2133 replies to this topic

[A. J. Raffles]

Tom Henrik, on May 30 2006, 02:08 PM, said:

I also just created another random character - a female orcish beastmaster, who managed to kill her own stupid self with a wand. Appearantly she was so stupid that I wasn't even allowed to choose the direction of the bolt.

No, I suspect it was one of the feared wands of ball lightning. They make you zap a lightening bolt in a random direction. Consequently, the only safe place to use them is in the wilderness.

Anyway:
Tom
- DV/PV: OK. Not exactly great for a level 14 troll, but they're OK. They might have been even higher, though, if you had blessed those scrolls of protection and defence and actually used them. The ADOM guidebook should tell you in which order they affect your armour, so you don't end up wasting them on items that can't be improved further that way.
- Stats: You've been lazy, my friend. Lots of moss of mareillon and morgia roots in your inventory, but your willpower and dexterity are both still significantly lower than 25. Tsk, tsk. Strength and toughness are great, obviously, but learning might have been a bit better. A barbarian won't be able to read spellbooks that easily, though, so you're excused on that count. Charisma, appearance and mana are lowish, but they're not really all that relevant for a barbarian anyway.
- Combat situation: *Never* melee a balor unless you absolutely have to and you have a character who's at least level 35 or so. Even then it's risky and you'll be hit. In this case it looks like you were doing something you shouldn't be doing anyway: exploring the dwarven halls when you already know where the stairs down are. Don't. Especially not when you're only level 14. Go through the dwarven halls as quickly as you possibly can. Use the diagonal keys to make sure you only use the minimum amount of turns down there. Every moment you spend loitering about in the dwarven halls can result in something genuinely nasty being generated. Like a balor.
- Speed: Again, you're getting weighed down by lots of useless junk - which is less pardonable than in the previous characters, because this one was well able to identify the stuff he was carrying. The easiest way to reduce weight would have been to bless that girdle of carrying and wear it instead of the girdle of strength (which has only a very slight effect anyway). But going through your inventory might be educational nevertheless. Items you could have got rid of either by dumping them or by selling them to Waldenbrook are: the mithril cap - one backup cap is OK, but you don't need two when you're already strained (40s), the clothes of travelling and the fancy clothes - those sound nice but are fairly useless (70s), the two inferior small shields (100s), archery gloves and boxing gloves - sound nice but don't really do much (12s), and all but the best pair of leather gauntlets (20s), girdles of strength and mithril girdle (50s), light boots and leather boots (45s), short sword and mithril longsword (62s), about 200 of your 269 uncursed run-off-the-mill arrows (400s), three of your fireproof blankets, plus the three plain blankets (60s), fluff ball and climbing set - you don't need either at this point (182s), broken keys (2s), holy symbols - as good as useless (15s), scrolls of item destruction, item detection, information, warning, danger and literacy check, the papyrus scroll and the ratling pamphlet (16s), manual of bridge building - bridge building really isn't worth the effort (100s), all non-useful herbs (126s), bones, seeds and plain candy - those are emergency food, but you clearly didn't need them (156s), various corpses - eat them, don't carry them around with you; they're heavier than most other types of food (420s), all the crystals (3s). If I added that up correctly, that's 1879s of dead weight.
- Weapon marks: it's good to train two or three different weapon classes, but there's no point in switching classes every time you find a cool item. Try to concentrate on about three different classes. The best overall are probably swords, polearms and axes.
- Talents: Healthy isn't really useful unless you chose it really early on.
- General comments: why did you not drink that potion of education? You didn't see it, right? That's why you should try and clear up your inventory from time to time.

[Tom Henrik]

My strategy is to sell everything that I don't need to the Dwarven Shopkeeper - and after selling all I think is useless, I usually end up as Strained or at Burdened +++

I also bless everything that I drink or read, and all the items I am wearing that I belive might be better blessed - such as weapons, rings and armor and so on.

I also sort out my inventory from time to time, but only when I reached Strained! - thus saving as many of my blessed Identify scrolls as I can. Things that I drink the instant I have identified them are Potential Stats, Stats and Education

As for the scrolls of protection and weapon increase, I was saving them until I got something that was actually worth enhancing (read the best of the best)

I'll be more careful in the future, though. Thanks Raffles.

One thing though... You keep telling me that my characters need better DV/PV, but how?
They all have the best equipment they have found, and to get better items, I need to go deeper into the CoC. That last troll had the best DV/PV I have ever had in any of my characters, and I was proud of that high score.

[Juni Ori]

Far too late, but going to humiliate myself: I'm accepting the challenge!

[A. J. Raffles]

Tom Henrik, on May 30 2006, 04:09 PM, said:

My strategy is to sell everything that I don't need to the Dwarven Shopkeeper - and after selling all I think is useless, I usually end up as Strained or at Burdened +++

It's a bad idea to be strained on a regular basis. You shouldn't be going past burdened.

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I also bless everything that I drink or read, and all the items I am wearing that I belive might be better blessed - such as weapons, rings and armor and so on.

That isn't always necessary, though. The two types of rings that need to be blessed are rings of ice and rings of djinni summoning. Nearly all of the others work just the same when they're uncursed. You're wasting holy water that way.

