Hound advice

[SSK]

I am totally unused to the new (to me) pack monster behaviour. In conjunction with (IMHO overpowered) certain hounds, this has led to badness.

How do you generally deal with the baddies--Gravity, Inertia, **TIME**, Aether, and others you can think of (maybe chaos, nether)?

Obviously banishment is a thought, but what if you don't have a renewable source of banishment? Anyone have special corridors/patterns you carve out to lure them out one by one so they can't breathe on you?

[buzzkill]

It you can't deal with them easily, it's often better to aviod.

[Chud]

My first choice is usually to avoid them if at all possible. They don't drop anything and they're too dangerous for what they're worth.

You can turn off the now-default "smarter in groups" behavior if you want - it's a birth option, I believe.

Otherwise, I sometimes have luck standing just outside a room where they hide and targeting ball spells on empty floor spaces at the very edge of my vision, assuming I'll get a piece of any that are just out of sight. One plus of the "smarter" behavior is that they generally let you retreat and rest as often as you like without interference.

[Derakon]

Avoid them.

If you must fight them, then be able to kill one in a single round of combat (or at least, in a single turn for them -- if you're twice as fast then two rounds of combat is okay). Then just lurk two spaces into a room:

###Z###
#@Z...#
#.....#
#######

You don't want to be standing right at the room entrance because then they get a chance to breathe on you.

If they're already in a room, then hitting them with ball spells when they're not in LOS also works.

Also, if you're feeling cocky, then let your HP fall below 50% -- they'll chase you no matter what you do then, so you can do the standard lure-around-a-corner trick. Of course, your margin for error is much smaller, so I don't really recommend this.

[SSK]

Avoid them.

If you must fight them, then be able to kill one in a single round of combat (or at least, in a single turn for them -- if you're twice as fast then two rounds of combat is okay). Then just lurk two spaces into a room:

###Z###
#@Z...#
#.....#
#######

You don't want to be standing right at the room entrance because then they get a chance to breathe on you.

If they're already in a room, then hitting them with ball spells when they're not in LOS also works.

Also, if you're feeling cocky, then let your HP fall below 50% -- they'll chase you no matter what you do then, so you can do the standard lure-around-a-corner trick. Of course, your margin for error is much smaller, so I don't really recommend this.

Thanks this is helpful. But I don't think I can play for a while. I am so exasperated at just dying again with a character that had found Eonwe and Durin--as I just said in another thread--it is just totally unfair for the program to tell me that teleport other spell is a beam, and then it is just a bolt. All these damned changes and the descriptions are not keeping up. I feel like i have to test everything first on harmless monsters to know what is true.

The monsters are not "aggravated" but I sure am.

[Chud]

It is unfair, I agree, but on the other hand it is a work in progress, never advertised to be ready for general release. That's not much consolation and I do understand the feeling though... still, it could also happen that you go to read a scroll and the game promptly scribbles nonesense all over your save file and then crashes with a big matrix-style green hex dump. Would that be better? Well, okay, that's not very likely, but the point of course is that the nightlies are never advertised as ready-for-release-robust.

I've never won the game, and I have a character in good position to do so now in 3.2.0... I took a break from that to play around with the current nightly just because I know I will be very annoyed to die in the mainline release with my promising character at this point. It'll probably happen anyway, and I imagine I'll be just as annoyed as I anticipate. I do understand the feeling.

[Max Stats]

Here's another possibility, but it may be considered an exploitation by some:

What if the hounds are in a room and you are in the hallway?

         # #
         # #
     ##### #
     #  @  # 
     # #####
     # #
###### #####
#   ZZZ    #
#  ZZZZZ   #
#   ZZZ    #
############

The trick here is to stand around the corner, and then dig yourself a "room".

         # #
     ##*** # 
     #  @  #  * = Dig Here
     # #**##
     # #

Once you have cleared the squares around yourself, the hounds will think you are in a room and flow to you.

         # #
      #### #
     ##    #
     #  @  # 
     #Z#  ##
     #Z####
######Z#####
#   ZZZ    #
#    ZZZ   #
#    ZZ    #
############

Does this seem like fair game? If not, I think the way to stop it is to mark squares in the dungeon as "room" squares when the dungeon is created and have monsters base their decision to chase the player on whether the player is standing on one of these squares.

I have mentioned in a past thread about the possibility of allowing the "aggravate monster" attribute to draw out "smart" monsters into corridors. This could give a beneficial side effect to aggravating equipment, and it makes sense that a monster that is aggravated might lose its self-restraint and come charging after the player. How does this sound? That would give players an acceptable method to deal with this, but with some cost to doing so.

[konijn_]

I am totally unused to the new (to me) pack monster behaviour. In conjunction with (IMHO overpowered) certain hounds, this has led to badness.

