Thanks for the reminder. It's been a pretty horrible week, but hey, weekend, time I got around to this.
I prefer Nepster's original suggestion, with my fencer modification (i.e.
this order), to Simon's proposal. I have two main reasons for this:
(1) Getting the eight original skills out of order is a serious drawback for NL (as opposed to Lix) because of the wealth of older content, when these were the only skills existing, that NL strives to keep available. This applies to levels with patterened skillsets and other, subtler patterns (e.g. the ordering of the tutorial levels in GemLems). I'm (hesitantly) okay with Nepster's bomber-blocker switch, because this is a small change and has good reasons in favour, but a more drastic change would need stronger reasons in favour. Which brings me to:
(2) "Bomber destroys terrain" does not seem a good enough reason for grouping it with the other destructive skills. The fencer, basher, miner and digger are variants of the same idea, with only the direction of travel different between the four; the bomber is completely different in all respects
except that it is also destructive. The bomber is the only L1 skill that kills the lemming, and it is the only
instantaneous skill, i.e. its action includes stopping itself, by contrast to the blocker and all the other terrain removers, which continue until something else stops them. NL's stoner and Lix's cuber share these features. Similarly, the stoner and cuber are not variants of the same idea in the same way the builder, platformer and stacker are.
I'm still not sure about the walker. In Lix, it certainly belongs with the jumper and runner; in NL it (more weakly) belongs with the cloner. Yet I do see the argument for keeping the skill order of the two games as similar as possible. Maybe all of these skills should come before the permanent skills.