[Announce] PosChengband 7.0.0 Released
 

I've begun a substantially redesigned 7.0 version, mostly in response to monster related issues and player effects. While I am not finished playtesting, I have tested enough that what I have seems stable and playable. 7.0.0 is available in the usual spot, but only those brave and eager for design changes should attempt this. I'll keep playtesting ... I had planned to sit on this 'til November or December, but having so many local changes not pushed to github makes me nervous (and once I push, people will play, I think).

Monster Issues:
Playtesting the recent monster additions revealed numerous problems, and investigation led to frustration with the existing system and, therefor, another major re-write. I've redone monster melee, monster auras, and, most aggressively, monster spells. I can go into issues if you like, but perhaps it will be better to just browse the commit history if you are curious. I tried to explain my reasoning whenever possible. Dont' browse r_info.txt unless you wish to spoil stuff ... Try playing "blind" instead!

Monster spells are now lored, and you can legitimately learn damage numbers with enough experience. Try playing without easy_lore and easy_id ... The lore system is quite good, IMO. And player omniscience does make the game much easier (not to mention spoiling anything new I might add).

Many monster types have been redesigned. Some new types have been added. Many of the recent 6.1 additions have been dropped (e.g. the Steam stuff) as there was just too much. For example, there is no need for new unique angels, but some work on the existing ones should do the trick. Go slay Azriel and Raphael (preferably in melee), and let me know if we really need new, harder stuff :)

Player Effects:
While working on monsters, its hard to avoid considering player effects. If the only way to improve monster difficulty is to bump up raw melee damage, then the game goes in a direction I dislike. So, player effects were changed:

[1] Free Action: No longer all or nothing. FA entitles you to a saving throw: one per source. (TODO: More late game monsters need PARALYSIS, I think).

[2] See Invisible: No longer all or nothing. SI entitles you to a "skill roll" to notice an invisible monster: one roll per source of SI. Which skill? Why, searching, of course!

[3] Hold Life: Very interesting changes here. I won't spoil, but powerful undead monsters (especially uniques) might have something nasty in store for you!

[4] Stun: Redesigned effects (for players and monsters alike). Effects are smoothed out, and more significant, I think. Monsters, on the other hand, had an off-the-wall ridiculous stun system where the least stun affect made them miss half their moves, miss half their blows and fail half their spells (non-innate). They now use the same system as the player.

[5] Poison: No immediate damage. Instead, all damage is delayed. You'll see a poison counter in the current version. Poison is much harder to cure and many things only cure it partially.

[6] Nether: A significant portion of nether damage has been siphoned off into ... something nasty. So there will be a bit less direct damage.

I'm sure I'm forgetting major changes ... Many bugfixes and game balance issues.

Oh, and a new score system. The old scores.raw was segfaulting by (1) keeping raw ids in the score table; (2) attempting to display without calling init_angband. Many monster races need a valid r_info to work. The new system is available with ~H or from the Birth Welcome Screen. It is a single user system, not designed for large concurrent access (as in the old, original VAX days). Don't delete files in the scores (apex) directory unless you know what you are doing. The system keeps dumps for you, and you can view them directly from the high score listing. Also, live characters are added to the score list so that if, like me, you have large numbers of currently active characters, there is no need to wait until they die/win to see them.

Finally, I haven't been on-line for the last 4 months or so. Any issues or complaints raised on oook in that time will be addressed in a future release.

Enjoy!

7.0.0 already.... One word, before I even have any chance to read further...AWESOME!!!!!!!!

Here is the usual place to get PosChengband 7.0.0.

Some notable stuff in 7.0.0:
*Poison counter
*Snaga snappers are much more nasty
*CCW poisons won't relieve you from poison anymore. You definitely at least !Neutralize Poison to really knock down the Poison Counter

Huge thanks, Chris!
this one is cool and tends to more realistic poison behavior.
probably life of melee characters become even harder.
I see a potential here, like you can remember approx. damage dealt
to you after very first hit and improve this after you taken more and more damage to more precise figures. Like after childhood everybody know pretty much how painful an ant can bite even after first bite, right?

Lazy removed, the lazy arts removed, the plain gold ring removed, blue mage removed, imitator removed, greater hell beast removed, the unicorn of order has 7000 HP and more yet unknown. the spirit of poschengband has been lost, perhaps version 6.1.0 and 7.0.0 should be the start of a new variant.

Always good to see an aggressive update!

I had been building up a list of various criticisms, bugs reports, and conspicuously missing features/content, but I'm realizing that I'm better off just putting that list up as a reminder for myself instead of posting it here.

