Competition 100

[Roch]

Any advice for defeating the teleport-to uniques like Palladio? I'm not doing enough damage and they are hard to shake. I guess with an ASC and enough healing it can be done but I hate to burn those healing potions.

[ramela]

Radagast, Pallando, Alatar and Saruman are all above the curve, in terms of their power level. This is intentional, because they drop multiple Excellent items. Having to run away from them, a lot, is normal.

Each of them has a different single basic element that they don't resist. That is a design call I made when designing the other Unique Istar, mostly for symmetry in regards to Saruman having a single basic weakness. In terms of flavour, it reflects the fact that unlike the "Servant of X" Ainur, the Istar took upon themselves mortal forms. (Or something to that effect.)

Left out Gandalf because he was the only one who did not fail in the mission given to the Istar.

Saruman retains his weakness to Acid, I won't spoil Radagast and I can't spoil the other two because I've already forgotten their weaknesses.

Outside of that, you mostly want to hit them fast and hard so that they have to start spending their precious mana and turns healing instead of blasting you.

[Roch]

Thanks a bunch -- that helps. Great to get your insight.

[Philip]

I know it's picky, but Radagast was actually a good guy who believed there would be a nice discussion, and not evil or failed(although he didn't achieve much, he did not voluntarily take part in evil) and the other two were said to have journeyed into easterling lands or something and probably did about as much as Gandalf(mostly in keeping the easterlings busy), although they weren't recorded.

[ramela]

Regarding Radagast, Alatar and Pallando, I guess their failure wasn't as much about turning on the free peoples as it was about not making enough of a difference. Radagast didn't take an active role in the War of the Ring, while the other two obviously weren't very successful in limiting Sauron's eastern influence, since Sauron had a lot of Haradrim, Easterlings and Corsairs fighting for him.

I used ICE's RPG supplements for Rolemaster/MERP as material, so I blame them if I've gotten something wrong.

I'm pretty sure that Gandalf was mentioned in LotR or it's appendixes as the only Istar to return to Valinor, which implies that he was the only one considered to have succeeded. I never said that any of them were evil.

I don't see this as a problem since Arien is strictly good and she has always been here.

[tigpup]

The most frustrating problem with the first quest is falling through trap doors from 50' - 100' before getting everything I need to take on that orc. It's possible to go back up, but that can cause a quest failure.

?DTrap are avilable but too expensive.

Most irritating.

[dos350]

sorry for afk, is this no stairs, please ~ no rage.. eee!

[Matthias]

This competition has connected stairs. It still discourages stairscumming by disqualifying anyone with more than 15 greater vaults skipped.

[PowerDiver]

This competition has connected stairs. It still discourages stairscumming by disqualifying anyone with more than 15 greater vaults skipped.

I'd say it encourages stairscumming more than discourages it. The comp conditions mean that you cannot descend to DL2 for a while, and the faster increase of monster power with depth encourages later trips to scum DL1 for !speed.

If dos350 stairscums until he misses a greater vault, that's a whole lot of stairscumming.

[nppangband]

I'd say it encourages stairscumming more than discourages it. The comp conditions mean that you cannot descend to DL2 for a while, and the faster increase of monster power with depth encourages later trips to scum DL1 for !speed.

If dos350 stairscums until he misses a greater vault, that's a whole lot of stairscumming.

You can probably stairscum a little more in the earlier levels.

Unfortunately, disconnected stairs would be unfairly difficult, due to the the deep monsters with teleport_to.

[Timo Pietilä]

If dos350 stairscums until he misses a greater vault, that's a whole lot of stairscumming.

That's how he plays AFAIK. Scumming until there is something interesting in sight, not leaving stairs for any reason.

[PowerDiver]

You can probably stairscum a little more in the earlier levels.

Unfortunately, disconnected stairs would be unfairly difficult, due to the the deep monsters with teleport_to.

I only play NPP very occasionally, to keep an idea of the feel of it. I found that monsters with teleport_to, notably Radagast on my last attempt, had me halfway stairscumming once I made it to the 40s. Enter a new level, take two steps and he appears, make way back and reset the level. Also, I needed to restock !speed more than with any other variant. That's just to get deeper. I don't think I have won NPP since 0.4.0 or maybe 0.4.1.

I'm sure the people who understand NPP use a lot less in the way of cheesy tactics than I needed.

[Matthias]

found a bug to clone ammuntion Is there a tracker for npp? Or does that other forum still exist

[nppangband]

found a bug to clone ammuntion Is there a tracker for npp? Or does that other forum still exist

If possible, can you send me the savefile and describe what I need to do do clone the ammo. It is probably a simple bug to fix, if I can duplicate it.

There isn't a formal tracker, just the NPP forums, which is at: http://forum.nppangband.org/index.php

But I respond to all bug reports & comments here as well.

[nppangband]

I'm chased by hunting parties after too much stealing. I think this is going on for more than 200k turns already. Will it ever stop? Also how much are they hasted?

I checked the source. I wrote that code about 6 years ago, so I had to refresh my memory.

The "caught stealing" counter only decreases if you are within 10 levels of your max depth. So you can't hide out at a safe level and wait for the timer to decrease. It maxes out at 50, drops by one every 5000 turns, and the dungeon calms down when it gets below 30. So the dungeon could take 100000 turns to calm down if you fail to steal a whole bunch of time.

This definitely needs to be improved.