The fact that it would take forever, you'd become bored out of your mind, and you'd eventually run out of healing potions. Granted, you could just find the nearest temple, but you have to get to it first. You could camp on a temple, I suppose, if you really, really wanted to. But let's face it: The game is as much about the exploration, the journey, as it is about the goal. That's where the fun is. If you wanna grind on the first few floors for 20-odd levels I suppose you're free to, but you're just cheating yourself out of a good chunk of what makes this game fun.
short answer - sanity got it. so I just need to decide when I think it's safe to go down further? is there a general rule of thumb I should be aware of? (like your hero's level should be greater than or equal to the floor level...)
Well you can try! But it won't work. Eventually your character will be a high enough level/battle skill that the ratio difference of level/skill will amount to basically no increases by beating up on puny wimps. Still, early on it's a decent plan to get a few xplevels higher than the dungeon floor you're on if possible.
Probably not a bad rule of thumb if you need one. I just make sure that I've explored every nook of every floor (including all areas through holes in the walls and all secret areas I can find) and once I'm done there I move on. By doing that I've managed to become level 20 on floor 15 with some pretty nice swag.
In the original Sword of Fargoal and I think a bit in the Legendary Mode, you'll also start meeting more and more "out of depth baddies" (tough dungeon bouncers from maybe a few levels deeper) coming up the stairs from the lower levels to get you to move on.
I've found that staying one character level above or below the current floor level I am on works well for some close "hanging by a thread" battles as well as average leveling up battles. For instance I'm on floor 7 and level 8 character currently. Most battles are easily won, but a few baddies travel up from deeper dungeon floors and give me a real fun time. It will be interesting to see if this strategy will continue to be successful the further down the dungeon I go!
It is my painful duty to report that, due to the release of Football Manager 2010, this game has been tucked away for now! Nothing comes between me and some footy management - not even my g/f (soon to be ex-g/f if it continues )
New and Noteworthy Hooray -- SoF has showed up in the N&N section of the iPad App Store. About time, huh? Hope this helps sales for you princes of the code.
Thanks Doffie! Oooh... I need to add ants to SoF! Then you could "torture" them from afar with your wand of fireball...
I just had an EPIC idea... Wand of puppetry: when you zap an enemy you take temporary control of their body therefore you can fight another enemy without risking damage to your own avatar. Combine this with invisibility so another enemy can't see you to attack your avatar while you "puppet" away..... awesome no?
That does sound cool - I actually just had a similar idea, but simpler - a wand of influence that makes monsters fight with you for a limited time.
Those are both cool ideas! Puppetry leaves you vulnerable, for a twist... cool. The "buddy" monster is unfortunately not a super feasible one, because of the way the combat works... unless the combat view just switched to the ones currently in combat.
What about simply making it possible for monsters to attack each other? I always felt, vaguely, in the back of my mind, that this was kind of missing as a gameplay element. I realize that you're the main target, but the rest of the time are they just hanging out, having picnics, playing a little Gin while you're out of their line of sight? Or alternatively maybe you could make a wand or spell or something, like a Spell of Aggravation or something that temporarily makes creatures attack each other.
Well, I wasn't figuring you'd control the influenced monsters - they'd just act on their own and attack based on their own AI, but they'd other monsters, not the PC. When not attacking, they'd follow the PC (until influence was lost), which of course would be dangerous to the PC once the influence wore off. Basically like having a temporary summon or pet.
My one, strange, radical, idea(whichbi am just hoping is interesting enough to spark a better one in the devs head really), for this game is corpses. I want monsters to have corpses and i want to be able to eat them for fun, positive, and negative (temporary)effects. Also things like combinging foods with no singular property for an effect, or overeating(which makes climbing rops or going down stares damgerous). Obvious ideas i have include poisoned when you eat a spider, being labeled a cannibal for eating a humanoid(and making all humanoid monsters more aggresive), mushroom effect for eating mushrooms, temp strength bonus for eating three dwarves, constant random teleportation for eating dimensiom spiders, eating an elf gives you a speed boost, but eating both an elf and a dwarf makes you attack yourself... Etc. I like different kinds of interactions in rogue likes that give lots of interesting effects. I know this isnt so good, but im throwing it out there either to be refined and implemented(not likely), or better yet just spark some even better ideas in the devs heads!
Mindfield, Vinny, the reason that doing combat asynchronously like that is tricky is because the flow of time in the game is rather dynamic, based on what you're doing. Also, time doesn't really progress while you're in combat. Now I certainly have given this a lot of though (had the same ideas as you guys), and it is doable, but it would be a major change to allow it. So... we'll keep it on the back burner, and we'll get there if we get there. It's definitely the sort of thing that would add a lot of depth to the game, so worthwhile considering. Vinvy, yeah we've sort of ruled out food and corpses... I know a lot of other games like Nethack do this, and it's cool. We could certainly have ingestible items, similar to potions, that have various effects. We're not likely to go the whole corpse/food/hunger route, though.
