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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Holds : Troshian Grounds (Dances of Death with different weapons!)
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Submitted By:Rheb
Hold Name:Troshian Grounds
Theme:Dances of Death with different weapons!
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Number of Levels:1
Number of Rooms:44
Number of Monsters:1466
Version:DROD: The Second Sky (5.0)
High Scores:View High Scores
Hold Karma:3 (+3 / -0)
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File: Troshian Grounds.hold (34.3 KB)
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icon Troshian Grounds  
Troshian Grounds is a spiritual successor to Troshian Tower. Just like Troshian Tower explored the puzzle potential of the swordlessness and speed potions that came with TCB, this hold explores the puzzle potential of the new TSS weapons and speed potions!

The hold features a short story that is mainly just a nod back to Troshian Tower.

It's been a long while since I worked on a DROD project, and it probably will be a long time before I pick up my next. So I'm very happy I've managed to squeeze just about each of my favourite kinds of rooms into this hold. It's got giant and goblin manipulation, rooms based on in depth analysis of obscure DROD features (in this case the staff pushing mechanics) and it is packed full of Dance of Death rooms and several tight timer goodies!

Big thanks goes out to the testers of this hold: Blondbeard, disoriented, Godot23, and mxvladi.
01-27-2015 at 09:11 PM
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Rheb
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File: Troshian Grounds Demos.demo (13.2 KB)
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License: Public Domain
icon Re: Troshian Grounds (+3)  
Most of the rooms are very hard, and almost all require close to move perfect solutions. While I personally love this kind of rooms I know many here on the forums feel they are out of their reach or simply becomes too tedious when you reach the point where your down to minor tweaks of your move order in order to find a solution.

For those who feel playing this hold might not be for you, I've chosen to upload all my demos from the hold. While this may seem pointless to many of you, I'm willing to bet there are a few people around who shares my slightly odd view of beauty in puzzles and their solutions, and to you I say: Don't let the hold's difficulty hold you back from enjoying it!

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[Last edited by Rheb at 01-28-2015 11:26 PM]
01-27-2015 at 10:15 PM
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Lucky Luc
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icon Re: Troshian Grounds (+2)  
For anyone pondering if they should even try this, here's something you should consider:

This hold contains what might well be the best frustration-prevention-device ever: The level-partially-clear-gate. Once you've solved fifteen (out of 24) required rooms, you can exit the level (and the hold). This is not really a new concept, but something I have never seen realized in DROD before.

This makes the hold actually pretty approachable. There are still quite a few rooms that I can't imagine I'll ever beat, but others are quite doable.

Oh, yeah, I should mention that the one-level-hold is divided into thematic sections. Approachable sections (in order of my personal taste of descending approchableness) are the dagger-section in the northeast, the general section in the north and the guard-pushing section in the south-east. Once you've solved them, you already have 12 of 15 rooms, meaning you'll only need three more from the other sections (which is possible).

However, though I loved how this kept motivating me, it poses an interesting question: How do you rate the difficulty of a hold? No, that wasn't rhetorical, how do you do it? So far, I've always conquered a hold, only solving the secrets I could on the way, and rated how difficult it was to do that. Mastering a hold always seemed a bit of a bonus to me (which I rarely succeed to do because of my short attention span). Of course, Dischorran's ajseukdjg (that was the name, right?) completly averts this scheme, but otherwise I found this a quite reasonable approach. If this level-partially-clear gate however gets used more often in the future (which I hope for), what does that mean for the difficulty rating? Only conquering this hold wasn't that hard, maybe 6.5 or 7 brains. Conquering all required rooms however is probably more around 8 or 8.5 brains. What would you do?

Anyway, what I was trying to say, this is a pretty cool hold with some very cool puzzles, and it's also approachable for non-optimizers like me; well done! :) No rating yet as I haven't solved the remaining required rooms (and don't get me started on the secrets), but definitely worth checking out.
02-11-2015 at 03:56 PM
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Nuntar
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icon Re: Troshian Grounds (+1)  
Lucky Luc wrote: However, though I loved how this kept motivating me, it poses an interesting question: How do you rate the difficulty of a hold? No, that wasn't rhetorical, how do you do it? So far, I've always conquered a hold, only solving the secrets I could on the way, and rated how difficult it was to do that. Mastering a hold always seemed a bit of a bonus to me (which I rarely succeed to do because of my short attention span). Of course, Dischorran's ajseukdjg (that was the name, right?) completly averts this scheme, but otherwise I found this a quite reasonable approach. If this level-partially-clear gate however gets used more often in the future (which I hope for), what does that mean for the difficulty rating? Only conquering this hold wasn't that hard, maybe 6.5 or 7 brains. Conquering all required rooms however is probably more around 8 or 8.5 brains. What would you do?
I feel similarly to you: I rate a hold only on how difficult it is to conquer. Many holds have some form of more difficult optional content, but it's the difficulty of the required content that determines how approachable the hold is, which is most helpful to new players sorting by difficulty in order to choose a hold at their level.

Oh, and I may as well mention that I have my own difficulty rating scale, which is based on a series of "standard" holds, and I decide which of these a given hold feels most similar to. (I only very rarely use half-integers.)

1 - Clearing School (the in-game tutorial)
2 - Bad Evil Restaurant
3 - Dan's Dungeon
4 - Beethro and the Cake
5 - King Dugan's Dungeon
6 - Journey to Rooted Hold
7 - The City Beneath
8 - Finding the First Truth
9 - The Intelligence
10 - Gigantic Jewel Lost

I did test Troshian Grounds, though I'm not mentioned as a tester as I got very much stuck :P I'd probably rate it 8 or 9, but I'd have to see how I feel when I complete it.

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02-11-2015 at 04:25 PM
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Rheb
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icon Re: Troshian Grounds (+1)  
So I'm gonna go ahead and bump this.

It passed very much under the radar when it was released, which always felt kind of weird to me.

Having seen Alex Diener play through Complex Complex I realize (for the first time) that a lot of people who may like many of the rooms I create, really dislikes my style of monster manipulation.

I can see why many (perhaps most) droders are'nt fans: it's manipulation that is centered around abusing the most niche movement patterns and is very heavy on execution.

But that's why I love it!

And I would be surprised if there isn't at least one or two other goof-balls out there like myself who feel the same. If you're still reading this, you might be one of them. Give this hold a try!

At least by my own standards, it's got several of the very best rooms I have ever created. :)

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Voligner is my very own DROD-like game. Please check it out!
11-11-2016 at 07:08 PM
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