Bay 12 Games Forum

In term of broken, out of the aliens that could obliterate other factions if they found it very early, the pirates faction added too by the expansion was very unbalanced :

Starting on water meant that you were completely safe from the other factions for a while, before they could get tech to get into the sea themselves.

And having immediately the technology to expand on water made it so you could then have a huge empire unchallenged (other by the various sea monsters) rather quickly, unlike ground factions.

Fortunately, even with the expansion you could setup the game as you wanted, without you or the AI using any of the factions you didn't liked.
Truly brillant 4X

Whatever spell or wand will be used, with spell noise it will certainly wake up the dragon considering the distance between the mummy and the monster.

A dragon having a good MR is not good news in regard to the chance of effect of whatever is thrown at it, so using a spell would mean counting a lot on luck, and luck is usually failing in crawl when you really need it.

A polymorph other, even if by chance it works against the dragon MR would probably just give another dragon, and even if by luck it's an ice dragon, being at close quarter it would just use his claws and teeths that do not care about the cold resistance.

Walking is out of question as the character has no stealthy mention on the dump text, so it will wake up the beast that will be at 1 range and then will use the fire breath.

reading the teleportation scroll or self use of the teleport wand would take too much time to make effect, the dragon would tear the character apart in no time.

The scroll of fear would be great to buy time for another teleportation, but again it is said that MR can save, and dragons don't have small MR.

The scroll of summoning, resulting an abomination, could lead the dragon to have a chance to target the abomination for its 1st attack, but is the current crawl system always targetting the player first ?
And even if Crawl do not have the monsters always targetting the player first, if the summon does not appear next to the dragon, the player is lost to the claws and teeths.
So again, luck involved.

Personnally, i would try the scroll of fear, of course if it does not work the dragon will wake up and the character is dead in the following turn.
But other possibilities seems to involve even more luck.

Crawl has been a huge sadist in where the teleportation sent that mummy character.

ToME4 would be an average or a mediocre game, it would not be that annoying, but considering how amazing the gameplay system is and how much fun i have with ToME4, it is frustrating to have regularly those heavy stuttering and slowdown on what is a turn based game.

The most annoying to me is that they seem to be very random, during most of a game it plays very smoothly, the interface very responsive, then suddenly the engine begins to crawl (even when a level is nearly completely cleared of monsters making it difficult to understand why) and the interface has huge delays (dropping a single item can take several seconds) when it starts to stutter.

The problem has been reported in the ToME4 forum and noticed by the developer fortunately, the game system is really good and i hope he will manage to get those heavy engine slowdowns fixed in future updates.

The graphical version of that "beta 1G" is looking really nice, an already fabulous game soon with very good visuals to reach even more players beyond the ASCII only public.
Could be a big boost in popularity for this excellent game, and it would be well deserved as DoomRL is truly awesome, enough to have kept me playing again and again an ... despite i'm no fan of ASCII visuals at all.

The expanded mortem we'll see in the incoming 0.992 is a great idea, more stats and infos are always fun for reading such files.
I wonder how the asynchronous animations introduced in 0.992 will change the gameplay.

Finally obtained with my mummy chaos knight of Lugonu a way to get to Abyss without being having to use the power : by killing Sonja and  wielding/unwielding her dagger of distorsion.
And with some luck i found a Lugonu altar very near, and my giant mace was branded.

Additionally, i found a few nice scrolls to enchant it further :

- a +3,+6 great mace of distortion (weapon)

What a very powerfull it is now, if an enemy is more powerfull than my character and can't be killed quickly, lots of chance the brand will either teleport it away or banish it to the Abyss, and even if unlucky the weapon does not kick the enemy out of the view, it can have some good damage bonus with this brand : my mummy have 2 shot-ed several hydras in my exploration of the Lair.

And talking of Lugonu, i noticed with a mummy chaos knight you actually get faith ranks rather quickly, as you don't have to eat, you can sacrifice everything you kill (you get faith from kill+faith from sacrifice), meaning you can get the highest Lugonu faith rank before Lair (as a chaos knigh you start already with this faith if you choose it so you gain a lot of time beginning to earn faith points right from the start of the game).

Corrupt is then rather quickly available to you, and it's definitively a very powerfull help.
I just got the Swamp rune thanks to it, the bunch of neutral demons that comes from the corruption can make short work of hydras and dragons (and a good weapon of distorsion will annihilate the survivors)


Corrupt helped me too in a dungeon floor in which there was a bit too much Ogres near the stairs.

Very fun to play such combo. I'm not sure if the increased GDR (from the website it is apparently doubled in 0. helped a lot, but as i have some very good armor items, with AC 33 currently, it can help the survival of a melee oriented character too.

Though, it seems my mummy is a bit too powerfull and lucky until now, it certainly means Crawl will find a way to kill it soon.

(took from my previous post edit to there)
In my understanding term of divine magic, if it costs magic points, it is some kind of divine spell you're casting, if it costs only food/faith, it's not a spell but a divine ability you're using

*sigh*

I never said god given spells should not be used as you're free to play as you wish, but as Frumple pointed it just proves the point as it shows that fighter characters will always have to use some kind of spellcasting (magic, divine, scrolls or item based ones) to get around the game, and can't rely only on their fighting abilities to get to endgame. Spells are a part of the needed assets for survival.

Anyways,
Mummy Chaos Knight of Lugonu can be a very fun combo, if you manage to get a bit lucky and survive long enough to have access to Lugonu spells.

I started with Mace as a skill (my goal being to increase the Mace skill a lot and find some Ogre giant mace) and to my own surprise, that mummy is always alive and is now level 11 (not yet explored Lair or Orcs).
I started with Mace as a skill and to my own surprise, that mummy is always alive and is now level 11 (not yet explored Lair or Orcs).
And while in the dungeon, it killed after slowing it down with a wand an Ogre early that had a +2,+2 giant mace.
Chaos Knight beginning always with a +2,+2 weapon helped a lot to survive as i found a few weapon scrolls spells to increase it to +4.

But what truly made a difference is  certainly because i found early (floor 2 i think) a +2 Orcish Scale Mail and before temple, 3 armor spells that leads that the armor early to become a +5 (max enchantment in trunk for this category of armor) Orcish Scale Mail, meaning a nice level of AC and not too crippling the EV that really helped the survival of that mummy.

Later i found a +2,+2 Giant Mace on an Ogre, that malus to accuracy is not that important as i have now a good skill level in mace/flail.

Few time later, the last Lugonu power to kick in, the distorsion brand.
So i planned to get to the Abyss using Lugonu power and then find an altar to get the giant mace branded.
And so i used the Lugonu spell.
Oh surprise that i was not expecting, -very bad- surprise : a Lugonu altar on my Abyss arrival screen.

Why very bad surprise then ? ... because i never thought the faith cost of the Lugonu power to go into Abyss would be that high, when i landed in Abyss i got the message that branding weapon was not anymore an ability for me ! basically the enter Abyss spell costed a whole faith level.
Something i didn't knew as i never went that far with any character and Lugonu.

Now that's not fun at all, i exited the abyss using another Lugonu given spell, *sigh*.

So beware, try to find some crappy distorsion weapon and wield/unwield them until you're self banished instead of using Lugonu power to get to the Abyss if your goal is a Lugonu altar and you haven't found one yet.