Sil Pasta v0.3

Sil Pasta

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What is Sil?
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In Sil, you play a hero/heroine who must descend into the iron fortress of Angband, dive 20 floors down into Morgoth's lair, steal a Silmaril from his crown and make it out alive. You can play as a High Elf (easy), a Dwarf (medium), a Grey Elf (hard), or a Human (impossibru). The game is based off of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion", so expect to see a lot of references in the form of enemies and items.

"There are no wizards or priests, no platemail or magical scrolls. Instead, it is the Norse Saga inspired world that Tolkien imagined, with warriors clad in shining mail, singing songs of rage or sorrow as they slay. The magic of the world is subtle yet powerful: there are songs of fear and of binding, rather than spells of fireball and teleportation."


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Links
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Download:
http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/sil/

Sil Forum:
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=12

Ladder (character dumps):
http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-browse.php?v=Sil

Video Playthroughs (some of which feature our very own Sage):
http://www.youtube.com/user/silstreamer/videos?view=1&flow=grid

mpa-Sil (MarvinPA's Sil fork with ease-of-life changes):
https://github.com/MarvinPA/mpa-sil


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Skills and Abilities
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Skills: melee, archery, evasion, stealth, perception, will, smithing and song. Dexterity adds bonuses to the first four. Grace adds bonuses to the latter four.

Abilities: every skill has many of these, some with prerequisites. Can be deactivated by highlighting the skill and pressing right.

In general, do not invest too heavily into abilities early on. If you're doing a generic melee fighter dude, good melee and evasion (this is what lets you hit and dodge) are more important than having melee abilities. One or two abilities can be fine, but they get more expensive the more you get. The early game is a little inflexible, as you need good combat abilities, but once you're a couple floors down, you can choose where you place your experience.


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Combat Rolls & Criticals
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The numbers on the left under your Health and Voice are your attack with melee, attack with bows and defense.

(+9, 3d7) means you have an accuracy of +9 and do 3d7 damage.
[+12, 6-20] means you have an evasion of +12 and reduce damage taken by 6-20.

Every point of melee skill adds one accuracy and every point of evasion skill adds one evasion. If your accuracy is equal to the target's evasion, you will hit roughly 50% of the time (there is an element of chance since both attacker and defender roll a 1d20 then add their respective scores). The same applies for dodging enemy attacks. Attacks with bows are an exception and ignore half of the evasion. A big part of the game is balancing between your accuracy and damage. Heavy weapons do decent damage (if you have enough strength) but are hard to score criticals with since they're heavy as shit. Light weapons on the other hand do poor damage, but have a much better chance of scoring criticals since weapon weight is tallied into the roll necessary to score a critical. High accuracy helps you do more criticals, and high evasion conversely helps you avoid enemy criticals.

What's a critical? Say a spear rolls 1d11 damage. Get a crit and this ups to 2d11. Get a double crit and this ups to 3d11. Add in slaying/elemental brands, sharpness, and this can lead to insane damage.

How do you get a crit? A spear is 3.0lbs, so you need to roll 10 (7 + weapon weight) higher than you enemy's evasion roll to score a crit. Abilities like Finesse and Subtlety lower the base roll necessary to crit (to 6 and 5 respectively).


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Tactics and Monster Behavior
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Enemies in Sil will fuck your shit up. Packs will often split up and circle around several rooms to block off your escape. They also get attack bonuses for surrounding (or flanking) you.

..o..
..@o. (this counts as being flanked, and each orc gets a +1 bonus to attacking you)
.....

.ooo.
.o@o. (now each orc gets +7)
.ooo.

Other enemies will run away from you while their buddies pelt you with arrows. Archers in particular are a problem for newer players, but there's an easy way to deal with them. If you get them against a wall with no doors or passages nearby, then approach them at a perpendicular angle, they'll stop running away and fight you in close quarters. It looks something like this:

-----
..o..|
..@..|

The idea is you want to get them into a position where they can't move without still being in attack range of you. Getting them in a corner is even better:

-----
....o|
...@.|

You can easily do this using 'L' bends in passageways. Simply give them five or so spaces of room, so they'll feel comfortable to move into the elbow and start shooting arrows at you. They won't run away when you move in to attack. Of course this is all easier said than done. Often enough, you'll have multiple ranged enemies attacking you at once, and they'll bring along melee support. Buying Opportunist is recommended when you start fighting cat assassins since they are difficult to corner.