Chris is very much making a version of Poschengband specialized for his long hours without internet, as well as for mitigating or leveraging his familiarity with the game, and that will slowly but steadily drift from what new or more sporadic players might want.

Makes me pine for two or three hundred spare hours I could throw into the commit trees immediately.

You should still post it, I think, hopefully Elliptic could use it in his ElliPosChengband

Well, here then; (Edit: It appears that spoilers cannot nest here, or have labeling, and so are less useful for organization.)
It's not nearly done, as you can see, and it doesn't include other things that go on my to-do list, such as the Nanite race.


I generally call them "scrolls of Disappointment" and Artifact Creation "honorary scrolls of Disappointment"; you might get better loot for bringing them to Olympus or whatever, but practically speaking it's just delaying the time you get a single piece of loot. It isn't worth the attention, and at the time I get them I usually just sell them, since their score is high enough to always sell for max shop price.

If you play a race like Balrog or Vampire, a high-charge staff can function as a Staff of Food. Also, if you have a low-level melee character, the extra targets mean you don't have to hunt them down.

Edit: Also these questions, for you Mocht;
They are, so long as you're loading sections of forest, water, or mountain. If you want to force one to appear, get on a loading boundary triggering one of those areas and hop back and forth until you get a "found something interesting" while going in the right direction.

I skimmed the code, and it looks like it's a roll with sides based on how much damage was done, with a couple multipliers for being a Vampire, using a Hex blade vampiric effect, and having a particular mutation. Also, of course, the target needs to be Living, but you probably already knew that.

Welcome to the world of PosChengband!

I'm not sure if the drops improved that much since I always play my staple Tonberry Skillmaster combo every time. The increased summoning is kind of new - it was toned in the version 2.x - 3.x days. The dazed ailment is a light player stun - Chris had changed the player stunning mechanics a bit. And yes, monsters can banish you away.

Sappers and packs are more dangerous now. I don't recall if Door mimics could paralyze befofre. The less-informative-telepathy is new and forces more strategy on the player.

don't think I'm going to download the 7.x the melee nerfs sound way to strong 20 little things hitting me with some paralyze or somesuch and they each have a separate roll = one will roll a 20 and I'm screwed 6x just came out recently seems less brutal on melee play

Seems the Virtue system is friendlier, no longer as punishing to players for actually killing monsters.
I had been turning it off as uselessly annoying, but new version, so everything is on

Ah, how to tell your new mage character is doomed? Step down to 50' and there two steps away, a Main Gauche of Westernesse.

- Bug with the Hex spellcasting error message, Attempting the second spell without canceling the first yields the error "Can not spell while spell more."

More findings:

Pretty much every element can now be an aura.
Hellfire is now an element, which I have seen in the form of a hellfire lance from one of the black 'p' monsters.
A bunch of new spiders with damage auras, jump, and plenty of their damage type on their attacks.
You can no longer use Phase Door to teleport out of vaults. Instead it fails without printing a message and wastes your turn. This is really dumb.
!Healing no longer seems to cure poison, but says it does in its description.

Sorry if I asked a noob question.
Is it ok to migrate saves from version 6.1.0? :confused:

nope, 7.0 breaks savefile compatibility with the 6.x versions

I wonder if in the future, player can go back to their home and pick an option from there to create migration files, then load those files in home back to normal saves using newer version :rolleyes:

Unlikely. If that were feasible to do (for a one-dev hobby project), then it'd also be feasible to just let the new version load the old version's saves directly, automatically detecting when a migration needs to be performed.

Especially with the class removals, NPC changes, and additions, logs and accomplishments would be utter chaos.

Odd 'bug', I still have a 6.10 install and when I open the 7.0 client and choose open characters, it takes me to the 6.10 Character directory, NOT the 7.0 one.

I had this one before even way before 7.0.0...It might have something to do with the registry if you're on Windows.

Probably won't work at all ... When Chris makes extensive changes to the game, the savefile compatibility breaks big time depending on what he does.

Ok, thanks for the info, guys.
So now I'm in the middle of playing 6.1, it would be sad to abandon my character just like that after all the efforts, to jump into 7.0...
How you guys deal with this issue? :confused:

Qy@ is a pretty simple solution.

I used to be a brave L43 Ninja... Then I took an Arrow in the Knee... :D

Ooookay, so, some feedback:

Poison seems really over the top to me. Having to quaff 5 or more Neutralize Poison potions after a brief fight despite having 1x res poison is just annoying.

