What is your current favorite Roguelike? [Or all things roguelike]

Games
1525

So far leveling is fairly even. Your part of four level up while they fight, those that are not being used gain some XP while back in town waiting, and if you build a Fort and station guild members in the fort they gain XP even faster yet. I filled my guild as soon as I could and picked a cool 4-man party of Soverign, Ninja, Wanderer, and Medic and put them in a Fort and decided to build a second party and try them out and they were about the same level as my first party! I was filling up my Inn stash with older, hand-me-down gear so I decided to give it all to them so I have a decently equipped and skill point spent squad as a backup.

This is important for rescue missions. So far if a character drops to 0 health he passes out and I usually use a thread to retreat or a means to revive him to keep going (lest the game get harder with only 3 party members and more importantly, to avoid said knocked out character missing out on XP). However, the game explains party wipes, where you then have to form a second party to attempt a rescue mission. This hasn’t happened to me yet, so I’m not sure what will happen exactly.

I know Forts play a role in it, but I’ve build a few forts and still don’t completely understand their role, except to keep the rooms in the area from becoming randomized? They still seem randomized to me though when I re-explore around the Forts, because the map is once more blank and fills in while I walk around.

There is a lot I don’t quite get, but the game itself and the combat is really engaging! I just opened up the fourth dungeon but I’m using my secondary party to sort of back tread dungeons 2 and 3 and doing some quests I forgot about. Sovereign’s are freaking amazing, is my take away so far.

1526

I’d like to wait on the Steam release, but this looks really great:

1527

As both an enthusiast of Shiren and Etrian games, allow me to thank you for the recommandation, as, pretty much like you, I had never even heard of the game.
I bought it on monday. My wife - a desperate Shiren 5 addict, nearly 200 hours clocked in there - snatched it and seems to appreciate it very much. She says she finds it harder than a Shiren game, but I think that is merely because she isn’t used to the system variations yet (those forts seem to be confusing everyone! She was talking to me about how you were supposed to dig moats around them to block monsters?).
Now I am just sad there is a single save slot :-/

1528

Oh, awesome! I am still enjoying it myself - it’s really super good. I put on hold for a bit to try out Bravely Second (which is also good in a different way) but I have a notepad with where I am and what I’m working towards currently. And yeah, more than a dozen hours in and I still don’t really “get” Forts, and I have two types unlocked and my first F.O.E. tracking me down even!

1529

Not keen on the game but that is a world class trailer.

1530

Anything in particular you don’t care for?

1531

I like stats, lots of stats, plus random loot, plus skills. I like treadmills :) This doesn’t look like that, at least from the excellent trailer. I could be wrong of course!

1532

That’s fair. I like the way the card system works, but it’s basically attack and defense with a handful of special abilities thrown in. It’s a very streamlined sort of system, pretty much the opposite of what you are looking for.

I like both, oddly enough, at different times.

1533

Whew, I certainly failed at this. :)

I do miss Elona.

1534

I just got Golden Krone Hotel on the Steam Sale, and I’ve only played one round, but WOW is it good. The use of sunlight/light and vampirism is really fun and clever.

1535

Are there any Roguelike’s that use the full unicode spectrum, e.g. Emojis?

1536

Heretic!

1537

Reporting after a few (well, I think she must be almost 30 hours in…) hours, to warn you, and everyone, about having a DOE reach your town. This just happened to her, pretty much out of the blue - she was exploring a deep dungeon when she was pulled out for an emergency without warning. A DOE had ravaged the town, forcefully closing the weapon selling shop (which she must repair for 500.000 spacebucks!), taking the better half of her current team’s gears (pretty gratuitous penalty, if you ask me), as well as all her inventory and ingredients.
So basically, skipping even a fort for economical reasons is a no-no - she used to skip some for building better ones deeper, now she sets up a basic fort on top levels.

1538

That’s terrifying. Is that really half a million? The period versus comma thing always confused me. Half a million is a crazy sum of cash though, wtf. I haven’t gotten back in for a bit but I do have a fort built in the fourth dungeon’s top floor. I wonder if I should build a fort at the top floor of EVERY unlocked dungeon then?

