The Tavern

Whats the best strategy for a novice player to win 3-5 runes with a mummy?

For a novice, easily the best mummy strat is to play an easier race.

Probably MuGl of Oka (heroism helps with bad aptitudes, finesse helps with low damage and lack of berserk). Or MuCj of Vehumet if you are patient and retreat properly (Cj aptitude is fine and you can cast spells without hunger)

Gozag so you don't die before lair.

I forgot about Gozag. Yes, it's probably the most OP mummy god for experienced players.

Definitely Gozag, exploits the fact that you don't need corpses and circumvents your incapability to drink by giving you potion effects.

I'm rather fond of Nemelex myself. Since there are never potions in your inventory you have space for all your decks of cards.

Novice player playing mummy sounds like you super-hate food management and are willing to quadruple the game's difficulty level just to avoid the food minigame. There's a less painful way to do that: try playing hellcrawl instead then: viewtopic.php?t=21527

Maybe he just likes mummies, i feel like most novices pick races that sound cool to them, possibly after having read the racial description, but mostly not

What about Mummy with Necromancy ?

That sounds fun

kiku is good yes

Kiku is good if you like necro. Gozag is good if you don't. Nemlex is good if you like getting OP stuff from drawing cards.

Necromancer is pretty strong and Kiku is a great god. That definitely works.

Gozag is also a very a good god, especially for Mummy (no need to waste money on feed, access to effects that are otherwise unavailable). Though I suspect Hunter is stronger than Gladiator, due to ranged superiority.

Summoner is good too, because summons don't require much XP spreading. They also kill most things fairly safely.

Otherwise, IE is still strongish, but with -2 ice and -2 summoning and ice beast level 4, it'll take a while to get reasonably strong.

Mummies have a decent early game. You have average hit points and no armor limitations, and a ton of useful resistances that more than make up for fire vulnerability.

(Once you're far enough along that an average character would have several potions identified.. .well, then you start to slack off, relatively.)

Yer basic fighter/gladiator is good. Grab plate. Mummies have high strength.

Artificers are good, too. They have great early game survivability but nobody seems to point this out.

Sadly, mummies can't berserk because of...

WEll because

I mean, the reason is..

The perfectly sound game-play explanation here is...

Yeah, I have no idea.

Mummies can't berserk (and that is dumb) so don't be a berserker, I guess.

Mu^Be is one of their stronger 3 rune starts though...

Do MuGl or MuFi of Gozag. MuFE or MuIE are good too but obviously I think melee is easier. Gozag will of course make it easier to get rF along with the potions and good gear.

Specifically, which starts is Mu^Be stronger than?

Wait, do you mean "what's a stronger start for Mu than Be?"

I'd guess IE, Ne at least.

I would suggest a mummy necromancer of Gozag. Train fighting, armour, and necromancy primarily first. Try to use whatever the best ranged weapons or melee weapons as best you can until you take some damage, then use vampiric draining to finish the fights. Save all your mana for draining, don't use pain or other necromancy spells. Wear the heaviest armour you can and still cast vampiric draining. Don't waste gold on potions unless you have no other choice. Pray for naturally spawned shops, or use Gozag's ability to spawn a shop for weapons or armour. You ideally want to find a powerful one-handed weapon as quickly as possible then you know where to dump points for weapon training. It's okay to also just assume M&F as it's the most likely category and probably the best overall anyways. Use a buckler with around 4 skill only until you get further along. Vampiric Drain, armour, and a very good melee weapon are your main priorities. You should be pumping STR.

MuNe is fine. Mu^Gozag is fine. MuNe^Gozag is questionable. I leave it up to the reader to identify the inefficiency in this strategy.

Also it is a very bad idea to train early necromancy and armor at the same time: either you barely get any AC or your spells are still uncastable.

Best way to do the pure necro challenge, without accidentally breaking the rules. I guess.

The reasons Mummy Necro of Gozag is good are:

Gozag's abilities of potentially getting a good weapon or armour from a shop outshine whatever you might get from animate skeleton and animate dead.
Since you have apt in fighting, you want to try damaging stuff with ranged weapons, then melee until you get wounded. At that point you switch to vampiric draining to heal, then resume melee. This creates a best case scenario for killing stuff and surviving for a class which is pretty terrible in apt in general, except fighting/spellcasting and necromancy.......

If you have undead running around, they actually just get in the way of using ranged attacks to pepper stuff until it closes to melee.
To be more clear, you should mainly train fighting+spellcasting+necromancy, until you find at least some decent armour, go up to ringmail, scale, probably hover there awhile. It all depends, since you are using gozag, you might be able to purchase some amazing armour early on, so you have to remain flexible.

All I'm seeing are a bunch of naysayers, who don't sound like they've tried what I'm describing. I assure the OP, I have played around with mummies lots.

This is a particularly silly statement, if you have undead running around *they do as much or more damage than your ranged attack would* In addition to preventing stuff from hitting you with a ranged attack some of the time.

Try looking at undead as "slow moving multi-hit conjurations that also act as blockers and give you more time to get into a best case melee position"

It is only with a slight lack of sincerity that I recommend the atheist unarmed MuMo. You want to immediately drop your robe and run with no body armor, this will let you use your unencumbered stealth to choose only the best fights. Going unarmed guarantees access to your endgame killdudes on d1.

Don't waste time on spells, evokables, throwing weapons, amulets or bucklers. MuMo is exp starved because of the -2 apts everywhere, you need that xp for Fighting UC dodge and stealth.

This has been a proven winning strategy for at least three players, and fun for countless more.

Context:

Can you really have a bunch of pet hunger ghosts as a mummy? They don't steal any hp?

Hungry ghosts can do a trivial point or two of damage, but can provide all sorts of nifty tactical utility, similar to using a bat to make space between you and a tougher monster, or keeping an orc alive so the centaur closes to melee instead of shooting.

They can also block your escape route in a cooridor though.

Control undead could alleviate that last problem, though...