Area of Effect

[zaimoni]

Compared to diving there's not much danger to killing the low-xp mobs.

But it's not necessary to powerdive to skip relatively low-xp anything that's detected. Aside from attention to detail (the most basic skill in Angband), the "danger factor" for even a min-maxed point-based spell-caster just isn't there past the basic detection point (when Detect Traps effect gets in range, or equivalent CL for warriors); you just adjust max. depth to "maximum safe given attention to detail". [Min-maxed autorolled? Even easier.]

"given attention to detail" is required, unfortunately, because RPoison doesn't have a decent chance of showing up by the time you can use it in any form (without level-scumming).

The player-turn faster level gain and ego-item finds generally compensate.

OTOH, the game already limits detection for mage-casters, if they dive, by making detect invisible too expensive to cast more than once/level for turn-counters. Almost got capped by Adunaphel recently because of that.

A stack of Rods of Detection handles that.

Anyway, if you don't care about turns all you have to do is sit and regenerate mana until you can detect again.

If the monster list were properly balanced (it isn't right now) and a reasonable way of handling underleveled monster generation was in place, the easy way to make the player care about turns is to adjust the monster spawn rate. (This controlled by a #define; currently 1/160 chance per normal-speed turn. Compare with 333 normal-speed turns absolute worst-case to fully regenerate either hp or mana, which gets faster with lower hp/mana.)

[aeneas]

But it's not necessary to powerdive to skip relatively low-xp anything that's detected.

Well, I'd say that this is my point, tbh, or at least part of it. Iron works, as a slow game, because you really can't afford to skip much, and because you are limited to a certain amount of stuff (if you don't fall back on some obvious, and very tedious abuses). That's not my preferred play-mode, and I suspect it is actually pretty abusable, but...

A stack of Rods of Detection handles that.

A moderately fast diver will be lucky to find one by 3500'. Adunaphel comes into depth a lot earlier.

If the monster list were properly balanced...(snip) the easy way to make the player care about turns [would be] to adjust the monster spawn rate.

I'd go farther for my hypothetical ideal Angband. I'd start upping the spawn depth of monsters while reducing the drop depth (and maybe the generation depth for floor items), based on some criterion related to rate of descent. If you wanted to be evil you could base that purely on turns, but I don't find that entirely satisfactory, for a number of reasons, though it would make a nice challenge mode if you set the parameters in a properly evil fashion.