1539

Well, it turned out that the half million repair cost was… a troll? Retrospectively, the theft of the ingredients was the most hurtful part of this fiasco: after doing a few dungeon runs, the game just auto-repaired the shop. There was no indication whatsoever that it was going to be the case, and my wife was (appropriately) about to give up before that. But there it is: the town fixed itself.
The game is quite strangely scarce about some informations that way. We don’t know if forts should be built everywhere you can, but someone I know started doing that, as a precaution. She noticed DOE don’t tend to move until you go past them, and she suspects this is why they do not move in previously visited dungeons, but better safe than sorry - especially with such penalties!

1540

Right, so I tried Mystery Chronicle:One Way Heroics. It’s essentially the same game, but it was remade from whole cloth by another team and company, Spike Chunsoft.

It’s sort of a second expansion pack, with more stuff again… but a lot was mangled in the transition. Taking turns is slow, with noticeable loading times, the UI feels more cluttered, it’s harder to see (fewer tiles on screen) and towns are now almost impossible to spot. Traps have been added to the game, but they’re almost impossible to spot, make carrying explosive items even more of a hassle and generally detract from the experience. And the game FORCES you to connect with Twitter if you want to see how other players are doing, see their ghosts, etc.

They’ve added Shiren the Wanderer as a playable class, which is pretty cool.

1541

My current favorite Roguelike is Caves of Qud. I just started playing it last week and I am very, very impressed. It’s scope is vast and the amount of stuff you can do is crazy. I’ve been playing a bit less than a week and already I can say this may very well be the best and most accessible Roguelike I’ve ever played. I’ll know for sure once I play more but so far it’s both incredibly fun and addictive. The quality of the writing and the world setting is very good. The amount of detail is amazing. I would not hesitate to say that anyone that loves this genre should give it a try. Most Roguelikes have a scope of one dungeon. The scope of CoQ is an entire world. The number of areas and dungeons to explore number in the thousands. Like I said, it’s amazing.

I had a few false starts leaning the game before I settled on a mutant esper Apostle character. He’s up to level 16 now. I finished all the Joppa quests and moved on and finished the Golgotha quests for some nice rewards. I stuck my head in Bethesda Susa at level 15 and killed 2 of the troll key holders but when I saw the third one was invisible and a teleporter, I got the hell out of there. I think I need some more levels to take on this quest.

My character has accumulated some nice mental mutations. Clairvoyance, teleportation, sunder mind, light manipulation, cryokinesis, force wall, they all help me make it though the day. As an Apostle, I started with the proselytize skill, which lets me convince NPCs or any mob to join my cause as a follower. My first follower was a simple watervine farmer from the starting town of Joppa. Now, the CoQ world has a lot of "sim’ features. One of them is that every single mob/NPC in the game are characters just like you are and each with their own skills, mutations, inventory, equipment and attributes. When you kill something that’s wielding a carbonite greatsword and wearing plate mail and boots, that’s exactly what they’ll drop when they die. This is extremely gratifying.

So, using the dominate mutation (which allows you to possess mobs/npcs to reequip and level them), I took my watervine farmer’s vinereaper away and gave him a 2 handed sword and some boots and good armor. I then gave him a mutation when he leveled up (your followers level up too, just like you do) to grow 2 extra arms so I gave him a couple of two hand swords. I also gave him the butchery skill and he would butcher hog corpses and the like for food for us after battles. He could also harvest watervines for food and water. I was sad to lose him in a battle with about 20 mobs but I soon replaced him with a giant boar that had a mutation that allowed him to shoot rifle slugs from his snout. He was great until he ran into another rifle boar.

Right now my follower is a level 15 goatman I renamed “Billy”. He has massive strength so I have him carry all of our heavy stuff. I have him equipped with a counterweighted fullerite long sword, iron shield, lacquered ring mail and chain boots. He’s quite a tough tank which is what I need as a squishy esper. Right now I’m exploring about 10 levels beneath Golgotha and stocking up on parts for tinkering, which is the crafting in this game. I’m mainly using it now to recharge battery cells for some of my equipment and add mods (like scopes) to my equipment. I found some twin semi-automatic pistols I’ve been using so I put scopes on them to improve my accuracy.

So, has anyone else here tried this game?

1542

Tried, yes, many times. Succeeded at, heck no. :)

1543

It’s a great roguelike. I played it many moons ago and loved it but haven’t picked it back up since it started active development again. Even bought it on Steam but have yet to run it again.

1544

I was playing it around a year ago, really enjoyed it. Usually playing as a fire breathing mutant who recycles his own water, I get up to around level 10 before I meet something that is fire resistant and then get into trouble.