Obscura wrote:"Read spoilers to get the good items, control one character", some tactical game.
Yeah it sucks. Once you learn where the good items are you can break the game easily. There's not really any skill, you just take your one guy and damage race everything.
But enough about Fallout!!
You sure like talking shit about games don't know anything about. Pretty hard to spoil where the good items are when a new world is randomly generated every time!
There are a ton of different tactical concepts you have to balance while playing a roguelike. A lot more than you you need to worry about in, say, X-Com (more on that later). First and most importantly, you need to be able to judge what you can and can't handle. Picking fights you can't win is the number one cause of death in these games. You always want to have an escape route prepared when you go into anything dangerous, and you need to make sure it stays open while you fight. Ideally you'll have a backup escape route just in case. You need to realize when a fight has started to go badly before it turns into a real problem. At best you blow a valuable consumable and at worst you get killed. You need to be able to judge when to burn a consumable and when to risk going without, somewhat like bomb use in shmups. You need to do all the usual things in tactics games like use cover to approach ranged attackers or exploit chokepoints to turn a fight against a group into a series of 1v1s. Using weak enemies as human shields of sorts to stop the advance or shots of stronger enemies can be very effective. Most of the time you can't do all of this stuff at once, so you need to decide what to prioritize in any given situation.
The great majority of roguelikes include time limits which are a big concern. Sometimes speedier tactics are worth taking a bit more damage or using up more resources. It's possible to win all of your tactical battles and lose the strategic war. Sometimes it's worth taking the time to prepare a perfect battlefield to face a dangerous enemy, often you can't afford it. There are lots of other ways in which roguelikes take advantage of the interplay between short-term tactics and long-term strategy. For example, it's common for the player character to gain special abilities from eating the meat of rare monsters, but you have to judge if you can really beat that red dragon and if the immediate danger is worth permanent fire resistance.
That's all still relatively basic, but much like shmups, roguelikes are more diverse than they appear and most need to be approached in their own unique way. Sil allows you to build characters who can move and attack at the same time, which lets you style on small groups of orcs and trolls, but a mobility-focused character is in that much more trouble if they get surrounded. Sil's enemy AI is very good so getting surrounded is a constant threat. Brogue's hunger-based time limit is extremely strict and most magic items recharge slowly, so the decision of when to use a magic item and when to take a break and let your items recharge is never easy. ADOM punishes you in the late game for the number of feline-type enemies you've killed (or rewards you with an incredible item if you haven't killed any) so whenever a tiger shows up, there's always a puzzle of how to get away without harming it.
To be fair, there really is one family of rogulikes that become immensely easier after reading spoilers, namely NetHack and its descendants. NetHack itself is the worst offender. You might figure out on your own to rub grease on your cloak to make it harder for eels to constrict you. You might decide on your own to wear a blindfold before you encounter Medusa. Maybe you'll figure out how to avoid petrification via cockatrices, and you might even find out how to weaponize their ability for your own use.
But the whole game is
full of things like that and
solving all of it through trial and error could
take literal years of your life. I respect NetHack's immense complexity, the huge number of things that can be interacted with, the sheer number of ways to interact with them, and that most of it is practical in some way or another. But as far as actually playing it goes, I'm not a fan tbh. Other hacklikes, such as ADOM and Ragnarok, manage to keep most of the appeal of NetHack's complexity while remaining far more playable and winnable for unspoiled players.
It's funny that you accuse roguelikes for being about looking up optimal strategies and engaging in trivial tactics, because that's a good description of X-Com. Learn a good base layout once and you can use it for every base in every playthrough, there's no reason to diversify. Look up a good research order and for every future playthrough you're just going through the motions. When to build more bases, what to manufacture, nothing changes between playthroughs to encourage trying a different approach from what works. Read a guide once and you've mastered the strategic half of the game.
When you start a mission, you want to throw a smoke grenade outside of your ship so you don't get nailed by reaction fire. After your smoke grenade goes off, send out your most expendable guys to spot and keep your most accurate guys on a safe hill or something to snipe. Have your snipers shoot the aliens your spotters find. If there's an alien in a building, blow up the building. If an alien is inside a ship and you don't have a blaster launcher to make your own entrance, send a sacrificial rookie inside. Once the aliens are out of TUs, send your real soldiers. That's the tactical half of the game. Repeat that for about 50 missions until you research psionics. After psionics you can steamroll everything in your sleep on superhuman difficulty. Speaking of difficulty, make sure to apply a fanpatch or the game will ignore your difficulty selection and set itself to beginner!
This gets pretty tedious pretty quickly, and it's made that much worse by the fact that you can bring about a ridiculous number of soldiers on missions (26 with the Avenger). Moving 26 soldiers every turn on missions that can last dozens of turns is a tedious nightmare. I always brought along a few tanks, not because a tank is better than four soldiers, but because moving one tank is a lot less of a pain than moving four soldiers. While on the topic of tedious mechanics, X-Com uses that execrable system where to get better at doing X, you need to repetitively perform X until your X skill levels up. This concept has never once in gaming history been used to good effect.
Just as with Fallout, X-Com is not an outright bad game. It's ambitious, it's complex, and it has excellent atmosphere. It's also
extremely overrated, difficult to learn and easy to master. Actually now that I think of it, "difficult to learn and easy to master" is the recurring theme of the old-school western pantheon. Bloated, counterintuitive rulesets where optimal play is simple and repetitive. RPGs where 99% of the difficulty is in reaching experience level 2. Games that make it it hard to obtain even basic supplies while playing blind, but where a knowledgeable player can obtain top tier equipment right off the bat. They love that stuff. Even genuinely great games like Star Control 2 follow the trend. Well it's still better than the modern "easy to learn, nothing to master" approach.
tnc wrote:Oh, thank you. I know Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, never heard of Brogue (Brogue? Really?)
So Vanguard, how are you comparing a roguelike with Fallout? I guess you guys past on the subject but...
Brogue's really good. Nowhere near as complex as NetHack and it can't match Crawl's character variety, but it combines parts of both games' best virtues into something stronger than the sum of its parts. It's very good about making everything understandable as well, easy to pick up and play immediately. Highly recommended.
Not I sure I understand your question. How did I come to compare the two? Read the thread. How can I compare dissimilar games? I think I did just fine.