Some of the more troublesome monsters like spiders, dragons and wraiths will stop chasing you if they can't see you (their descriptions say they "do not deign to pursue you"). Ducking behind a corner or even a pile of rubble is enough to get a shadow spider off your back. Dragons prefer to stick by their treasure piles and will only attack if you get too close to their shinies. Dragons don't carry their loot on them, so tricksy hobbitses can lure a dragon away from his hoard then dash around and steal everything.

Midgame enemies like easterlings, easterling archers, and giants need light to see (you can tell because they all have a light radius). If you have an item "of shadows", you can unequip your light source to make your light radius -1. This means that they can't see you, but you can see them, which gives them considerable attack and defense penalties. This is especially recommended if you're a frail character fighting giants like Nan and Gilim.

Some enemies like shadow spiders and amethyst serpents emit too much darkness to see, and the issue can compound if there is more than one nearby. It's recommended that you carry a stack of shiny items like feanorian lamps that you can drop in emergencies to give yourself extra light.

As of 1.2.1, many enemies also received abilities. For instance, orc warriors get Charge, which means you'll need to step to the side of them to avoid the extra damage.


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Item Identification Strategy
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There are a few methods:

1. Buy Lore-Master from the Perception skill tree.
2. Make a Lore-Master helm if you're a smithing character.
3. Play the dreaded ID game.

The last method is more time-consuming and hazardous, but once you get familiar with it, you can save a shitload of XP since you won't have to blow it on Lore-Keeper and Lore-Master.

Here is an extensive and exhaustive guide on how to beat the ID game:
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=6986

Alternatively, if you're playing mpa-Sil, item identification gets a lot easier since your potions and herbs are auto-inscribed at the depth you found them, letting you make some educated guesses on what they are. Many items will also auto-ID if you test them properly (i.e. attacking a group of enemies with a weapon of fury will trigger Whirlwind Attack and ID the item). In addition, artefacts are automatically identified upon discovery.

If you're familiar with Nethack's ID game, you might want to give this a shot.


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Character Builds
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Noldor Brawler:
 -House of Fingolfin: 3, 3, 5, 3
 -at chargen: 6 melee, 6 evasion
 -necessary abilities: Hardiness, Critical Resistance, Constitution
 -recommended abilities: Power, Opportunist, Song of Slaying
 -generally an easy character since you have high HP and defense
 -pick a weapon that makes use of your strength bonus
 -high will means lower chance of certain status effects and attribute drains

Noldor Light-Weapons:
 -House of Feanor: 2, 5, 4, 3
 -focus on light weapons like spears and longswords to rack up criticals
 -pick up Momentum later on
 -can also double as a smithing character if you're into that

Edain Fighter:
 -House of Hador: 3, 2, 3, 1
 -evenly work up melee and evasion up to 10 each
 -get Power, grab a battle axe or bastard sword, and kill enemies before they kill you
 -work up to 6 points in will by the time you hit 300ft (you can't afford to be stat drained)
 -don't fight giants unless you have a source of shadows
 -aim for things like Constitution and +Con items

Smithing characters got gimped hard in 1.2.1, so play one at your own discretion. Basically there are not enough forges anymore, and you can no longer dual-wield smithing hammers like some dude on the cover of a power metal album.


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I Want to Kill Morgoth
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Who doesn't?

The hard part is actually getting to him. The next hardest part is securing a decent weapon with the "sharpness" brand, which will let you bypass his insane defenses.

The typical method is to stroll into the middle of the throne room, take a shit on the carpet, buff up, sing Song of Slaying, then go absolutely apeshit with an herb of rage to rack up a ridiculous slaying score. Once your rage herb wears off, you can start laying into him directly (Concentration and Rapid Attack are nice for this), keeping your buffs/health/voice up all the while. Once your slaying bonus goes down, pop rage and start killing some of the guys around you to quickly get it back up. Then start whacking Morgoth again until he drops dead.

