Dungeon Sprint

[danr]

From the now deprecated freeforum:

I would like to see some better players play Sprint. I've tried a number of times and I just get killed after about 3-7 rooms. Maybe it's changed. However, it seemed to me to be impossible to heal up - even if you retreated, they came out of the woodwork back to your lair and killed you there.

Sprint is massively skewed toward certain character builds. Try a Troll Berserker - you will run into some trouble after a while, but you should be able to get more than 7 rooms on any of the maps.
The only Sprint win I've ever managed was in the Violet Keep of Menkaure with a Troll Chaos Knight of Lugonu. I used corruption to bypass most of the level and get the Orb, then I self-banished and left the Abyss, which puts you on the up staircase.

Also, I think the Ten Rune Challenge is by far the easiest map, though hardly trivial.

Try SpEN for Dungeon Sprint. Once u get stealth to lvl 7-8 and stabbing lvl 5+ u can reliably sneak to instakill almost every monster. If it survives 1st hit learn/use Confuse and later add Invisibility. Train spellcasting to lvl 9+ to lower hunger cost.

If u play "The Violet Keep of Menkaure" (easier then "red sonja" atleast for me) always choose Jayva as ur God some parts of map are filled with slimes,jellies,eyes and thx to Jayva they will be ur allies now.

Btw im no expert myself i never ascended. my best char till now HEFE died on 27th lvl of main dungeon back in version 0.5. When i could scan whole lvl with divinations and clear it out slowly.

But i was somehow able to win both sprints in 0.7.1 which thx to SpEN and some (brutal) luck.

I've beaten Sprint a few times.

Red Sonja: Try a SpEn, TrBe, or DEFE

The Violet Keep of Menkaure: SpEn, TrBe, or OgCK (Makhleb)

The Ten Rune Challenge: SpEn, TrBe (see a pattern?), or FeBe

DDCK of Makhleb is another good one, even though it basically comes down to summon-spamming.

DrTm of Kiku is another good combo for The Ten Rune Challenge. Use spider form and simulacrum to deal with monsters, until you find dragon form and haste.

I actually think that Sprint III is the hardest of the 3. Getting 2 runes is easy, the 3rd is hard, Mennas is insanely tough (he can silence and cast in Sprint) and Zot is ridiculous.

Sprint I is almost easy with a SpEn (I beat it once with Oka, once with Makhleb) once you get a pattern down. Berserkers are also viable and I got killed by Lom Lobon with a TrHu of TSO once.

Sprint II: Merfolk Chaos Knight of Makhleb is a pretty easy win. Go immediately to the left after killing the initial monsters and summon some smoke demons - they'll smite behind glass and you get a bunch of free EXP. If you get 2 water subvaults, you can easily raid them later and there is a ton of water on the level elsewhere.

I beat Sprint 3 with a MiBe, but I cheated and looked at the map file.

[lucy_ferre]

Here's a brief guide I wrote for Dungeon Sprint awhile ago:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... rint_guide

It doesn't include the latest map (Ten Rune Challenge). Feel free to improve/update it.

[DemiFiend]

With Troll Berserkers, I usually end up starving before I even get to learn Brother in Arms from Trog. With Spriggan Enchanters, I do great until I run into enemies that can't be affected by Ensorcelled Hibernation, Confuse, and can see invisible or manage to attack me just fine despite me being invisible. Any advice?

[Sjohara]

The Violet Keep of Menkaure is the only Sprint map I can bring myself to enjoy, mainly because it's the only one that even vaguely emulates the experience of actually playing Dungeon Crawl. It dumps you into a fight where your starting berserking potion is basically mandatory, and winning it gives you a huge boatload of experience to get you started on your actual strategy. From there it's nice and open with lots of routes and rewards, and any class that's viable in the regular game is able to perform there too. It's a neat way to see how a given strategy would play out at various points across the entirety of a real Dungeon Crawl run but in a tiny fraction of the time. Which sounds like it should be the entire point of Sprint.

But then Red Sonja, The Ten Rune Challenge, and Fedhas's Mad Dash are all so railroaded by comparison. In Red Sonja, you have one or two fixed, narrow paths, and you're either a Troll Berserker or one of another small handful of halfway viable options or you lose outright. The other two are almost crueler in that it's possible to get through the early runes without a specific power class, but it's an utter crapshoot. Just now I was trying out Merfolk Ice Elementalists in those maps, and the first rooms contain semi-weak-but-tough-for-level-1 enemies, like oozes in one and a green rat in the other. It's possible to get through these rooms with regular Freeze spam, sometimes. But sometimes you get bad rolls and you die unless you use a consumable. But then it's senseless to waste a consumable in the first two rooms when you know for a fact that they're doable without it...why waste time on characters who are bound to die in some later room due to their lack of a berserk or healing potion when it's possible to conserve those resources? So optimal play often requires throwing dozens of characters into unavoidable RNG deaths devoid of strategic content before you even get started. There's no fun in going up against the water elemental in the fourth room of Sprint III with a MfIE or SETr knowing for a fact that there's a 50% chance of killing it easily and a 50% chance of getting oneshotted without having any real say in which one happens, and there's not much fun in picking TrBe for the 10,000th time to trivialize it either.

I just wish it had been the kickstarted open-ended playground style of Sprint that caught on with the mappers instead of the tightly-linear, single-solution guantlets. "Play a round of Dungeon Crawl at hyperspeed" is just a much more entertaining concept for me than "figure out the one fixed sequence of actions for the one background which solves this puzzle (RNG-permitting)".