Sil-Q 1.4.1 release
 

A new release, just in time for the holidays!

Archery has been overhauled. Dedication and Deadly Hail made it from the beta. Running Shot and Steady Hands didn't. Two new skills replace them, Blessing of Orome and Fletchery. I have wavered back and forth on how powerful Blessing of Orome is. Currently it's placed quite close to the start, skills-wise, because it's easier to get people to investigate it if it only takes a small investment.

The first level has also been overhauled, and has a new enemy and new terrain which both feed into Sil's light-matters theme. The new terrain may occur occasionally a little deeper in the dungeon, becoming rarer the deeper you get.

There are a number of quality of life improvements - starting with a sword equipped, staircases not falling through if you take them too fast on the ascent, staves no longer require a Will check, it's less likely to lose loot dropped on a crowded floor. There are many little bugfixes including level generation trying harder to generate a route downward that isn't blocked by a chasm and Song of Oaths not crashing the game.

Morgoth will be a little more challenging on the ascent - he arrives on the level a little closer to you than he did before. The more Sils you have the more closely he will pursue you.

Play. Enjoy. Have a merry Christmas.

Get it here:
https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q/releases/tag/v1.4.1

Thanks are due to a great many people including wobbly, Hugo, MITZE, Angriath, Jamba and Blinkhog.

I note incidentally that I didn't list all the bugfixes in the changelog - so double-identifying Esgalduin and wrath have been fixed, they just didn't get listed.

Bit of a request. I had a room with sunlight & a phantom in it, so I played around for a bit trying to work out what was actually happening mechanically & ... I guess I could of looked at the rolls window, but it's actually a little unclear? I mean one of the nice things in the original is that for the most part mechanics were clear if you read the manual. So I checked before I embarrassed myself & hey nice a Sil-Q manual, unexpected, but I couldn't find it there either. Is it just an extra light radius? If it is it doesn't display on the character sheet if I stand in it.

Good point well made. Standing in sunlight increases the existing light based penalty for light sensitive creatures to hit you by 3 (it didn't make sense to me to have you see further by standing in sunlight), and light sensitive creatures and undead cannot cross sunlight. I'll make an update to the next version of the manual.

The penalty starts as the light you have minus two, so adding three light when you're carrying a torch will be a -3 penalty (I calculated this as -2 initially but forgot to track the base light in a lit room).

I think I've neglected to add the calculation into darkness resistance - this interaction is unlikely to come up as darkness creatures exist much deeper than sunlight will usually be seen. I'll fix it anyway for the next release, possibly basing it more explicitly off the way Inner Light works.

Nice release! Thanks! Note that the fixed 50k xp option has a hidden xmas gift, it will grant you another 50k xp in certain circumstances.

Thanks for the heads up. Will be fixed for the next release.

Looks like there's some multiple threads going on but just wanted to say thank you for keeping up development! For the changes, I do like the staff change a lot (and keeps staffs in line with a horn change a few years back iirc).

Haven't really noticed the phantoms playing, but I generally go with high evasion/melee so they've probably just melted running into them. Like Scatha mentioned in that other thread I think they should become lowercase 'w's (which might also give them some instructional value in that they're demonstratably not worm masses).

Don't really play archers so can't comment on the skills. Blessing looks.. weird, but in a pretty thematic way. For fear archers? Fletchery might be a little plain (it's pretty much +3 archery early on and tapers off in the endgame with ego arrows becoming more abundant), and it does overlap a bit with smithing +3 arrows. Might be a decent dump for the free ability for non-archer elves?

Bit mixed on the sunlight spots. It's a decent little addition, but takes something from the doom and gloom atmosphere. Then again it does teach light level mechanics and breaks monotony some, which is nice. I do dislike the color though, I find bright colors in general do detract from the otherwise muted grey- and brownscale aesthetics (this also goes for a lot of other things of course, like glyphs of warding and certain monsters), and the yellow can be dificult to spot. Bright starlight could be an alternative and is a little more evocative of Tolkien imo (the sun and moon being the newfangled knockoffs of proper illumination that they are).

