I Humbly Demand a "Superogue" Difficulty!

I, being the amazing puddle of gaming awesome that I am, have reached the conclusion that Going Rogue isn't hard enough to be sufficiently difficult, not even with both Permadeath and No Time To Grind on - which is how I usually play the game. Therefore I suggest adding a more challenging difficulty for those of us who are something... more, than mere rogues. A difficulty that've got more in common with "real" roguelikes if you will.

Now the way I see it this could be achieved -relatively- easily, I don't know how difficult it is to add entirely new content to the game from the developer side of things after all. Namely by:

- Making the AI more aggresive: One of the big problems with Dredmor in terms of difficulty is that the AI waits for you to act. Meaning that you can just lock yourself in some empty room and heal up or whatnot. This could be fixed relatively easily by making monsters capable of spawning more frequently and/or giving them higher field of vision. The former may be the perffered option as rogue classes would get the short end of the stick with the latter.

- Making ressource management more important: Another issue is that the game tends to be rather generous with loot, much more so than in "normal" roguelikes. This could be "fixed" by either limiting the loot spawns (somehow), restricting access to or removing the pocket dimensions, make No Time To Grind a forced feature of the difficulty, make loot able to despawn or decrease cash flow.

- Increasing the damage done by traps: Yes, it's that simple.

Just throwing ideas out there that shouldn't be too difficult to code into the game (then again, what do I know?) in a foolish attempt to get you guys in the mood for making the game hate us players sooo much.

EDIT: Notice that I haven't mentioned monsterscalling. This is because simply making the monsters stronger wouldn't actually make things more challenging, it'd only make the difficulty more focused on combat. Which should not be the main focus here, Going Rogue already provides sufficiently powerful foes, we just need to make the world itself more dangerous.

EDITEDIT: Also, before anybody starts telling me that Dredmor is a roguelike; it's not. In fact it's a roguelikelike (the only one in fact), acordingly to the developers themselves.

 

It should be called "Dashing Rogue" mode.

 

It dosen't matter what it's going to be called, I just want it.

 

Check here. This is based upon a meager mod I made. (I am shocked no-one had done it before me.)
http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/core-elvish-reality-reborn.5146/

*Edit* Ninja'ed by Danyab. Lol.

You may actually get more benefit by examining the files themselves and tweaking a mod of your own as you see fit. I strongly suggest diving to level 14 and seeing how insane it gets while testing. It gets hairy by level four with either Elvish Reality or Elvish Reality Reborn. By level ten the weak enemies wade through your Sandstorms laughing because it tickles.

 

Uhh, I'll go check it out. Problem though is that that mod focuses, as far as I can see, on making the monsters stronger. Which while it naturally makes things more problematic dosen't exactly make it more "roguelike'y". Rather it reinforces the hack-and-slashy aspect of Dredmor. Then again in order to get a more "roguelike" difficulty the devs'd have to mess around with the AI and a number of other things that we mere mortals can't do. Which I doubt that they're willing to do due to them wanting to focus on Clockwork Empires... darn.

 

I'm not too knowledgeable about the inner workings of the game, nor am I a super player, but judging by your posts, it sounds like what you wants transcends what a mod could accomplish--it sounds like you actually want a different game from what Dredmor is. You want a true roguelike, and Dredmor isn't.

If there is one thing that bugs me about Dredmor, it's not the overall difficulty of the game--it's that the difficulty seems to be concentrated in the boss fight (Dredmor himself). I can traipse through most of the dungeon with no problem on Dwarven Moderation, only to get to Dredmor and find myself hopelessly outmatched (depending on the choices I made leading up to that point--it's been said before, but there are only a few viable tactics when fighting Dredmor). It kind of makes me wonder why Dredmor doesn't just sit by the dungeon entrance and kill adventurers as they come in. Does he gain power from all the crushed hopes and dreams, the lost potential of 10-15 levels of dungeoneering? Or is he just a sadistic bastard?

