Rogue-likes! (not a discussion of the correct use of the term)

[Mutant Donkey]

My favorite is Rogue Legacy.
I'm currently playing Wizard of Legend but it's a bit too simple and grindy.

[Wookieetank]

My favorite is Rogue Legacy.
I'm currently playing Wizard of Legend but it's a bit too simple and grindy.

Rogue Legacy is fantastic. I like that there's such a variety of options with the game. I was pretty atrocious for the longest time, so I made my character to deal with that. If I know I can't dodge well, might as well have absurd amounts of retaliation damage, and it works on traps too!

Been playing a bit of Dungeons of Dredmor again recently, forgot how much of a difficulty cliff the 2nd floor is if you're not careful. Went through 3 characters in an hour earlier this week thanks to early run ins with a zoo.

[factotum]

Been playing a bit of Dungeons of Dredmor again recently, forgot how much of a difficulty cliff the 2nd floor is if you're not careful. Went through 3 characters in an hour earlier this week thanks to early run ins with a zoo.

I really like the monster zoos from Dungeons of Dredmor. Sure, they'll slaughter you right quick if you haven't got anything useful to use on them, but if you *have* got some nice AOE stuff, it's all sorts of fun to go hog wild and blast everything in there!

[Kaptin Keen]

I really like the monster zoos from Dungeons of Dredmor. Sure, they'll slaughter you right quick if you haven't got anything useful to use on them, but if you *have* got some nice AOE stuff, it's all sorts of fun to go hog wild and blast everything in there!

... but it's just a tension room!

I agree though, they're run. And since they're mixed, you never know what might be in there. Although, as I recall, if you're a melee style guy (m/f), you can still often just hack your way through the lot of 'em.

[tyckspoon]

Rogue Legacy is fantastic. I like that there's such a variety of options with the game. I was pretty atrocious for the longest time, so I made my character to deal with that. If I know I can't dodge well, might as well have absurd amounts of retaliation damage, and it works on traps too!

Been playing a bit of Dungeons of Dredmor again recently, forgot how much of a difficulty cliff the 2nd floor is if you're not careful. Went through 3 characters in an hour earlier this week thanks to early run ins with a zoo.

Yeah, you really need to have a plan for something useful in your first 2-3 levels, whether that's a good spell ability or crafting to guarantee yourself access to good enough gear to just bash through the next couple levels. I usually run into the issue at dungeon level 3, tho - not!mindflayers, robots, and genies all show up there, and they're all capable of thoroughly ruining your day without decent answers for ranged enemies, higher physical defense, and just generally higher enemy HP due to the dungeon level multiplier. Easier to do with Wizardlands, at least, since you'll probably get access to at least a couple of low-level extra dungeons you can punch through for extra XP and materials.

I agree though, they're run. And since they're mixed, you never know what might be in there. Although, as I recall, if you're a melee style guy (m/f), you can still often just hack your way through the lot of 'em.

Takes forever, tho, and you often end up having to chase down or use a backup ranged weapon to finish off some of the ranged or teleporting enemies. But yeah, if you can create or retreat to a chokepoint and not get yourself surrounded you can chop through a zoo without too much difficulty, it's just kind of tedious. Until the later levels where you're dealing with corrupting enemies and other things that you just really don't want to let touch you at all, at least, but by then you should have a healthy supply of squidbolts or poison flasks or similar to use as an opening shot and take care of ~half the zoo that way.

[Wookieetank]

Dredmor zoo discussion

Another thing I found out the hard way a while back with zoos, is that you have to kill them in one go. If you save and exit and come back, it makes it so you won't get an artifact from clearing it.

One of my personal favorite way of clearing zoos is to summon critters in the middle of the zoo, shut the doors, wait till the pets are dead/done, and repeat till the zoo is clear. A bit cheap, but the thought of listening to my pets as they shred through a horde of enemies is amusing. I'm usually running werediggle though, so I just wade in as a penguiny vortex of doom.

[Anteros]

Speaking of Dredmor, did they ever add any way to speed up the gameplay? I usually ended up giving up on runs halfway through simply because I was tired of watching the same animations 400,000 times.

[zlefin]

been playing adom some more, trying stuff out. lots of deaths, haven't gotten past lvl 10 yet.
it's still a reasonable game, gonna note my concerns/questions/comments: I'm mostly focusing on the negatives rather than the positives simply because they're more apparent, but it does ofc hvae quite a few good points.

some stuff I may've missed cuz of not finishing the tutorial (died in it, and it was only moderately helpful as a tutorial anyways, but maybe later on it had some useful stuff)
I been looking stuff up on its wiki a fair deal; it doesn't seem as friendly to an exploratory/learn style. having fixed information that isn't available directly in the game is something I dislike. e.g. what eating each corpse does. it's not a random thing like unidentified items that can vary from game to game, but it's a long fixed complicated list; with few, if any, ways in-game to figure them out beforehand. and the consequences for eating a bad one can be very severe and are always so.

