[S] YAFWP - Kimba the Dark Elf Lady of Enchantment

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm afraid I'm just instinctively opposed to decrementing - it offends my suspension of disbelief that you can "unlearn" things. But I am of course free not to use it, so cannot object to it being included. I think it is perfectly reasonable for you to limit it to the top and bottom of the skill range for the reasons you give.

Decrementing other skills when you concentrate on something you have not previously done is pretty natural. You actually lose skills in real life too, if you are not using them.

[Magnate]

Decrementing other skills when you concentrate on something you have not previously done is pretty natural. You actually lose skills in real life too, if you are not using them.

Yes, but you don't choose to forget them. If camlost wants to implement a natural deterioration of unused skills over time, I'd support that - but we're discussing the issue of the player consciously deciding to decrement some skills in order to "make room" for new ones. That really bothers me.

[Timo Pietilä]

Yes, but you don't choose to forget them. If camlost wants to implement a natural deterioration of unused skills over time, I'd support that - but we're discussing the issue of the player consciously deciding to decrement some skills in order to "make room" for new ones. That really bothers me.

Well, you could rationalize it as "I choose not to pay attention to that part of my life to make space in this new hobby I have". Conscious decision of what to neglect in order to do something else.

In real life it's a bit more complicated (obviously), but for game purpose it works.

[EpicMan]

Allow the player to set skills to forget. Then XP will reduce that skill over time, allowing room for further development of other skills with additional XP. Don't make it "Press A to respec", make it a slow process so that players have to gradually change their character, rather than roll the clock back instantly and go a new direction.

[LostTemplar]

While learning a skill is instant, unlearning should the same IMHO, or not allowed.

[Magnate]

Allow the player to set skills to forget. Then XP will reduce that skill over time, allowing room for further development of other skills with additional XP. Don't make it "Press A to respec", make it a slow process so that players have to gradually change their character, rather than roll the clock back instantly and go a new direction.

I think this is an excellent idea. Essentially you could implement this by "marking" skills as "not maintained", via a toggle in the skills screen. Any so marked would deteriorate over time, enabling you to develop other skills. Obviously, until you get close to 100 power you don't need to mark any skills at all. If you want to respec instantly, just rest for a few thousand turns in town.

Personally I think this is a very elegant solution to the skill cap problem.

[NotMorgoth]

Another idea I thought of is to have some kind of consumable that can be found in the dungeon (like an uncursed Potion of Lose Memories?) that allows you to reduce a chosen skill when you use it.

I guess the disadvantage of this is that it would encourage scumming if you want to change your skills, so maybe EpicMan's idea is better.

[EpicMan]

Have potion of lose memories be instant and in addition to the slow method, so it's nice to have when you want to respec but not needed. Then make sure it shows up in the deepest depths so you can find it when you might actually want it.

I still like my idea but I like the idea of adding a niche use for a generally bad item already in-game (well, its in most bands, not sure if it's in Sangand). It turns a 'sucks to be you' item into a situationally useful one.

If you want to avoid scumming, make it an artifact potion with a fairly common rarity near the bottom of the dungeon so the player doesn't have to scum for it.

[Bostock]

Hmm, it seems to be more kosher to post variant AARs in AArs and not in Variants. But since I'm already here... I'll just stick this second win in my existing win thread.

Quite a bit faster this time (622,255 turns), not sure if pure mages are just inevitably slower or if the handicap of a poor primary stat on Kimba was just that bad. The fast diving was partly about wanting to get this win out of the way, not just about trying to be impressive: I'd actually gotten a couple of OoI's down deep, but one, the first Axe Hero dwarf, was too obsessed with low turncount, not cheesily skillificated enough, and too slow in the opening, so he crashed and burned at D:80ish from excess risk, and the second, Cheese Speed Iron the not-as-cheesy-as-planned Half-Orc, died to my unwillingness to bore myself by restoring from a D:85 save. Because I overwrote the Morgoth-at-5-stars save. Because I had created a new S folder and then accidentally erased the old one before copying in /save/. Because I have to create new S folders sometimes due to the display code getting horribly confused by my dropboxing between two versions of Windows and two monitor ratios. The more you know!

