IVAN newb

Hi guys,

Just wanted to introduce myself to the community. Kinda a newb, been playin ivan off an on for about...oh i dunno a few weeks. Died A LOT. Good times.

Best death thus far: Survived the Kamazee Dwarf, survived the ensuing explosion of my wand of fireballs, survived the ensuing breaking of my lighting wand, survived the breaking of my wand of door creation, but when my 2nd wand of fireballs broke, it blew open the doors, and a lizard man stabbed me in the gut.

Was hilllllaaaarrrriiiioooouuuuussss....

Anyway, I've been reading the forums a bunch and the tips are great. ANy super usefull stuff you guys wana share?

The Music Man

Welcome on the forums!

Only one tip I can give you that's not on the forums already: Keep trying. You might eventually get there. Or you might end up like me and keep trying for years without ever getting any closer

It took me years to beat my first roguelike. Now I have a handful of wins under my belt at various games of the genre. Patience is the key.

EagleV's exactly correct. IVAN, if anything, requires patience and a bit of the Dwarf Fortress "losing is fun!" mentality. That's because the vast majority of the games played end up in a loss.

After you've your head to a wall enough times, the wall will collapse. In the end it's only a matter of being more patient and resilient than the wall.

A very basic rule of IVAN which many first-time players tend to miss is this:
This is not a nice game. You are not "the lone marine who brings down hell's legion". You are not an unbeatable Spartan warrior. You are just an ordinary guy and you are weak.
And that means a gung-ho attitude and "bravery" will get you killed.
Do not be afraid to run!
Use your head!
Make sure to progressively upgrade your equipment!

Die happily!

put your wands into a box, it will (most of the time) delay your death.

Use all possible tricks that you can think of - even if they give only a shade of chance they might save your arse. Check everything twice. Odds are ALWAYS against you, ALWAYS! Even weakest of foes can rip your head of your shoulders if they are lucky. Constant paranoia is the way, beacause the worst and most wicked possible scenario of brutal demise is the one that will happen if you act carelessly.

When I read that, I thought, "how can you hit a wall with your head? Maybe when you have no arms and no legs? and I thought that you cannot bring down a wall if your attack is too weak... or maybe he meant vomiting on walls?"....

Maybe there could be a "hit a wall with your head" command in IVAN...

I could see that being useful for a situation where you wanted to get stupid fast. Like, say there's an enemy that follows you like a pet as soon as your intelligence reaches a certain level and has inane enough conversation that your will to live (HP) drains away at a constant (high) rate and only stops when you either manage to slay him (not too likely) or become as dumb/dumber than he is.

I'd personally like to see a "strike" command where you can hit world objects like walls with your weapon. Would make breaking walls and doors down a lot simpler than having to find a decent wand or training LStr.

It would be fun to have a 'headbutt' command, a bit like kicking. Or as suggested by AzbA, a (H)it command, using weapon\\arms\\legs\\head\\pelvis(?), with a prompt to select which item\\bodypart to execute the strike with.
I imagine the code would be just a generalisation of the kicking command?
There could be a chance to fall unconscious due to headbutting very hard objects.

n.b. Back in the day, I used to throw daggers at doors to break their locks.

I had envisioned something like the following:

You strike the door with your mythril battleaxe +2!
The door is completely destroyed!
(2x) The balsa stick hits Huang Ming Pong the sumo wrestler!
The balsa stick misses Huang Ming Pong the sumo wrestler!
Huang Ming Pong the sumo wrestler panics!

I don't think it needs to be any simpler to break down doors or walls than it already is, other than perhaps enhancing control with the pickaxe so you can use it faster than you can now with the apply command. It's not like it's hard to find pickaxes!

(personally, were I in charge of developing and everyone pleaded with me to put it in anyway, I'd put it in with some hidden fun stuff causing weapons to degrade in quality from use on things that are decidedly unlike flesh [the harder the material you're trying to break down, the faster it goes] - to be fair, they'd degrade anyway from inevitable use upon armor, but those who went trying to break through stone walls carelessly would soon find their favorite weapons useless, and the change in quality would be far more severe for non-combat uses than combat uses)

(in the event you found a way to turn the walls into flesh, that would be just dandy - good luck with that though)

What about monster walls? You try to dig through them and they suddenly become hostile and try to kill you. Would be useful (read: annoying) to put around secret rooms or room-within-room secrets.
Also, mimics.

(I think this is getting off-topic :/ )

Actually, such a strike command would be also useful if you want to attack a monster in a specific way (e.g. if you want to create a master biter character and attack enemies by biting them).

That sounds better. Also what would be neat is if you could call shots with the command (aim for the head or specific limbs).

(I don't care if it's going off-topic, we haven't had any recent activity in the real ideas thread anyway)

An advanced unarmed combat mechanic would be nice, like if we could somehow code our own version of dwarf fortress's wrestling. Although I didn't really like it because it was too complex. Rather, take the locks and breaks, maybe eye-gouging too (lowers perception) and remove pinching.
Also this is likely to have been said a thousand times, but having a stat that raises magic resistance would be wonderful. (for mystic frogs mostly)

Well, that what Willpower is implemented for in CVS. The problem is - how it should be raised? By zapping self with wands, sci-talk or getting hit by fireballs? It also seems to me that having ~100 INT and WIS already helps surviving some spells (but by means dedecting caster before he casts a spell and teleporting near him in order so sodomize his fragile body with cold metal blade).

Maybe through use of "Ye olde book of magiks"?
Besides, its just a placeholder skill as of now, it doesn't do anything and isn't part of the "Default(stat)" line up in the character files. Also, proof it doesn't do anything useful:

My personal interpretation of magic resistance wrt wands of foo is that a wand of magical arrows is more "pure" magic oriented vs. a wand of fireball or a wand of lightning. The source of the power is still magic, but the effects are not, so the whole idea of "the lightning bounces off your chest because of your strong willpower" doesn't jive with me. Plus there's the part where if this particular stat is powerful enough the danger of mages goes down by a lot.

In my view, a wand of striking against a character with high willpower might not inflict more than scratches, but should attack/break armor. A wand of fireballs, as it causes an explosion centered on whatever it strikes, could perhaps be mitigated by willpower a bit but it should still inflict hefty wounds and maybe death if your endurance isn't high enough (since the environment gets seriously heated up and the force of the blast are side effects of the magic-induced blast), and if a wand blows up in your pack maybe willpower saving only counts for half thanks to the proximity of the blast. That would also take care of those who would count on their willpower alone to save them from the otherwise abysmally stupid measure of breaking a wand to kill foes. A wand of lightning might be mitigated more since it has less environmental damage than a wand of fireballs, but it could also inflict bonus damage to people wearing metal armors (since they're pretty conductive), as well as less by armors made of insulating materials, and also would still be mitigated somewhat better by an amulet of element protection or more HP than just a high willpower stat by itself.