First meeting with Morgoth

[bslive]

I played Moria a fair amount about 20 years ago. A conversation at work re-sparked my interest, which led me to Angband, which I've been enjoying quite a bit.

After several deaths I decided to try something different and play an iron man game which to my great surprise and pleasure was my most successful adventure.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=17963

Some of the success is surely due simply to experience and research, but I do agree that the game is designed well to allow players to succeed and learn with little (or no) visits to the town level - a great feature of this descendant of Moria.

In this case I went down to level 99 thinking I probably did not have enough healing/life potions to kill both Sauron and Morgoth. In the end, I had Morgoth down to 50% and wonder if I might have been able to engineer the victory with better strategy.

My actual undoing seems to be that my 3.7 speed vs his 4.0 speed eventually allowed him to have two un-countered rounds of attack, and they were both storms of raw magic.

Likely, I would have perished later anyway, but does make me wonder what would have happened if I was wearing my +10 ring of speed (which would get me to 4.0 speed) instead of Nenya, which is a great ring, but only +5 speed.

I guess I'm curious to get opinions on whether one can win, while conserving healing/life potions by simply teleporting Morgoth away many times - he seems to regenerate some, but not completely by the time he returns.

Another thing I'm interested to hear opinions about: I found the short sword Sting fairly early on and swear I never found a better weapon the rest of the time, at least not based on damage per round, which doesn't take into account that Sting also gives +3 speed. I think I found some great weapons, but when damage modifiers get applied 8 times per round Sting seems extremely effective. Another advantage of the light weapon is the ability to wear/carry heavier/more items.

[Philip]

Yeah, having anywhere below 4.0 speed risks unavoidable death. it's not guaranteed, and people have won without it, but as you experienced, sometimes the (rather unlikely) double mana storm happens. Even if it doesn't, however, getting double-moved is pretty nasty. Two round of melee can hurt quite a bit, though a warrior is liable to have enough AC not to notice too much. A mana storm and a summon forces a low-hp teleport, a mana storm and a damage spell can kill you if you're not at full health etc.

You wouldn't have gotten killed this precise way if you were using the +10 RoS. That said, not having Telepathy, those stat boosts, the extra damage, the pBlnd, probably wouldn't have gone great for a warrior either, especially if you were already low on supplies.

Teleporting Morgoth away regularly would probably allow you to win eventually in theory. However, without 0% fail TO, it wouldn't be all that great for healing conservation, you'd still be taking frequent risks. So you'd kind of want to be a Mage (though Mages really should probably just Create Doors, staff of healing, recharge if needed, and open a door and keep blasting).

Sting is a pretty good weapon. It's still somewhat unfortunate that you didn't find anything better, though. You are right that blows are more important than dice for most of the game. There are variants which try to change this with alternate combat systems.

Making it to Morgoth on your first ironman game is impressive. If you want to take the pressure off a bit, you could turn off either force_descend or no_recall and still get either a townless or a limited-stuff game.

[bslive]

I had several other ways of using telepathy, but in ironman games you make a lot of irreversible decisions about equipment. Will file that away for next time - 4.0 speed highly recommended and/or required.

I will probably hold off on another ironman game for a bit - I think I benefited from the experience, but I will wait a bit before taking up that challenge again.

Thanks for the insight, and the encouragement!

[wobbly]

Both Thranduil and Thorin which I can see as lost on the dump are very strong in an endgame setup.

Congrats on making it that far with an ironman warrior & better luck next time.

[Philip]

If you're not playing Ironman, it becomes a fair bit easier to get temporary speed running the whole time you fight Morgoth, in which case you can afford to have somewhat less base speed. (this is even easier on classes with good devices/recharging, but even a warrior can buy up Recharging over the course of game, collect like 10 staffs of speed, and start using them until you run out of Recharging or blow up all your stuff)