Favorite games

[Taqwus]

Stryke11 said:
Since these games get so much praise I know I am missing something or doing something wrong. Please help me get the full experience! Is there a tutorial? Tips? Did I pick the wrong game to start with? I've played a relatively new roguelike called Drash and that one is pretty fun, but it doesn't claim to have the depth of Nethack and Slash 'Em.

Modern roguelikes tend to be far more complicated than the original Rogue. (Which has its own irritations, e.g. Aquators).

Two fairly prominent families are the Nethack family and the Angband family. The Nethack games tend to be somewhat shorter, more purely dungeon crawls, more capricious (*lots* of opportunity for extreme fortune / misfortune)... and yes, very irritating if you're not either a veteran player or playing with a copy of the latest spoiler files.

The Angband family tends to be longer and more involved -- many include overland travel between towns (on the surface, no less) and dungeons and what-not. They both require and reward caution -- there's somewhat less arbitrariness, but it's also harder to save yourself by taking a bad chance. Casually entering a full graveyard is a -bad- idea no matter what you have...

You need to invest time in increasing stats, covering crucial resistances and the odd immunity, stockpiling those mana / healing potions -- easier to do than in Nethack, but slow.

Among the Angband family, PernAngband (now refocused a bit and called Tales of Middle Earth, IIRC) included quite the odd variety -- including a character type which could possess the bodies of slain monsters and so forth; there was an ability to forge new magic items; and so forth. Very funky.

[B0rsuk]

There are three other roguelikes worth mentioning here (alphabetical order):

A.D.O.M.
A roguelike that has a lot in common with RPG games. It has a story, quests, etc. It has a lot of interesting ideas, depth, and memorable places. It's just fun. It was my first roguelike. It has some cons, too: it's not being developed anymore (bugs are not going to be fixed, etc), story gets annoying after a while because you have to redo quests in almost the same order each time you start anew. It has some almost worthless skills, like bridge building. It's quirky and on many occasions plain unfair, without a chance to escape.

DoomRL:
The simplest of the three, but it's also refreshing. A breath of fresh air in the world of roguelikes. It's quite simple, but deffinitely fun. Not only it's the most notable Sci-fi roguelike around, but also one where ranged weapons (not spells) actually matter. Even better, ranged weapons pack a punch and it makes tactics important.

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (Stone Soup variant)
http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net
My favourite roguelike. First, it prides itself on being mostly a tactical game and has few quirks. Mechanics are mostly transparent to the player. Spoilers are of little help in Crawl. It's skill-based rather than class-based, meaning you can shape your character in any way you wish. It has a lot of interesting, innovative spells and items. It's technically more advanced than ADOM, has more gizmos, much more varied random levels etc. It has really good interface - for example you can travel between explored levels by just pressing a few keys, auto-explore long, dull corridors until something interesting happens, etc. Gods of Crawl are a lot more interesting than those in Nethack or ADOM. Each of them has its likes and dislikes and rewards (mostly) something different. Crawl has a lot of depth, a lot of variety (many enemies which require unique tactics, for example giant bats which are several times faster than you and use hit&run tactics), and is also quite fair. It rarely has instant deaths which you can't prevent by playing safer. Also, it's almost immune to scumming - there are very few ways to cheat the system, and you can't, for example, stay on the same level to grind forever (Nethack is infamous for this). Crawl has quite high difficulty, and wanting you dead is how it shows its love. Running away is a common survival tactic in Crawl. But, as said before, it rarely kills you without a warning.

[Wokeye]

I <3 Dwarf Fortress. I only play it with the may green tileset version though. Much purrrtier.

Can't wait for the future patches to fix the bits that really need it (ie military) and add a srategic context (war on gobbos!).

[Foodstamp]

Thats the tileset I use as well. .

I am so terrible at dwarf fortress but I still love it.

[Saarud]

Remember... Losing is fun!

[Stryke11]

Borsuk, thanks for the Crawl suggestion. I'm playing it and it's great, way more fun then Slash 'Em, and I think I'm picking up the key commands, since it appears for the most part they stay the same across games.

ToME seems cool, too, but I'm just not ready for that level of complexity. I dl'd a few of the 7Day games that looked promising, as well.

[B0rsuk]

Stryke11 said:
Borsuk, thanks for the Crawl suggestion. I'm playing it and it's great, way more fun then Slash 'Em, and I think I'm picking up the key commands, since it appears for the most part they stay the same across games.

You're welcome. If you have any questions, it would be best to join ##crawl at irc.freenode.org . Traffic is quite high over there, much higher than #dominions. And you can often chat with developers.
There are a lot of subtle commands ready to be discovered. For example, try pressing CTRL-O for auto-explore. You can disable/enable autopickup with CTRL-A . CTRL-G lets you travel between explored levels. CTRL-F is for searching. You can search for items, shops, staircases etc... and just press a letter to travel there.
Check your species' innate abilities by pressing A .