I'm annoyed by some of the traps, which can be very nasty destroying equipment. In particular two nuisances: with the long narrow corridors, traps often block a path such that you have no choice but to walk over it, and in the early game there may be no ways at all to mitigate that; fortunately already seen traps aren't too likely to hurt you, still annoying though. The other being the door traps; many of which are very painful. Again, the real problem is that there's often no way around it, the doors are blocking the paths further into a dungeon, you either go home and give up, or you take the hit. quite a few classes don't have a way around that yet, and the items that might do so are not available yet.

I haven't made it to a good shop yet; only the munxip one, which is food only, and the black market one, which doesn't give you much gold and is too expensive to buy anything from.
shops can be very useful, so it's understandable they're limited; but keeping them from being available in the early game, while letting people use them well later seems like iffy design. in particular, with the wide variance in starting equipment based on race/class, the lack of a shop (and the infrequency of suitable item drops) exacerbates it.

the wiki said that the early game is one of the hardest parts, and many players feel that if you make it past that your odds are a lot better. I dunno if it's true, but there's certainly a number of things which point in that direction, and it's not a difficulty curve I'm fond of; wherein you can end up reaching a mid-game point where the game starts getting a lot easier. I remember that was one of the problems with the otherwise excellent XCOM, if you got a good start, it tended to snowball and the missions would end up being trivially easy stomps and stopped being fun.

the scaling of monster threats feels weird: as my character levels up, I have to face stronger monsters; but I haven't grown strong enough to actually beat them. with monsters continually spawning in the dungeons, and it seeming like they scale to match my level, it feels like levelling up is actually a disadvantage; that is, while I get stronger, the monsters growth rate in power is greater than my own, particularly because finding good new gear is rare, and there's no early shops to help address that. why should I take a class/race that levels up faster if that doesn't help me because the monsters are just scaling up with it?

[tyckspoon]

Speaking of Dredmor, did they ever add any way to speed up the gameplay? I usually ended up giving up on runs halfway through simply because I was tired of watching the same animations 400,000 times.

The +/- buttons are a hotkey for 'increase animation speed'; I usually play at double or triple speed just to make all the walking around go by at a reasonable pace. It's gotten me killed a few times tho because it outpaced my ability to process the game - getting counter-critted by something on the first attack but sending two or three more turns through the game before I realized my health was a lot lower than it should be, making multiple attacks into a monster with retaliatory damage, walking forward while dragons fireballed me after breaching a new door, letting a critical buff expire and getting swatted before I noticed and could take a turn to recast, etc.

[Wookieetank]

The +/- buttons are a hotkey for 'increase animation speed'; I usually play at double or triple speed just to make all the walking around go by at a reasonable pace. It's gotten me killed a few times tho because it outpaced my ability to process the game - getting counter-critted by something on the first attack but sending two or three more turns through the game before I realized my health was a lot lower than it should be, making multiple attacjs into a monster with retaliatory damage, walking forward while dragons fireballed me after breaching a new door, letting a critical buff expire and getting swatted before I noticed and could take a turn to recast, etc.

There's also the no time to grind mode that halves the floor size and doubles all xp earned. Its usually how I end up playing d/t time constraints and having too many hobbies to keep up with.

[Anteros]

The +/- buttons are a hotkey for 'increase animation speed'; I usually play at double or triple speed just to make all the walking around go by at a reasonable pace. It's gotten me killed a few times tho because it outpaced my ability to process the game - getting counter-critted by something on the first attack but sending two or three more turns through the game before I realized my health was a lot lower than it should be, making multiple attacks into a monster with retaliatory damage, walking forward while dragons fireballed me after breaching a new door, letting a critical buff expire and getting swatted before I noticed and could take a turn to recast, etc.

Interesting. That might make the game actually playable. I'll give it a try later. Thanks.

[tyckspoon]

Interesting. That might make the game actually playable. I'll give it a try later. Thanks.