How do you generally deal with the baddies--Gravity, Inertia, **TIME**, Aether, and others you can think of (maybe chaos, nether)?

Obviously banishment is a thought, but what if you don't have a renewable source of banishment? Anyone have special corridors/patterns you carve out to lure them out one by one so they can't breathe on you?

Try wearing a ring of aggravation, the pack monster AI gets turned off then and they will follow you everywhere. Of course you also wake up the rest of the monsters around you and everybody will be hasted.

T.

[Derakon]

Try wearing a ring of aggravation, the pack monster AI gets turned off then and they will follow you everywhere. Of course you also wake up the rest of the monsters around you and everybody will be hasted.

T.

Not currently true in Vanilla, not to mention that rings of aggravation don't exist right now.

[Max Stats]

While we are talking about the smart pack behavior, I have thought for awhile that the same behavior should be given to humanoid pack monsters (orcs, trolls) but only if they are escorts of a leader (orc captain, troll chieftain, or unique). The idea is that the leader gives them tactical direction, like a general, but when they are leaderless groups they just run around like they do now trying to smash things.

[fizzix]

         # #
      #### #
     ##    #
     #  @  # 
     #Z#  ##
     #Z####
######Z#####
#   ZZZ    #
#    ZZZ   #
#    ZZ    #
############

Does this seem like fair game? If not, I think the way to stop it is to mark squares in the dungeon as "room" squares when the dungeon is created and have monsters base their decision to chase the player on whether the player is standing on one of these squares.

This is not true (unless something has changed to pack AI). What determines whether you are in a room has nothing to do with whether there are walls around you. Instead it is determined by a bitflag which is either "room" or "not-room". Moats of vaults and pits are considered rooms. Hounds will chase you there, even though these are favorable terrain for @ to fight. Also casting earthquake or destruction will remove any room flags on affected floors. You could conceivably use earthquake to keep hounds from chasing you.

That being said. I think that pack behavior in caverns should be screwy. Does anyone have experience with this?

[bulian]

Also casting earthquake or destruction will remove any room flags on affected floors. You could conceivably use earthquake to keep hounds from chasing you.

An unintended(?) (exploitive?) side effect is the ability to phase door into destructed vaults. Perhaps destruct should not remove vault tags?

[Max Stats]

This is not true (unless something has changed to pack AI). What determines whether you are in a room has nothing to do with whether there are walls around you. Instead it is determined by a bitflag which is either "room" or "not-room".

It definitely works; I just used it. Maybe it is an either/or thing, where it can either be "room" squares or "empty" squares?

That being said. I think that pack behavior in caverns should be screwy. Does anyone have experience with this?

I wonder if a change was made because of caverns, otherwise monsters would never chase you on these levels.

[SSK]

Try wearing a ring of aggravation, the pack monster AI gets turned off then and they will follow you everywhere. Of course you also wake up the rest of the monsters around you and everybody will be hasted.

T.

I already almost discovered the dig next to the corridor trick but didnt know exactly how to use it.

I **LOVE** the aggravation idea. I like that it makes sense froma role-playing point of view and adds usefulness for aggravation.

Only now I feel double stupid--that last game I just screwed up I had Calris in my bag for disenchant but it wouldve been great for this, and **DUH** I forgot I could've used Eonwe which I was wielding for mass banishment! I just don't remember what failure rate I had on it and how many squares radius. Anyway it couldn't have been worse than *bolt* of TO.

Anyway I think I need to refigure how I am progressing--it seems I am too conservative/slow in diving to DLevel 33, but too aggressive advancing from DLevel 45 to 55, and it seems I am not carrying the right consumables and thought-out escapes at the DLevel 50 region for the new (to me) code. I am still used to like 2.7 with beam TO. Actually I never realized how much bolt TO is a major game changer. I also used to play artifact No-preserve with "special" feelings, so I have always been loathe to teleport level.

It seems no there is far diminished risk with preserve mode being standard and far greater utility with the breaking of beam TO and further weakening of teleport self as escape methods...

Anything new in the May 2 build I need to know about that will kill me if I don't?? LOL. I want Eonwe's Axe back :-(.

[ItBreathes]

It definitely works; I just used it. Maybe it is an either/or thing, where it can either be "room" squares or "empty" squares?

In 3.1.1, anyway, it works. Maybe squares that were originally not in a corridor that are adjacent to a room are flagged as being in the room?

Was trying to find a way to deal with a group of hounds in a room just now. From the initial arrangement...

     # #
     # #
###### ##
#       #

...I widened the corridor and created an alternate entrance, hoping to create multiple LoS so I could at least shoot and duck back behind cover:

 #     #
 #  @  #
## ### ##
#       #

In this configuration, the hounds came after me as if I was in the room.