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Comment by tsywke44 | Hacker News Reader

That actually sounds nice. Compared to most other "competitive” games, where there is an optimal meta way of playing it, and doing anything else is basically trolling and instant loss

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In some sense, yes, but in another, not so much. Crawl is quite difficult and you're always a few steps away from death if you don't react to different situations appropriately. It can take players months to years to get their first win. Some people are never able to beat it before giving up on it. There's still an optimal way to play in most situations, but many couldn't tell you what that optimum is beyond some rules of thumb which aren't always right.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of gold in those hills and I had a lot of fun getting better and getting my first win. But after that I was very frustrated with how hard it was to just stop at a fork in the road and try to answer, which choice is objectively better? I like difficult games that are fair and require skill growth to succeed in, but I want to be able to understand them so I can make informed choices as I get better as well. Too much: because that's what the black box determined. sorry, you died. should have been more cautious.

Isn't this what this is though? There are certain builds where if you follow them to a T, then the game is "easy" and you win almost always. If you just experiment then yeah you can win by some crazy stroke of luck, but most likely you will just have a bad time.

I had the same experience in Caves of Qud(which is great btw) - there are some builds that really really really work, and others which are unwinnable.

No not really. Very few builds will let you win the game easily. Situational awareness is required. Relatively few enemies in the game are just melee brutes. Most of them occupy some niche that requires you to think. They can confuse your character, or lock all the doors, or summon, or irresistibly cut your health in half, etc. An exceptionally fortunate character, say, a kung fu octopode transmutated into statue form and wearing 8 magical rings of power can probably karate chop their way through 99.9% of the game without much of a worry, but may still lose in a 1:1 slug fest with certain lords of hell.

There are easier builds and there are harder builds, but if you aren't good, you will lose. Case in point, the bug described here effectively doubled damage output and win rates were still pretty low.

Although it's worth noting that there are different degrees of "winning the game". Only three runes are required to win, but maximizing your score and prestige will require you to get all fifteen runes. If you're just going for a three-rune victory, then there are more-or-less "safe" builds. For example, a Minotaur of any melee class, or a Berserker of any species that isn't completely inept at melee can reliably win a three-rune (not a guaranteed victory obviously, you still need to know what you're doing, and most importantly when to run away), although these characters are going to have a very hard time in the extended endgame without some sort of pivot.

There’s a great YouTuber named Ultraviolent4 who plays lots of “unwinnable” or maybe just really odd combinations, and watching his games really improved my own.

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