Melee is one of them, and that will be easier with the new parts, plus some more specialized ones like a cannon-based sniper/guerrilla build (with the capacitor--though that item won't be as easy to obtain as actuators). I've also been working towards making datajacking and assistance from allies any increasingly viable strategy. That's gotten easier with almost every release so far.
That's music to my ears! I appreciate it must be an incredibly fine line between:-
- Optimized parameters for a really taunt competitive optimizers to complete the entire run eg avoid farming strategies or other such "easy pickings"
- Allowing a bit of slack for players to feel for different solutions and experimentation
On the one hand, the former seems the main focus (depth). On the other hand, the latter adds a bit of breadth (I guess this may help accessibility, wider audience... just a blind guess however).
This would manifest itself in terms of achievements, I believe, something that many games have or add when joining Steam, so something I'll be thinking about more later. Basically one angle of what you're talking about is built-in conducts, which are common in the roguelike world but are usually self-enforced by players themselves. We could formalize that without too much trouble.
Ah yeah "Achievements" is the common standard in games. I vaguely recall the different types of player ala Bartle: Explorer, Killer, Achiever and iirc Role-Player. Sounds like those are beginning to be well catered for with stats, lore, playstyles and mastery of the mechanics over time.
Honestly I believe this could be a stumbling block for new players and there will likely be some backlash from those not willing to... do a little thinking. Some players will undoubtedly assume this means there's something wrong with the game, but in the bigger picture it succeeds at doing what I want it to do, and I'm not really willing to make adjustments that might ease entry into the world at the cost of sacrificing early game replayability. Cogmind's world is wide yet (very intentionally) only 10 floors deep, so there isn't as much time to let the difficulty ramp up too gradually.
In that one sense it's not the perfect roguelike to attempt going more mainstream, but hopefully the many other positive factors can carry it 
The biggest "early impressions hook" is undoubtedly the superlative effects from the rexpaint tool used to create the matrix/mecha vibe and then the UI feels like a 1st person view of the robot atst as a top-down view of the robot, then add the info tools on the screen.
I remember playing desktop dungeons when it was in alpha (much preferred the graphics in that version tbh) and it was good because the info of my choices was fairly clear to see how I could win (think I enjoyed playing an archer or other devious char play-style). But I got to a point where I did not understand my choices were not winning - namely I could not find the info that told me how to evaluate my next moves. I guess this is a core staple of roguelikes - but I think if it's visible what sort of idk calculations (?) are inherent in which choices and then the player can work out the different trade-offs? I found the same problem with mmorpgs. All in all it got the point where I did not care about the graphics, I just wanted a combat log dump to be able to make it more explicit what numbers were happening when and why which would then tell me more clearly how to make better choices (or which button to spam!!).
I don't know if any roguelikes ever did a system where it involves the character using a "predict all oppenent's next moves" analysis shadow type representation? Maybe some sort of tool like that for newbies mode on level 1?! Then it gets electro-magnetic or other blast destroyed just as they hit the stairs to level 2...
Of course the predictor would be marginally accurate and marginally mistaken?
Similarly a sort of "rewind" style of option to evaluate wtf!? just happened crutch for new players, maybe a good number of moves to replay different options in a particular scenario... an interesting hypothetical maybe? Of course that's supposed to happen per live run for most players in roguelikes.
I sincerely hope the aim of helping take traditional roguelikes mainstream more alongside the derivatives works via cogmind.
This will depend a lot on how much buzz there is around the game once it's on Steam. The current community of supporters is great, though we'll need publicity outside the regular channels before everyone else can discover it xD
There are a lot of games tagged "roguelike" on Steam, but most are actually roguelites so the term is now being dominated by non-traditional games. I hope that doesn't cause problems in terms of expectations (or worse, outright aversion due to its overuse as a marketing term, when Cogmind really has much stronger roots in the genre).
It's a big problem: Visibility or "Discoverability", more curation needed to more diligently classify using more tags more accurately applied. I don't know what tags you've decided on for cogmind:-
* Roguelike
* sci-fi (scifi)
* mecha or robot
* acii and tileset
* indie (this is a very powerful tag)
etc. In fact the core features bit of info is really useful in this respect:-
* dynamic char progression
* full world lore backstory
* AI-driven robot ecosystem
* destructable environment
* 00's of unique weapons and equipment (acii art)
* customizable UI?
* Stats metrics of each run (interesting if persistent graphing comparisons of different run stats maybe, can't remember how much of this is already discussed).
Those seem like they'll press most people's buttons the right way (the dollar button in particular!).
Anyway apologies for the wall of text.
(Kyz edit: fixed a quote tag for you--made post hard to read
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