It definitely makes killing things by repeatedly Psychic Shove'ing them into a corner at 1-2 points of damage per cast a lot more tolerable

[Silfir]

been playing adom some more, trying stuff out. lots of deaths, haven't gotten past lvl 10 yet.
it's still a reasonable game, gonna note my concerns/questions/comments: I'm mostly focusing on the negatives rather than the positives simply because they're more apparent, but it does ofc hvae quite a few good points.

some stuff I may've missed cuz of not finishing the tutorial (died in it, and it was only moderately helpful as a tutorial anyways, but maybe later on it had some useful stuff)
I been looking stuff up on its wiki a fair deal; it doesn't seem as friendly to an exploratory/learn style. having fixed information that isn't available directly in the game is something I dislike. e.g. what eating each corpse does. it's not a random thing like unidentified items that can vary from game to game, but it's a long fixed complicated list; with few, if any, ways in-game to figure them out beforehand. and the consequences for eating a bad one can be very severe and are always so.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, you're supposed to figure out the effects of eating corpses with trial and error.

You can get quite far using "learn style", though. I've never eaten a zombie corpse figuring that couldn't be a good idea, and sure enough, it isn't. Once you've eaten one kobold corpse, you get the memo about their personal hygiene. On the other hand, nobody tells you that you should be eating the first (non-chaos) spider corpse on sight, as well as the first giant ant corpse.

"Explore an unknown world" is part of the game's central appeals, so it's difficult to argue that online resources should be baked into the game proper. They're already present for those who seek them out, after all.

I'm annoyed by some of the traps, which can be very nasty destroying equipment. In particular two nuisances: with the long narrow corridors, traps often block a path such that you have no choice but to walk over it, and in the early game there may be no ways at all to mitigate that; fortunately already seen traps aren't too likely to hurt you, still annoying though. The other being the door traps; many of which are very painful. Again, the real problem is that there's often no way around it, the doors are blocking the paths further into a dungeon, you either go home and give up, or you take the hit. quite a few classes don't have a way around that yet, and the items that might do so are not available yet.

One crucial element of ADOM's design is that you can go home and give up, do something else and come back later. There is a big wilderness and several early game dungeons that allow you to toughen up before you forcibly kick open a door.

To be unable to tank a door trap from full HP, your character would have to be extraordinarily frail (which suggests some additional levels should do the trick, HP scales with level after all). The same generally applies to floor traps. Conserving HP for for surviving traps is a fairly important early game exploration strategy, which means building up some damage-preventing armor (5 PV upwards) tends to be an early priority.

I haven't made it to a good shop yet; only the munxip one, which is food only, and the black market one, which doesn't give you much gold and is too expensive to buy anything from.
shops can be very useful, so it's understandable they're limited; but keeping them from being available in the early game, while letting people use them well later seems like iffy design. in particular, with the wide variance in starting equipment based on race/class, the lack of a shop (and the infrequency of suitable item drops) exacerbates it.

In ADOM, you find items by exploring dungeons, killing monsters and taking their stuff. General purpose shops do exist, but they aren't any more useful than generic item drops like the ones you get just from exploring places. The main use they have is that they will accept any item you try to sell to them - but the main use of all that gold isn't to spend it in those shops. You're more likely to give it to NPCs or sacrifice it on altars.

Figuring out how to use what you find, rather than what you'd like to have, is part of what the game is about. Something as simple as picking up stacks of rocks thinking "hot damn, I can throw these, plus I might find a sling" is an example.

the wiki said that the early game is one of the hardest parts, and many players feel that if you make it past that your odds are a lot better. I dunno if it's true, but there's certainly a number of things which point in that direction, and it's not a difficulty curve I'm fond of; wherein you can end up reaching a mid-game point where the game starts getting a lot easier. I remember that was one of the problems with the otherwise excellent XCOM, if you got a good start, it tended to snowball and the missions would end up being trivially easy stomps and stopped being fun.

I wouldn't call the late game in ADOM harmless or trivial; you still have be vigilant and use the right methods to deal with certain late game creatures. What improves your odds so much is that you will inevitably have accumulated so much stuff and gathered such excellent equipment that there's almost 100% a way to deal with a threat at any given time, and in the rare cases there isn't, there'll definitely be a means of escape so you can turn around and come back.

the scaling of monster threats feels weird: as my character levels up, I have to face stronger monsters; but I haven't grown strong enough to actually beat them. with monsters continually spawning in the dungeons, and it seeming like they scale to match my level, it feels like levelling up is actually a disadvantage; that is, while I get stronger, the monsters growth rate in power is greater than my own, particularly because finding good new gear is rare, and there's no early shops to help address that. why should I take a class/race that levels up faster if that doesn't help me because the monsters are just scaling up with it?

