.. LOS .. i dont understand it.

[Sky]

ok so,

i have been trying my hand at the speedrun challenge. I figured that with my superior Tiles mastery i will have the clear advantage over the ASCII plebs, and, it's not going too bad.
5 attempts, all 5 dead, but i got 1 of those to DL90+ within 1 hour.

Now, the problem is .. once i get to Morgoth - what do i do?

I keep hearing "you must be a wizard of LOS" but, how exactly .. you do .. the thing?
Like, do you find a vault and hockey-stick Morgoth with Mana Storm, hoping he never makes it close enough to see you? Maybe Rift him away, hoping to never be in his LOS? Hope you can !Phase and never once phase badly ?

Seriously, explain it to me like i'm 5. I'll even take crayon pictures.

[Estie]

I have done it, like, 5-10 times this way and my way might not be optimized for speed runs. This is what I do:

I position myself at the border, say bottom, of the map, towards one side, say west. I make sure I have peace from other monsters, for example by destructing once.

I wait till M approaches. He follows a specific pattern, like going west till a certain point then change direction to SW. I keep that pattern in mind.

As he approaches, I make sure he has no LOS. Thats easy to do if you position yourself such that, in this scenario, theres rock N and NE of you (he approaches from east and above). If he doest approach from east side, I TO him away and me being on the left side of the map almost ensures he will be teleported to the right, so he should approach from E the next time.

If he moves to a point where he has LOS, I TO him away. If he moves in my LOS without having LOS himself, I shoot at him. With time, I can improve my position (by using digging and/or re-destructing) so eventually I can get phases where he comes on nicely with a long track of me being able to hit him before I have to TO him away when he gets too close.

Perma rock can make the process easier or more difficult depending on the exact layout; in any case, its not required.

[Pete Mack]

Sky--watch the end of one of the speed runs. You need to get M at 45°, then bounce back and forth with a combined with create doors and push back spells. Use annihilation for damage, because you're unlikely to have enough restore mana for mana storm.

[Estie]

With a mage, I used mana bolt(?) after wands had run dry; you dont need the last book to do this. I wonder if this is the last piece that can be dropped to improve time.

Edit: and of course, double cast

[malcontent]

i have been trying my hand at the speedrun challenge.

Just curious... What is the speedrun challenge? Is this related to winning a game in less than 24 hours?

Or as we now know, that it can be done in less than two hours?

Not sure if I have actually written what I've been thinking on this yet, but holy crap - thunderf00t - that is amazing!

[Sky]

well, turns out i had an outlier at the start because my estimate of 1-in-5 making it to DL90 is WILDLY wrong. I am now at, idk, 30+ tries and have not managed to get past DL30-ish.
Yesterday managed to lose a character that found a amulet with ESP on it as well.

But yeah, the idea is to see how IRL fast you can do it. Angband's always had this kind of a challenge, but it used to me measured in game turns, considering that it's a game of thinking.

Instead going with actual time, the game becomes much harder. I die to situations i would never die to if i was playing normally. I have a Base Delay of 10ms and my system is veery snappy so i can die to a +10 Spd mob before i notice they are even on-screen.

Yesterday i died to a Shade because i was too dumb to take my loss of XP and hit the stairs, and instead tried to fight it. Got blinded and did not have a single potion of cure-anything. Again i could have walked to the stairs as it hit me, but was playing too fast to think coherently.

[Sky]

ugh ... DL61 in 1h22m, died to keeping the stupid button pressed. And fundin bluecloak.
Which is probably the first time in history he's ever killed anyone.