khalil wrote:Kay, I'm trying ogre necromancers now, and I was hoping for a bit of help.
What I've been doing:
Put almost all my points into necromancy, with a small amount going to spellcasting. Maces/flails and fighting get turned on once I have my spells at a acceptable power/failure rate, but they get turned off sporadicly as I need the xp for things I don't have good attributes in.
Worship Ash, and use animate skeleton to get around the fact I cursed a giant spiked club.
Not use regeneration, as training two spell schools, each with a -3 aptitude seems to be a bad idea.
Anything I'm doing wrong, or ideas you'd like to share?
I've had a lot of fun with OgNe, but I've never won one. (I don't win very often.) So I can't tell you how to win, but that won't stop me from babbling on
I do early game skills very differently. I start by upping necro only, but only to maybe five ranks or so. Initially, I use pain, skeletons, and whatever weapon is lying around (since they're all the same when you're at skill zero). I especially love lethal infusion. I don't try to get every spell early on with an ogre; that's for races with higher spellcasting aptitude IMO. I go for a modest amount of spellcasting, just to drop the hunger costs a little.
Once I have just a little necro and even less spellcasting, I put every last skill point into M&Flails. I rarely focus skills as much as the forum recommends, but for ogres I make an exception. They're so good at M&F, they're guaranteed an endgame weapon in the early game, and they're bad enough at spellcasting that I really want to get that sweet weapon developed early on. I treat them almost like an ogre skald (but better IMO because animate skeleton is so useful).
Once I get pretty high skill in M&F (at least 18, maybe 20), then I'm less sure what to do. But even then, I'm not in a big hurry for high level necromancy spells. If I go kiku, I want some more necromancy, pain brand, and animate dead. Otherwise, I might want armour or dodging, or charms or translocations. Blink, haste, swiftness, repel missiles, etc. I figure I will mostly bash things with my club, so I want support spells, not damage.
I never know what to do about dodging, though. Part of me wants to raise it, because I usually go through a painful period where I have no armour except a robe and I want some defense. Part of me hardly feels like it's worth the bother, because the large size seems to mean I get hit no matter what. Usually I raise dodging unless I find some useful support spell, in which case I go for the spell. I switch to raising armour as soon as I can get decent body armour. I still haven't really made up my mind. Sometimes I think ogres are the only race for which packs of green rats can actually be a threat, because every rat will land a nibble!
For gods, I like Ash for the awesome skill boosts plus monster detection, but I also like Kiku for corpse delivery. That's another reason to raise necro, you get better corpses. Okawaru also gives an effective skill boost, but so far I seem to do better with Ash and Kiku. Might just be me making mistakes though.
Anyway, I die a lot so this is no guarantee of success. But I do think that weapon first, spells later is the way to go, and I die from other mistakes, not early game poor skilling. I think the best I did was finishing lair and reaching D20, but I'm not certain (it was an offline game).
Thursday, 23rd May 2013, 12:53 