Level scaling exists, but it's very minor. The main determining factor of difficulty is the danger level of the location you're in. If you feel the monsters are getting more dangerous faster than you can handle, you should take a step back and do another early game dungeon, where the monsters will be easy again. The Puppy Cave, the moldy dungeon, Village Dungeon/Druid Dungeon, that kind of thing. Or even venture into the Infinite Dungeon, which gives you an infinitely respawnable supply of monsters of any danger level for xp, though it tends to only drop basic items. (Which is still good enough for spellcasters, since any kind of spellbook is a danger level 1 item.)

[zlefin]

re: silfir
the level scaling seems a bit more than very minor.
I was trying out a farmer (who do of course start out quite weak);
ended up dying at lvl 6. the monsters kept getting tougher (with more advanced and deadly monster types showing up), I stayed in the starter cave for awhile, and then the puppy cave once the starter cave was getting too dangerous, at floor 1 of each. but the monsters kept getting tougher; and I never found any armor. (or at lesat not any with PV)

the level scaling is a lot more than minor (at least for the early game) the monsters get a LOT tougher as you level up, even staying in the same area. the monsters get tougher far faster than I improve from levels.

while I can't know for sure how much better things would be with a proper shop, I do at least suspect that having a decent useable shop might've let me pick up one or two useful items.

[Silfir]

re: silfir
the level scaling seems a bit more than very minor.
I was trying out a farmer (who do of course start out quite weak);
ended up dying at lvl 6. the monsters kept getting tougher (with more advanced and deadly monster types showing up), I stayed in the starter cave for awhile, and then the puppy cave once the starter cave was getting too dangerous, at floor 1 of each. but the monsters kept getting tougher; and I never found any armor. (or at lesat not any with PV)

the level scaling is a lot more than minor (at least for the early game) the monsters get a LOT tougher as you level up, even staying in the same area. the monsters get tougher far faster than I improve from levels.

Honestly, I don't think the level scaling is what's at fault there. At zero PV even the most basic creatures can hit you hard enough to be threatening.

Farmers are not a good baseline in general. They're by design much weaker than the classes with formal combat training.

I would recommend your first stop shouldn't be the starter cave or the Puppy Cave in that case, but the Village Dungeon, accessible by talking to the village elder Rynt in Terinyo before you talk to the Druid. That gives you access to the NPC Jharod, the healer, who can full-heal your PC if need be, and may even teach you the Healing skill if you figure out his quest.

If you start out with only minimal armor, try out taking off all clothing and switching to berserk mode. As long as you're using a melee weapon, you'll enter "true berserk" mode, in which you can generally kill off monsters in one hit even with fairly weak level 1 PCs.

[Gnoman]

One thing that is easy to overlook is the true value of the outlaw shop. Buying from it is a bad idea unless you find something critical in there, but it can get you some very nice IDs early in the game.

[Kaptin Keen]

re: silfir
the level scaling seems a bit more than very minor.
I was trying out a farmer (who do of course start out quite weak);
ended up dying at lvl 6. the monsters kept getting tougher (with more advanced and deadly monster types showing up), I stayed in the starter cave for awhile, and then the puppy cave once the starter cave was getting too dangerous, at floor 1 of each. but the monsters kept getting tougher; and I never found any armor. (or at lesat not any with PV)

the level scaling is a lot more than minor (at least for the early game) the monsters get a LOT tougher as you level up, even staying in the same area. the monsters get tougher far faster than I improve from levels.

while I can't know for sure how much better things would be with a proper shop, I do at least suspect that having a decent useable shop might've let me pick up one or two useful items.

Where did you go, though? I mean, if you go to the small cave, that's bound to end badly. If you know you're comparatively weak, retreat before things get too tough. There's nothing wrong in clearing the first couple of levels of several early dungeons, to level up and get gear so you can handle the deeper levels later.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out the game isn't really trying to be fair - it's trying to be hard. Say you find a room full of traps, literally every square of it. Is that fair, when you need to pass? Nah. But is it unpassable? Likely not. Quite possibly, you have something in your backpack - a wand of teleportation, say, or a wand of monster summoning, or you have a skill that will let you find and disable the traps.

Or, like me, you just take the shortest route, and either shrug it off - or save scum.

[zlefin]

Honestly, I don't think the level scaling is what's at fault there. At zero PV even the most basic creatures can hit you hard enough to be threatening.

Farmers are not a good baseline in general. They're by design much weaker than the classes with formal combat training.

I would recommend your first stop shouldn't be the starter cave or the Puppy Cave in that case, but the Village Dungeon, accessible by talking to the village elder Rynt in Terinyo before you talk to the Druid. That gives you access to the NPC Jharod, the healer, who can full-heal your PC if need be, and may even teach you the Healing skill if you figure out his quest.

