Zot Defense!

[Patashu]

Yes, this still exists. Have you beaten it yet? Experience beautiful Zot Defense the way it was meant to be played - as a magic wielding god of all you survey!

Some tips from when I beat this back in 0.10:
1) Start as Ne or Su and take Sif Muna as your god. Channel, make summons/undead, channel, make more summons/undead, get books, get buffs and conjurations, overwhelm your enemies with sheer numbers. (The most won class for Zotdef is fire elementalist, so you can try that too if you like.)
2) For race, you probably want Felid (doesn't rely on gear - good, since you won't find much - has nice UC and movement options, I forget if the extra lives work in zotdef but if they do good), but if not that Deep Elf for magic apts so you learn faster or Deep Dwarf for being a Deep Dwarf.
3) For placing defensive structures (oklobs etc), place them one line thick along the walls, e.g. such that when an enemy comes into the orb chamber, it goes to the orb, gets shot at from both sides by plants, gets distracted back and forth but usually not enough to damage/kill any of them, etc. If you just try to make a wall over where the orb is the enemies will happily plow through them and kill them all the time. For the orb itself though, I forget if you want your summons to crowd it (which they do, whenever they don't have a target) or to place a box of defenses over them - but you definitely won't want to guard it with your own body past the early game, as you are flimsy and not replaceable and would like to be able to move around.
4) Eventually you'll be able to build defenses directly in the rooms where enemies spawn in, controlled teleport around the map, grab the loot behind the glass, make arbitrary amounts of shallow water (ice beasts/tengu/gargoyle/merfolk/octopode reasons?), make statues and lightning spires, etc. The fun of zotdef is getting to the point where you are a god over all of the map.
5) Some of the maps are easier to defend than others. IIRC the default map is fine if you don't want to experiment, but give them a look over.

[dck]

I think a sturdy race is miles better than DE or DD could be in zotdef, particularly trolls or Mi -certainly better options than a cat could ever be.
Regen if particularly valuable in zotdef even if you pick the best possible god there is there, Makhleb, so I suppose VS are also good options there what with their fake rechargeable hp and huge base regen and melee damage. Ne is a strong background there also.
Makhleb is insanely strong in zotdef because:
He gives you piety from ally kills.
He gives you healing on your own kills, which is very helpful since you should be killing a -lot- on your own.
He gives you extremely strong, mobile allies you can pretty much spam with impunity and whose usefulness doesn't ever disappear.
He gives you extremely strong ranged attacks that give you ways of killing things that are not already covered by your zot abilities.

The change to statues in trunk has probably unnecessarily nerfed ice statues and certainly has made orange ones pretty much useless for their cost.
Burning bushes are great.

[Patashu]

I think a sturdy race is miles better than DE or DD could be in zotdef, particularly trolls or Mi -certainly better options than a cat could ever be.
Regen if particularly valuable in zotdef even if you pick the best possible god there is there, Makhleb, so I suppose VS are also good options there what with their fake rechargeable hp and huge base regen and melee damage. Ne is a strong background there also.
Makhleb is insanely strong in zotdef because:
He gives you piety from ally kills.
He gives you healing on your own kills, which is very helpful since you should be killing a -lot- on your own.
He gives you extremely strong, mobile allies you can pretty much spam with impunity and whose usefulness doesn't ever disappear.
He gives you extremely strong ranged attacks that give you ways of killing things that are not already covered by your zot abilities.

The change to statues in trunk has probably unnecessarily nerfed ice statues and certainly has made orange ones pretty much useless for their cost.
Burning bushes are great.

I looked at your log for zotdef ( http://crawl.lantea.net/crawl/morgue/dc ... 170814.txt ) and I have to say, I have no idea how you won zotdef without using a single spell. Every time I try something like that I get overrun by enemies faster than I can kill them myself. What's your secret?

[dck]

I don't remember that game so well but iirc I mostly delegated on klobs and statues to guard the side I wasn't personally taking care of and didn't concern myself that much with expanding past the area immediately adjacent to the chamber, instead fortifying that place itself so it could mostly defend itself without losses with some help and thus keeping my economy afloat. It also left much more room for me to actually use some of the strong and cheap abilities like grenades, water and klob circles as well as destruction.
After poking through the log I remembered a frustrating thing about Mi was using water with no flight and without being a fish. Mf trades the regen and hp of trolls but you do get incredibly better maneuvering power and still have amazing offense so you can probably get some nice results with one ^Makh.
Might run a Mf there actually, sounds like fun. MfNe should get rid of annoyances with both water and corpses, too, and has better leveling which is also important.

[milo]

"You feel a sense of great excitement!"
"You feel a sudden sense of peace!"

What do these messages mean?

[dck]

Runes!

[milo]

Monsters only spawn when the stairs are out of the player's LOS?

Having all three stairs in view stops it completely (or at least the 2k turns I just waited)...

Shirley that's not right?

[0.14.0-2-...]

[dck]

Yeah they won't start charging until you go back to doing your job somewhere close to the orb.

[milo]

What's your job close to the orb? I'm just owning the entrance room.

I have no long-term strategy whatsoever.

No idea what I'm really supposed to be doing. Zot Defence needs just the most basic tutorial. More basic than the OP.


edit: Anyway, the no-spawn thing really shouldn't happen, unless there's a very good reason to keep it, that I haven't thought of. Entirely possible.
I get that ZD is just icing on a huge cake, but they should taste the same.

[Patashu]

Wait, since when do monsters not spawn when you're looking at the stairs? That seems like a bug, it didn't work that way in 0.10 zotdef.

[dck]

Rounds don't start when you're in the general stairs area iirc.
Which makes sense because at one point or another you want to grab runes.