Old player's general impressions after playing tiles seriously for the first time.

[Blasphemous]

Hey guys.
I have finally decided to buy the steam version of ADOM, with no real plan to play the tiles since I just wanted to have the most up-to-date ADOM available.
In the past, I refused to play tiles because in my mind, it would defeat the purpose and spirit of a roguelike game - that being the chance to imagine in my head the blue D as a fearsome lightning-wielding dragon or a purple Z as that undead dwarven hero resurrected by an evil necromancer.
It was like reading a book, only the narrative was in my hands.
However, since the game downloaded and installed, I decided, what the hell, let's try it.

Boy, was that a good decision.

Let me start off by saying there are still things I would change about the way tiles currently work but none of these are easily implementable, or in fact, that relevant.
That said, I am hugely impressed by the effect.
In the past, I would play the game with some other music playing in the background, on youtube, mp3s from foobar or whatever.
While it was stuff that I liked, it was far from immersive.
With the new ADOM, not only do I get to experience that new graphic interface which for me is reminiscent of the games I played in the early nineties on Amiga 500 and mid-nineties on PC, but I also get to hear all the sounds and dungeon-crawl friendly tunes in the background. It's like playing a new game, only somehow familiar in a broad sense.
The GUI confers so much more content and it's for the most part quite intuitive.
I was about to post a question here when I noticed occasional purple "corrupted!" above my head but after I noticed how it changed in frequency when in different locations, I realized it was background corruption.
That was good. I am playing in easy mode - a candle-born elven assassin - so that I can fully take in what the new interface offers.
Herbs' ripeness status can be determined from miles away, the nature of known traps is quite obvious, shops suddenly look exciting, world map has a new depth... I could go on.

At this point, my char is level 17 and I'm about to visit the ToEF soon and probably dive to casino so there's lots of things I haven't explored yet (and probably have not had a chance to be impressed by) but already I can tell - I'm going to be playing the game more often in the immediate future, at least for a while.

So to summarize: while highly skeptical at first, I have been convinced that the tiles spell out brighter future for this great game than any other features could have.
Congrats and thanks to the dev team and to Thomas for polishing this gem and making it exciting for me (and I guess many others) once again.

PS. The biggest fun right now? Trying to figure out what monster am I facing just from its picture. So far, I've been ~95% correct, so well done to the artist(s) behind those.

[grobblewobble]

Elven assassin is easy mode now?

I'm having a hella fun on steam now as well. The cute dog looks absolutely adorable, I think that's my favourite so far. At the moment I'm busy failing the Rolf quest again and again, I get stuck on a specific point but I don't want to spoil you. Do play around with the talents, some of them have improved big time! Healthy is especially notable, it is about as good as, and stacks with, the Candle sign.

Don't know about you, but my Adom sure got a little rusty. I killed a high level beastfighter because I misremembered the weight restrictions for a frozen piranha lake.
Just now I nearly killed an OP hurthling archer by zapping the unidentified wand of teleportation to grab the SoCR from the high mountain village. Woops, that wrenched the final charge.. I was lucky to carry a wand of wonder and heap of booze and manage an escape.

[Blasphemous]

Haha, some nice adventures man. As for the elven assassin, I started with 8 PV and a stack of 7 daggers, which was very nice in the early game.
I picked the healthy talent and it's indeed quite useful.
The Rolf quest kinda bugs me because I always randomly kill a dwarf; they insist on spawning before I get my alignment to L and thus are frequently hostile. Or pop up from a tension room and in my sloppy-fingering glee of stab-stab, they just turn into another meatball.

[kapsi]

Heathly talent is really good now. Before I hated using a class without either healing or herbalism because of the HP problems if you choose herbalism and I can't not use herbs. Now it's not a problem to not have healing skill, especially with Candle sign.
BTW inspired by you I started a gnomish assassin and wow! She's super powerful. I dual wield phase daggers now and the Ancient Stone Beast went down in about 4 turns. Greater molochs, ancient wyrms and titans are a joke. Probably best skillset in all classes. Find weakness combined with class powers (and cat ring) means almost all hits are criticals.

[Blasphemous]

Yes, this combination has a great skillset. I play elves to also render aging a non-issue but I guess people don't have as much of a problem with ghosts as I do.
The thing you mentioned about herbalism or healing, that's what I do every time. It has to be at least one of these, then I feel comfortable.
Also, herbalism is preferable because remaining herbs provide solution to the other common problems - early stat training and satiation.
With that and assassin's alchemy, there's some potential with random fireballs and an occasional useful potion involving herbs.

[kapsi]

Aaaand I got too sure and got paralyzed to death by mimic hivemind at the bottom of D. Time for a few month break. Also apparently giving the little girl a wished puppy doesn't give you a line in the achievement log.

[UltraBlueCat]

Elven assassin is easy mode now?

I'm having a hella fun on steam now as well. The cute dog looks absolutely adorable, I think that's my favourite so far. At the moment I'm busy failing the Rolf quest again and again, I get stuck on a specific point but I don't want to spoil you. Do play around with the talents, some of them have improved big time! Healthy is especially notable, it is about as good as, and stacks with, the Candle sign.

Don't know about you, but my Adom sure got a little rusty. I killed a high level beastfighter because I misremembered the weight restrictions for a frozen piranha lake.
Just now I nearly killed an OP hurthling archer by zapping the unidentified wand of teleportation to grab the SoCR from the high mountain village. Woops, that wrenched the final charge.. I was lucky to carry a wand of wonder and heap of booze and manage an escape.

Hahahaha... I just had a similar situation last week, with a scroll of random monster summoning. Got a werewolf, soaked up a million tons of hit and got a scroll of teleportation. Felt better than closing the gate.

[Blasphemous]

Yesterday I explored some more stuff - Ice Queen domain is an interesting set; while in ASCII it looks somewhat bland, in tiles it gets a certain conservative but compelling look.
The 80x25 window size does not however work that well with tiles in my opinion. The levels feel stretched horizontally, more so than in ASCII.
Also, using walk mode to traverse corridors is not easy on the eyes - it's kind of choppy. However, it ceases to be an issue when manually exploring.
I got to R6 cave and at some point almost died to a berserker emperor, not realizing it wasn't a regular one. I guess in some cases, monster tiles should be more distinct and threatening.
In ASCII, any unusual color and a rare letter of the alphabet were relatively certain indications of a dangerous enemy.
I believe tiles could benefit from that, if colors are tuned accordingly.