ASCII Invasion ~ playtesters requested!

DoD uses the Animal taxa for fleshy bloody creatures and the Other taxa for blobbies and such, so changing the @s to Other would mean that eg. geysering wounds wouldn't work on them where thematically it should. I'll probably switch snails or Q-things over, maybe rename Giants to Giant Mecha ...

I'll add colour-coding the buff icons to my to-do list. Red shaded for physical debuffs, black/white for dangerous turn-skipping debuffs etc.

 

Good point about the monsters, and any sort of color coding wold certanly help - the game has easily recognizable debuffs. The texts are funny, but once I start collecting souls and have one brown rectangle with a $ and one with lost souls, it soon starts getting crowded. Anyway, awesome job as far as I can tell

 

Q-things should definitely be other. And Giant Mecha...that would just be awesome.

 

If you go for the giant mecha, you could save yourself thinking time and just flavour one thusly: "Conviniently dungeon sized." Or alternatively: "Huge on the inside."

 

Update! New monsters, less obscure bugs, better taxa balance, clearer buffs, brutally slaughtered save files! (See the OP.) If you notice the conspicuous gaps in the bestiary, that's because there were two more monsters that I planned but either couldn't get working or just sort of ran out of ideas for new, interesting abilities. I may or may not just add them back in with simpler spells to fill the gaps, we'll see.

 

My new goal: Find out which words I can spell with the corpses of my enemies.

 

I recommend "kwyjibo".

 

hell, that should be a monster type.

 

Forest bonus is not a constant bonus on the tile. It alternates on/off each turn.

 

Are you using 1.2?

 

Turns out I wasn't. I dl'ed it but didn't copy it into the folder. Let me change that bug report into a request for versioning in the file name.

 

Issues.

I can't remove the "Tied Up" buff. How long is it supposed to last? I swear I stood still for at least four-five turns but it didn't work. That character's dead now so I can't test it sorry.

I have now had three crashes that I'm certain were Fallen Wizard-related. I have more mods than your body has room for so this might be a coincidence, but that would be one very big coincidence.

You are a bastard for creating an early corrupting monster, SO MANY powerful melee monsters, and how hard it is to stay away out of the uniphin boss' exp drain range, and the Mimics that do scary effects that I can't predict, and the scary-ass Paladins, and the

Your mod is extremely high quality. It also makes the game quite a bit harder. You bastard.

 

Did you notice the 'Daring Escape' buff showing up at all? The idea is that it counts down the turns until you've freed yourself, but gets reset whenever you move or attack. When the game crashed near a Fallen Wizard, did you have any buffs active? Its mass-debuff spell might be causing some issue I'd not run into, otherwise I've not got no idea. Also ... what difficulty level are you playing on? I've only been playing on normal while balance-testing, so it's possible my new monsters might be scaling up harder than I'd assumed.

 

I play on GRPD NTTG. Your 1000th Dog is ridiculously, ridiculously tanky, and Paladins are too, though I figure that's intentional. A lot of your monsters deal damage worthy of some of the nastiest early-game things. I would estimate the scarier of your monsters to be close to Friendly AIs, which is horrifying. Albeit minus the damage mitigation of Friendly AIs.

I can't remember if I had a ton of buffs on for the Wizard. I don't think so.

I did not see a "Daring Escape" buff. I ate a Hoglantern with the theory that I would escape while invisible, and it didn't work.

 

On a play balance note, is there anything in your mod that would spell/missile kill me and not register cause of death? I was one shotted on level 3 for 50+ damage. Instead of "killed by the player", for example, I have "killed by". I think it might have been an 'L' or a '*', but I wasn't really paying attention at the time because I wasn't in any perceived danger.

 

1000th Dog is intended to be nothing but a HP-sink, with the upshot of getting some resources back if you manage to kill it. I suppose I should nerf it a little so that it's not completely out of context. Paladins and the like I'll have another look at before my next release (I'm working on some new rooms ATM). Lesser Mimics are definitely on the list though, they annoyed the heck out me the last time I passed through their floor.

Right, I forgot to add this to the buff's description, but Tied Up is supposed to cancel invisibility while active. (The monsters can still see the ropes.) I have absolutely no idea what could be insta-gibbing a character on level 3 though. The most damaging spell I can think of would be moving while partially rooted from a tree sapling, and that's still only 12 toxic. Unless you ran into a critical hit from an OOD, randomly-named Great Pumpkinn, which is, for reasons I have yet to figure out, a thing that's rarely happening to minibosses with this mod active. >_<

I read this as: within acceptable core-game difficulty variation.

 

Oh you know what?

I bet the Fallen Wizard crash was due to some buff being canceled that shouldn't be canceled early.

 

Actually, Kazuhiro, follow-up question if you can still remember: Were you near the edge of dungeon map when the crash happened? Because if so, I'm now 95% sure I know why it happened. I ran into into a consistent crash killing an Adorably Puppy in my own playthrough, and both monsters use a wide template spell to target the player for a buff on death ... that is, apparently, still CTDing if it hits outside of the defined dungeon area.

 

Interesting. I feel like it wasn't on the turn that I killed it that I got the crash, but it might have been.

I just had a Lesser Mimic counter me four motherfucking times in a row. I might be remembering this wrong but I think this has actually happened on several occasions. I looked and it didn't have any special buffs on or anything.

... I wonder if a Fallen Wizard canceled my Daring Escape buff, that one time? Because I've now seen Tied Up a couple times and it was working properly.

 

I, too, just suffered from a "Tied up" that wouldn't go away. As it is, you have a permanent debuff with non-permanent triggers to remove it. I can no longer tell what caused me to lose the "Daring escape" buff (I played last night while tired), but for the sake of argument let's say I walked around for 1006 turns.

You should either make "Tied up" a 999 turn debuff or, preferably, add a trigger in "tied up" so that after 999 (or whatever) turns the debuff is removed naturally and without any hoops to jump through.