And - do we really need to make the game harder? It seems like the vast majority of changes has that intention. From all I know, this (entire genre and specifically Posch) is already one of the hardest out there. The introduction of a "begiinner" mode seems really ironic, especially given the kind of changes it has. I don't think anyone willing to play such a complex game with ascii graphics will be deterred by too many options....

A couple questions, too:
How does the life mechanic work? Does anything happen at specific points?
Is there info anywhere about the damage the poison ticker does?

PosChengband has been always a version of Hengband on steroids. Imo, I can't complain. It forces players to play smart or it intends to. ;)

I was in the middle of a summoned swarm of zombies, they mostly missed me, BUT! The Poison counter kept climbing almost as fast as I could clear it. They were adding 30-40 counters a round while Neutralize Poison only removes 50.
Had me to 50% health by the time I cleared the room.

minor display bug, pressing ~W as a mimic sometimes says you have no melee attacks, when you are in a form that isnt wielding a weapon

~x shows the form's innate attacks, but on that page you cant see your bonuses from rings, potions, etc

Bug: Playing as a Sniper, one never sees spell_desc, just the damage list.

What does "Hurt" in addition with a percentage do?

Quick question: Does the 'Virtue' system actually have an influence on the game or is it just for spellcasting fail rates?

NOTE: another bug: when using the samurai, kendo magic, upon casting a learnt attack, the bars of : 'name', 'LV', 'SP' are displayed twice, which is pretty much unnecessary

Nubz Questions
 

Well, i play as a rogue class and i have a couple of questions:
1) I have a backstab attack for an enemy which sleeping or fleeing. Does this kind of attack have increased damage or it only for roleplaying sake without any bonuses?
2) I found a broad sword which have title (Armageddon). I assume this is some kind of brand, but i don't know what is suppose to do. Where do i can find a list of all brand with desc for this game?

I've not played Poscheng yet, just wanted to note that in Zangband and Z+Angband they do summon. They are rather weak and usually killed before they could show all their fine skills : ))

1) Yes. Does a lot more damage (3*base or more).
2) For any fully identified weapon, just pressing i/e and then the letter of the weapon will tell you its properties (or use x in stores). If it's not fully identified, use *identify* (Scroll, spell, town service).

Also worth keeping in mind back-stab works with confusion & a bunch of other stuff unless that has changed in 7.0, it did in the older versions. So look for a staff of confusion for extra fun

Bug:
If you're killed by a monster that outside of your LOS, then the Tombstone would say you were killed by 'it'...without identifying what it was...

Or...Is this something new??

I know it, but this broad sword is fully identified. Even in Library (Morivant) there is no option to Research this particular sword and there is no warning left about *identify* in description of this sword. So title Armageddon left unexplained. Maybe this sword power up magic from realm of Armadeddon?

Thank you. Where did you find this information? Ingame manual or other sources?

Not to mention they often have large plusses.

Some feedback on 7.0.0 for Chris:
Attacking acid veils with acid immunity still triggers the "you are dissolved" message.
New attack flavour messages seem to trigger even with elemental immunity to the given damage type.
Healing type effects (staves, potions, spells) all say they cure poison, but do not - Holiness does this as well

Even Identified it tells you little about many of the brands. Like (Craft) this affects Craft School magic in some way I assume, but damned if I know...

It is also annoying to have Identify tell you basically nothing you didn't already know.

-An Amulet (unidentified) becomes,
-A Barbarian Amulet (?)

umm, yay? :p:rolleyes:

The brand is mostly flavour text. Armageddon tends to get damage boosts visible on inspect & often an element brand. Death is vampiric & sometimes poison resist or hold life. Craft is just an element brand. You can either *id them or sell a bunch of junk brands till you know all the flavours, but there is actually nothing there that doesn't show up by inspect if fully *ided, except perhaps blessed which gets rid of the pointy penalty on a good priest.

It might just be the color text wording. The block of text saying that an item might still have hidden powers to be revealed by *ID or selling should probably go away once the item is *ID'd.

Back in Ang/Zang days one of the primary reasons to *ID was as a protection from memory-loss. Is that still the case? I could swear my now dead Ninja forgot ID'd items on several occasions.

I'm going to give you a protip right now and just say: play with easy_id on.

Yeah unless you're a no-spoilers kind of person, Easy lore turns id into *id & makes the game a lot easier to play. Though I think it's actually easy-id & easy lore is monster id. There are 2 settings under = to play with when starting the character.

@Wobbly, oh yeah. I always mix those two up since I'm thinking of Stone of Lore.

It mainly makes the game easier by virtue of being less obnoxious to play. *ID* is probably one of the dumbest mechanics I've encountered in a loot simulator. If I wanted to enjoy IDing items, I'd play Brogue or something.

