Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.development,rec.games.roguelike.misc (
More info?)
R <r@xxx.com> writes:
> Chris Morris wrote ChessRogue:
> > ChessRogue is a mini-roguelike starring chess pieces. You play the
> > White King, and your quest is to fight your way past armies of pawns,
> > knights, bishops, rooks and queens to kill the Black King.
> >
> > Windows and Linux versions are available for download from
> >
http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/~cim/chessrogue.html
> >
> > Version 2 fixes most of the bugs from the original 3DRL, and makes a
> > few adjustments to the difficulty level to make it a little fairer.
>
> I have just won ChessRogue (with 2420 points). A great small game with
> many interesting tactics to discover, balance is good. My comments:
Well done. I wondered how long it would take someone to win. How many
attempts at the queen levels did it take?
> - Most of my games were ended not by checkmate, but by some kind of typo,
That's the roguelike side of it, then...
> or not noticing a threat.
....and, king capture rules excepted, that's the chess side of it.
> I think that a simple "Are you sure?" when a move/stop could
> possibly lead to immediate capture would be useful.
True, but on the other hand true checkmate situations are very rare
until knights appear in large numbers, and quite rare until rooks
appear.
> Just checking if there is some piece which is able to make such a
> move (without regarding intervening pieces) would be enough, with
> one exception --- when being attacked by a rook/queen and an
> intervening piece is a pawn or bishop which is unable to open the
> way because of water:
>
> = =.=
> @.P.Q or @.B.Q
> = =.=
The issue is that, in the situation
===.=
@..PQ
===.=
the pawn *could* move out of the way, but probably won't.
I couldn't work out a way to give a capture warning that wouldn't give
masses of false alarms (or, worse, fail to warn of real danger)
> - A traditional roguelike high score list might be nice... 100 entries of
> something like "55 username, captured by a bishop on level 5 on
> 5/5/2005 (5:05)" (the last item is time of play) Also the high
> score claims that I lost, which is not true. (I did escape.)
Oh? I'll have a look at that, then. Did the highscore call it a win
when you actually won, and just the entry in the highscore is wrong?
> - If you like, you could add items and resource management (e.g.
> potion of speed, polymorph, limited flying carpet), but this
> would make it a wholy different game...
Yes. I left items out since I couldn't see them really fitting.
> - don't read further if you want to discover interesting tactics
> yourself...
>
> - I find that some tactics work despite of being quite cheap, i.e.
> rather bugs in AI than tactics. (This may be subjective, since
> black obviously has a winning strategy of combining its pieces
> into pairs who defend each other, and in a sense, all roguelikes
> are exercises in exploiting bad AI. Someone else might disapprove
> of tactics which I like.) They are as follows:
The AI is intentionally quite stupid, for the sake of balance. I wrote
a very simple AI just to get it working, but found that difficult
enough to deal with as a player, so left it at that.
> - Knights should assume that @ has superpawn and bishop powers (but
> no knight nor rook power), and should avoid stepping one bishop's
> move from @. Currently, when @ is three steps from N, the N will
> happily jump into @'s attacking range.
You do need a bit of free space to do that one, and you also need the
bishop power, which isn't always possible by the first knight
level. When I'm paying attention I find the main problem with knights
is when two or three turn up in the same area before I have their
power.
> There are lots of other tactics against knights (they can be
> captured easily with bare hands when they enter a pair of
> corridors separated by a single row of water; this also works when
> there is open space above the upper one), so I think this should
> be fixed. This should not have a massive impact on balance (not
> sure, maybe changing this behavior would make the later levels
> harder somehow, a pair of knights who defend each other is hard to
> destroy).
That is a (reasonably) straightforward way to capture knights,
yes. Without making them scared of corridors, though, there's not much
way around it, since it's just them running out of options on moving.
> - Likewise, the rook should assume that PC has knight, but has no
> superknight nor rook yet. In both of following situations the rook
> will step into a knight's jump from @, although if it used a correct
> strategy it would be safe:
Rooks assume superknight+superbishop.
> (not sure about @ location in (b), but you can move)
I think one square to the left.
> > R... .....@.
> > .==. =======
> > .=@. .BR....
> > .... =======
> > (a) (b)
>
> Changing this would probably have a big impact on balance, since
> it seems that when I capture a rook it is usually caused by this.
> (There are another tactics, like jamming the rook between pawns,
> also the rook has no winning strategy in (a) without water)
Well, the rook simply can't win in (a) without water, no matter how
smart it is, unless some other pieces turn up.
Of course, to do the same trick on a queen requires superbishop
powers.
--
Chris
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