That's pretty badass!

And horn of healing is strong. There's a reason why it's rare, very heavy and has a long cooldown.

Wow, that's a pretty impressive track record!

Is the Loss mode in Elona the one with permadeath? If so, you're a madman. I enjoyed Elona for a while, but could never bring myself to try it with permadeath.


To specify, they will follow you if they are near you while you go up the stairs, like in NetHack, but won't follow after you later like in Brogue.


Equipment in IVAN is often about trade-offs. Plate mail offers exceptional Armor Value, but penalizes your Dex and Agi. Chain mail is the middle ground, while cloth/leather armor gives less AV, but with no stat penalties. Similarly heavy weapons will be more damaging but less accurate, and light weapon will do less damage, but strike much more often.

Dual wielding is strong, as it gives you two attacks and two block chances. Two-handed weapons, on the other hand, have much higher damage. I personally also think that shields are quite viable nowadays, as they give you a boost in AV and a high block chance.


You should be fine with no exploits or grinding.

If you find any bottle of can with ommel stuff inside, drink it for sweet stat boosts.


Sorry, not yet. It's been sitting in my TODO list for a long time...


Unlike in other roguelikes, you total HP is not that important to keep track of. You can have your head cut off while your HP are still high if only your head is damaged. Have a look at the body part mannequin in upper right for color changes: bright red means the limb is dangerously damaged, striped grey means it's likely to be destroyed if you don't do something about it right now.

It's good to have either fire resistance, searching or levitation as you go to the Gloomy Cave.

Golems are often more dangerous than they look, but they tend to be slow and cannot see invisible.

Explosions and some monster attacks can break wands, and wand explode with their corresponding effect when broken. It's better to have all but your emergency wands stashed in a small chest, as a cascade of exploding wands can cause a sudden YASD.

Have a look through the starting village and later Attnam, you might find some useful NPCs.

I might not be the best to answer this because I tend to die often too, but...

* Don't try to kill everything. Run from anything scary, or teleport/web it with a wand and then run away.
* Don't try to melee everything. Zap wands at dangerous monsters. Also zap wands at annoying monsters (sirens...)
* Always have a wand of teleportation ready in your inventory. It will save your life when you get cornered or critted.
* Always stash additional wands into a chest, or they will explode in your face.
* Don't stay in a fight if any of your body parts becomes bright red. Run/teleport away and heal, then return to finish the job. It's better to "waste" some healing/teleportation than to die.
* Golems are tough, but don't see invisible. Use your wands of invisibility. They are also slow. Use run command, then hit them once, move away and wait until they step next to you, rinse and repeat. With enough Agi, they won't even get a hit in.
* Sometimes it's better to just teleport past Enner and leave him be. Also ghosts are immune to Enner screams, so you could polymorph into one.
* Zombie level is much easier with invisibility.
* Mystic dark frogs must be killed as fast as possible, just teleport to them and zap them.
* Never ever let Elpuri to touch you.


The scroll uses the same check as a scroll of taming, so you can possess same creatures that you could tame. That means uniques are immune, but otherwise with higher Cha you can become nearly anything.

If you get it early, you might want to possess something with high Int, so that it's easier to harden/change materials and so that you can train your Int higher. Otherwise all mistresses make good bodies, because they have high stats, but are not that hard to tame.

Don't possess animals. They can't read and some can't even open doors.

Machine intelligence for IVAN.

I agree that should we allow more mobs to use wands, we need to be very careful with balance. Tying wand use to Int sounds good. Maybe the higher a monster's Int, the more often can their AI use a wand?

I actually just recently tried to replicate this behaviour in my dev branch. We'll see if it turns out OK.

But in general, I'd be for some improvements to enemy AI and them being more smart in combat. Of course, we need to make sure they're not so smart it becomes too hard for the player.

Some other improvements off the top of my head:
* When there's space, mobs should try to encircle the player and not stand in a line and wait for their turn to be murdered.
* Some A* pathfinding would be great.
* Once we have throwing mobs or ranged weapons, shoot-and-run mob would be nice, as you mentioned.
* Mobs picking up and using wands. Some already can use wands, but they won't pick them up, AFAIK. This needs to be carefully balanced, because wands are deadly and we don't want kobolds in UT1 blowing the player to smithereens.
* Mobs picking up potions and waiting to sip them when they're hurt. Now they just drink them when they find them.

The INSTALL should hopefully be up to date.

Depending on your OS, on Linux compiling is quite easy (that's what I'm using). There were also saome threads about using Visual Studio on Windows and about compiling on Mac.


Darkness is scary, as it should be.

If you want to circumvent this, you could give the player some emitation (ie. make the player glow ). That will simulate night vision, as there will be alaways at least a bit of light to see by.


Hmm...

Looking at the code, I can only see weapon skill, move ease (burden state), Dex and Per contribute to thrown to hit (see item.cpp line 160). So yeah, no throwing skill involved.

Oh, BTW, I noticed that your Perception is already used for searching, so you do get better at searching with higher Perception.

I was wondering if we have any pixel artist here that would be willing to help? I'm currently working on a new quest that will add a few new locations and other stuff, none of which has a sprite yet, and my artistic skills are, well... limited would be an overestimation.

What I would like:

* A mighty seaside castle of a king.
* A small camp (several tents, probably).
* A ruined castle/fort.
* A cave entrance.
* A pyramid.
* A small fortress/tower.
* A ship - the player will get a ship to sail the ocean and I would like to change the sprite while onboard.

And the black market could probably use a better sprite.

BTW, if anyone wants to have a look at the very WIP branch:

Aslona

IDK why people keep saying armour of great health is a trap, I'm using it quite often. Its AV got buffed a bit, I think, and the extra HP is quite worth it, IMHO.

Metal gloves and boots give much, much more AV for the same Intelligence requirement as cloth. It's not a trap, but a choice: take hit to attributes for high AV, or take lower AV for no attribute hit.

The disappearing valpurium sword, well...

What gear do you feel is a trap? There was already some rebalancing of various items to make more play styles possible and to have no useless gear.

Not yet, but it will. I hope to finish the patch for the next version.


Note that sirens use the same check for taming your allies as when you tame monsters, so very strong monsters (eg. angels) will probably resist the charming. It's probably still a better idea to have several weaker pets kill a siren than to let a strong pet solo her, though.