Starting with the sword equipped is either way for me; it being on the floor is a cool little piece of immersive storytelling (and instructive to newer players), then again I very seldomly have to restart the early levels so I can see it being repetitive starting out.

This is sensible, and I think I shall do this.

Pretty much what I envisaged it being. The dedicated archer can probably invest better, but I think this is something that is more exciting for the less dedicated archer early game than Careful Shot and Precision were, and makes the free skill a bit more of a choice (I see some people now reaching automatically for Rout for the quality of life gained in thinning fleeing orcs, and I see this competing against that).

I would kind of like to have the player equipped more thematically, as it's never been clear to me why precisely they are entering Angband unarmed, and unless I actually introduce orc slavemasters (the letter 'o' unfortunately has a lot of weight to carry here and restricts my theming) it seems to make more sense to have them at least be carrying their own shortsword.

However, that involves some amount of balancing and deciding what makes for a reasonable opening, and while I put that off for now I did cave a little bit to the mpa-derived desire for speedy descent.

hello! i've been on a hiatus from sil for a while. i have some thoughts on the new update, most of them positive. for now though, just a possible bug report.

smithing a vanilla shortsword is 0 difficulty
(+0,1d8) 1.5lbs = 4
(+0,1d7) 1lbs = 10
(+0,1d8) 1lbs = 19!

is this intentional? this doesn't seem to be mirrored in other items.

Yes. The way Subtlety and Assassination work make the 1d8 1 lb shortsword the best weapon in the game for stabbers, notably better than the artifact shortswords. Basically it scales to be unhealthily good when you're getting large numbers of critical hits based on weight. Making it trivial to smith would make it an automatic choice on every stabber.

should it not be the automatic pick? what's the competition, longswords? without rings of damage, deathblades and momentum, a 1d8 1lb shortsword is pretty much the only viable option. but at a difficulty of 19, one would probably be better off putting points into melee, stealth, perception etc. and grabbing the first 1d8 shortsword you find. heck it might even have an ego. the goal is to boost smithing after all.

With Finesse having shaved off an extra point on crit cost since the Sil 1.3 days (before you could take your crit base from 7 to 4, now it's 7 to 3), you really don't need rings of damage, momentum, etc for stabbers to be extremely effective.

Poison, artifact and 1d6 daggers are actually quite decent now. Artifact shortswords are acceptable to good. A 1d8 1.5 lb shortsword is still good, but slightly worse average damage than a 1d6 poison dagger.

Currently I'm not terribly concerned with boosting Smithing - it's showing up on 2/3rds of winners as is and I think that's a little on the high side.

Just to throw some numbers out there:
Currently a 1d6 dagger is average damage 3.5 per die, on a crit base of 3.5 (with Finesse and Subtlety).
A 1d8 1.5 lb shortsword is average damage 4.5 per die, on a crit base of 4.5.
Shortsword gains a little because its first die is higher, though the dagger is more reliably close to average because it rolls more dice i.e. less likely to leave a barely damaged opponent.

With the old crit base of 4 this is somewhat equivalent to a 2 lb 1d11 deathblade (ignoring the melee bonuses) or a 1 lb 1d9 shortsword.

A 1 lb 1d8 shortsword gains slightly more than an extra 10% average damage. This is slightly better than having a 1d12 2 lb weapon in Sil 1.3. It's very strong. It feels wrong to have it easily smithable at 100'.

Part of the goal has been to make daggers actually useful. I think at present they are, though the vanilla 1d5 ones are probably unsavable.

at a difficulty of 14 (sum of it's parts) a 1d8 1lb short sword is not easy to smith at 100'. it's achievable, but even if you did it you'd probably regret having sunk so much xp into smithing. shortswords seem to take a long time to get good in my experience.

lets say you have a 4 grace feanor. you take 7 points of smithing for 2800 xp. plus armoursmith and enchant to make +2 gloves to get up to 14 plus weaponsmith. 1500 + 2800 = 4300 xp. 4 + 7 + 1(affinity) + 2 = 14 smithing

you have very little xp left for melee/evasion let alone finesse and subtlety.



i'll concede that perhaps shortswords are op in the late game though; i'm still experimenting. even so, i'm not sure i like this solution.

