Next competition

[bron]

A lot of that comes down to whether you find a bunch of food on one of the early floors. iron-man trolls are the only class where starvation is an issue.

Agreed. You do need to get a bit lucky: you need to find food, and probably some Phase Door scrolls, and you need to survive the inevitable reading of an early Deep Descent scroll. But the biggest risks are front-loaded, so restarting from an early death is not too horribly painful.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Here's a sadistic idea - Having a PosChengband compo character that starts in the wilderness next to the dlvl 666 entrance with some GCWADLs within LOS

[debo]

Man I'm glad I'm the one who runs the competitions, you guys have really bad ideas IMO

(joking)

The Sil thing -- I think we've done something like the bron idea (1st sil is all that matters) -- look back in previous comps. It still favored turncount though, I think.

PowerWyrm usually makes comp ideas that no one plays except him and then he wins

I think we can probably do more ironmanny V comps. I'd like to do a Sil no-artefact comp too, I think that would be fun -- although I feel like we've done something similar to that before, I can't quite remember.

For now, stay tuned for a HoM David Bowie tribute comp. We'll figure out where to go from there.

Also, I really wish unangband wasn't terrible. If it had fewer than 20 bugs per sloc I think it would be amazing fun for comps.

Oh, and animeband should be a much more frequent entry in competitions. Prepare yourself.

[bron]

I think we've done something like the bron idea (1st sil is all that matters) -- look back in previous comps. It still favored turncount though, I think.

I'm guessing you're thinking of comp 158. That did allow pick-your-own characters with just the 1st Sil mattering. But the main thing I was proposing was a comp where something other than "speed" was the determining factor. Secondarily, I also proposed "no artifacts" as a means to both make things harder, and (more importantly) to reduce the importance of getting a lucky equipment find.

I'm glad I'm the one who runs the competitions

I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say, we're all glad too.

[debo]

I heard some noise about a Quickband competition, but I can't remember from whom. (Pete Mack?)

If the person who volunteered the idea wants to supply a savefile, great. Otherwise I'll try my best to invent something as annoying as possible.

[Derakon]

Otherwise I'll try my best to invent something as annoying as possible.

I just had an idea for a potentially really annoying "variant", but it'd take some implementation work. So, assuming I ever actually do do it, it won't be for this comp.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I heard some noise about a Quickband competition, but I can't remember from whom. (Pete Mack?)

If the person who volunteered the idea wants to supply a savefile, great. Otherwise I'll try my best to invent something as annoying as possible.

Make a human rogue with manual stat distribution turned on for character generation, but don't actually spend any of the points.

[PowerWyrm]

What about the egoless artifactless bookless ironman elf mage using only fists to fight?

[bron]

Iron-man no-artifacts would be a good (hard) comp. Pick a strong race/class, e.g. High Elf Mage, Dwarf Priest, Half Troll Paladin, Dunadan Ranger. Personally, I'd still like to see a comp where "fewest turns" was not the deciding factor, but making it hard(er) to win at all is something. [Since the first few levels can be slow (esp. for a mage), it would probably be good to start a comp character at dlvl 30 or so.]

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Iron-man no-artifacts would be a good (hard) comp. Pick a strong race/class, e.g. High Elf Mage, Dwarf Priest, Half Troll Paladin, Dunadan Ranger. Personally, I'd still like to see a comp where "fewest turns" was not the deciding factor, but making it hard(er) to win at all is something. [Since the first few levels can be slow (esp. for a mage), it would probably be good to start a comp character at dlvl 30 or so.]

Oh, no! Shades of Leon are coming back to me.

[T-Mick]

Quickband Half-Elf Warrior/Rogue with Auto-Scum and randarts. Just about the most excitement you can get out of twelve floors.

[Pete Mack]

Yikes. Quickband autoscum is brutal, and half-elf makes it even worse. (Quickband half-elf is "lucky" in that it gets lots of "special" levels. But High-elf is even worse, since it gets bad luck with increasing frequency starting at CL 27...including cursed (blasted) weapon and random summons.

[ranger jeff]

Sooo.... it's been a while, huh?

Not sure what all's involved in helping along the Competition process, just submitting a savefile? I spent a while today looking over the variants and when last they were in the competition, and I have a few suggestions of what to try next:

Vanilla is up to 4.0.5...
ToME has only been done twice, and not for a while
Unangband
Steamband
DAJAngband
Chenband (is this completely superseded by PosChengband?)
Z+Angband
haven't had a NPP competition with the current release...

and I understand that comps are great for testing new releases, any maintainers out there need some playtesting?

Thoughts?

[HugoVirtuoso]

Chenband (is this completely superseded by PosChengband?)

Superseded in every aspect, YES

I'm leaning towards a Sil 1.3 competition. Sil has been quiet on the oook.cz ladder these days.

[ranger jeff]

But Sil was very recently done as a comp, back in January. And I notice there's been no new release of Sil for over 2 years...