I had always considered easy_id/lore as spoilerish, cheat mode. :) Might as well, save file dupe.
But given the difficulty, sigh... :D

I think Chris feels the same about them, given their in-game descriptions...
But when you've already played a bunch, it's better to just be able to read which half dozen spells one of the 1500 monsters has instead of remembering. If my savefile persisted between versions I'd have 100% accurate info on everything except the changes in the new version.
You could probably get a lot farther with save file duplication than by turning on easy lore/id, but it would be a lot more unfun!

I think of them as "boring bullshit removal" options. :)

There's no wrong way to play the game. One player's "cheating" is another player's "changing the game so it's more fun for them."

I used to remove the MULTIPLY flag from monsters in ToME 2 because I got sick of the dungeons getting taken over by flying breeding monsters all the time (which, due to the use of trees for walls, meant the monsters effectively had passwall). It made the game slightly easier, in that I wouldn't have to abandon levels as often, but it made it vastly more enjoyable as well. In general, creators make the game that they think is best, and they deserve the benefit of the doubt...but they're not always right!

trying a fresh Monk, with all easy's on, and virtues off.
One thing I noticed very quickly, Monks absolutely suck versus breeders.
And being a 'Sexy' Monk none of the breeders ever stop breeding and take a nap. LOL

So is there a way to auto-id wands, staves and rods without having the autopicker picking them up? It's fairly annoying to have every single one of them picked up, yet if the auto pickup is disabled, they're not IDed.

I'm going to concur that the new poison mechanic can be a bit too much. An Ancient green dragon now has now become a new big shot killer of low level power-melee characters. At clvl 22, an Ancient green dragon breathes on me and my Poison goes to 639 (that's > 600!!)!!

Btw, as for Skillmasters, Dagger-type weapons should be in a separate category than true Sword weapons similar to Weaponmasters. I will say that even if this will make Tonberry Skillmasters less fun in the future.

~?wands or ?~wands

Thanks - just figured this out myself.

More specifically e.g.:
~?unidentified rods

How about adding Shieldmastery for Skillmasters? Or is that too overpowered?

What's the deal with uploading html dumps from this version? Tried several times, so far nothing showed up.

Poison has gotten more deadly, but I'd also point out that with the addition of the poison counter, you can see exactly how much curing is necessary, which is an advantage the player never had before

I'm not convinced poison is more deadly. I suspect once people change tactics any character with the str to carry a billion cure poison potions will be safer & low hps characters used to be one-shot by poison. How are they suddenly worse off? Mostly I'll need to play more to judge.

Well, i have some more questions:
1) What does ego "Blessed" mean in names of weapons? Is it harder to be cursed by monsters with this weapon equipped?
2) I play with class Ranger and in Virtues i am an enemy of Nature. Does it mean that spells from realm of Nature has any drawback from this status?

Good realm priests get penalties for using non-blessed sharp weapons apart from that its pretty much just what you see if you *id it.

As far as I'm aware being an enemy of nature is fine on a nature caster as long as your over all alignment is neutral (good or evil gives you penalties to your fail rate), but I've never checked the code. It's near impossible not to be an enemy of nature as hydras & hounds count as animals.

On the character sheet screen, use the '|' command and change the extension to .HTML and then that should do it.

Well yeah. I know that, and it appears to upload fine - the result screen on http://angband.oook.cz/ladder.php looks like it parsed correctly. Only that the dump does not show in the ladder.

Uh...I take that back. Better to keep Daggers in the same category as Swords, because Daggers are Swords (i.e. Blades) according to the Proficiency menu (press ~ then P) anyways. I'll keep quiet on that.

Btw, anyone noticed that there IS NO non-Staves (i.e. the one to utitlize non-staves Hafted weapons) Weaponmaster option?? Also, when playing as a Staffmaster, the ability to use Sabres is NOT capped as ![Unskilled] too!

wobbly posted one on the ladder today for 7.0 so he has it working it seems

Found the problem. I was assuming I could use the "Your character's name" field when uploading to override the actual character name. That doesn't seem to work, so it failed because I already got a higher level char with that name.

I guess there's no way to rename an existing character ingame?

In Outpost, check the building with the Thieves/Warg quests.

I saw monster spells mentioned in changes list and got excited, but it looks like unresistable (except for one mutation and level 50 psion skill) dispel is still a thing.

Any plans on changing this?

I hate to be salty but I have to say this; I really don't like the course this variant has taken. Which is a shame, because, as it is seen from my username, it was my most favourite rogue-like.

