Announcing Brogue v1.7

[penderprime at gmail.com]

It is my pleasure to announce the release of Brogue v1.7 for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Downloads, screenshots, a forum and a wiki can be found here:

https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home

New with 1.7:
- Removed experience from the game to reward exploration instead of combat, in part to avoid discouraging character builds that survive by avoiding or incapacitating monsters instead of killing them.
- Potions of healing are now potions of life, and in addition to healing you, they permanently increase your maximum health. Their frequency is now tightly controlled, like scrolls of enchanting and potions of strength.
- New item category: charms. Each can be activated periodically for a non-targeted effect. The duration over which the charms recharge as well as the intensity/duration of the effect increases with enchantment.
- New quest room features and types which are intended to make the quest room system feel more organic and less systematic, some of which were inspired by Andrew Doull’s UnBrogue.
- New potion, the potion of invisibility.
- New weapon type, the rapier, which attacks twice as quickly as ordinary weapons.
- New armor runic, armor of dampening, which renders you immune to explosions (though not to flame).
- Reduced the frequency of treasure rooms to its former, pre-1.6.4 rate to reduce player decision fatigue.
- Increased the accuracy progression of weapon enchantment (to a compounding 6.5% increase per point of enchantment instead of a constant +5 per enchantment) to remain competitive with armor enchantment, based on a quantitative analysis by Alex Mooney.
- The items that monsters drop are all pre-determined at the start of the game, to prevent different players playing the same seed from finding different items. Monsters will also no longer drop food.
- Depths from 30-33 have only two lumenstones each, and depths after that have only one lumenstone each.
- The window on Mac OS X will resize smoothly, and can be run in full screen mode on Mac OS 10.7-10.8.
- Fixed a bug that prevented hidden pit traps from being permanently discovered when you fell through them.
- Fixed a bug that could cause allies and occasionally players and items to fall through the ground when activating extending bridges.
- Fixed a bug that could occasionally cause a custom dungeon seed to generate a different pool of items and monsters based on the player’s actions on the prior depth.
- Fixed a bug that caused weakness status to erase allies’ level-up benefits.
- Fixed a bug that caused polymorphed monsters to regenerate health quickly (unless they were of a type that didn’t regenerate at all).
- Fixed a bug that could prevent phoenix eggs from hatching.
- Fixed a bug that could cause out-of-sync errors when attempting to throw an equipped weapon, confirming at the confirmation box and then canceling during targeting.
- Fixed an issue that could cause foliage and rings to appear as colorful emoticons under Mac OS 10.8 because of Apple’s new font selection routines. Many thanks to Joe Wreschnig and Dennis Gentry for their assistance in solving this issue.
- Damage statistics in the monster info panel are expressed in terms of the monster’s current health rather than its maximum health.
- If a weapon stack is divided into two or more stacks, and some of them are degraded by acid, enchanted or rust-protected, they will no longer stack with the weapons that were not degraded/enchanted/protected.
- Monsters’ damage ranges are generally tightened, so that they will deal the same average damage with less variance.
- Weapons of slaying will never miss their intended target, and will not be generated for bloats of any kind.
- Enchanting a wand will add to it the minimum number of charges that a wand of that type can initially have.
- Inanimate creatures cannot be weakened.
- Goblin conjurer allies will no longer count blades from the prior or next depth toward their summoning quota.
- Allies on the previous level and next level (in addition to allies on the same level) will gain experience from the player’s exploration, and exploration points will accrue for locations discovered via telepathy.
- Reduced the frequency of monkeys in the interest of being less annoying.
- Burning monsters will not ignite terrain while they are submerged.
- Rewind with left-arrow no longer hangs replays when used more than 100 turns into playback.
- Allies will no longer cast negation on entranced teammates, nor cast offensive spells of any kind at reflective opponents, nor try to engage bloats in melee.
- Weapons of slaying will not miss their intended targets.
- Disabling color effects with the backslash key will result in even blander graphics than before.
- Jellies will not split if there are already 100 of their clones within one depth, so that the elusive jellymaster build will not cause crashes.