zaimoni
7/23/2008 3:50:00 PM
On Jul 23, 5:19 am, David Ploog <pl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Antoine wrote:
> > On Jul 23, 12:04 pm, awhite <spud...@iinet.net.au> wrote:
> >> Both have their merits - Iron has no skills apart from attributes, and is
> >> extremely fun. Steam has skills up the ying-yang, and is extremely fun.
> >> Crawl has skills BUT IS BRUTAL AND THEN YOU DIE.
>
> > In all fairness, I hear the brutality and death of Crawl is mixed with
> > a certain amount of fun, too :)
>
> I hope so :)
>
> This seems to be a good thread to ask, as there are banders in here: What
> is the risk of death (assuming conversative and optimal play)? Can you
> almost entirely avoid it?
The catch with *bands (speaking specifically of V and Heng, Heng being
a Z-variant) is that conservative play is *not* optimal once one
approaches stat-gain.
I suppose, if the V RNG were replaced with a save-stated Mersenne
Twister, that it would be Borgly possible to wait for enough items to
be generated with object-depth 127 on DL 1 and then proceed. In
practice, the V RNG starts going heavily correlated for pairs of
events whose cumulative theoretical probability is less than 1/27 or
so; I doubt that the needed ego items/artifacts would happen fast
enough to save the Borg. (Very consistent 2% alpha failures, the
paired event of probability 1/n when checked for 4n times fails to
happen far more than (1/e)^4 ~ 1.83% of the time; tested with save-
scummed enchanting stacks to study the severity of this exploit
[awful, made far more inconvenient in Zaiband 3.0.9 alpha]).
In practice, the key V strategy seems to be: Never, ever permit the
theoretical maximum damage to be enough to kill in one player turn.
* That means the Detect Traps effect is critical.
* Go as deep as possible consistent with this. This is a bit deeper
with Autoscum off. Remember that Teleport as an escape doesn't work
well starting near stat-gain.
* Some effort to minimize turncount is required because arriving in
LoS of a monster group with inadequate area-effect attacks, requires
immediate escape. Also, minimizing monster restocking becomes
important around DL20.
V actually allows the player to enact this, but gives the player
*much* more room than NetHack to make strategic errors that
inobviously make the above impossible.
> If so (like Nethack), then this may be the basic difference: while Crawl
> is not nearly as deadly as hyped to be (I won't complain :),
Certainly not on DL1-3 for the easy classes. For SSCrawl 0.3.4, the
only real threat to a properly played MDFi is Sigmund.