I took on a couple small restrictions: nothing but axes once they were a reasonable choice (thus the weaponsmithing) and no decrementing smithing skills - which is bearable when you've only got 8 skills. Living without stealth was OK as long as I was buff for my depth, scary when I wasn't. Experimented twice with aggravating kit, but the first time it was too scary and the second time, it was OK, but a better configuration that was also non-aggravating arrived pretty fast.

The fast diving was mainly possible because gear came together very nicely this game. Diving quickly until about D:20 doesn't take much special gear for a warrior, just cash. Got a problem? Just quaff. After that you gradually want and then need certain things (FA, then one of SI or Sustain Mind, then rLightning (with the assumption that the other elements are trivial)) but they're not too hard to get while diving. Only after about D:40 does it really take luck to sustain OoI diving momentum IMO. The most memorable bits of such luck this game were the midgame Belthronding and an elven cloak that got Aman'ed into rNether/Hold Life on a lucky *Enchant Armor* read, which along with some odd thing or another of rChaos meant I could just tank a lot of stuff I'd normally have to fight slowly or avoid.

Sauron was innocuous again, although in his defense, my half-orc did have a hard time with him. Morgoth was painful mainly because I'd accidentally opened up a sDex hole during my last regearing, so I couldn't really melee him. (None of the riffraff dropped a means of restoration either, until after he died.) Thankfully I'd gathered up a record four - FOUR! - rods of blinking, which are the damnedest pain to acquire in useful numbers but are a lot less frustrating than ?PhaseDoor. So my big, tough OoI ultimately ended up wanding M to death. Annihilations with a clear shot (16% fail is a LIE!), Doomblasts without, Banish Evil when wanting to save the loot, tAway/Destruct combo to thin the hordes, wash, rinse, defeat.


Yay balance thoughts!

- Disarming has been the dark horse of my OoI runs, going from "that skill that I would never take" to something I'd recommend for any OoI. Why? One little slot. One little slot is huge for OoI, where almost every effect you want costs a slot.

- Shop cycling is really powerful for getting a low turncount. It's also great for packrats ("I can't recall *now*! I still need to kill that unique! Oh, and maybe take this vault! And maybe dive a little more - oh look, a pit!"), as you can treat the stores as about a quarter of an extra house if you've got money to burn. And by D:50, you've always got money to burn.

- The V advice of taking non-device sources of desired effects into the last advice doesn't apply to S, as I learned at the cost of much hair-tearing. Maybe it's S's greater difficulty of preventing item destruction, maybe it's easier recovery from charge drain... I'm not V-savvy enough to be sure.

- Still trying to figure out the point of the much-lauded Rune of Protection. Lauded in V, I mean. Maybe I'll try a priest next and see if the scroll at least becomes useful with the priest-boost.

- Rods of healing/curing/speed suck just as much as they apparently do in V. Maybe it's different with a slower endgame... but my endgame already felt pretty slow (see unused XP).

- Still deciding if there are situations where invisibility really matters (judging from other char's, not from this weak-at-range guy).

- Gradually getting a worse and worse opinion of missiles and of burglary (once again, from other characters than this one), at least for a munchkin like me. Ultimately... slots. Not so hot on Infusion either, but I realize it has its proponents so it gets a grace period.

- the Rick Astley award OTOH goes to probably Perception, closely followed by armor forging, I will admit. In the case of perception it's funny since I've seen at least one person state they found it rather useless. And yeah, lacking Perception doesn't kill me...... it just makes me want to die.

- the recent jousting damage adjustment seems to have been done well, damage wasn't uber high but was enough better than swords to justify the drawbacks.

- I was bummed to have polearm-oriented titles all the time -- I wield an axe, dammit!

[NotMorgoth]

Very impressive turncount; I am actually running a similar character at the moment, except that I'm using infusion and throwing but don't have dodging or disarming. I'm not diving - the character is mostly intended to check out the changes to jousting weapon damage, so I want to use infusion to see if I can get a scythe of slicing with vorpal and +2 blows...