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I also sort out my inventory from time to time, but only when I reached Strained! - thus saving as many of my blessed Identify scrolls as I can. Things that I drink the instant I have identified them are Potential Stats, Stats and Education

Good thinking, but wrong approach. It's not scrolls of identify you need to save but potions of holy water. Scrolls of identify are common as muck, and you can easily see from the fact that you had 20 uncursed ones in your inventory. And again, don't wait until you're strained to get rid of the useless stuff. I tend to do that myself, but in the end, you're not playing Monopoly. The point of the game isn't to amass as much money as possible. You need it to sacrifice and to buy the odd useful item you find in a shop, but that's it. Once you hit the casino, it becomes virtually useless.
About the potions: don't bother blessing potential stats potions unless your maximum for them is uncommonly low. Blessed stat potions will raise your potential maximum anyway.

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As for the scrolls of protection and weapon increase, I was saving them until I got something that was actually worth enhancing (read the best of the best)

What's the point, though? If you never use them because you keep saving them for later, they can't do you any good, can they? Your eternium cap, dragon scale mail and mithril boots would have benefited from the scrolls of defence, and bracers, cloak and girdle (girdle of carrying, mind you) would have benefited from the scrolls of protection. If you find even better items later, so be it. Just change them.

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One thing though... You keep telling me that my characters need better DV/PV, but how?
They all have the best equipment they have found, and to get better items, I need to go deeper into the CoC. That last troll had the best DV/PV I have ever had in any of my characters, and I was proud of that high score.

By being patient, concentrating on a few weapon classes to get higher DV bonuses, avoiding items that reduce DV until you can afford losing a few points that way and by using your scrolls of defence and protection wisely, basically. Going deeper and deeper isn't the only way to find good equipment. More often than not, a bit of patience (and a bit of gremlin-scumming in the churchyard ) will do the trick as well and expose you to fewer risks.

You can be proud of that highscore, but if you tweak your playing style a bit, you can do even better.

[Juni Ori]

A. J. Raffles, on May 29 2006, 06:37 PM, said:

Well, if you've only got one character, you can't really scum anyway, can you?

Anyway, random characters are fine by me. My character will be (or is, rather, as she's already generated) Challenger, the femal dwarven assassin.

I got male dwarven assasin! (And AJ, isn't it "female"? )

Edit: I told you I was going to humiliate myself... Hmm! How was I able to upload that flg-file?

[A. J. Raffles]

Juni Ori, on May 30 2006, 05:46 PM, said:

A. J. Raffles, on May 29 2006, 06:37 PM, said:

Well, if you've only got one character, you can't really scum anyway, can you?

Anyway, random characters are fine by me. My character will be (or is, rather, as she's already generated) Challenger, the femal dwarven assassin.

I got male dwarven assasin! (And AJ, isn't it "female"? )

Edit: I told you I was going to humiliate myself... Hmm! How was I able to upload that flg-file?

Be merciful, Juni, I've got a terrible cold and my brain stil isn't quite working the way it should.

About the file, the new forum won't take flg files for some reason, but if you just change the file extension to txt, it'll work.

[Juni Ori]

Trying again to upload it...

Attached Files

•  randomix.txt   11.32K   27 downloads

[Tom Henrik]

The first thing that stuck me was that you should've gone one step back, and just dealt with one enemy at a time. That was also the only thing that struck me

[Juni Ori]

I was backing up! Of course that stupid Ogre was faster than me! And those bloody blink dogs softened me first...

[DeathDude]

Ahh yeah I was gonna ask if ya had been listening to megadeth's take no prisoners, cause yeah had the same thought, but yeah dang ogres.

[greywolf]

I ended up getting a trollish assasin... Looks like the RNG decided it's gonna spew out assasins today...

[A. J. Raffles]

- DV/PV: *sigh* I'm impressed by the fact that you managed to rescue Yrrigs, but you can't tell me that's all the equipment you found throughout the game. And if it was, you must have been going too fast.
- Stats: OK for a level 6 character. 19 strength is quite nice.
- Combat situation: in all likelyhood an avoidable death. Always try to place yourself in a corridor so that only one monster can attack you at a time. Going one space east would have done the trick. If you do end up in a position in which you can't help being attacked by three monsters at once, the last thing you should do is berserk. It makes you even more vulnerable than you already are because you are fighting three monsters instead of one.
- Speed: Tsk, tsk. Another strained character. You could have ditched all those hats (14s), the clothes (40s), at least two of those daggers (20s), and the useless manual of bridge building (100s). You could also have got rid of two of the rations by eating them - they won't be "lost", and you won't need to lug them around with you (400s). That's 574s of dead weight, which would probably have been enough to get you down to burdened.
- Weapon marks: Clearly, you didn't like that mithril spear, which is a bit of a shame, because it's the best weapon in your inventory. But if you preferred axes, why weren't you fighting with the hatchet? Hatchets are generally better than plain hand axes. You really should have trained bows, though.
- Talents: Quick is OK, but it's not going to be of much use to you if you slow yourself down by carrying too much junk.
- General comments: You saved the carpenter, so why didn't you get the healing skill from Jharod?

[Juni Ori]

Never found a single identify scroll. True that I may have gone too fast, but I don't really much care to play ADOM anymore, got little bored to it! And that's all I found, left basically nothing behind (explains quite well that I was strained)! And I just wanted my str up, so consider it excercising!

[greywolf]

@AJ: So far, who do you think is gonna win? And all these characters are confusing me - do we get more than one, or are you just handing out advice?

[A. J. Raffles]

greywolforiginal, on May 30 2006, 07:02 PM, said:

@AJ: So far, who do you think is gonna win? And all these characters are confusing me - do we get more than one, or are you just handing out advice?

So far I'd say it would have to be Tom the Barbarian.