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Jack Trades posted:Played some Fights In Tight Spaces and I gotta say that I really like the small scale combat part of the game, reminds me a lot of Into The Breach but I'm really not sure about the deckbuilding aspect of it. I really don't think tactics + rng work together. StrixNebulosa posted:I find this fascinating as I'm loving how the rng makes it less of a solved puzzle - I know I'll be coming back to it more often than I did Into the Breach, which I feel that I "solved" after a certain point. I've found that the deck RNG in FITS presents clear "correct" answers with each individual turn, but that it's important to be thinking ahead. If your positioning can't take advantage of your cards then you might be in for a world of hurt, although unlike a lot of StS-like games you can see that coming in the physical space and choose not to put yourself there. There's been one mission where I made the conscious decision to give up a secondary objective because it would have been guaranteed suicide if I didn't get a particular card on the following turn.
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Feb 25, 2021 19:52
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Thanks for the Ironclad advice; got my hands on a Feel No Pain and leaned into the Dazed economy, and now that I've picked up a Barricade and an Entrench+ I simply cannot be damaged anymore by any means. Got a good feeling about this run e: slaughtered the final boss in a single-digit number of turns, without taking a single point of damage 
Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 22:00
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Yea if you get a big block deck and then find some body slams you tend to just crush everything. Personally I find StS best in ascension 10-15 or so. Everyone has multiple viable builds and you've got room for error while its still decently challenging. The higher you go the less viable options you really have, until you're restricted to the point I find not fun at all.
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Feb 26, 2021 02:07
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So I've been messing around with covenant 25 in Monster Train and it runs into the same problems as Slay the Spire. Your options become much narrower as you have very strict requirements you have to meet. Entire strategies become irrelevant. The RNG becomes way more impactful. I installed the restart combat mod to test some battles and there was one I could not win because of where my cards were. I was playing a deck where my champion needed to die and be brought back. Only 3 of my resurrect spells were in my opening hand and the other 2 were in the bottom of my deck. And it was just like, whelp, my strategy just straight up is invalid this fight because the amount of damage 25 covenant does gives me no flex. All the things I praised Monster Train for get less and less relevant as you go up in covenants. The switch from deciding what I want to calculating what I NEED just super-undermines the fun of this style of game for me. And I can see why the restart fight button is so popular, you can absolutely die to fights because the sequence of your draws just fucks you if you set up this way instead of that way, in such a way that you can't really see coming. It would be one thing if you were like "oh of course I should have done it that way" but often I'm left thinking "well I guess if I had arbitrarily done that I would have won". I love difficulty when it forces you to use more of the game. Like an RTS difficulty level forcing you to use combined arms and smart upgrades instead of spamming 1 unit, or an action game requiring you to use multiple different moves, or an FPS forcing you to use different tactics for different situations cause you can't just blast through it all. These games though just start invalidating strategies as they get harder, narrowing the range of acceptable cards and options. The randomness already provides the variety and need to master different strategies and make use of all sorts of different cards. Hard difficulty just feels wrong.