Well, Sil's "simple" mechanics come with a cost: outside certain parameters they break hard. There's a sweet spot you can optimise weights, to hit and damage dice around, but only so many weapons can exist in it and be recognisably different from each other. Letting people add damage sides and alter weights can easily swing things into broken territory and soon you have vanilla weapons far better than already strong artifacts and game balance turns upside down.

Another solution might be to prevent item weight being altered by smithing beyond the 2/3 or 3/2 ratios from the base weight that are used as min and max weights on weapon drops and moving shortsword base weight to 2 lb. This also fixes the brokenness at the cost of making other items less flexible in smithing than before.

You said also you had some other thoughts I think?

On more pondering, it's definitely better to tighten smithable weight to match drop weight.

Smithing outside drop weight is rare, and almost only used to make vanilla weapons broken in some way. It will be easier to balance things if I don't have to worry about it and I can afford to make weight changes cheaper if I'm less worried extreme weight will make things broken.

Also, making the default shortsword 1d9 instead of 1d8 makes it a bit better for non-stabbing usage.

I guess this is it for 1 lb shortswords.

i'm a little confused here. 1d7 is the default. are you adding the str bonus?

Yes, sorry for being unclear. I mean that the 1d7 1.5 lb shortsword does 1d8 damage with the bonus, a 1d7 2 lb shortsword 1d9. Without any reduction from Finesse or Subtlety, the latter is straightforwardly better if you can muster the second Str (though worse than a longsword or curved sword in most practical contexts). They're close to the same with Finesse and Subtlety.

As a by-the-way, I'm introducing a new 1 lb weapon in the next release. Throwing Axes are being deprecated in favour of Hand Axes: a 5d1 1 lb weapon (so 5d2 with Str 1). This is a little on the weaker side, but with Power becomes quite reasonable. I had already removed damage side bonuses on rings and gloves to tone down Smithing a little.

There are quite a few new things in my development release. For Melee lovers, I think I have a more interesting and elegant skill to replace Anticipate; Smite lets you roll maximum damage on your first attack of the turn when you're wielding a two handed weapon, at the cost of taking an additional turn to recover (i.e. your opponents get to move twice when you attack). The high damage overwhelms armour and kills quickly, but being committed for an extra turn comes with some danger.

My first thought: great spear assassin. But I'm not sure that it's actually better with spears. Anyway it's an elegant design.

Thank you.

I'm planning to have the "first attack" encompass all enemies hit by the swing so e.g. Follow Through, Whirlwind Attack and Impale would all be capable of heavy damage to multiple opponents. All these skills are currently on the weaker side so I don't anticipate this overpowering them. Zone of Control, Riposte, Rapid Attack are unaffected.

Prerequisites wise I'm currently looking at Charge and Knockback.

FYI, angband.live's Sil-Q has been updated up to commit 2fc4394 on the Sil-Q GitHub. Since it is fully updated up to that point, this is a great opportunity for our beta-testing. I hope Quirk doesn't mind this.

Hmm there have been some fairly substantial changes since I last pushed (Ease was boring and has been replaced, Smite is in and looking pretty exciting), but it should give people a chance at playing with the new Song tree. Right now I think Staunching will be somewhat OP, I cut it back to about a third as strong in my current development code. However all thoughts are welcome.

Got this today, from the version on angband.live :

The mountain troll tries to knock you back, but you stand fast.
You realize that the pair of greaves is a pair of greaves of the iron hills
You realize that your Arrows is 33 Arrows.
You realize that your Arrows is 94 Arrows.

Ah great, I hadn't found that. I'll look into what is going on there. Thanks.

From throwing a stack of 4 spears{special}

The spear{special} hits the orc scout
the spear strikes truly
You recognise it as a spear of gondolin
You have 3 spears{special}
the spear strikes truly
You recongnise it as a spear of gondolin
You have 2 spears of gondolin

Not sure if I got id xp the 1st time, I know I got it the 2nd time

Interesting. I'll look Into it. Thanks for the report.

