Buying a Wand of Magic Missile with your starting money is a pretty fun way to go sometimes. It's pretty expensive, which limits your other gear options substantially (and almost certainly means your first dive is one-way until you find a ?WoR), but it trivializes a surprisingly large number of fights. It's especially worthwhile for mages and priests, whose offensive options early on are very limited.
list of bugs and wishes
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Oil misses more than Magic Missile fails to activate in my experience. It also has considerably less range. I will agree that your proposal is more versatile, mostly on the basis of giving you other consumables that are generally useful, but I'd give the -MM approach a shot once or twice before you shoot it down entirely.Comment
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Oil can be a bit of a disaster for a human mage, you don't have infravision so you can't actually see the doggies without light. Even with !heroism I'm not convinced a lvl 1 human mage can hit the dogs reliably enough, I think the little guys have +throwing? The hobbit certainly does.Comment
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I never bother with oil. The chance of missing is way too high compared to shooting/throwing/magic.PWMAngband variant maintainer - check https://github.com/draconisPW/PWMAngband (or http://www.mangband.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=9) to learn more about this new variant!Comment
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The chance of hitting with oil is the same as with any other thrown object, and at a low level, the extra +10 to hit from !hero makes a huge difference in odds. It and -MM are the only way to take out Bullroarer at CL 1 or 2. It is useful at most once in a game. But it is a use with massive potential upside.
That said, if you are grinding at low levels, it won't ever pay off.Comment
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I have tried the MM approach but do find it so expensive. I will give oil and heroism a try next time!Beginner's Guide to Angband 4.2.3 Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9c9e2wMngM
Detailed account of my Ironman win here.
"My guess is that Grip and Fang have many more kills than Gothmog and Lungorthin." --FizzixComment
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OK, here's a response to the first list:
01 - map view often doesn't refresh correctly: you can see your own character in there a lot of times, and sometimes remains are left of beam/cone attacks. CTRL-R corrects the errors. Apparently erasing changes from the previous turn is imperfect.
02 - outdated dungeon.txt:
* "Each level has at least one up staircase and at least two down staircases. There are no exceptions to this rule." Level 99, 100 and 127 are, I believe, exceptions. But several types of special map levels might not have 2 downstairs either. Notably a maze level always seems to have exactly 1 up and one down stairs.
* The whole file also is based in the character interface, ignoring tiles. It should e.g. mention that with tiles you can see the visuals under '~', 'display xxx knowledge', select one item and press 'v'.
05 - if there is a bunch of monsters, I am often in a corridor get only one attacking me, resting until the next one steps in. Their drops are piling gradually, and when there is more than one item under me, the screen gets redrawn every time because it displays the list of items under me. I wish there was at least one wait command key (of the '5', ',' or '.') that I can use to rest without picking up.
Because 'm' is the real command, and 'p' is just mapped to it. With new classes coming in it may be best to remove the 'p' command altogether.
10 - Wish: display monster level in monster memory (esp. with uniques). If there is not enough room, I wouldn't mind the monster symbol being removed, but I think both should fit. Especially with uniques it helps to quickly see which you might expect on your current dungeon level.
13 - treasure balance seems off: too many weapons compared to armor pieces (you need 6 armor pieces compared to 1 weapon, so it would seem better if they occur 6x as often too, but they seem to have similar occurences currently). For artifacts my high level mage has found 25 weapons, 4 shooters, 28 armor and 4 miscellaneous (light, ring, amulet). I would also prefer not to find at least one of the *thanc daggers at one of the first levels so often; then all the fun disappears of first finding one with bonuses, then the first ego, and finally the artifacts.
15 - Amulets of resistance are way too high level for their worth: since most artifact armors, shields, and even many ego armors, shields and cloaks offer the same elemental resistances, by the time you reach level 60 no one is ever going to need them. 10 levels later than resist acid en lightning, so 20, seems more appropriate. Or perhaps it should have 1 or 2 random extra resistances?
16 - in principle it is a good thing that slow digestion is powered up, but still there is so much food found in the dungeon, not to mention loads of satisfy hunger scrolls, that even a half-troll warrior is unlikely to sacrifice a ring or amulet slot for it. Perhaps the ring and amulet should have some minor extra power, like slow poison?
17 - spell failure chances seem higher than the spellbook mentions. I tested this with a 21st level mage with listed spell failure of 4% on detect monsters, with no negative effects present as far as I could see. I cast it in total 335 times in a row, and had 26 failures, which amounts to more than 7% - almost twice as much as listed.
18 - stores will not accept unidentified armor, not even for free. (I had a robe [2,+2] {??} that wasn't accepted until I happened to find out the rune in another way. It was resist fire.) I think they should, just like unidentified negative potions, scrolls, wands, etc. are bought. This is also contrary to the description in dungeon.txt. Weapons that are partially unknown and contain a curse are also unsellable.
I'll get onto the rest of the list soon.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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Usually, in a single, non-repeated experiment, a result is considered statistically significant if the p-value is 0.05 or below. So yes, that seems a statistically unusually high failure rate, and worth investigating. There is usually a reporting bias, in that only 'unusual' results get reported to the devs, so the best thing would be collecting completely new data to test it.Last edited by fph; October 28, 2018, 22:21.--
Dive fast, die young, leave a high-CHA corpse.Comment
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Ran some tests: created a human mage, advanced him with debug commands to lvl21 and enough int to get 4% failure rate, and cast detect monsters 335 times. Got 14 failures. p-value of 0.47. Verdict: the RNG seems to work OK. Complaint "refuted by an appeal to advanced mathematical statistics".--
Dive fast, die young, leave a high-CHA corpse.Comment
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For low probability events, a poisson distribution is generally appropriate. It always has a fat tail (because you can't have fewer than zero events.) Yes, it will eventually converge to normal (as any distribution will.) But even at expectation value E=14, while the curve looks close to normal, the tail is significantly fatter at 1.5*E. The estimate of 0.11% is too low by a significant amount.Comment
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For low probability events, a poisson distribution is generally appropriate. It always has a fat tail (because you can't have fewer than zero events.) Yes, it will eventually converge to normal (as any distribution will.) But even at expectation value E=14, while the curve looks close to normal, the tail is significantly fatter at 1.5*E. The estimate of 0.11% is too low by a significant amount.
Code:scipy.stats.binom_test(26,335,0.04, alternative='greater')
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Dive fast, die young, leave a high-CHA corpse.Comment
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