No inventory, no equipment, no stores, no artifacts, Ironman

[miyazaki]

Maybe breeders who breed shouldn't give drops. Specifically add a flag on the newly-spawned monsters that prevent drops. After all, it makes sense that some ooze might have picked up some items while oozing around, but it's "child" that spawns in front of you wouldn't have anything other than what it finds after it is born.

Could also apply this kind of thing to summoned things in general, and rebalance things as needed. (e.g. increase the drops of the summoner).

I've thought the same thing. But I also think that summoned monsters shouldn't be able to summon (except uniques).

[PowerDiver]

Breeders don't breed. That's just silly. They summon another of the same type, but we mislabel it "breeding". No reason the summonee should not have loot.

[Pete Mack]

Classy win!
Sounds like you need a real challenge--you can always go back to the original roguelike. I've never won it, or even come close.
Also, I've never considered farming black oozes as a really bad thing, though i've never done it quite so systematically. If you want to get a lit of drops in a little time, you can't beat black puddings... They are extremely profitable, evenif you have to drop
most of your inventory first.

[Hariolor]

Astounding

The discipline alone needed to survive those first 15 levels is staggering

Also, thirded on the pudding-drop issue

[ewert]

Wowie. Very very cool.

[Roch]

That's an incredible effort and a great story. Wow.

[Bandobras]

This is sick.

[Zikke]

Bravo! I am most shocked at how many grizzled old grumpy *band veterans are also amazed.


So I guess the only way to make it harder for you is to turn on all the extra AI intelligence? (Exploit weaknesses, follow player, etc.)

edit: I don't have the patience for anything close to this, things like taking off a torch to backtrack up a path.

[bron]

I guess the only way to make it harder for you is to turn on all the extra AI intelligence?

I had completely forgotten about this since I never change any of those. What settings do you recommend? [No promises that I'm actually going to *do* that you understand ]

[Derakon]

The most devilish one is "monsters exploit player's weaknesses", which basically causes the monsters to know what resistance holes you're missing and go after them reliably. I can't remember if Vanilla has "monsters behave stupidly", but if so that should obviously be off. Smart pack behavior should be on.

[Zikke]

The "exploit weaknesses" is indeed devious. Sometimes they chain the same kind of bolt turn after turn that all hurt bad. Chase player location isn't too big of a deal near the end, but it's almost like starting with permanent Aggravate.

[Pete Mack]

The nastiest is turning on full AI (broken). Monsters with healing spells (think: Morgoth) become almost impossible to kill. You need to do well above 500dam/turn to make a dent in him.

[Zikke]

Yeah they definitely weren't balanced to be able to spam heals at will. Is that a real working feature? Or just a place-holder?

[Pete Mack]

If by "working" you mean "has an effect on gameplay" the answer is yes. The usual way to fix this is to give monsters a finite amount of mana. Perhaps in V M is just smart enough to stash !rMana.

[Derakon]

Angband has always been a game that compensates the monsters' crippling stupidity with overwhelmingly superior force. Remove the stupidity and suddenly they have way more force than is really all that fair...