If you start out with only minimal armor, try out taking off all clothing and switching to berserk mode. As long as you're using a melee weapon, you'll enter "true berserk" mode, in which you can generally kill off monsters in one hit even with fairly weak level 1 PCs.

it wasn't the most basic creatures that killed me; iirc it was a floating eye. i'll try out some of thsoe other places. but it remains the case that the monsters kept getting alot tougher (and with more advanced monsters appearing), while I wasn't getting much tougher. while still in the starter area, on the first floor.
As a farmer, the problem wasn't the first couple of my own levels, when the monsters are still weak, the fault was still definitely with the level scaling. As my level went up, I had to face stronger and stronger monsters, while I didn't get much benefits from levelling, and certainly nothing compared to the stronger monsters I had to face.
yes, farmers are weak; that doesn't change that level-scaling was a source of the problem.
if the monsters had stayed weak, I'd be fine and could farm them until I got strong enough to go to stronger places; but the monsters don't stay weak.

Where did you go, though? I mean, if you go to the small cave, that's bound to end badly. If you know you're comparatively weak, retreat before things get too tough. There's nothing wrong in clearing the first couple of levels of several early dungeons, to level up and get gear so you can handle the deeper levels later.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out the game isn't really trying to be fair - it's trying to be hard. Say you find a room full of traps, literally every square of it. Is that fair, when you need to pass? Nah. But is it unpassable? Likely not. Quite possibly, you have something in your backpack - a wand of teleportation, say, or a wand of monster summoning, or you have a skill that will let you find and disable the traps.

Or, like me, you just take the shortest route, and either shrug it off - or save scum.

as I said, I went to the starter cave and the puppy cave, and was staying on the first floor of each. I didn't go deep; even on the first floor you start getting much more advanced monsters as you stay there. I didn't go to the small cave.
There's good forms of hard and bad farms of hard. there's a vast amount of known info on game design now about the difference between them. again, remember, this is early game, so you don't have the variety of supplies that provide answers yet.

edit: another thing I find annoying: suddenly appearing traps. that is, an area doesn't have traps; its' already been walked over several times. then all of a sudden it DOES have a trap. new traps spawning on a level is just weird.

[Kaptin Keen]

as I said, I went to the starter cave and the puppy cave, and was staying on the first floor of each. I didn't go deep; even on the first floor you start getting much more advanced monsters as you stay there. I didn't go to the small cave.
There's good forms of hard and bad farms of hard. there's a vast amount of known info on game design now about the difference between them. again, remember, this is early game, so you don't have the variety of supplies that provide answers yet.

edit: another thing I find annoying: suddenly appearing traps. that is, an area doesn't have traps; its' already been walked over several times. then all of a sudden it DOES have a trap. new traps spawning on a level is just weird.

Starter cave is 3 levels, and you should clear all three. You should still retreat if you feel it's growing too hard. But starter cave is easy.

Puppy cave, if memory serves, is 6 levels. The 5th is cavernous - meaning very large rooms, and very high spawn. Also, 2nd level has an ant hive. All of these are dangerous.

Outside of the Small Cave, scaling is definitely survivable. Even as a very weak character, like .. farmer, or merchant. Small Cave will kill you, it's just a matter of time.

You should generally be able to walk into the starter cave, and clear it, no worries. No matter your class or race. You should be able to find a goblin camp somewhere around Terinyo, which will give you some experience, a ton of rocks, and a potential companion. And a pile of loot. Some of which is cursed, btw. Don't worry about that, but it is.

What Tactics setting do you use? It's generally prudent to be Berserk so long as you can stay ranged, then - maybe - switch to something more cautious in melee.

Traps can be dropped by Trappers. I think they're kobolds or goblins or both.

Floating Eyes aren't really dangerous - although they can stun you for one action, I believe. More dangerous varieties will appear later.

What else are good starting tips? Hm. Always train a ranged attack. Snakes, spiders, fire lizards, trolls - all worth snacking on. Blink Dogs too, but rarely leave corpses, so get a pile of summons, then kill. Pixies are also very worth eating, but don't unless you've had some Blink Dog first. Zombies, displacer beasts, dopplegangers - are not food. Giants and the like seem to be yes or no - they can give a bonus or a malus.