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Feb 26, 2021 04:59
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so uh, in adom i just went to the water dragon cave for the first time ever. i underestimated some of the monsters in there for sure. ran up against a greater water elemental blocking the exit of a hallway and a great dragon turtle blocking the other end of the hallway. the water elemental breathed at me for 97 damage in a single hit, like half my hp. i hit him in melee and it only got him down to 85% hp, so i wasted a turn loading some construct slaying ammo into my crossbow. on the same turn i was loading the ammo, it said he attacked me again and i blocked him, and he instantly died and i escaped the cave. what the heck happened, i can't figure it out. by all rights i should have died in that cave
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Feb 26, 2021 06:00
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fart simpson posted:so uh, in adom i just went to the water dragon cave for the first time ever. i underestimated some of the monsters in there for sure. ran up against a greater water elemental blocking the exit of a hallway and a great dragon turtle blocking the other end of the hallway. the water elemental breathed at me for 97 damage in a single hit, like half my hp. i hit him in melee and it only got him down to 85% hp, so i wasted a turn loading some construct slaying ammo into my crossbow. on the same turn i was loading the ammo, it said he attacked me again and i blocked him, and he instantly died and i escaped the cave. no fuckin' idea, but yeah water breath is really nasty. monster detection is a good thing to bring to the WDC if you can spare it (and just keep wary and run away immediately if you can't) so that you don't get giant dragon turtled. they can do hundreds of damage even if you breath water. they make elementals look tame
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Feb 26, 2021 07:34
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yes the giant dragon turtle hit me for like 150 damage in one turn and i had water breathing. i only got away by using a darkness crystal and invis potion to shake him off
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Feb 26, 2021 07:36
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Just dipping into the thread to put in another recommendation for Curse of the Dead Gods. I really like it. It's very combat-focused, and the combat feels great. Very satisfying impacts and hit-freezes, fluid movement, aiming and cancels, great animations for both player and enemies, especially their telegraphs, and so on and so on. Has some cool mechanics as well with the whole light/darkness, stamina management and greed combos. Even though I had already gotten so far and there wasn't much story to speak of, I'd keep coming back to the game just to beat some stuff up and try to get better and more stylish with different weapons and parries and perfect no-hits and so on. I think someone earlier put that roguelikes are akin to a fancy evolution of old-school arcade quarter munchers. One thing I loved to do as a kid was search for those rare arcade games that wouldn't try to gobble up your wallet: those games that were fair and could be beaten with one credit. For example, I always liked games like Time Crisis (where you can influence the game with skillful use of ducking) over House of the Dead (where its a crapshoot with tons of non-reactable bull). Curse of the Dead Gods definitely feels like a very skill-based game to me, something that could potentially be beat right at the very start: unlike a lot of roguelikes where it felt like I would get unlucky with bad drops or it felt like I would have to metaprogress until the game was actually beatable, I feel like the combat in Curse is always down to my skill as a player and it felt good to personally evolve. The only downsides to the game I'd say is that its best part can maybe be its worst, as it can actually be a bit...too fair? at times to the point of being maybe too easy, as I felt like my transferred skills from other good combat games allowed me to get all the way through the temple rather quickly. Also, I like how Hades allows you to choose what weapon you're going to use on a run, while Curse has some altars with random loadouts on them: just a preferential thing for me, and not a big issue as I can usually find a weapon I like in the temple itself (or end up liking the weapon they give me at the start upon using it). FutureCop fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 08:24
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So what is a good order to do things in ADOMs mid-game? I've done all the Thrundarr quests, but gone no further down than below DH/ animated forest, cleared pyramid and the graveyard, gone to the Ice queen domain, and am now in the Frost Jarl cave, which feels pretty difficult at level 18. Am I here too early? Where should I go if so?
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Feb 26, 2021 09:04
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darkforge?
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Feb 26, 2021 09:36
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ZypherIM posted:Yea if you get a big block deck and then find some body slams you tend to just crush everything. This, except Ascension 1. I just want a big ol' row of relics and a decent chance at winning without having to get all sweaty.
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Feb 26, 2021 09:38
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Kobold Sex Tape posted:no fuckin' idea, but yeah water breath is really nasty. monster detection is a good thing to bring to the WDC if you can spare it (and just keep wary and run away immediately if you can't) so that you don't get giant dragon turtled. they can do hundreds of damage even if you breath water. they make elementals look tame The only things you ever bring to the WDC are two charges of controlled teleport and the sense to turn off Auto Pickup. 36 spaces left of the stairs, you're welcome. Re: ADOM midgame - it's a bit late now, but one thing a lot of people forget to do (or don't know to do) is to visit the bottom level of the Moldy Cave before accumulating 90,169 XP. 18 is probably high enough to do ToHK though, or to grab the Phial from Gremlin Cave if you have a light source. Lastly, Archers can do a bit of the top level of Bug Temple for a huge boost.
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Feb 26, 2021 11:50
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Jedit posted:The only things you ever bring to the WDC are two charges of controlled teleport and the sense to turn off Auto Pickup. 36 spaces left of the stairs, you're welcome. i did this. second step which i forgot for a while is to bless the tome of donors asap.