Also just pulled 3 blessed realm amulets out of a small steel chest at 300'. There's a pretty noticeable pattern of getting the same things most but not all the time from chests, for example 2 quickness+1 miruvour from the earlier small wooden chest. Not sure what the deal is there.

I guess this is my answer? :
& likewise with the other themes? That's not a lot of options at certain depth ranges.

Just looking at how chest contents actually work I can see why I've always felt there was something skew-if here. Like I can see the logic behind it, a box full of healing potions make sense but I'm not convinced the result is good.

Part of the trouble is 3 is a significant number in how people recognise patterns. You start regularly pulling up a pattern of 3, then a slightly off-pattern of 3, then no pattern. It's an incredibly jarring effect.

Yes. I'm not sure themed chests work very well as they are at present. That said, I'm not sure any permutation of them will seem very realistic without further tweaks to dungeon generation: I could expect certain results out of chests in a treasury, an armoury and a pharmacy, but the game doesn't have any of these, just random chests in random rooms populated by a number of vaguely thematic monsters.

Interim suggestions are welcome.

Yeah I guess I don't have any great ideas here at the moment and there's certainly more important stuff to get right. The consumables are fine being consumable, maybe just fix the worst? The box full of blessed realms? Is there jewellery that wont work in a chest? Mixed jewels seems to make as much sense as here's where we store our blessed realm amulets. Straight off the mint. All catalogued, filed and stored in rows....

A minor request since you seem to be working on another release: could you add an "other" gender option to the character creation screen? (or just remove the gender field altogether, since I think it only affects the pronouns on the opening quote) It's a little thing but it matters a surprising amount, and I've been hesitant to recommend Sil or Sil-Q to nonbinary friends who I think might otherwise enjoy it because of that.

I don't have any objection to removing the gender field. If anyone does, please speak up and give your reasons, but I think without the field we can all have the character default to the gender we assume for them in our head and nobody need be upset by it.

I agree this seems the simplest solution.

Gender turned out to be more than a pain than expected - height and weight were based off it. Have fudged a solution. Commit is up.

Some weirdness in Uldor's AI. In this screenshot:

http://angband.oook.cz/screen-show.php?id=4602

they are just exchanging places. After killing the archer, Uldor proceeds to just keep moving between the 2 squares rather then attacking back.

Watched and read Sil for a while, beat one game of Sil 1.3, left another game of Sil-Q half-finished at 700', have another game at 850'. Remember some old discussions about Smithing builds. Had a spitball for Smithing:

Smithing a Masterpiece Greater Jewel, which, when the presented in the throne room, would incite so much greed in the foes there that they would begin fighting each other over the jewel. (See: Ungoliant fighting with Morgorth over the Silmarils). In the chaos, the Iron Crown falls off Morgoth's head, and the character can carve out a Sil and run. (Course, that leaves the question of why the Throne Room doesn't just kill the player to get the Shiny).

Reason: From what I know of my reading (I may be wrong; I have relatively little gameplay experience, little hard numerical analysis of Sil, and am late to the party), because of inability to knock off the Iron Crown, all builds, ultimately, come back to Melee, Archery, or Song, in order to accomplish the game's objective. Since it seems "Smithing builds" are an aesthetic desire of Sil, but Smithing is generally just a support skill for Melee or Archery, I figured the part of the way to accomplish that aesthetic desire would be to give the player a way to use Smithing to "knock off" the Iron Crown (knocking it off in a way that doesn't go through Melee, Archery, or Song). I figured my proposal aesthetically matched up with Tolkien's lore, hence, the suggestion.

That's it. I'll go back to lurking now.

There is no "gender" field.

There is a "sex" field though, but I dunno why you would want that gone unless you like to roleplay as an amoeba.

I think my main question with this is why, if the throne room will descend into bickering and chaos to acquire a jewel, it has not already done so over the Silmarils themselves, the greatest jewels in Tolkien. I suspect the answer is that nobody else in that throne room wishes to enter into a conflict with Morgoth.

This leads me to the conclusion that entering the throne room with some fancy and desirable jewel would only lead to Morgoth ordering "take it!" and a legion of orcs, Balrogs and other fiends descending on the player.

