Unique Weapons

I just added unique weapons to my roguelike game engine. There are only a handful of them now. You never run into these weapons by just wandering the dungeon. You must defeat specific unique monsters. That causes the unique weapons to appear.

The explanation is that the some unique monsters carry unique weapons. They drop them when they die. The power of some of the uniques I got requires you to find and wield the unique weapons. Now that I got this done, I should be able to easily add unique armor.

I still need to do some testing on the unique weapon generation code. The unique monsters that carry the weapons occupy the lower levels of the dungeon. I have yet to implement any dungeon levels other than 1.

Looks like I know what feature I need to implement next. Then I test.

Fighting Chance

I have been trying to do some balancing with my roguelike game engine. It felt too hard at the start. If you could not locate a weapon before the monsters found you, death was a sure thing. I want players to be able to survive the first level in general. So I thought I would provide the player with some default items to start.

Now at the beginning of the game, I automatically equip the players with one weapon and one piece of armor. I choose these from the maze. And I pick the least desirable weapon and armor. However something is better than nothing.

I also added the ability to quit the game. I give the user the opportunity to confirm the exit. Then the game automatically ends.

cLevel 50 Ranger

After my last character in Angband died, I was a bit depressed. It had taken a long time to build up that character. I can no longer remember how he died. It was probably some double poison breath from some monster. Whatever the case, I was not in the mood to play Angband for a while.

Then I got a good idea. What not let the Borg build up the next character for me? Then I could choose a race and class which cause a high experience penalty. That's no problem for the Borg. It has unlimited time to knock out experience points galore.

Now the Borg is not perfect. There are times when it causes my characters to die. I have found that the deaths happen quickly. But once a character is a bit established, the Borg is more conservative in the long run. So I let the Borg run for a few times each night. Before long, I had myself a character level 50 High-Elf Ranger with a bunch of goodies to show.

Here is the equipment my character is wearing:

The Lance of Eorlingas (3d8) (+14,+21) (+2)
The Long Bow of Bard (x3) (+17,+19) (+2)
a Malachite Ring of Speed (+5)
a Malachite Ring of Speed (+6)
a Ruby Amulet of Wisdom (+2)
The Star of Elendil
The Full Plate Armour of Isildur [25,+25] (+1)
The Cloak 'Holcolleth' [1,+8] (+2)
The Small Metal Shield of Thorin [3,+25] (+4)
The Hard Leather Cap of Thranduil [2,+15] (+2) {BlndESP}
The Set of Cesti of Fingolfin (+10,+10) [5,+20] (+4)
The Pair of Soft Leather Boots 'Dal-i-thalion' [2,+15] (+5)

Borg Unleashed

I was so distraught with my last character Bizz dying, that I decided to let the computer play for me. Therefore I fired up the Angband Borg. I decided to let the Borg be a Dunedan Mage. The idea was that the Borg would do all the boring work. Then I would take over the character later.

The Borg quickly brought my character up through the character levels. Every once in a while I would stop the Borg and check on the progress. I was most interested in any artifacts the Borg had discovered. At first there were few. Then the Borg started diving down, getting nice treasures.

By the time the Borg reached character level 50, it had great items to spare. Normally I go for the items that give me the highest speed. The Borg chose otherwise. For example, it kept a Ring of Speed +14 at home. I would be wielding that on my finger immediately. The Borg also found at left Ringil at home. Come on. It gives you +10 speed!

In the end, I just let Borg do most of the playing. It dived down to dungeons levels 81 through 99. It strangely spent a lot of time at levels 80 and 81, even when it had gone much deeper previously. Eventually the Borg character died too. I did not feel that bad. The computer did all the work. Now it is time for me to start up another character. Maybe I will not choose human mage this time.