Even if you don't manage to kill Morgoth, this can make the rest of your job easier, since the throne room will usually be cleared out. You can hop over to his crown, nab a Silmaril, and run up the stairs.

There are other ways of killing him, but that's the most common and probably the simplest to pull off.


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Protips
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1. Read the fucking manual and play the fucking tutorial. Seriously.
2. Murky brown potions are always potions of orcish liquor. Clear potions are always potions of miruvor.
3. Swapping any piece of equipment only takes one turn.
4. Use a shortbow or thrown weapons to kill fleeing enemies. You don't need any skill to do this. To use thrown weapons more easily, press '{' to inscribe, select your spears or axes, and inscribe them with '@t1'. Now you can press 't' to throw and '1' to select them, instead of looking for their letter.
5. Orc archers and esterling archers are annoying since they bypass half your evasion score. Swap to a shield and use heavy armor when fighting them.
6. Some enemies have very high evasion and low protection, use an accurate weapon against them. In particular, flying insects ('I' glyph) have high evasion and no hp. Shortbows are great at killing them because bows ignore half of their evasion.
7. Some enemies have high protection and low evasion, so use a big damage weapon against them. Centipedes (probably not worth swapping for these), esterling warriors, serpents are good candidates.
8. If a door on your map is closed, you can see when a monster opens it even if it's not in vision. Strategically close doors behind you, so monsters don't get the drop on you.
9. Enemies in groups like to wait at the exit of a hallway to gang up on you. If you take enough damage to make the color of your @ change from yellow to orange, they'll chase you into the hallway. A fun way to mess with them is to take Charge and grab a heavy weapon. They won't chase you into the hallway, so you can freely step back and forth, busting heads like a champ.
10. Concentration bonus carries over between ranged and melee, so work up your score as tough enemies approach
11. Seriously read the manual it has a lot of important info on mechanics not covered here. It has pretty pictures too.
12. Food should never really be an issue unless you're wearing an item that boosts metabolism. In a pinch, you can eat herbs and drink potions to satiate yourself.
13. Some items like pale/dark herbs can be hard to see on the floor, especially if you're using a smaller font. Do a brief scan of the floor every now and then to make sure you didn't miss anything.
14. Don't eat until you are gorged, as you won't be able to drink potions or eat herbs in emergencies.
15. Staves of freedom can be used to clear rubble.
16. Keeping a single save file has a few fun benefits. You can see how many times you've been killed and by whom. You also keep your monster memory which you can check by pressing 'Esc'.
17. Killing enemies has decreasing returns in XP. Check the enemy with (r)ecall to see if you'll get any items or experience for killing it. Don't waste time killing wolves when you won't get shit for it.
18. Weapons of Gondolin are excellent until around the midgame. Exchange it for a weapon of Doriath and Nargothrond later. You might want to hang onto it though since troll guards are a pain.
19. If you're having trouble with rauko and balrogs, you can take Rauko-bane in the perception skill tree. You'll fight tons of them, which gives you a hefty bonus. Plus, there are seven balrog bosses to fight.
20. You can refuel your equipped lantern with ones in your inventory or on the ground with the 'u'se command.
21. Don't open chests if there isn't enough room for the loot to drop; pick up the chest with 'g' and open it in a more convenient location. Chests can have up to four items in them.
22. Make sure that if you kill a unique their loot has room to drop; items can only drop up to two spaces away from where the unique died, and they can only drop on open floor tiles. If an item doesn't have room to drop, it will sometimes disappear.
23. You can turn abilities on and off by highlighting the ability and pressing the right arrow key. This can be necessary with some like Flaming Arrows and Rapid Attack.
24. If you are behind an open door and the enemies are standing outside it, you can close the door and they will move onto the door tile, turning a 2 or 3 on 1 into a 1 on 1.
25. You can test theoretical smithing recipes with '0'.
26. Orcish liquor cures fear. Seriously.