond normal view) to tunnel through and get money from it.
The goal was to have enough to buy some of the better items and assorted survival equipment that were a bit too expensive from the start.

So newly level 8 dwarf (he leveled faster than i thought in those runs) went back to town again in order to see if there was some identify scroll in shops.
And as expected from what i read about the identify nerf from this new Angband version, i found nothing like that.

So i did it the DCSS way, just read each piles now that i was out of danger, and drink the potions piles too.
It was good, but then i read a scroll that revealed itself to be a scroll of deep descent, as i had a pile of 3 i wasn't expecting it to be such scroll ... but it was

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ouch, the ground opened, and took my character from town to the 10th depth.
Well, let's say that level 8 dwarf warrior wasn't really ready for that, both in term of equipment and in term of hope, so i was ready to use my town recall scroll.
Tough i noticed a pile of gold nearby, ran to it (as depth 10 money = lots of money) i ran straight into an acid trap.
And guess what the acid trap did : yeah it destroyed my only town recall scroll ... fantastic ...

Oh well, it would be a long long climbing up and he would probably die anyways at that point.

But he survived ! and managed to get back to town despite how huge every depth was and how apparently ridiculously rare stairs leading up were (i wonder if the dev has been vicious enough to only have 1 of them spawn by depth, unlike stairs leading down that are nearly everywhere) that took so insanely long to find.

On the way up level 8 dwarf warrior got a huge truckload of additional kills and vast amount of money (as the lower depth you are the more money you'll find both on ground or tunnelling into precious tiles), so much that he managed to kill Smeagol, Wormtongue and with a lot more difficulty Mugash the kobold lord and Brodda the easterling (yeah for berserk potion and cure serious wounds i had)

I didn't had to clear all depths , but i did because those upstairs were so rare that i had to explore those giants levels and so kill nearly everything on the way.



At least this nasty experience really helped to equip my character and power him up a bit.
Oh and in this long climbing back, i found 0 town recall scroll, so if you play the game, better buy a couple more of them in town before doing something stupid like reading a scroll of descent with a low level character

[Robsoie]

It's rare it's so satisfying to destroy an unique.

But in the case of Orfax, son of Boldor

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It sure is great to destroy that yeek.

[Robsoie]

Angband 4.1.1 has been released a couple of weeks ago.
While the focus was bugfixes, and it did, there's still an addition over 4.1.0 with an option allowing to have persistent levels (and monsters populating them) instead of the default setting of levels (and their monsters) being re-randomly generated when revisiting them.

One of the defining features of Angband has always been the fact that new levels (aside from the town) are always freshly generated. In 4.1.1, an experimental birth option was introduced in levels persist, so each level is only generated once and the player can return to previously visited levels.

There are nightlies builds available too if you want to benefit from more bugfixes like the one from today :
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpost.php?p=126668&postcount=77

[teoleo]

time ago i have played some version where i can start from the deeper level and go versus surface and after go down.... i don't remember the name...can help me?

[Robsoie]

For an Angband variant i have no idea.

I remember ToME4 (that isn't an Angband variant unlike ToME2) had most classes starting into a class specific dungeon that you had to exit before going to the world and exploring other dungeons.

I have never played ToME3 (and no idea if it was an Angband variant or like ToME4 built from the ground up) so no idea if it use a similar class specific dungeon start, at least in ToME2 you always started in a village

[wobbly]

time ago i have played some version where i can start from the deeper level and go versus surface and after go down.... i don't remember the name...can help me?

Tome2, Multiband, FAangband & steamband all have versions of this. Maybe others?

While I'm here Quirk is working on a Sil fork (Sil-q) & there's a Sil-q christmas comp just started. So if there's something you'd like  to see in a Sil fork now would be a good time to pipe up. Will post links when I'm not ony phone.

[Robsoie]

Found this about what's new/changed/etc... in Sil-Q
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8592
For the download it seems it's there :
https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q/releases

So far it looks like a rebalancing / skills change / mechanics modification fork, it's not about adding new content unless i'm reading this wrong.

With how Sil makes it closer to the Tolkien atmosphere than near of every Tolkien-world themed RL, i was hoping for an expansion of the original "dive in single dungeon" concept, probably not an overworld as i can imagine it would be a lot of work but with how expansive Tolkien middle Earth was would be great, but probably the "single dungeon" split into a few dungeons linked to some kind of hub.