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Feb 26, 2021 11:57
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Osmosisch posted:This, except Ascension 1. I just want a big ol' row of relics and a decent chance at winning without having to get all sweaty. This is perfectly fine too! IMO you should treat ascension like extra runes in DCSS, do the ones you find fun and don't sweat skipping the ones you don't. I like hades heat system because you can choose which things you want to take (based on personal preference, or your weapon, or whatever), though I would like it if there were more things that altered how the game played and not just numbers.
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Feb 26, 2021 15:13
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I completely agree. Hades' Heat system is a fantastic way to both a) offer granular control over the game's difficulty and b) encourage (and reward) taking on new challenges. Extreme Measures is the best Heat setting and you should always crank it to 3 before even looking at anything else. As soon as you hit 10 Heat, it goes to 4 and stays there 
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Feb 26, 2021 17:55
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https://i.imgur.com/nTY3RuN.mp4 Kith's guide to being a lovely wizard: 1) Find a wand that casts Nuke six times in a row. 2) Forget it does that. 3) Survive nuking yourself five times through the grace of Explosion Immunity. 4) Die to a bouncing rock.
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Feb 27, 2021 01:57
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Still thinking of ADOM. I went back to play it to suss out what I didn't enjoy and I think I've figured it out. There is too much work to do to play it, you have to hold so much stuff in your head to deal with and any one of those slipping up can tank your run. There's little stuff, like figuring out which of the three quests suits your character, marking your first kill. I don't mind this stuff I think it's a fun bit of character. None of the following is by itself bad, some of them are fun to learn but most of them aren't so interesting once you figure them out. You have the basics, food, early traps. Both of which fall off pretty early but still have long-term consequences. Food is trivialized later on but you it's still work to solve it, cooked lizard trips, stomafillia etc. You gotta manage herbs! Patches of them and learn conway's game of life! These aren't mandatory but the benefits from them are pretty key. You have to manage your alignment, critical to getting the best items in the game reliably a lot of managing altars, keeping tabs on your artifact count. You have to manage carry weight. You have to manage the various floors of the dungeon. You have to manage corruption, the constant warnings a ton of places you go with corruptions that can critically blow your run and it's a ton of work to get cure corruption. You have to keep in mind your stat training methods and potentials. You have to keep in mind how many of an enemy type you've killed as they get stronger. You have to keep item destruction in mind, because even with blankets there's still a destruction chance. You have to keep all the trials(fire temple, pyramid, gremlin cave, chaos levels etc) upcoming in mind to have the items you need for each. You have to come up with a plan to avoid every single cat enemy you encounter or come up with a plan to deal with an insanely challenging enemy. There's probably some more but I just realized I started getting exhausted thinking of all the stuff I had to do. I think it provides discovery which is very fun. I think the opposite of this design feels like DCSS which at times feels like they've filed off a lot of edges.
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Feb 27, 2021 18:39
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Angry Diplomat posted:I completely agree. Hades' Heat system is a fantastic way to both a) offer granular control over the game's difficulty and b) encourage (and reward) taking on new challenges. I'm going to take the opposite position, that StS and Monster Train have nearly perfect systems of boiling the frog, but Hades' heat system creates a non-linear difficulty curve. The player will pick heat modifiers in the order of least impact, so each difficulty increment is necessarily larger than the one before it, and are introduced when the player is least able to learn to deal with them. The difficulty curve in Hades is interesting because of how clearly the mirror and heat systems interact to create what's effectively a bathtub curve
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Feb 27, 2021 19:32
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I love being given the spreadsheets and having to do the developer's job of balancing the game difficulty.
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Feb 27, 2021 19:33
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Jack Trades posted:I love being given the spreadsheets and having to do the developer's job of balancing the game difficulty. Oh, word?
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Feb 27, 2021 19:38
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Pladdicus posted:There's probably some more but I just realized I started getting exhausted thinking of all the stuff I had to do. I think it provides discovery which is very fun. I think the opposite of this design feels like DCSS which at times feels like they've filed off a lot of edges. Yeah that's why I don't play it anymore. It's so much busywork and micromanagement without the fun parts carrying that tedium. There's very few ways to try to game the system as well, so you rarely feel like you can get away with anything, like the old Mindcrafter trick of doing level 1 Darkforge raids. There's very little feeling of power or reward from checking all the boxes as you go. If the game ever becomes moddable, one thing I'd love to do is change around corruptions. I'd make them much more powerful to match their inconvenience, and make corruption removal a little more targeted and difficult to obtain. That, and try to balance out how many of them are either completely ignorable, or game-ending. Like, gently caress Stiff Muscles. I'd make it give x2 Strength with a scaling DV boost to match. Or have something like Horns add an entire new set of unarmed attacks and benefits. It bothers me how much they're just a yes/no question instead of a risk/reward system.