Yea. If you keep going, feel free to ask. I've had many, many troubles too =)

[Silfir]

it wasn't the most basic creatures that killed me; iirc it was a floating eye. i'll try out some of thsoe other places. but it remains the case that the monsters kept getting alot tougher (and with more advanced monsters appearing), while I wasn't getting much tougher. while still in the starter area, on the first floor.
As a farmer, the problem wasn't the first couple of my own levels, when the monsters are still weak, the fault was still definitely with the level scaling. As my level went up, I had to face stronger and stronger monsters, while I didn't get much benefits from levelling, and certainly nothing compared to the stronger monsters I had to face.
yes, farmers are weak; that doesn't change that level-scaling was a source of the problem.
if the monsters had stayed weak, I'd be fine and could farm them until I got strong enough to go to stronger places; but the monsters don't stay weak.

[...]

There's good forms of hard and bad farms of hard. there's a vast amount of known info on game design now about the difference between them. again, remember, this is early game, so you don't have the variety of supplies that provide answers yet

edit: another thing I find annoying: suddenly appearing traps. that is, an area doesn't have traps; its' already been walked over several times. then all of a sudden it DOES have a trap. new traps spawning on a level is just weird.

What you've done there is you've collected purely anecdotal evidence and misinterpreted it.

Case in point, floating eyes are very basic monsters that I would certainly expect to show up in danger level 1 areas. They're quite harmless, except for the paralysis, which is easy to avoid by using ranged weapons.

If you don't find anything in the way of armor with most farmers (i.e. the 0 PV ones) you were never safe to begin with. You need PV to protect from damage, otherwise you'll be whittled down by anything, even rats, kobolds, goblins and orcs. You can fairly reliably survive with one as long as you use every tool at your disposal. Use whatever you can scrounge up as thrown weapons, work together with your dog for a while, fight as a true berserker to finish fights instantly, and start in the Village Dungeon so you can badger Jharod for full heals. If all else fails, pray, or run. Farmers have tons of food, you can heal up in the wilderness (you can use > to enter a wilderness square) if need be.

Put in another way, if you die with a farmer, it's not because of level scaling. This is not the hill you want to die on, man.



As for suddenly spawning traps - I suspect a kobold trapmaster. ADOM is not nice.

[Winthur]

Put in another way, if you die with a farmer, it's not because of level scaling. This is not the hill you want to die on, man.

Farmer is one of the few classes that is a mundane fighter, but not even Gray Elves or Dwarves get any good starting gear as a farmer (normally these two races get solid armor most of the time). You shouldn't roll a farmer if you're concerned with early game survival. Even Priests, who are casters, get much better gear.

If you must play a fairly mundane class that has a hard time with early game survival nonetheless in spite of reliance on physical damage and gets worthless starting gear (Thief, Mindcrafter, Farmer), roll a Hurthling (and throw rocks at everything) or Drakeling (spit acid at everything). Or pick up the Heir talent line, the starting present isn't too shabby for these classes. Or get the actual line of PV talents at start (further enhanced by Dwarves).

[Kaptin Keen]

Farmer is one of the few classes that is a mundane fighter, but not even Gray Elves or Dwarves get any good starting gear as a farmer (normally these two races get solid armor most of the time). You shouldn't roll a farmer if you're concerned with early game survival. Even Priests, who are casters, get much better gear.

I'm not entirely sure that's true. I started a farmer - because I never did, and I wanted to know how bad it was - and while they do start in barely a loincloth armor wise, they have a companion, a 2-hander, and training in it's use. They have enourmous amounts of food, tons of skills, get double carrying capacity at 6 (which is much more OP than it sounds). They have archery.

I think farmers can be ... more than adequate.

They do not seem to get a lot of armor drops though. I'm level 9 now, and I've had only one single drop of a leather armor. On the other hand, since they have mining, metallurgy and smithing, I guess they can eventually make their own. I hate crafting in all it's forms and expressions, so I've never tried.

Edit: Aaaahhhh-hahahahahah ...! So he died at level 10, because I got careless. And when I look through his inventory - what do I find other than that 2-handed sword I picked up in the small cave is the eternium one? Say what you will, but it's certainly not without humor =D

[Winthur]

Edit: Aaaahhhh-hahahahahah ...! So he died at level 10, because I got careless. And when I look through his inventory - what do I find other than that 2-handed sword I picked up in the small cave is the eternium one? Say what you will, but it's certainly not without humor =D

Protip: blindly equip pretty much every piece of gear that's unusually lightweight compared to usual items of its type. Especially if the weight is something weird, like a sword that weighs 34 stones (note the weird number; normally item weight ends with a number like 0 or 5). This is almost always a tell-tale sign that you have something made out of a precious metal in your possession. The likelihood that you find something like cursed ultra-light broadsword (+0, 1d7+1) is pretty small and at this point in the game you don't have that much to lose from doing that.

[Cespenar]

Apart from ID'ing by weight, which is super useful, I remember that you could tell different materials by their color as well? I don't know if that's still valid in the graphics version though.

