Your variant of choice?

[Mondkalb]

Originally Posted by archolewa

Ive tried FirstAgeAngband, but I dont like its wilderness, and playing without wilderness feels so close to vanilla, it doesn't really scratch that "like Angband but not Angband" itch.

What aspect of FAangband's wilderness did you dislike?
I find it rather appealing with its various environments.

[swim]

I would really like to try FAangband... but I feel like I should wait for the new version to launch
Plus I heard it’s much harder than V

[Eric]

I'm a fan of First Age Angband (as opposed to the older FAangband? Not sure a proper shortening is) now, but I do find that the wilderness areas in particular require a lot more keypresses for movement (I'm lookin' at you, Mountains), which isn't great in my current moment of having recently over-stressed something in my forearm. The current version pretty much just works for me so far. Digging through the old wiki on github (https://github.com/NickMcConnell/FAangband/wiki) has been helpful to get a feel for how things are supposed to be different. Not sure if it's harder than V or just different; I die a lot in both, as intended. FAA has a really nice immersive (to me) atmosphere after having re-read the Silmarillion recently.

I'll also second (third, fifth?) the recommendations for Sil!

[archolewa]

Originally Posted by Mondkalb

What aspect of FAangband's wilderness did you dislike?
I find it rather appealing with its various environments.

The same problem I have with all wildernesses in every roguelike that has them: the maps are both brutally hard, and boring. From what I saw the wilderness came in two modes: giant wide open fields with no cover, and long straight mountain passes. No twisting corridors leading into various flavors of rooms of different shapes and sizes.

Hard, because you have no cover so its in incredibly easy to get swarmed or trapped, and theres nothing you can do about it. Boring because you dont have much if any means of controlling LOS, or repositioning ( because all positions are bad or too far away to be useful)

Also, Angbands run mechanism of move until the terrain changes breaks down *hard* in giant open fields, making moving through them a giant PITA.

[archolewa]

And thats before even getting into how some of the races like Edain and Noldor start in stupidly deep danger level, making classes that dont have good stealth (like oh Blackguards) at best waaaay to frustrating to play, at worst completely unviable.

[Pete Mack]

Back to the original question, I would say NPP 0.5.4
That was the last release that didn't go over the top into wall to wall monsters. Hydra pits with 12 headed hydras are bad enough.

[Mondkalb]

Originally Posted by archolewa

The same problem I have with all wildernesses in every roguelike that has them: the maps are both brutally hard, and boring. From what I saw the wilderness came in two modes: giant wide open fields with no cover, and long straight mountain passes. No twisting corridors leading into various flavors of rooms of different shapes and sizes.

Hard, because you have no cover so its in incredibly easy to get swarmed or trapped, and theres nothing you can do about it. Boring because you dont have much if any means of controlling LOS, or repositioning ( because all positions are bad or too far away to be useful)

Also, Angbands run mechanism of move until the terrain changes breaks down *hard* in giant open fields, making moving through them a giant PITA.

There is way more variety to the wilderness than those.
Some of the starting towns are in a more dangerous environment and are supposed to be harder.

E. g., if you start in Gondolin, the level of the wilderness is 28, which is really tough.

Thist map shows the (d)level of the wilderness and also the type of wilderness:

   Anfauglith -------------------------Lothlann
    (Angband) \                              \
        |      \_____Dorthonion               \
    Fen of Serech  (Nan Dungortheb)            \
        |                   \                   |
Sirion Vale-----Gondolin  Dor Dinen             |
(Tol-in-Gaurhoth)           |    \              |         Hithaeglir--Gladden
          \                 |    Himlad         |             /       Fields
          Brethil        Doriath     \        Ered Luin   Khazad Dum
             \              |         East        \         /
          ___ Ephel      Menegroth   Beleriand     \    Hithaeglir
        /    Brandir             \       |          |     /
Talath /         \           Doriath     Thargelion |   Eriador
Dirnen       West Beleriand       |     *    \      |  /    \
(Nargothrond)     \                \   *       Belegost      \
              Amon Rudh      East Beleriand        |          Eriador
              (Amon Rudh)     *           \     Ered Luin      town
                    \        *             \        |            |
                West Beleriand              \       |            |
                     \                       \    Ossiriand      |
                   Andram                     \      |           |
                      \                        \     |           |
                    East Beleriand              Ossiriand        |
                        \                        /town           |
                      Taur-Im-Duinath   _Ent Path   |            |
                          \            /           Ossiriand     |
                        Taur-Im-Duinath             |            |
                            town                Ered Luin South  |
                                                        |       /
                                                    Ered Luin South
                                                        town

[tangar]

Originally Posted by archolewa

The same problem I have with all wildernesses in every roguelike that has them: the maps are both brutally hard, and boring.

Yes. Thats why in my variant I made full custom hand-builded world-wilderness. The map is on the web-site https://tangaria.com/map/ (click on image at the website to show directions-guidance)

[archolewa]

Originally Posted by Mondkalb

There is way more variety to the wilderness than those.
Some of the starting towns are in a more dangerous environment and are supposed to be harder.

E. g., if you start in Gondolin, the level of the wilderness is 28, which is realliy tough.

None of that invalidates what I said? Even if there are other wilderness maps than the plains and mountains, the plains and mountain environments are still hard, boring and tedious to navigate, leading to frustration. Even if Gondolin's wilderness is supposed to be really tough, it still effectively bans High Elves from being Blackguards, unless you have way more patience than I think is reasonable to expect from most players.

Frankly, I'd rather if the game let you pick the town you started in. So for those of us who want to play the race-class combination we want without having to restart over and over again we can, and for those who dive aggressively and want to skip the super early game, they can do that too.

Don't really have any ideas to make the wilderness more palatable for me, especially since it seems to be a common problem with wilderness in the roguelike genre, leading me to think that's just the nature of the beast.

[Mondkalb]

Well, "boring" also applies to early levels in most Rogue-like games and even to deeper ones, if they don't happen to have something exciting on them.
That is just the nature of these games with randomly generated levels.