Crawl Stone Soup - V0.8 Released

[skavenhorde]

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has reached version 0.8. For those of you who may not know Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a variant of the Roguelike Linley's Dungeon Crawl. One of Stone Soup's major difference between Linley's is the use of tilesets instead of ASCII graphics.
There have been a quite a few changes to the game. Some of the changes include new gods, monsters, races, spells, a new game mode, items, a host of fixes and many tweaks. Here are a few of the highlights for this update:

0.8 Highlights
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* New god: Ashenzari, god of divinations.
* New species: Felids, sentient cats.
* New spells: Malign Gateway, Tornado, Leda's Liquefaction, Summon Dragon, Summon Hydra, Darkness.
* Removed spells: Bone Shards, Tame Beasts, Portal, Alter Self, Extension.
* Split Enchantments into Hexes (harm foes) and Charms (self-buffs).
* Replaced Selective Amnesia spell with scroll and book destruction.
* Improved heavy armour.
* Makhleb and the Shining One are no longer available as starting gods.
* Shortened the Elven Halls.

All of those changes are great, but if you play a summoner like I do from time to time then you'll pleased to know that they have added a summon dragon and hydra spell. I personally can't wait to give those a try provided I can keep my character alive long enough to get those spells.
A big thanks goes out to Sir James for posting about it in our forums.
More information.

 

[Twotricks]

They also changed stalker class ?

Not sure for the better

 

[SirJames]

The new stalker class is excellent!

The old one was pretty much just a poison mage with a nice dagger.

Now you can cast AoE poison, confusion and other effects from evaporation potions. Confusion functioning just like mephitic cloud, only you also get a +2 dagger to stab them with while theyre confused.

Passwall and Dig give you sneaky ways to escape or attack and allow access to treasure blocked off by translucent rock walls.

Petrify pretty much speaks for itself, too. Very easy to kill someone who's held!

If you want to play like a combat focused version of the old Stalker, just go assassin and use your blowpipe + poison darts. They're just like the Sting spell only better.

If you wanted to focus more on leveling your poison magic... Go a poison mage! Won't take long to get your shortblade skill to 2.

Also, the old stalker pretty much made assassins a pointless starting class as assassins we're almost identical only without a spellbook.

 

[skavenhorde]

I've played a little bit yesterday and love the new interface. Almost everything you could ever want to do is an icon now. I could almost play the whole thing without ever touching the keyboard, but it's still much easier to use ranged weapons/spells with the keyboard/mouse combo. Click the ranged weapons and hit enter instead of having to click on my opponent.

There is a lot of nice little changes even to the character creation portion. They've separated the different character classes into categories now like fighters, fighter/mages, pure mages and then lists all of the classes under these categories. That's nothing earth shattering, but it definitely paints a clearer picture as to what all these different classes are.

As usual the tiles are fantastic. I would be seriously torn between ADOM and this one if I wasn't so stubborn and wanted to turn my necromantic dark elf good and win that dang game.

Plus, I like the ADOM's necros a little better than Crawl's. Crawl's necros are too much like Diablo 2's necro. In ADOM you have to be careful when you raise your dead, but in Crawl you just raise and raise and raise till you have your own little army marching behind you. Both have their good and bad points, but in the end ADOM is more my style.

I think I should stick with summoners with this one. They're a fun class to play in Stone Soup.

 

[SirJames]

"I think I should stick with summoners with this one. They're a fun class to play in Stone Soup."

I haven't played a summoner far into the game yet… But one you definitely need to try is an Orc Priest of Beogh. Its a god thats exclusive to the Orc race.

What happens is as you gain piety with the god any orcs you run into might decide you're the Orc messiah and permanently join you. They'll then pick up gear you leave behind and level up becoming more powerful orc units. Occasionally Beogh will imbue them with priestly magic and give them names like boss monsters. You can end up with such a big army of orcs and unlike summons they'll follow you down to the next level.

Also, you get a bonus to damage when using orc weaponry which is based on your piety with beogh too. This adds up to a LOT of bonus damage when you're a high priest.

Also, when you get damage that might kill you theres a chance Beogh will protect you and remove all damage from that attack, saving your life.

AND (lol) you can eventually walk on water. Its a miracle! xD

On top of that you can cast a Smite spell which never misses and can target units behind others, rather than, say, a magic dart which will strike the first person it comes into contact with.

I feel that rather than picking a summoner straight away you're better off picking a Wizard, since they get the awesome summon imp spell… And Shadow Imp are necromancers themselves and will raise the dead for you! Of course, its a matter of luck whether or not you'll find a more powerful spellbook containing better summons. At least with summoner you can be sure to get Summon Ice Beast.

EDIT: also, just in case you didnt know already...

Hit o to auto-explore until you see something on interest. Makes clearing the early levels lightning fast, espeically for fighter types like the mighty dwarf fighter.

To find exits quickly hit x then > or < (downstairs or up) then enter to quickly auto-run there.

 

[skavenhorde]

Thanks for those tips. The orc god definitely sounds like my kind of god. I didn't even consider an orc priest. May be interesting to see what it can do.

And walking on water, lol, ok now that is too funny.