Post your Rogue Tips!

Discussion about Rogue Touch for the iPhone and iPod Touch
farnsworthiness
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2009 6:13 pm

Re: Post your Rogue Tips!

Post by farnsworthiness »

Optimize your search patterns through unlit rooms.

You have a room that looks like this. You are the ever-classic @ symbol in the upper left corner. Don't just proceed with a search that goes from left to right, down two lines and right to left - you'll be wasting turns that way. In the examples below, the "." is the player path.

Code: Select all

Example Room
+----------------+
|@               |
|                |
|                |
+----------------+

Code: Select all

Bad Way
+----------------+
|@...............|
|               .|
|................|
+----------------+
Instead, work on diagonals. Remember, your light casts a 1 square radius all around you. In the "Bad Way" above, you searched the middle of the room twice.

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Good Way
+----------------+
|@   .   .   .   |
| . . . . . . . .|
|  .   .   .   . |
+----------------+
This is even more protracted in rooms that are two squares wide by n squares long. If you just proceeded from left to right and back, you would have really wasted your time. As we all know, in Rogue time equals food expenditure.

Searching for Doors

Searching for secret doors follows similar patterns. If you simply follow along a wall, mashing the search button several times every few squares, you're likely to waste a lot of food. Instead, practice the following:
  • Know where to search. If you're in the south west corner of the overall maze on a level, you won't find any doors on the south and west walls. You won't find any secret doors on the wall you entered in on - one door per wall. The rooms of the maze are laid out in a 3 x 3 grid and there may or may not be interconnections between each adjoining rooms (though all of the maze will be accessible _somehow_) If you were in a room adjacent to the room you are in and it didn't have an exit to your room, chances are you won't find a secret to it. Pay attention when drinking potions of clairvoyance. As you roam the level, you can see where passages are - the monsters give them away as they move.
  • When searching, your character simultaneously searches all of the squares immediately surrounding him. So, when searching a likely wall, search several times in a location. When you are satisfied you didn't find anything there, move THREE squares away on the same wall and search again. If you don't, you will have wasted your effort on searching the same wall squares twice.

Code: Select all

Good Way
+----------------+
|@  @  @  @  @  @|

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Bad Way
+----------------+
|@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ |

Other Miscellaneous Things:

Don't drink your potions of gain strength when weakened by poison. They will bump you up a point of strength, but when you drink that potion of restore strength, you won't get the permanent bump that a gain strength potion should provide when healthy.

Save your high power magic for lower levels when you need them. It might be fun to zap that hobgoblin with a staff of flame or cornucopia, but you'll regret it when you're going after bigger game such as griffins and trolls.

Take your time and rest if you need to. Don't barge into the unknown with low health. Surprises are bad when you're in poor health.

If you have the food to spare, need experience and have quaffed a potion of clairvoyance, stick around on the level. You can see when monsters repop every so often and you can go pick them off.

If you're not searching for traps at deep levels, pay attention to where you walked as you traverse a dark room. If you retrace your steps, you won't encounter nasty pit traps.
Last edited by farnsworthiness on Thu Apr 09, 2009 8:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Jim2wheels
Posts: 104
Joined: Sat Apr 04, 2009 7:03 am
Location: London UK

Re: Post your Rogue Tips!

Post by Jim2wheels »

Good tips :) however surely you should search along a wall in steps of 3? seeing as your rogue can search in a 3x3 grid patterm? Otherwise you will be searching over the 2nd block to your left/right twice? Looking at your diagram it even looks like you have moved 3 times.
farnsworthiness
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2009 6:13 pm

Re: Post your Rogue Tips!

Post by farnsworthiness »

Yes - you're right! Move THREE, not TWO!!! I mistyped and have gone back and edited the post.
skizzybiz
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2009 11:19 pm

Re: Post your Rogue Tips!

Post by skizzybiz »

Great tips, all.

A couple more tips for conserving movement:

- in a room that's 5 tiles high, you can save a bit of time by following a zig zag pattern along one of the walls:

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+----------------+
|@ . . . . . . . |
| . . . . . . . .|
|               .|
| . . . . . . . .|
|. . . . . . . . |
+----------------+

- Always remember where you started zigging! You not only want to conserve movement, you want to lower your risk of stepping on a trap. In general, retrace your footsteps as much as possible.

As for using identify scrolls, I'm not sure whether saving them all for rings is the right strategy. Quaffing potions and reading scrolls as soon as you find them is a good way to die early. I generally wait until around level 10 to start reading and quaffing, because (1) it's not too difficult up to that point, even without magic; and (2) there are a number of scrolls and potions that are generated at a higher rate than others (see the odds here), so you can usually tell the identify scrolls because they're the ones that you've collected 3 or 4 of (and similarly with potions of healing, gain strength, and restore strength). Honestly, I don't know which is a better strategy -- should you die early and often and save your identifies, or work on avoiding blindness and hallucination at all costs? What do people think?
User avatar
preuve
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:20 am

Re: Post your Rogue Tips!

Post by preuve »

skizzybiz wrote: (2) there are a number of scrolls and potions that are generated at a higher rate than others (see the odds here), so you can usually tell the identify scrolls because they're the ones that you've collected 3 or 4 of (and similarly with potions of healing, gain strength, and restore strength).
We might need CD to come and check the probabilities. I am not sure how closely he follows the original Rogue for the various probabilities. He did mention that his is a clean room implementation and some of it was coded based on memory.
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