 

ER does a whole lot more than just make the enemies stronger. It makes them more numerous, and makes them respawn faster, and makes them give less experience and so on. Check the files. If there is a way to make it work for you it is in those files. They are plainly written XML and you can read them easily and understand most if not everything in there.

However Suho is right. DoD is a different type of game. The allure of DoD is that it ca be many different games. It may be impossible for it to be what you want though. The only one who can decide that is you.

 

Why of course I'm asking for something that you can't do with a mod. Otherwise I'd be posting this in the modding forums or better yet, just mod my copy of the game myself... even further. Don't really get why you get the feeling that me suggesting making a "omg this is haaaaard D:" difficulty'd make you believe that I want a different game (or anything even close to that) though seeing how I repeatedly state that I'm just suggesting something and that I'm perfectly aware of Dredmor's limitations.

And the Dredmor boss fight is sadly a result of how bosses with the Dredmor scalling system works. It's amazing for balancing and for when making common enemies but it's terrible for bosses. Also Gaslamp may not have been spending that much time planning the actual boss fight itself versus the dungeoncrawling aspect which kinda explains how it can only be either monotone or unfair with little to no middleground.

In other words; It intensifies the focus on combat, which as mentioned isn't what I was looking for, or rather was suggesting. There's a difference inbetween wanting and suggesting after all. Although I did increase monster respawn rate in my own game which I didn't think you could do. Alas, if only we could mod AI.

Also... I pointed out myself that Dredmor isn't a roguelike in the OP, how did both of you come to the conclusion that I think otherwise?

 

It is just a poor choice of words in my case. I do not think you believe that DoD is not a roguelike. I bounce back and forth on weather or not it is or is not. But it really does not matter. It is a good game with loads of different mods that basically equal a hundred full expansion packs in a similar game.

 

In regard to difficulty levels, I think that in general we need more in-game customizability of the difficulty levels; something that could be tweaked on a game by game basis and without having to change preset files.

 

Then you should probably play on Going Rogue.

 

Um, sorry? Didn't mean to step on any toes.

How did you come to the conclusion that I came to the conclusion that you don't think Dredmor isn't a roguelike? Because I didn't. Come to that conclusion, I mean.

I'm a bit confused now, though.

 

I will have to give that a try, definitely. But my experience with Dredmor himself on Dwarven Moderation leads me to believe that Going Rogue would be an even greater level of frustration...

 

Going Rogue won't made Dredmore less frustrating, no, but it'll make the 15 floors leading up to him more fun. I almost never make it all the way to Dredmore, but on Going Rogue, that's because I'm killed, instead of because I get bored of killing everyone who looks at me funny.

 

My thoughts concerning difficulty:

The Complete Essential Skills, Essence's skill reworks, YHTNTEP, and some of the stronger mods I play have cranked a lot of things up to "actually good build" status. In the vanilla game you either play to win with intense meta-knowledge, methodically making sure you're playing the best you can, or you play something cheesy like a Vegan or a Promethean.

Warlock, Geology, Clockwork Knight, Bushido, weapon stances, and Poisoneer are just a few new things that expand "what kicks major ass."

Begin by installing OneMoreNameless' ASCII Invasion, which significantly ramps up the game's difficulty by adding a bunch of really horrible monsters. Then maybe we can talk about tweaking monsters to match the fact that far fewer characters are crippled by lack of a key aspect to their build.

 

I can understand you wanting a super-hard mode, but I'm not sure why you think this game would benefit from it.
I know you claim you are the best of the best and all.

I just can't help but think you're playing this game for all the wrong reasons if you want a special super difficulty that makes Dwarf Fortress look easy.
Don't get mad at me. I'm just saying, it seems like this is not going to be fun, even if someone did make that super difficulty for you.

I recommend playing Omega and beating it if you want a challenge. You can join a list of 4 other people in that case. 20+ years and I doubt more than 4 people beat it.