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stuck in lower caves on the 6th level. there is no exit. at least none that i can find without digging, and yes i had a rocket/grenade launcher going in but lost it. there was some talk about being an intruder on the territory of some warlord if that narrows it down. also log says exit = found a bit later after the talk with the warlord so i must have found one but it's gone now. i looked at the whole map several times and walked around to make sure i searched every corner. if i'm not mistaking the exit should be visible once found even if not in view range.
edit: i also suffer from data loss due to corruption, so maybe my cogmind forgot where it was?
edit2: there was a great maul lying around and it seams one can dig with it, but nothing suggests any place to dig to. if there was an exit it's gone. digging outside the maze only causes caveins.
edit3: turn 12133 did i mention getting stuck isn't fun? you may want to implement some fail-safes for situations like these even if it's just a scanner that searches for the exit(is there an exit? if not, tell the player there's an error. where is the exit?) and for the player (is there a player? where is the player?) and looks if there's a clear line between the player and the exit and if not, is there any item that can cut through walls? where are these items? are they in the player inventory? if not, is there a clear line between the player and the item/s?

"Crush" as in all these obstacles can be reliably overcome, yes, with sufficient experience--as I believe it should be in a roguelike.

And yes, combat is perfectly viable. I stream Cogmind on Twitch, I only use combat builds, and I often win (or at least get to the end--in fact, I've never not reached the late game). It usually takes about four hours. Some of the wins on the leaderboards are combat-heavy tactics, but there are lots of players who enjoy other sorts of strategies as well.

Regardless of strategy though, you have to play very differently than you would other roguelikes, otherwise you're going to die. Repeatedly. Forever. One day permanently even!

i don't mind the dieing, that's part of the fun of roguelikes. what grinds my gears is getting stuck or overwhelmed and stuck "as in not being able to fight back". take my first post here for instance. getting stuck after a collapsed ceiling. i believe space rangers had a way to rescue you like if you waited long enough after running out of fuel some ship would fly by and either share some fuel or loot you. cogmind's enemies could perhaps come after you and dig through to kill you especially since after you wait long enough messages keep showing up that say troops are being dispatched to your location. but they never show up, never find you if you are surrounded by walls. or a game over message could appear telling you, you died miserably to rust / lived forever thinking about how you let yourself get trapped like that.
then there's another way to get "stuck": it's very frustrating to have weapons in your inventory you can't equip because you've ran out of matter. and matter is not that easy to find if you can't kill anything because you have no equipped weapons. so maybe a kind of self sacrifice like an inbuilt option to melt something else that is equipped to get some matter, even parts of the core. heat will dissipate, energy get's restored if you disable stuff and wait a few turns, matter gets you stuck. and it's easy to think/hope one more shot will suffice to kill that last enemy and ignore the low matter warning or just be a little low and equip another weapon which gets blown off right away. even running away will only piss you off more if you find weapons but no matter. i believe even if you make it to the exit you won't get your matter bar filled.
btw i am getting better at building solid fighters and this is the first roguelike i play with ASCII since stuff is so small on my screen and yes i did read you post about the difficulty of changing the size of the tiles. i just wanna say the game is appealing enough for people to learn to play with ASCII in part due to the tooltips and mouse support. it's been a very smooth transition. being able to just mouse over or right click a symbol to know what it is instead of browsing some manual every time you forget is pure gold.
edit: while on the subject of tile size, would it be viable to just make a new alternative tile set with 4 tiles for each tile of the old ones? it would be a strict 4x zoom but since font size is adjustable it would not be necessarily too big. and i'm guessing it would not affect the UI since the UI doesn't consist of tiles. then again, the people that can't read the UI would still not be served. unless the letters would be replaced by 4 tiles each drawing the letter. just a thought, ignore if it was already a possible solution in the thread (not sure if i read it all) or if it's not possible.
edit2: while on the UI mouse over an enemy would be very cool to show how damaged it is in %. unless i'm missing something it does show for a split second but then disappears.

Unless maybe it's a discussion about effective UI, there isn't really any room to compare Cogmind to DCSS on any familiar terms. At all.

They're completely different styles of game, each with their own internal logic, and if you approach one like the other, you are destined to perform very poorly in either one. There are plenty of players who can crush the game, including even winning every single run, you just need to understand the mechanics as they exist, but might be unwilling to do that.

That said, if you find it too difficult there is an easy mode coming in the newest version next week. If you're interested in buying the game for immediate access, that is

But if you want roguelikes in the vein of DCSS, there are many other options out there of a more traditional nature! I suggest you try Caves of Qud.

do these people crush the game with fighter builds? because if not, then there is a problem since fighting should be a viable approach given that there's all sorts of weapons and "armors" in the game. if yes then maybe i need more time. and what do you mean by crush? finish it as soon as possible? if that's the case, then there's an even bigger problem. i don't think i'm the only one who likes to explore in roguelikes.

there's a serious problem with balance in this game. coming from DCSS where your equipment doesn't deteriorate so easily (basically only in rare cases like with acid or something) and where most enemies can't shoot this is extremely frustrating. everything here shoots at you, everything hits better then you most of the time and your gear is made of fucking cardboard. i know running away is supposed to be the best strategy in this game but it's much too much focused on running. why can't the player take his time to explore a bit? why can't i build a robot that will last a little more in battle? deterioration is cool but it happen's much too fast with this game. weirdly enough the game has at the same time a problem with HP bloat. much too often do i have to shoot at other robots 5-6 times with 2-3 weapons and hit every time and still not kill them. first you have to hit the cell, then you have to hit the robot in the cell then you have to hit the core on the robot then the dmg type should be one that doesn't get resisted, then it's preferable that the robot doesn't use armor and/or shielding, then you have overheating and energy and matter to keep track of then your weapons should be still functional by the time you land the last hit on 1 fucking robot!!! when you're dealing with 2 or more it gets absurdly hard. it seems to me enemies maybe shouldn't have so many slots available. or just give the cogmind an inbuilt shield system so it doesn't loose its equip that easily. DCSS is hard enough without losing your equip all the time. why does cogmind have to be that much harder? also, you'd thing a cogmind could chose which weapon should hit which target since he can have more than one weapon and more than one enemy and is a robot... shooting 3 weapons at one swarmer is less smart than shooting 3 weapons at 3 swarmers since if one of them kills, the rest are wasted shots in the first case and not wasted in the second.

in my last run i managed to get stuck after the ceiling collapsed on and around me. i was under heavy fire and lost all my weapons and was almost dead when the ceiling collapsed on me and at least one enemy next to me killing him but leaving me alive and replacing the square in which the enemy was with a wall. waiting for like 5000 turns did not change the situation for better nor for worse. it's a fun kind of "death" but maybe not a very elegant one, especially if it happens to people who aren't nearly dead at all but just don't have the means to break free.