You also made the teleporters show up on the map. This is greatly appreciated. And the Hydras are not giving me such problems as before, but I think this is because they do not chase me from the other side of portals as before. Indeed this leads to a minor exploit. Find a monster, and make it chase you to a portal. Teleport out. Teleport back in, and move to 1 square off the portal, not on the monster side, with a direct line of sight to the monster. The frustrated monster will just stand there, raging, as it cannot move any close to you because of the portal. You shoot it full of arrows, firebolts, or whatever. I think we had better let the monsters walk through the portals when chasing you.

re: phoenixes I think they do a fixed amount of mana reduction with their mana drain spell. This doesn't inconvenience my magic users who have tons of the stuff and regenerate it quickly. I think a percentage would be nastier. I also think that phoenixes should be immune to fire damage, which will make things most inconvenient for my current caster, who doesn't have any non-fire based offensive spells.

re: magic user spell layout. Now that I have 5 spells, I cannot get the 4 I would like on the page, and worse, I often hit the 'cycle through the spell list' button when I wanted to cast a fireball. But things are even better than before, keep up the great work.

Again, sorry it took me so long to get going on this... just when you sent out the link, a bit of a family crisis cropped up and I didn't have any time to play until recently. I've completed the the expansion levels, and found only one (potential) actual bug: when taking a screenshot (Unrooted HTC Sensation 4G with the stock T-Mobile ROM, using the native screen-shot function) the game is reset, though the screenshot is taken successfully. This reset did not occur before installing the expansion. The last saved game is preserved, but any current unsaved data is lost.

I did notice that on the longer corridors, it becomes very apparent how short the horizon is... in the underground levels, this is not obvious because the skybox is uniformly black. Maybe there's a way to crate a distance haze for the most distant rendered models?

As has already been pointed out, restricting a monster from entering a square containing a portal has created a very easy way combat them with ranged attacks. I know others have had problems with combat around portals prior to this change... I didn't really experience this difficulty. I think it would make the game more challenging to allow monsters to cross portal squares (or even pursue through portals). A better way to deal with the portal-crossing problems mentioned earlier in this thread would be allowing the player to release the current target or, at least, cycle through available targets.

In fact, with the exception of the hydras (who are pretty tough) none of the monsters in the expansion have proved difficult. My character is a caster, level 16, and my primary attack is level 4 Firebolt. I've attached screenshots so you can see my stats and spells. The expansion was very easy... in fact, I cleared the Medusa level (including defeating Medusa) in under two minutes. I'm playing on the "Normal" setting (because I didn't want to totally lose save-game data).

Other thoughts:

As has been mentioned, being able to customize the spell layout on the screen would be massively useful.

There appears to be no facility for deleting old characters within the game (this has nothing to do with the expansion, but would just be a nice thing to have).

Typically, I cannot get a target lock on a monster except when standing at a right angle to them. However, occasionally, at random, I will acquire a lock on a target in the squares immediately adjacent to me at 45 degree angles. Monsters seem to have no problem targeting me at these angles, and indeed I frequently get targeted through walls (something I cannot do, though I can detect targets through doors). I also get attacked through walls (because I'm only a single player, I cannot tell if these are area-of-effect attacks or targeted attacks, from the monster's point of view).

Also, I still can't figure out why my character is so vulnerable to Fright / Fear spells... at level 14, with pretty boosted stats, I could deal with anything thrown at me. But, even gearing up with equipment totaling a Magic Resist of 100+, Fright killed me in two castings. No other spell or attack has affected my character so dramatically, and Fright didn't until I installing the expansion. At the moment, the Ghastly Visage is THE MOST difficult monster in the game. I have to save every few steps on the levels they occur on to actually make it through the game because I get Fright cast on me through walls...

From the challenge creatures presented when I played back through the game using my original character, it seems monster levels scale accordingly. However, I will play to and through the expansion levels again with a new character, and see if I find anything new.

Thanks for the opportunity to participate! I'll keep trying to poke holes in the game. :)

EDIT: I cannot get the files to attach properly to this post, which is really annoying because they're fairly small image files. So, I'll just have to type my stats out...

SPELLS: Fire Arrow 4, Ice Bolt 2, Lay Hands 2, Overload 2

STATS (With boosts from equipment included, at Level 16):

HP 292

MP 319

AC 228

Strength 24

Endurance 88

Agility 89

Magic 105

Attachments
 2011-11-15_09-23-20.jpg [63 KB]

I agree with everything that Tank_0042 says, except that I think that the Mother Hydra is slighlty more nasty than the Ghastly Visage.  And for sheer discovering you are not up to this, and have to die, the gatekeeper is very bad news.  Much worse than the heretic that is being protected, and if you have not made significant investments in agility before you meet this one, I think you are toast.