[Silfir]

I'm not entirely sure that's true. I started a farmer - because I never did, and I wanted to know how bad it was - and while they do start in barely a loincloth armor wise, they have a companion, a 2-hander, and training in it's use. They have enourmous amounts of food, tons of skills, get double carrying capacity at 6 (which is much more OP than it sounds). They have archery.

I think farmers can be ... more than adequate.

They do not seem to get a lot of armor drops though. I'm level 9 now, and I've had only one single drop of a leather armor. On the other hand, since they have mining, metallurgy and smithing, I guess they can eventually make their own. I hate crafting in all it's forms and expressions, so I've never tried.

Edit: Aaaahhhh-hahahahahah ...! So he died at level 10, because I got careless. And when I look through his inventory - what do I find other than that 2-handed sword I picked up in the small cave is the eternium one? Say what you will, but it's certainly not without humor =D

You're not wrong at all. There are reasons to play farmers - not having to worry about carrying capacity in any way shape or form as the game progresses is pretty much the biggest one. Archery isn't a substitute for all the lovely combat skills like Alertness, Dodge or Find Weakness, but it's not nothing.

No matter how you slice it (get it?), though, the lack of meaningful armor is a big factor in early game survivability, even with a fairly strong two-handed weapon and true berserk power.

The best farmer out there is probably a drakeling farmer, as others have mentioned. Good odds of Toughness of 20 and higher (which grants natural armor) and you add Alertness, an invaluable skill to have in high-stakes late game combat.

Smithing is used to improve existing armor, and difficult to use in any event. You need an anvil, a forge, a hammer, and practically speaking a pickaxe so you can collect the raw metal. I don't think farmers are more or less likely to get armor drops; it's just that if you're playing a PC that has armor to begin with you don't notice how rare armor drops can be just as a result of RNG variance.



Identifying by appearance is easier in the tileset version, if anything. Unfortunately I play ASCII only again these days, so I don't have a lot of hands-on experience with that.

[Kaptin Keen]

I wonder ...

So my level 1 strat is generally to try for the blanket and the path to HMV at level 1. But! Another options is to just spot the stairs down - which I can more reliably get away with (because then I also give a shot to finding the blanket) - and then returning later, when (if) I get a wand of teleportation.

Because, if you stay, you can also kill Krannach, which is nice, and that's not possible if you fight your way to HMV - you'll be too high level when you get back.

Not that 3k gold is necessarily that important, I guess.

But ... what are some level 1 options to keep in mind? My current ratling farmer is past small cave, and on his way to HMV, incl. blanket. Very happy with that - although I did the same yesterday, only to meet an invincible ogre mage on the level before entry to HMV.

[Winthur]

I wonder ...

So my level 1 strat is generally to try for the blanket and the path to HMV at level 1. But! Another options is to just spot the stairs down - which I can more reliably get away with (because then I also give a shot to finding the blanket) - and then returning later, when (if) I get a wand of teleportation.

You can also simply enter SMC, pick up the scrolls (you can train Literacy if not a Wizard or illiterate by spamming the action to read the scrolls if you're so inclined) and leave. All that matters is that the monsters spawn for a level 1 character so you can later go through the dungeon at your own pace. If you end up returning to the UD->HMV route much later, you may very well have Magic Map, Teleport, Invisibility and other tools to find the exit.

But ... what are some level 1 options to keep in mind? My current ratling farmer is past small cave, and on his way to HMV, incl. blanket. Very happy with that - although I did the same yesterday, only to meet an invincible ogre mage on the level before entry to HMV.

SMC -> UD dive is what a lot of people do because making it all the way through is a good "good luck charm" that unlocks an useful location at the end of it all, but you can also just do Village Dungeon first (from talking to Village Elder and NOT the Druid ), which is extremely important if you don't start with the Healing skill. It's much easier than Druid Dungeon. If you want a feel-good thing to write into your character's .flg (although it's a challenging dungeon, particularly PC:2, 5 and 6), go PC first and save the doggy, otherwise ignore until much later; the guaranteed vault in PC:6 might be a potential surge of power if you enter it at a late clvl anyway.
Roaming the wilderness to get the 3k for Kranach is nice, particularly if you're a Dwarf since the gold might also be a good helping route to a (pre-)crown; I can't think of many items I'd actually want to buy at the early stage of the game (esp. with Barnabas and his prohibitive prices), but 3k is 3k. Maybe Kranach synergizes best with a dive to HMV because Leggot's shop is more accomodating and UD has a great capacity for spawning special features like shops (and also anvils, altars, whatnot).