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Feb 27, 2021 19:52
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Pladdicus posted:ADOM Interactivity is magical, and I think Adom managed to scratch that itch in a time when Nethack was the only other game doing anything like that, but still obtuse as gently caress I would absolutely love to see a modern rogue like that prioritized world interaction above all else, but as a core game mechanic, not a spoiler mandatory wiki venture of a game with a host of one off gently caress yous as gameplay I think a lot of immersive sim, simulationist, and survival games have similar dna, but almost none of them really pair world interactivity alongside a focused quest with clear goals *and* proc gen elements (notably, Prey Mooncrash and Subnautica spring to mind here a bit, and I have my eyes on the Weird West game) That kind of game is bastard hard to do though, I'm not surprised it's rare Black August posted:it bothers me how much they're just a yes/no question instead of a risk/reward system. Curse of the Dead Gods does exactly this with curses and I like it quite a bit
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Feb 27, 2021 19:56
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Re: ADOM, I think there's a strong argument, or at least a design tension, where you want the immediate early game of a roguelike to be simple and more focused compared to the primary game loop, because that feeling of early-game freedom and possibility is what incentivizes acutally come back after ending a run. Games where the early levels feel notably punishing or tedious are the ones I'm quickest to drop.
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Feb 27, 2021 21:49
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Angry Diplomat posted:I completely agree. Hades' Heat system is a fantastic way to both a) offer granular control over the game's difficulty and b) encourage (and reward) taking on new challenges. Counterpoint: Meg appreciates a bit of alone time and if you leave Extreme Measures on she doesn't get that. Switch to some of the heat settings occasionally and give her a break!
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Feb 27, 2021 22:06
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Roguelike design concept: Alternate Starts. You do this by recording all the moves players make for each play, and gathering all the data from that. You take the time to examine how they died, where, what level, what equipment, what quests/flags done, etc. You use this to create viable 'skip ahead' starts, where the game generates a start at a chosen point into the game with parameters picked to the player's liking. So then you can be like hey, start me 30% of the way in, this race/class, Level 20, with equipment based off of similar runs in the same time/place/power. In this way you can have a comfort level each player can keep replaying at, as well as encouraging experimentation. Cap it so you can't start later than how far you've gotten so far.
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Feb 27, 2021 22:49
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Wouldn't it be easier to just not have permadeath at that point?
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Feb 27, 2021 22:52
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a better way to achieve that is to just have really big rewards for diving e: most developers wildly underestimate the value of safe play and consequently create games where tedium is optimal Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 22:57
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You make permadeath an option toggle! I think roguelikes are best when they build from the ground up as a permadeath design, but then include a large variety of alternate ways to play.
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Feb 27, 2021 22:58
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just my imo is that I don't want granular control over difficulty in my games, and I don't like how getting to high heat in hades requires turning on some obnoxious conducts
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Feb 27, 2021 23:03
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Black August posted:You make permadeath an option toggle! I think roguelikes are best when they build from the ground up as a permadeath design, but then include a large variety of alternate ways to play. its such a new phenomenon and i'm already so loving tired of games asking me how i want to play it
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Feb 27, 2021 23:44
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:a better way to achieve that is to just have really big rewards for diving A lot of games will beat your rear end for even trying. One time I decided to cautiously explore the Dwarven Halls in ADOM to see if I could pick up something good from the floor due to the high danger level. The very first item I walked up to ended up being a high-level mimic that obliterated me.
