Seriously though, I never liked animated objects, such as animated swords, rolling boulders or dust clouds, in any Roguelike (golems are the exception). Somehow they're just too artificial, and not as gratifying to slice. Of course it's a matter of taste, but I always disliked the Hall of Blades in Crawl for example.
On the other hand, finally beating a 'tough dust cloud' after fleeing upstairs and restoring health four or five times did feel like an achievement. :) These monsters with extra toughness, speed or experience modifiers are nasty.
Strange, I've never had problems with artificial monsters, if it bleeds, kill it! (And all monsters in FD bleed, even the metallic ones. Odd, eh?). Those superior monsters are meant to be very hard later on. It's sometimes wiser to flee from them and continue to the next floor if you aren't sure if you can beat them.
It is supposed to happen, and DisaffectedBeta's explanation is exactly what I was thinking while creating it.
His explanation is what came to mind when it happened. That was the only 'strange' behaviour I could think of. On the whole I think the game behaves very well, and I haven't seen any obvious bugs (except maybe some minor grammar issues such as missing articles and singular/plural mismatches).*
Yeah I know there are those missing articles and singular/plural mismatches, but I found it useless to add a lot of code to detect whether an item or a monster starts with a vowel or a consonant. It doesn't make the messages incomprehensible. Unfortunately there are a few bugs, and you just found one aswell. I'm planning to quietly release a new .exe, which fixes a few annoying or nearly critical bugs. The next version isn't coming out any time soon, so I don't want a flawed version to be the newest one.
At times it's hard to guess a weapon's class, or its stats. I mostly just go by the inventory list order, or the equipment asterisk. Also I've noticed that there are several weapon skills, but I haven't found a list of those. Could you give a short explanation on this, or would that be spoiling?
Usually the weapon stats are pretty straightforward. A crude bronze weapon is better than a copper weapon, but worse than a non-crude bronze weapon. Sometimes blessed crude weapons are better than uncursed non-crude weapon though. Unfortunately you just have to check whether a weapon is 1 handed or 2 handed by unequipping the previous weapon and looking at the available weapons list. By the way, the asterisk only appears if there's a better item of same weapon class. For example, if you find a bronze 2 handed weapon, and you're wielding a copper 1 handed weapon, the asterisk doesn't appear. But if you find a 1 handed bronze weapon, it appears.
Uhm, the weapon skills shouldn't be mysterious, it just means how well you can handle a certain weapon type. Press '@' to see your character's stats, including the weapon skills. For example, twohanded weapon skill increases occasionally when you use two-handed weapons, and it increases the damage and chance to hit slightly with those 2H weapons. Did I understand your question correctly?
Edit: I just had a very successful run with another dwarf fighter cut short by a wraith. This thing punched me so hard that my health dropped from around 40 to -98 in a single hit! Not fair! :(
* Come to think of it, there's two more things. You can pick up small bombs after throwing them. I expected them to explode and disappear, even if this is the standard behaviour for thrown weapons. Also, I found a Wand of Greater Identification which didn't work all the time, even though it had charges left. It just refused to ID one of my unidentified weapons, but allowed me to select another item to identify. I have no idea why this happened.
Holy cr*p! I'm sorry about that Wraith death, that was a bug. For some reason I've mixed the Wraith's minimum damage and health, which means that it's damn weak, but insanely deadly. I'll fix this in the silent update I mentioned. I'll add a news message on FD's site when the update is uploaded. Getting to floor ~40 is very good playing though!
Haha, I never thought of that when I added the small bomb's name. I'll change it, it really doesn't make sense. Who would throw bombs that don't explode? :)
Wand of Greater Identification doesn't identify weapons. It identifies accessories, other wands and potions. You can use it on already identified weapons that have a prefix to learn more about the prefix though.
And I replied to DisaffectedBeta's post in a private message. (Lazy me).
Thanks for the feedback Rabiat!