Incidentally there is one more way to remove Morgoth's crown you haven't mentioned, which is to use a staff of slumber with sufficiently high Will. It's relatively rare that a build would have this as an only option; I'll explain.

No Melee and no Archery implies pacifist or a Stealth build. This incidentally also more or less rules out Smithing, because it required a prolonged period of making noise and attracts monsters, which pacifists have no permanent means of dealing with.

Pacifists most popularly use Lorien as their song of choice, which puts Morgoth to sleep and removes the crown. Elbereth pacifists are just about possible but very rare, and there are certain enemies such as serpents they have difficulty dealing with: they can either use Lorien or make use of high Will plus a staff of slumber - since Majesty is useful to the build high Will is plausible. Pure stealth characters with low Song are the most constrained for options.

In general though most of the major constraints on builds are imposed by the need to survive until the throne room. It is not impossible that something like this could work outside the throne room, where a jewel could be thrown as a distraction, and it certainly seems like that might work for dragons in a nearly canonical sounding way, but I suspect that it would either not be worth the smithing cost or a broken tool in the hands of an archer. It wouldn't be broken if the enemy was required to be unaware of your presence, but then the mismatch between Smithing and Stealth appears again.

There is also no "eye/hair/skin color" field: people are happy to leave these details to the imagination of the player roleplaying their character, without the need to write them down. It's not clear why the shape of the character's genitalia is more important, to the point of deserving an explicit mention in the character screen. Also, since it's an issue many people are sensitive to, it makes sense to leave it out.

Hey, I'm still very much a newbie at Sil, so my opinions here aren't backed up by a lot of experience, but I like the game a lot so far and would like to post some suggestions anyway.

I saw that scepters are getting removed in version 1.4.2 probably because they don't have much of a purpose as weapons, but I think there might actually still be a niche for them. They could still be useful for their effects or as stat boost items for pacifists or for fighters as a replacement to a shield. Maybe they should not even count as weapons at all and be equiped straight like a shield (although hardcore pacifists might still want to combine them with one). They'd essentially be jewelry, but for a hand slot, and that's why I'd also think of moving them from the weapon smithing ability to the jewelry smithing one. That would mean that pacifist players could take up jewelry smithing to get a stat boosting scepter for their hand slot. Maybe crowns could also be swapped to the jewelry smithing ability? I don't know if that would make the ability too strong though.
I just like the idea of some wizard like character carrying a scepter of power in their off-hand, like Gandalf in the movies, to boost their song magic power.

Doesn't the Song of Staunching have a very similar effect to the removed Song of Este? Why don't you just reuse the old name then?

The description of the Puncture ability is "Whenever an enemy's armour roll exceeds your archery damage roll, the enemy armour roll is reduced to zero, and you deal the enemy three damage."
The "enemy armour roll is reduced to zero" part makes it sound like you will deal your full normal damage + 3 additional damage, but that's not what it actually does, is it? I'm assuming it's only supposed to deal the 3 damage and your actual damage roll is ignored? In that case, that part should be removed from the text.

The Accurate weapon trait lets you reroll missed attacks. I haven't been mathing in a while, so I find it a bit difficult to compare this bonus to the normal accuracy boni that weapons normally have. In an attack where your hit bonus is equal to the enemy evade bonus, this reroll increases your hit chance by about as much as a hit bonus of +5 or +6, right? Is there a particular reason why this trait uses rerolls instead of just adding +5 or so hit bonus to the weapon?

The new Hand Axe does 5d1 damage. This might just be me, but doesn't a damage stat with a high amount of dice and a low amount of sides fit better to a blunt weapon? Like the war hammer with its very similar 4d1. It means the weapon is bad for sneak attacks and gets substantially more powerful the stronger the wielder is. Sounds to me like it wouldn't have much of an edge. An axe, I think, fits better with a more even ratio of numbers. Maybe a club or mace would be better flavor for this 1lb 5d1 weapon type?
Anyway, that's just my personal interpretation.

Hi Destragon! Feedback is always welcome. Thanks for chipping in.