The game as it is now, is unreasonably hard and encourages some playing styles over the others. I feel that insta kills, randomized energy, summoning and unresistable dispells made the game hard as is. In the last versions, monster damage has had been effectively doubled (the resistance nerf), my favourite artifact penalized with - 60% total health (crown of beruthiel), and now these recent changes.. Its really not a game for me anymore.

(plus, the removal of the clear -more prompt- option, nerfing of devices, nerfing of ring and amulet detection etc)

Of course chris, the variant maintainer, has the right to do with his variant as he pleases but if he wonders about the opinion of his audience; this is mine, and i am sure i am not the only one who thinks so.


I would stick to older versions but it'd feel like cheating. Im glad I could experience this variant in its alpha/beta stages when it wasn't so unreasonably punishing.


cheers.

For vortex monster, the description of the "elemental explosion" power is broken.

I'm afraid this is part of the new Free Action mechanic. ^What just happened with two layers of Free Action, is working as designed, per Chris. You're going to have to tolerate deaths in order to play PosChengband nowadays.

This just seems to me to be actively trying to drive people away. Now, no matter how carefully you guard your self, one string of bad RNG rolls and Poof!

This may be what Chris wants, but to me, it has become more like convincing people to go to the gym, then when they exercise, you randomly Tase them so they fall face first into the treadmill, or drop that barbell onto their chest.

I think it's more of an attempt to encourage you to fight at range. Unfortunately, ranged combat is boring af in pretty much every angband variant.

I haven't tried poscheng 7 yet but a similar mechanic exists in Sil and works well there. However, entrancement in Sil wears off after you take a single (highly disadvantaged) hit. I'm sure there are some balance changes that can be made to make this more fun.

I also think maybe people are missing the fact that poscheng 7 has a giant 'beta' tag next to it in the version number.

If by 'resistance nerf' you're talking about how higher resists work now, then I believe that this is false -- breath damage was also reduced across the board so that it was less likely to do huge enough damage to kill.

Beruthiel is just one artefact, and if you really want you can just edit it back. It's not like there's some huge competitive spirit in poscheng.

Instant kills and randomized energy were emblematic of poscheng from the beginning and I would hate to see them go.

I do think the recent changes have missed the boat a bit, though. Poscheng was always attractive to me because it was basically the spinal tap of angband variants -- all dials turned to 11. It was nice to have Sil, which was lean and mean, balanced on the other extreme with poscheng, which was huge and mean. Now it seems we're starting to get finnickier about how people play the game, which is sad.

I'm still optimistic, though. At worst, someone will fork from v5 or v6 and take it further in the super batshit crazy direction.

Why would a staff of simplicity have exactly the same fail rate as a normal staff of the same type (with more max charges)?

So the key for auto travel is not present on my keyboard. I want to rebind it through @8. What do I enter for the action/code?

And another one (would it make more sense to add/edit them into one post?):

I very vaguely seem to remember an overview of home item properties to make it easier to review resistances etc that one has available. Can't seem to find it now. Am I misremembering this existing ever, did it get removed or am I just too dumb to find it?

As far as I can tell paralyze length is reduced if you have FA in 7.0. I've never been paralyzed for more than 1 or 2 turns through it.

Found a bug with Weaponmasters:
Polearmmasters, Clubmasters, and any other non-Sword/Dagger Weaponmasters are able to improve skill with Sabres.

Another bug:
You can go into the World Map while certain erratic awake monsters are visible in LOS nearby. e.g. Metallic blue centipede.

That was unfortunately lost when the recent chardump inventory changes were made.

Out of interest, what is it about these that you like, if you can explain it?

I ask because I am also a fan of punishing difficulty, but for me, the line between fun and tedium is crossed quickly when deaths become unavoidable. There are plenty of race/class combinations that would simply never have the HP to be able to survive a double mana storm from the Serpent. Getting more speed than it is feasible, but getting enough speed that it can't double-move you seems impossible. And this is only compounded by the opaque nature of game mechanics; something that seems to be purposefully cultivated.

Do you think there should be mechanics in place to prevent an 'unavoidable' death, or a death that wasn't somehow warranted through imperfect play? If not, what do you think of the relationship between time spent playing and the chance of an instant death? Dying to an unfortunate trap on D:1 is never a big deal, but the situation is very different after someone has invested dozens of hours in that character.

To the topic at large: the poison changes sound interesting, but the Free Action ones sound distinctly unappealing. Giving someone a practically unavoidable % chance to die - no matter how small it is - never feels fair to me, particularly in a longer roguelike like this.