Do you have any tips for getting there so fast? Whenever I've tried, I've found I've run into a brick wall at about DL40, where every time I go into the dungeon I have to use all my healing almost immediately, have great difficulty killing anything at all, and also get my stats and experience drained into the dark ages by invisible monsters. I very quickly have no more money even to buy ?recall, and find myself having to go back into the dungeon at level 1 walk down again, which kills any chance of getting a low turncount.

[Bostock]

Some things that I've found to help reduce turncount:
- Avoiding quests. The first couple are at worst speed-neutral and probably speed you up. The rest slow you down.
- Being lucky. Early coverage for key resists and for even resists that are normally grin-and-bear-it until much later really helped here.
- Catching yourself and stopping yourself when you start to fight a tar-baby - like an early Wormtongue or Smeagol.
- Diving itself - the best place to get foo resistance is generally a few hectometers into the zone where you're hit by foo.
- Using recall to heal.
- Keeping the skill count low and cheesy.
- Heavy use of ?Recharging.
- Willingness to carry !RestoreExperience and grit your teeth a bit before drinking them. (Not needed in this game thanks to my luck this time, but in other fast dives I've done this.)
- Ironically - openness to slowing down when you're starting to get too deep. Like you described, diving too fast becomes slow.
- A bit of Eddie wisdom that's grown on me, though I don't always follow it: a dived-to "quiet peaceful" level is a much faster power boost than a shallower lucrative pit.

[NotMorgoth]

My further thoughts about attempted diving: (some of these come from experience, others are pure speculation as I haven't been successful enough to test them.)

Armor Forging is a great way to get rare resists earlier than you are likely to find them. (You still have to find components obviously, but it gives you an extra chance.)

See invisible is very important, with it you at least have a chance against the ghostly stat-drainers.

A lucky early staff of speed or speed boots can really help - not only by reducing turncount but also enabling you to take on monsters you wouldn't otherwise dare to; I actually suspect that a fighter-mage may be the best character path for diving simply because they get Haste Self earlier and in a more accessible spell book than anyone else.

I'm also thinking about the whole quest thing. I'd like to experiment with taking quests but just abandoning them if they look hard - it ought to end up being very similar to playing without quests, except that if you are lucky and get something easy like giant green dragonflies it gives a useful XP boost. However, whenever I try this, I can't resist trying to kill all the monsters just in case I get a useful reward.

I have also found that magic devices are not as useful as I thought for offense for a diving character - if I'm descending fast, I don't seem to find big enough stacks of attack wands or rods to be worth giving an inventory slot to.

[Bostock]

Armor Forging is a great way to get rare resists earlier than you are likely to find them. (You still have to find components obviously, but it gives you an extra chance.)

I can but agree.

See invisible is very important, with it you at least have a chance against the ghostly stat-drainers.

Both of seem to suffer in 'bands from a bad case of permalevelitis. (The amount of Crawl that I played prior to last year goes by the scientific name of a "shit-ton.") You don't HAVE TO FIGHT ghosts. (On the other hand, you do - it's true - need SI or excellent stealth to avoid ambushes.)

A lucky early staff of speed or speed boots can really help - not only by reducing turncount but also enabling you to take on monsters you wouldn't otherwise dare to; I actually suspect that a fighter-mage may be the best character path for diving simply because they get Haste Self earlier and in a more accessible spell book than anyone else.

Spells and turncount are a complicated subject. Existence/timing of Detect Doors and Stairs, existence/timing of Phase Door, etc.... and then there's druids' Stone to Money, which feels like it should be important, though I've never played a diving game with a druid that survived until that spell so I'm not sure. And yes, definitely Haste Self too. Not to mention the elemental resistance spell and later Wizardly Enhancement (rDisenchant). Though Druids once again also get elemental resistance - including rPoison! - and *cough* orvat genafsbezrq cebivqrf 100% erfvfgnapr gb rdhvczrag qnzntr *cough*.

I have also found that magic devices are not as useful as I thought for offense for a diving character - if I'm descending fast, I don't seem to find big enough stacks of attack wands or rods to be worth giving an inventory slot to.

Huh. My device problem when diving tends to be elsewhere - in keeping my skill up to par with the typical devices for my new depth. For OoI at least.