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Feb 28, 2021 00:01
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Avatar of the Serpent in Curse of the Dead Gods is such an absolute motherfucker, pretty much an AOE DPS check where if you don't meet it you just can't stop him from healing to full health every 30 seconds or so 
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Feb 28, 2021 00:32
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Yeah ADOM is insanely hostile to attempts to try to walk a different path than intended which is a big detriment to a game that as so many locations It also hates any generosity, I'm still rolling my eyes over nerfing the Minotaur Maze
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Feb 28, 2021 01:04
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Given the forthcoming, apparently highly moddable nature of Ultimate ADOM---I fully expect some kind of communal effort to spring forth to up-port ADOM itself to it(once Phase 2 arrives)...either relatively cleanly or availing of the newfound room to breathe every which way to improve on the obvious. Imagine if we also got a "SLASH'EM Extended" rendition of ADOM that somehow managed to work... Or convert The Ground Gives Way to it, as that might well be among the smokiest of smoke tests for Biskup's interactive environmental sim reckonings. Or IVAN's new lease on life~
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Feb 28, 2021 03:35
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Repaired Radio posted:its such a new phenomenon and i'm already so loving tired of games asking me how i want to play it Oh no, the dreaded accessibility!
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Feb 28, 2021 04:58
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Black August posted:Yeah ADOM is insanely hostile to attempts to try to walk a different path than intended which is a big detriment to a game that as so many locations nerfing the minotaur maze was actually good because it makes people less likely to go there and then want to die, irl.
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Feb 28, 2021 05:00
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packetmantis posted:Oh no, the dreaded accessibility! A bit of a tangent but I’m really not a fan of the bait and switch people use around “accessibility”, where sometimes it means good subtitles and fully rebindable controls, and sometimes it means “I should be able to ‘access’ everything in the game even if I don’t put in any effort”, using disabled people as a cynical shield for what’s really just a matter of preference. Anyway, I do think that people don’t acknowledge enough the fact that giving the player a bunch of sliders and settings and telling them to figure it out is not free, even ignoring the dev time for making them. A game is best when it has a focused design, muddying the waters around what challenges are expected to be overcome versus what challenges should be skipped can make it harder for a player to find the actual fun bit the dev had in mind. It can work but it’s not something that should be mindlessly added to every game.
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Feb 28, 2021 05:13
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I do think that fully tweakable difficulty, especially without some kind of alacarte experience is a bad thing. Crosscode did a neat thing, you can tweak puzzle/combat but there's a clearly defined intended experience and the subversion isn't so in your face about it you'd need to sweat resisting using it on any kind of failure. Doom had five difficulty modes and Doom is about as perfect a game as I can think of. I think you run into problems when you don't expose a way for someone to know how to play the game right for them, the intended experience, the 'i like to sweat' challenging experience, the 'grind me into dust' and the 'let me look at your game and move on' seem to be a good set of targets to keep in mind when making a game. But, when you just kind of throw seventeen sliders at a user with no clear indication on what does what, or make it so easy to spoil the experience with a button press (ala grand theft auto cheat codes) then I think you run into problems. Snake Maze posted:A bit of a tangent but I’m really not a fan of the bait and switch people use around “accessibility”, where sometimes it means good subtitles and fully rebindable controls, and sometimes it means “I should be able to ‘access’ everything in the game even if I don’t put in any effort”, using disabled people as a cynical shield for what’s really just a matter of preference. Maybe you didn't intend it, but your remark came off as accusing folks of virtue signalling for gamers with disabilities when really they're just easy mode carebears and I think that's pretty weird. However, I think it is fair that players should not have to figure out how hard to make a game but that both you should consider various playstyles and make it easy for someone to gauge what's right for them and especially allow specific tweaks to various parts of the game in the name of accessibility. Crosscode lets your turn down puzzle times for example as opposed to just combat difficulty, I think that's a good idea. Kobold Sex Tape posted:nerfing the minotaur maze was actually good because it makes people less likely to go there and then want to die, irl. what a miserable dungeon Pladdicus fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Feb 28, 2021 |
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Feb 28, 2021 08:02
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Pladdicus posted:Maybe you didn't intend it, but your remark came off as accusing folks of virtue signalling for gamers with disabilities when really they're just easy mode carebears and I think that's pretty weird. maybe she's not, but packetmantis hasn't given a poo poo about disabled people anywhere else in this thread but there is this packetmantis posted:Not everyone has the time or desire to become really good at a video game. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 28, 2021 08:14
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Americans with Disabilities or Just Don't Feel like Improving at Games Act
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Feb 28, 2021 08:18
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