By the way, Tank_0042, can you check something for me? My belief is that monsters go down easier if you have level 4 charge and level 2 firebolt and then have them both at easy finger range -- so pick them 1, 2 if you are right handed and 3, 4 if you are left -- than if you have level 2 charge and level 4 fb. I even think it works for level 4 charge and level 1 firebolt. Right now I am testing the theory that level 2 mana recharge is enough of a boost to make fireBALL (rather then bolt) a good choice -- when you need to cook 2 monsters in a square, you will, and you will gain mana fast enough that the greater expense will not matter. I think the answer is yes, which means, curse it, loyal tester that I am that I will report that the game seems somewhat unbalanced that way. But I am interested in how other magicians take it.

stats now (in clothes, as a 13th level character on godlevel 17) hp 140 mp 348 ac 135 str 10 (natural) end 44 (enhanced somehow) agi 54 (enhanced somehow) mag 94 (enhanced somehow)

magic resistence is not on this list and I wish it were. I am wearing +50 scale armour of greater mana +50 mana +36 and 1 round of scale mail skill. I have a hand axe of end +9 and agility +9 which I am using now, and a different one of mr +30 which I used against the lich -- but the god levels seem remarkably magic free, while agility and hp are always nice. I have an 18 pt round shield which is also mr +27 to wear, a +40 helmet with magic +14, 2 twin +10 magic rings, and an end +10 agi +10 necklace.

I guess we can work things out where the natural vs clothng stats are if we care.

At any rate, this agile and extremely magical violent person has no trouble with the god levels now except for nasty mother hydra. And even she was more tedious than difficult, because poison is bad for characters. It was harder before, and I think better that you could be chased through portals.

Grävling .

I am taking my new magician character for a second run through the dungeon. Hobgoblin Maniacs pose no problem when they slash me but kill me almost every time they throw a bomb.  Magic resistence does not seem to help here.  Does anything?

exploit:

If you save while poisoned, you ressurect in a non-poisoned state.  I am not sure what we want to do with this -- the exploit is not nice, but neither is having the game only restart you in a state where your only option is to watch yourself die.  Go back to the last save before that?  seems good, but how many saves do we want to allow people to backtrack? And makes deleting chars a priority, which I suppose it ought to be anyway before people start complaining that they are out of space on their phone due to old dead characters they don't know how to get rid of. Or, as some games did, we could make a distinction between saves you make yourself and automatic saves that happen when you go up and down levels, and make it possible to restore the other one of those? You could still get yourself into a state where both of those had you poisoned to death, but just not dead yet but it would be harder.

I expected frozen armour to drain magic from me as I used it. I have level 1 FA, and 1 (or maybe 2, I will check next time I go up a level) level in mana regneration. I cannot see any difference between how my mana regenerates when I have FA cast vs when I do not. It seems that I can run with this on all day long. Also, I will have to experiement more, but it seems to me as if instead of reducing the damage I have by 10% it is making some larger than 10% fraction of the attacks do no damage. Does this interact with your endurance in some way? I took the unusual (for me, at any rate) step of incarnating this character with 40 points in endurance. Leot is correct -- thank you Leot -- frontloading endurance matters.

Sounds reasonable to me. Though I would actually like to play with 'smarter monsters but not permadeath' -- I wonder how many others would like that?

[codezombie 17-11-2011 08:31:43]:

I like that idea as well - a more difficult level than normal, but without permadeath. Possibly, a "compromise" could be worth considering, where the monsters are generated as in nightmare, but you'd still have a resurrection point at each dungeon level (by that stairway for instance), so if slain you wouldn't have to restart for the very beginning, but only at the beginning of each level.

This weekend I have been working on the level generation algorithms for the other maps in the expansion. I likely won't release an update this week. Next week's update will likely have all the maps for the expansion. Though, will include temporary graphics for content that I do not have yet.

Will there be any adjustments to the character creation at the start? I read before in the forum that you would insert 2 skillpoints that you could use

I think I am going to go with adjusting starting equipment and adding some areas to the starting area to allow the player to have a better chance starting out.

I was able to design out all of the levels for the expansion.  I may just throw everything together before sending out another test though.  Not sure how useful it is to test levels that are not totally complete.