Debo, you mentioned Sil earlier by way of comparison. For my part, I actually think Sil has the same problem in this regard, rather than being at the opposite end of the scale. It's uncommon, but it rarely happens that your rolls will fall in such a way that you'll suffer a very unexpected death. I've died to Orcobal, for example, in a single hit from full health, with a character that no one would say shouldn't be fighting him.

When that happens, a player doesn't feel like 'Damn, I made a mistake there', or 'Should have retreated earlier'. They just feel screwed by the system. It's the same whether you're paralysed and killed by a pack of ghouls because you rolled 1 on that d100 twice in a row, or whether Morgoth rolls max damage and creams you in one 6d10 blow in Sil, or whether the Serpent double mana storms and kills you from full health. That said, it's less aggravating in Sil because of the shorter game length.

That's not to say the % chance of failure shouldn't exist; without it, we'd just be playing chess. But I personally prefer safeguards or gates to limit the effect of bad - or good - luck. I don't want to be paralysed and killed through a 1% chance, and I don't want Ringil to drop for me on D:1 either. If luck goes against me, I want to have to burn up precious resources - like a soldier's life in X-COM, or a scroll of blinking in Crawl, or a 'life' in other games. Where I'm punished, but it's recoverable, and I know that my luck will average out over the course of the game. If I'm a poor player I prefer to be punished for it by watching with alarm at my rapidly dwindling resources, silently adding up the missteps I made where I wasted what I had, or where flawed tactics cost me greater rewards.

The alternative - instant death - is more tense, of course. Players are never safe. Even if they've played perfectly, never wasted any 'resources', not maneuvered themselves into a poor position, even a single misstep (or no misstep at all) can kill them. That kind of tension is certainly attractive, but I find the cost too high. Because when the moment comes when the roll goes against them, and they're left regretting their 'awful daring of a moment's surrender', I think they're going to be less inclined to pick up the game again if they can't say 'Well, I know where I fucked up'.

<mutter><mutter>
So, I was trashing mobs in the overworld with a new 7.0 char. A tough battle with two named at once gave me the Phial of Galadriel, and the Gloves, Cammithrin... Problem is, I'm a Ninja and abhor light... grrr, aargh... :p

Quote:
Originally Posted by debo View Post
Instant kills and randomized energy were emblematic of poscheng from the beginning and I would hate to see them go.

To be fair, randomized energy predates Chris, it was first added way back in Hengband. Randomizing it does remove the binary can-or-can't-be-double-moved-by-the-SoC in favor of a more graduated "more is better" scale, which is where resistances, free action, etc have all been moving. This is more in line with CRPG-style scaling stats and less in line with Angband's binary attributes.

Fwiw, I agree with Conker.

Version 7.0.1 is up in the usual spot. This release is a minor update, mostly because I am about to go online to access all the expected complaints about the 7.0 stuff ;) As with the last release, I'm not finished playtesting and still making considerable design changes. If this bothers you, wait for the 7.1 release which should happen sometime around Xmas ... I hope.

This release addressed a few 6.1 oook reports including:
[1] Problems with quests if monsters are summoned *after* the quest is completed. Fixed. Reports about the Vapor quest not working could not be reproduced. Is this still an issue? If you are on Linux (I think the OP was), try running in gdb and at least getting a backtrace (bt). Also, make sure you are running the correct executable. The build system builds into the src directory. Any executable at the root level was placed there by you, and therefore must be manually kept up to date by you. Also, on Linux at least, you can just run out of src (directories are set by configure).

[2] Minor complaints about message coloring ... weapons of sharpness.

[3] Request to look at mimic design ... I did, but haven't had a chance for playtesting. FYI, mimics are designed to be much weaker in mimicry than possessors. They can learn 5 forms, after all, and they are quite capable of success in their native form whereas the Possessor is hopeless without a current body. They should not be able to count on learning any specific form.

[4] Confusion about device design: In the old days, almost any player could get enough device skills to use (almost) any device. Skills were meaningless for mage types: You could probably do a Mighty Zombie Mage and not notice any decrease wrt devices. These days, *nobody* is above the device system... Well, perhaps a Devicemaster is, but then only in their speciality. And even in this case, race and personality choices matter, as does INT. Every player *might* find Magic Mastery useful.

Wrt devices themselves, the old system had each effect identical (and damage indexed to player level??!). The new system has variability in effectiveness, and I've gone ahead and taken a good hard look at this for 7.0.1. For example, Fire Balls start at around 65 damage, but can go all the way up to 370 damage! If you are in the habit of ignoring certain device types, you might want to rethink that approach. So while a Warrior can't use a wand of rockets, they might be able to snag some other device type that doesn't scale difficulty with power so aggressively. (Of course, warriors are *much* better off shooting.)

