Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.misc (
More info?)
keith wrote:
> On 6 Apr 2005 14:15:27 -0700, Erik Piper <erik@sky.cz> wrote:
>
>
> > Actually, rods are a very convenient all-in-one package; all sorts
of
> > powers in one little skill, and one that trains quite fast for most
> > races, and really fast for some. Spriggans are *unusually* talented
> > with Evocations. So don't think of it as "eating up skill points,"
> > think of it as "putting skill points in the bank."
>
> Well, I personally get high-sky values in Evocations if I don't turn
them
> off. Even when turned off, I still train in them. So I usually turn
them
> off. I was thinking of running a sprig Warper or Enchanter or
somesuch as
> the rod will then be my prime offensive weapon. It just seems a waste
as
> I'd like to raise Spellcasting usually and the highest of
> Spellcasting/Evocations determines the amount of my mana. So I
usually cut
> back on Evocations a little. I was thinking of warper because of the
> scarcity of teleportation scrolls
You might want to flip that and -- even for a Venom Mage -- let your
Evocations determine your mana and your Spellcasting raise gradually.
Don't get wrong; spellcasting is a very nice skill. But the power of
rods -- especially for someone who's not so good with conjurations --
has to be seen to be believed.
[summoner strategy?]
>
> > The best strat is to play a *band. This will fulfill your goal of
> > boring yourself to death much more efficiently, especially if you
> > choose a *band summoner on top of that.
>
> By *band you mean an Angband variant?
Angband or a variant, yes. Sorry for the lame joke, by the way. I
haven't played them much (you can guess why, I think), but I'd say the
best strategy in Crawl for a summoner, during the start, is to train up
spellcasting (by turning off summoning) to increase your spell points
so you can get quite a large cloud of small mammals around you, while
gradually collecting clubs, arrows, and
whatever-that-other-thing-is-that-can-be-converted-to-snakes, and
cautiously "spend" these when you encounter a difficult opponent. After
that, from what I can tell, things get better and better.
Keep in mind that:
* Vehumet provides four things that are very useful to summoners --
summoning books, lowered miscast probabilities, SP regeneration for
kills, and energy channeling
* You will receive less experience for your kills than if you were
killing by hand, so you will always be a bit XP-starved.
You might want to read over Tina Hall's summoner YAVP in the Google
Groups archive. Some good keywords to use for the search are, well,
tina, hall, summoner, and yavp.
> Also do you think we will have a multiplayer Crawl someday?
Most likely not. Roguelikes take poorly to multiplay, because of the
difficult problem of coordinating turns. Even moving down a corridor
may take 20 moves, and if you have to wait during each of those turns
for someone else who is fighting a hydra, etc. and thus needing to
think 30 seconds about each move, that's 10 minutes to move down a
corridor. So quite innovative solutions are needed to accomodate even
two players at a time in a roguelike, let alone 20 or 200.
There have been attempts at MMORs, however; see for example TOMEnet
(you can navigate there fairly easily I think by starting from the
address http://t-o-m-e.net).
The engine would probably have to be built from the ground up to
accomodate multiplay, and Crawl is not very easy to tinker with; the
code and its comments read more like a theological discussion than a
built-to-modify set of modules.
Erik
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