So there are various reasons that drove me to get rid of them.
1) They barely appear in Tolkien. Gandalf has a staff, not a sceptre (though in the Hobbit it is sometimes called a wand).
2) The few times they do appear they're kingly regalia - not something that would be littering the floor at 100'. They'd possibly make sense as artefacts, but the Rod of Thu is about the only mention of a sceptre I can think of that dates from the First Age, and I decided it probably wasn't worth the effort of special casing it as I did for crowns.
3) Pacifists are a relatively rare taste, and artefacts that are only really good for pacifists are a disappointment for everyone else.
4) If I do introduce something to boost Song in the hand slot, it will probably be a harp. Harps are all over the First Age.

Song of Staunching is in fact an actual song from Tolkien's canon
while Song of Este was not. While there are certain similarities, also, there are several differences: Staunching operates directly on health rather than via regeneration, it cures bleeding, it does not shorten the duration of other status effects. It felt cleaner to give it a new name and free it from old perceptions.

Help with the wording would be appreciated, certainly. It doesn't say "additional damage", so I'm not sure of your reading here, but it may be close enough to need clarification. Omitting "the enemy armour roll is reduced to zero" however doesn't specify that your three damage is unblocked.

In any case your damage roll is ignored, the enemy armour roll is ignored, and you deal three damage against an ignored enemy armour roll. Perhaps "Whenever an enemy's armour roll exceeds your archery damage roll, you deal the enemy three damage through their armour"?

Rerolls increase the chance of hitting while having less impact on the chance of critically hitting, so it's not quite the same as a hefty Melee bonus. Largely it's there for variety, which is always hard to come by in a game with such a tight mathematical core; rerolls have already been in Sil for a while thanks to the Sil curse, but have historically worked against the player. The new trait lets you operate the same skew in your favour when you're on the attack.

This is not unreasonable as an interpretation. On the other side: there aren't many combinations of dice for weapons that are competitive, axes feature rather more in Tolkien than blunt weapons do, and dwarves gain from wielding axes whereas nobody gains from wielding blunt weapons.

Hand Axes don't really benefit very much from strength as 1 strength maxes out their potential, though Power helps them quite a bit. Other axes do, particularly Great Axes, which are generally too heavy to particularly benefit from sneak attacks. I'm not sure I buy that "bad for sneak attacks, more powerful with strength" necessitates a blunt weapon.

How about "whenever the enemy's armor would fully block your archery damage roll, they take a flat 3 damage instead"?

I like this. It seems clear to me.

Thanks for replying. Yeah, sorry, I'm not very knowledgable on expanded Tolkien lore.
I really like the idea of harps or other instruments though and hope you'll eventually actually try to get them in. They fit perfectly into the game's magic theme and are not something you'd really see in many other games. The +will +song scepter could totally work as a harp. They'd of course have to be off-hand items for the same reason as scepters and maybe they could even get a little two handed bonus if you don't have a weapon equipped? That might encourage people to drop their weapon for the bonus, but maybe that's not actually that bad of a thing.

Some sort of rework of magic staves could also be very interesting, although complicated to think about. Was the flame scepter the only item that could have the flame enchantment? Would be a shame if that effect couldn't be salvaged.

"Dealing damage" to me sounds like the damage is getting applied, bypassing armor. Either way, Derakon's version seems to be unambiguous.

I still have a bunch more random suggestions, but I'll probably post about them in the new thread instead,

There is a flame-branded artefact sword, and a canny smith can make their own flaming weapon with Artifice.

I would like to rework staves at some point. Their dual existence as quarterstaffs and limited-charge magic wands vaguely annoys me. I appreciate the tactical value of consumables, but they sort of hint at wizard spells that in Tolkien had little to do with the staff and a lot to do with the wizard. It's difficult however to come up with consumables that both feel authentic to Tolkien and have valuable effects other than healing.

how about pipe weed? not sure about any mechanical effect though.

Words of Power! They could conceivably replace all other consumables with little to no mechanical changes, and the player memorizing and utilizing scattered words of power makes for a more compelling mental image than him packratting magical doodads strewn around the place.