Check out the wizard commands ^A"3 and ^A"2 if you don't understand the current system and its design goals. And remember, devices should be considerably weaker than mage spells ... at least until the end game (where device skills really, really matter).

I've also continued to make minor gameplay adjustments, such as:
[1] FA helping with slowing effects from inertia as well as with recovery from being slowed.

[2] Random quest rewards are now 10 levels deeper than the current quest level, but there are fewer reward objects (You can get good stuff early).

[3] There is now more !Healing. _Healing is not required and never really was ... at least before the 6.0 monster additions. If you have it, of course, then it is very nice.

[4] Black Market now stocks object levels commensurate with player level. This is not realistic, of course, but is a nice balance change. For example, stocking OL50 for CL30 is a bit broken. On the other hand, the BM is no longer useless in the late game ... You can get OL70 and CL50.

[5] reduce_uniques no longer removes boss monsters or demigod parents.

[6] _Holiness removed. If you upgrade, it still works of course. You just can't find these any more.

[7] Nexus stat scramble replaced with something else. No spoilers, just play and see!

And remember, I still haven't seen any comments about 7.0. I'll adress those in the next release ...

This seemed to happen because the edit files for Vapor Quest and a few others--Sandworms, Mountain Shrine, and I think one other I can't remember--were somehow not making it in with the rest of the edit files when compiling for Linux. The problem was manually fixed for the server, but I don't know if there's something that stopping those files from being included with Linux compilations.

MITZE means installation, rather than compilation. The makefiles needed to be updated at some point when quests were changed, but weren't.

For what purpose was this done.

EDIT:
Okay, I read the commit log and while I agree that _Holiness is too strong for its depth, I still really like it as a staff effect.
I propose you keep it in since it has a great thematic set of effects.
You still have much better effects on staves, such as Genocide, Destruction, Banish, and the Storms.

Regarding the damage: I don't think 100 LOS damage is actually very good at all in PosChengband. Sure, it literally disintegrates hordes of orcs and early hounds, but as soon as I get deep enough to find good stuff like _Holiness or _Dispel Foo, I am probably sitting in an ASC, wailing at one monster a time as much as possible or blink-scumming lone uniques- stuff like that. And once the chaff has more than 400 or so HP, I can't clear them without burning all/most of my charges (though it is very nice to have this utility on a healing item for when a summon roll fills a wide open space with harmless low U/u etc..

Looking for and conserving healing and *healing* is the most fun part of the game so it was made longer

Oh, by the way, it would be fantastic if we could get those savefile headers with text descriptions of the character (Name, race, class, level, dungeon level, killed by) that V and FA have. Please.

That's just another step in turning the game into IVAN as MITZE calls the path PosChengband has followed

Going to comment on my opinion on the 7.0.0 changes since I just finished a character using them here.

(long-ass post ahead)

Poison: I really like the change up that poison got recently. It's now much more of an interesting effect, but still needs significant work.

• Poison counter is a huge improvement over not knowing how much damage you have stored up.
• The description of many items which cured poison since it was kind of a default to cure poison need to be changed.
• Poison damage numbers seem mostly fine, but IMO the counter should tick a LOT faster and at least every game turn if you have a really high poison value (being able to zap _Curing multiple times between ticks is lame and makes poison really weak).

Free Action: I'm not too sure on this one, on the one hand, I never really got paralyzed once I had like 2 pips of FA on my last character- but on the other, I am very sure there were several instances where hitting that 1% or so chance to fail all my good saves would have got me killed. I am fine with instadeath, but only when it comes down to player fault (and not the "you did not unconditionally avoid the monster with the 1/1000 chance of killing you instantly" type of player fault).
However, I like that you have diversified its effects a lot, and now with several FA sources- it just means that paralyzing monsters are more likely to double turn you (which was a thing anyway).
Honestly, overall I think this is a win.

See Invisible: My character had poor searching/perception skills so this may colour my impression somewhat- but please revert or rework this awful change. Permanently invisible enemies have never been interesting in Angband, but making you require telepathy to actually see the dread pack you are fighting is 100% obnoxious. I swear I could only actually see these DL40 monsters 1/20 turns with 2 or 3 sources of SInv because of this low skill score. That doesn't make the skill more interesting to take, since this is really the only use of it after CLvl 15 or so and Telepathy trumps it 100% unless you were somehow fighting a monster named Tik (haha).

