Comp 168

[Sose]

This is my first time ever playing PosChengband but it's pretty easy to get into. And lots of fun!

At the start you can't attack anything, so you must get a corpse with your wand of magic missiles. After that you can press 'U' to possess a corpse you're standing on (or have in your inventory). Special abilities like 'shoot arrow' are also in the 'U' menu. Spells are under 'm'. Sometimes it's better to be barehanded in the beginning, you can check your damage with 'Cw' to figure out whether your damage is better with a weapon or without.

Finding a good corpse is pretty much trial & error unless you know the monsters well. Good things early game are things that move fast obviously, since +10 speed can quite easily be more powerful than anything else. If you wanna find out a bit more about a corpse without changing into one, you can *id* it. Usually if I find an interesting corpse, I'll pick it up, recall (careful, they weigh a lot -> make you slow) and use the town's *id* service to find out the stats. Monster recall gives a hint about the abilities/spells you will get.

One quick question: for example Dark Elven Warlock's monster memory says that it can evolve into Dark Elven Sorceror with enough experience. Does this apply to possessors? How much is required approximately? Or is this something different, like related to killing player's summons or something

[wobbly]

I think I might join-in on this silliness when I get a bit of free time. I have not played a possesser yet, so I'm not even sure what keys to press to possess & what not. If someone doesn't mind giving a quick summary on the basics? I'll just work out what forms are good by trial & error & dying, more fun that way.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Sorry, I haven't had time to tell Pav to reconfigure the ladder. Scoring is going to be messed up for a bit.

Heh heh...As of 8:25pm EST on Jan 6th, 2015, Chris has the most uniques dead (45 of them), yet he's in 2nd place on the Compo 168 ladder!

Edit:
*Update* - As of 2:18am EST on Jan 7th, 2015, I (Hugo) took the commanding lead on the Compo 168 ladder. I even found a Wand of Rockets already! Check out my current Compo 168 progress here!

Also:
The Compo 168 ladder shows a '0' for all players' 'max depth'.

Edit on 1/8/14 (East Cost evening):
Compo 168 ladder fixed. Thanks! We have three clvl 45+ players on this ladder...What happened to the remaining competition?!

[debo]

Compo 168 activity is starting to pick up. I must say...Compo 168 is *a lot* more fun than I ever expected. You know what, the Lite Town didn't detract the fun at all!

*Spoiler*
Btw, Combat-Echizen as a Wanted Monster is still a huge incentive (despite me de-prioritizing him in the Hugo criteria for my non-compo Possessor characters)

And Debo...Why aren't you in this Compo?!

And ALSO, the Compo 168 ladder doesn't have a column for "# of Uniques Killed"?!

Sorry, I haven't had time to tell Pav to reconfigure the ladder. Scoring is going to be messed up for a bit.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Compo 168 activity is starting to pick up. I must say...Compo 168 is *a lot* more fun than I ever expected. You know what, the Lite Town didn't detract the fun at all!

*Spoiler*
Btw, Combat-Echizen as a Wanted Monster is still a huge incentive (despite me de-prioritizing him in the Hugo criteria for my non-compo Possessor characters)

And Debo...Why aren't you in this Compo?!

And ALSO, the Compo 168 ladder doesn't have a column for "# of Uniques Killed"?!

[debo]

This is officially on now -- enjoy

[Arjen]

I prefer using quickstart myself too; load your game, press yes and go! Way faster than keeping 2 savefiles and copy paste before you start the game again. I'm *lazy*.

And knowing everything about your char feels a bit more like cheezing than starting with a different char where you don't know your max stats, life rating and questmonsters.

[debo]

If you die and use the quick-start option (which I assume is OK), then the wanted unique list gets re-rolled. So do the quests, your life rating and your innate stats. I'm not sure which if any of these are critical to the comp, but it's very common for possessors to die a lot early on. I've been using the quick-start without thinking about it!

Actually, the last Poscheng comp I was in felt like cheating knowing which quest monster was up next (from looking at dumps on the comp ladder).

I think the general opinion is that you should always restart with the original unplayed comp savefile every time, but I honestly don't care.

The other advantage that using quickstart has is that you get to keep your monster memory, which is great for those of us who haven't memorized the game yet

Hugo: After the 3.4.2 release, I went back and updated the comp announcements to use that version.

[chris]

Hugo: did you notice that i rolled a character that has a *guaranteed opportunity* of Combat Echizen just for you????

If you die and use the quick-start option (which I assume is OK), then the wanted unique list gets re-rolled. So do the quests, your life rating and your innate stats. I'm not sure which if any of these are critical to the comp, but it's very common for possessors to die a lot early on. I've been using the quick-start without thinking about it!

Actually, the last Poscheng comp I was in felt like cheating knowing which quest monster was up next (from looking at dumps on the comp ladder).

[HugoVirtuoso]

Hugo: did you notice that i rolled a character that has a *guaranteed opportunity* of Combat Echizen just for you????

Yep, even though I'd prefer Wahha-Man on the list. At the same time, Combat-Echizen is still a great incentive.

P.S. Compo 168 is about version 3.4.2? Yes?

[debo]

Hugo: did you notice that i rolled a character that has a *guaranteed opportunity* of Combat Echizen just for you????

[Arjen]

Did some running too. The biggest 'problem' with the pure casters start is the lack of casters. Novice mage are great at the start but at lvl 10? you need to swap and around that level you just don't have common casters. Possessed some spiders/hounds/a lot of randomness until I found DEWs, who are just prefect ofcourse.

Forms I used

Dark elven warlock
Air hound
Chimera
Air hound
King Mulu, the Chief of Southerings
Earth hound
Fire hound
Wutugu, the Chief of Southerings
Swordsman
Carnivorous flying monkey
Cave spider
Bandit
Giant white mouse
Raving lunatic

Forgot the point I wanted to make: expect to die a few times.

[chris]

Nice...*super* nice. I'll probably give this a shot too..

Edit: I just did a very short playtest. This run is going to be way harder than usual for...obviously because I exclusively play Melee Possessors. Lite town is a nice touch for the competition, even though I'd always want multiple dungeons (yeah, me and my biases). While I don't want to spoil it, I'd say that some late game Possessor choices are actually decent.

You can still do melee if you must. I did a couple early start ups looking for bugs and what not, and can confirm that a melee build is doable!

[HugoVirtuoso]

Nice...*super* nice. I'll probably give this a shot too..

Edit: I just did a very short playtest. This run is going to be way harder than usual for...obviously because I exclusively play Melee Possessors. Lite town is a nice touch for the competition, even though I'd always want multiple dungeons (yeah, me and my biases). While I don't want to spoil it, I'd say that some late game Possessor choices are actually decent.

[Arjen]

Hmmm another Ultimate Magus attempt in comp form, I love playing magic orientated mimics! Im in! (next year probably...)

It's over 9000!!! =)