You can also scum Bug Temple if you're a caster (a couple minutes there with some luck and careful tactics {mostly keeping to the edge of the screen} can yield easy powerlevelling to like 13-14), but you need to have 100 dead PCs in your high score to even access the place.

[Kaptin Keen]

You can also scum Bug Temple

I am utterly terrified of the bug temple. Never been inside - I think I can safely say that I've never had 100 deaths on a single install - but my urge to enter is minimal =)

Addendum - Skree, the skaven ratling farmer:

Skree is now level 14. He's on an epic quest to save a small puppy, which has wandered off to the lowest level of a deep dungeon filled with various terrors. He has found two sets of platemail, an interesting array of weapons, spellbooks (although his learning is low), and he has learned how to read, curtesy of a dark sage. He's doing well, but it was touch and go for a while. On his way to the high mountain village, he'd reached a tension room he simply couldn't beat, and it was the only way onwards. So he had to walk all the way back outside - through the small cave, again - mainly to raid that famous secret goblin camp, to stock up on missiles.

A couple of levels and a giant heap of rocks later, Skree arrived at the high mountain village. On his way through the caves he not only beat that tension room, but two ghosts of past adventurers, and no less than three named enemies, one of then Anu, the Death Jackal. Anu, despite having the most impressive name, was the least impressive of the enemies Skree faced. Also, when the game sees fit to warn of the presence of named enemies, it really should warn about ogre mages too - those are way harder.

Skree has thus far shown remarkable resilience. I think I can safely say that farmers aren't too weak to play. Also, Skree will now enter CoC, which is where I generally die. So there's that.

[zlefin]

What you've done there is you've collected purely anecdotal evidence and misinterpreted it.

Case in point, floating eyes are very basic monsters that I would certainly expect to show up in danger level 1 areas. They're quite harmless, except for the paralysis, which is easy to avoid by using ranged weapons.

If you don't find anything in the way of armor with most farmers (i.e. the 0 PV ones) you were never safe to begin with. You need PV to protect from damage, otherwise you'll be whittled down by anything, even rats, kobolds, goblins and orcs. You can fairly reliably survive with one as long as you use every tool at your disposal. Use whatever you can scrounge up as thrown weapons, work together with your dog for a while, fight as a true berserker to finish fights instantly, and start in the Village Dungeon so you can badger Jharod for full heals. If all else fails, pray, or run. Farmers have tons of food, you can heal up in the wilderness (you can use > to enter a wilderness square) if need be.

Put in another way, if you die with a farmer, it's not because of level scaling. This is not the hill you want to die on, man.



As for suddenly spawning traps - I suspect a kobold trapmaster. ADOM is not nice.

I'll decide what hill I wnat to die on; and I'm just going where the evidence leads me, and the evidence does point to level scaling as a factor, you've not presented any argument that actually counters my point at all. just because farmers are weak and play skill helps mitigates threats doesn't mean level scaling doesn't have a real and palpable effect on what they face and the risk of dying.
attributing causation is a complicated web of factors; but if there's a level scaling effect at all, then it most certainly could have an effect on the death risk.

now, what monsters do you think wouldn't appear in a danger level 1 area like the first level of the starter cave?
so far I've seen ghul, doppleganger, clay statue, chaos brother
I want to know at what point I'll have seen something you wouldn't think you'd hvae to face in a danger level 1 area.

[Kaptin Keen]

so far I've seen ghul, doppleganger, clay statue, chaos brother

It's not a 1:1 sort of thing. You'll meet all sorts of things on level 1 of a starter dungeon. You may even meet something you have no chance against, but then the game has the common courtesy to warn you. You meet other things that you can beat - but will take some effort. Generally, for just the normal stuff, you need to just fiddle with Tactics, maybe zap a wand, drink a potion, something like that.

And of course, never fight in the open. Never let more than one enemy attack you at a time.

Soften enemies with missiles before they close.

The game is certainly hard, but not impossible. And it wouldn't be near as exciting or fun if it wasn't for the constant dread. Read my post above: I tried a farmer, just to see. Not to be an ass, but just because I've never tried the class, and it might legitimately be very hard. Mindcrafters are, for instance (so I hear).

My latest farmer is doing great. Took some tries, and some work, but he's very strong now. He'll surely die around level 10-11 of Caverns of Chaos, they always do - but that's on me. I'm not careful enough. Or, maybe, good enough.

And this farmer? He's faced more really hard enemies than any other I've rolled. And I'm way past 100 characters by now. Which is embarassing, since I've still been no deeper than ... maybe CoC 14 or so?