New monster abilities: For the most part I love these, the primary exception is the jumping ability on spiders. Possibly consider giving these spiders a jump ability which teleports them *to* the player (placing them in the nearest open cell or failing if you can't place within x cells).
Considerations:

• Makes them considerably more dangerous to fight in the open.
• Makes them considerably less obnoxious to fight.
• Continues to reward killholing (except disintegration spiders- what fun that would be!).

Also the stun effect on ice spiders and stunning auras in general are a bit too spammy for stun effects that aren't attack brands IMO, punishing characters for having lots of attacks makes me sad.

Stun: Speaking of stun, I am actually really happy that it's not the be-all end-all status effect to apply to an enemy, but I still feel it's quite useful against magickers. Thanks for that.

Unlife: I haven't noticed this doing anything at all. Maybe because I've always had plenty of hold life?

Monster/Lazy/Blue Mage Removals: Can you please explain why you did this? It doesn't seem very poschengband (in my own, personal, interpretation of what that means) to remove these bad/difficult achievable things. I understand nuking some of clouded's monster contributions, but stuff like PGR is odd to me.

I haven't really tried anything to do with recall/ID since I like knowing what everything does (thank you for easy lore) and hate ID game in stuff which isn't like Brogue or Sil (thank you for easy ID).

Also, have you considered looking at PosChengband R's "Coffeebreak" mode? It seems like a really fun way to mix up PosChengband, 100% constant looty/killy madness (looty/killy being one of my favourite things about the game after chargen options).

Anyway, the device changes sound like they might actually be worth giving a shot, so if I give 7.0.1 a try, I'll try to give some feedback on that too.

Hope this was helpful, cheers and thanks for the development!

Possible bug: (not) summoning camelot knights
 

I suppose it's a bug, though it certainly didn't bother me, but twice now in a game, Sir Kay has summoned Camelot Knights, who, unless they're invisible, aren't there. (Or maybe just the failure message is the same as for success?)

Think that's a joke feature, like - "the demonite summons Cyberdemons", "the deomonite invokes a Starburst"

Incidently Sir Kay is a different alignment to Camelot Knights. If you leave him alive till you get to Arthur they'll punch on.

I'm also curious about this. Holiness is an interesting mid-level utility device, 3-uses in 1 device. It's hard to argue that the heal or the damage is too strong. You can get much better damage on other device, much better heal. At some pt standing in line of sight of multiple enemies becomes pretty risky.

I'm getting the feeling in all of this that you haven't considered the little guys when trying to balance. I'll use the phase spider as an example as I'm currently playing 1:

How is this meant to do damage in the later stages of the mid-game if you nerf all mid-level devices.
The top-tier devices don't drop till low levels blocked by quests they won't complete without mid-level devices.
They already have to grind a lot, what gain making this super-grind. I don't want to kill 1000 great drakes because my only option has become level up for hps.

Please keep in mind that some characters simply can't get much progress through stages in the game without leaning heavily on devices. Game is meant to be fun, not work.

I also don't understand the removal of classes, items etc.

And I don't get the point of the reforge nerf. Do Ninjas need to be punished, or monster classes?

It would seem to be much better to actually make all slots similar in potential power, avoiding this issue entirely (though certainly a big change).

Bug: Displayed damage of one my weapons changes without anything else changing. Hitting C, scrolling, sometimes shows 257, sometimes 260. In town, no buffs, switching back and forth.

If I recall correctly:
The way the game creates your weapon damage numbers to display to you is by runming a bunch of samples and taking the average damage per round assuming every attack hits.
So it's not a bug, just a peculiar implementation.

nikheizen: Okay, makes sense.

When was Telepathy nerfed, though? That seems silly, as mid to late game almost everyone has some form of detection, and then it's a matter of mentally tracking what's what.

The telepathy nerf was 7.0.0.

I don't really like it either. It's not because of making telepathy weaker, it's because it just forces you to remember which glyphs the monsters were on when you originally cast/zapped detmons.

IMO if you want to nerf telepathy, Chris, consider making it like DCSS- where monsters show a glyph whose colour is based on their relative difficulty- very easy with monster depths and have uniques multiply the relative monster depth before getting their rating. You could put them on N.

And an alternative if you want to keep the ~tele nerf in: make sense into old ~tele. Showing the exact monster as well as shielded from telepathy monsters (like it did before)- since each sense effect only applies to one monster type at a time.

My issue with reforging is it was already unclear what the hell was going on. Now I've got zero idea what I'm looking for in a reforge. Also was pretty off-putting to get 2 anti-teleport wizard staves in a row. With Isildur range reforges. This was the last version in the 6 series. I have no idea whether that was bad luck or if there's something out with the numbers.