Friday, 9th May 2014, 19:42 by tasonir
Futile attempt at a short newbie guide
Goal: Make a reasonably short guide that covers a fairly wide range of newbie pitfalls and general information as to how to get your first win.
It would be especially handy to have something that you could point a player to that would prevent having to explain why they should be training only one skill at a time on many CIP's and YASD's over and over again.
topics: Tactics and positioning (This is basically Patashu's writeup, somewhat formatted, used with permission)
Skill training
Identification minigame
When to/how to run away
Recommended easy combos and how to typically play them
What other topics should be added? Looking up monster stats? Armor/equipment/resists? This is in a VERY rough draft state - I'm looking for feedback and corrections, as always. I know it's a lot to read. Maybe I can condense Patashu's tactics section somewhat to make it less wordy, as that's currently the bulk of the guide. It's been mostly formatting, and I added a section on unarmed combat, and a few more warnings about considering the MAX damage you could take rather than average damage in the when to run part.
Do we want to make it less melee focused, or is recommending berserkers as the first win generally okay? Add a typical ranged character and typical caster section?
It would be especially handy to have something that you could point a player to that would prevent having to explain why they should be training only one skill at a time on many CIP's and YASD's over and over again.
topics: Tactics and positioning (This is basically Patashu's writeup, somewhat formatted, used with permission)
Skill training
Identification minigame
When to/how to run away
Recommended easy combos and how to typically play them
What other topics should be added? Looking up monster stats? Armor/equipment/resists? This is in a VERY rough draft state - I'm looking for feedback and corrections, as always. I know it's a lot to read. Maybe I can condense Patashu's tactics section somewhat to make it less wordy, as that's currently the bulk of the guide. It's been mostly formatting, and I added a section on unarmed combat, and a few more warnings about considering the MAX damage you could take rather than average damage in the when to run part.
Do we want to make it less melee focused, or is recommending berserkers as the first win generally okay? Add a typical ranged character and typical caster section?
Spoiler: show
Tactics (melee positioning)
1) Crate's Law. Crate's law says that you should almost never move towards an enemy that is in your line of sight. It's not due to one reason, but it's a heuristic due to a few different reasons. In general, you usually want to retreat from an enemy you have just seen rather than approach it.
2) How noise works: Stuff like melee that isn't stabbing, most offensive spells, monsters shouting and you shouting creates a noise that radiates out in a circle and tries to alert monsters. Monsters alerted will be in a 'hasn't noticed you' state, but will be awake and will beeline towards the center of the noise, and then start wandering. If that brings you to their LoS, then they're only a stealth check away from starting to hunt you, but if it doesn't, they won't go looking for you because they don't know where to look, they'll just go back to random movement. So there's no such thing as 'pack coherence' in that you can get the attention of the first orc you see, beeline on a retreat path, and after 8+ tiles let it come to you and engage, and the other orcs will either have gone to the original noise and given up or not noticed at all.
This leads to the general framework for dealing with monsters that are or may be in dangerous groups: 'lure/split'. The moment you see a monster, stop moving towards it. If it hasn't noticed you yet, throw a stone/other ranged attack at it so it notices you (a trick called shoutless - if a monster is in wandering state and you hit it first, it never shouts, it always just silently goes to hunting state). Now back up 8-16 tiles towards a safe escape path (towards stairs, doesn't go through/towards unexplored territory), breaking LoS with corners/doors if you can. Let the one or two monsters come to you. Deal with them as an isolated, safe incident that you know won't attract anything else with the noise. Rest, repeat.
If you don't do lure/split, and instead run at monsters on the edge of unexplored territory and fight them then and there (or even nearby), you'll feel like every battle is an endless torrent of enemies and huge groups streaming in, because the noise of the battle 1) attracts enemies in the unexplored territory 2) they see you 3) they join in the battle guaranteed.
Doing lure/split also means you can use things like berserk/all your MP in more comfort and safety, because you are almost guaranteed that no other enemies will show up after the battle ends.
3) Doors are OP
3a) A surprising number of monsters can't do anything about doors. Anything that has hands can open them, but basically any animal or monster can't, even things like drakes, dragons and elephants that you wouldn't expect to be stopped by a door (the unique Xtahua is a notable exception, being a dragon that can open doors - however, the unique Prince Ribbit, a blink frog, cannot)
3b) If the monster is the same speed as you, you can close the door as fast as it can open it. This leads to a technique called 'door dancing', where as long as you and the monster are the only thing around the door, you can repeatedly close the door to recover HP/MP/stall for time otherwise.
3c) If you just opened a door and see a bunch of shit you don't want to deal with, the first step is usually closing the door to break LoS.
3d) If your stealth is meaningful, breaking LoS with an enemy is a requirement for it to forget about you/stop hunting about you, so if you close doors on enemies with good stealth some of them will stop hunting you as you keep doing this, and since it takes them just as long to open it as you did to close it, it's not 'losing turns'.
4) Energy randomization. In Crawl, for monster movement only, there is a random chance that the monster movement will happen 10% faster or slower. These 10% fasters and slowers add up, and eventually the monster will fall behind a tile or advance an extra tile. (If you see one happen, the other is likely to happen again soon, due to the energy randomization going in the opposite direction.) This also applies for opening/closing doors, but it doesn't apply for the monster attacking or casting. If a monster suddenly gains or loses ground on you, this is probably why.
This is what makes the smallest case of 'pillar dancing', where the pillar is only one tile wide, not work reliably (but larger pillars are usually fine depending on the monster), and it is also why 'door dancing' will eventually fail with the monster stepping into the door after opening it on the same turn.
5) Corners are OP. Going around a corner, like a door, is one of many ways to 'break LOS' (there is also fog/smoke/steam, allies/summons, blinking/teleporting away, wielding a lantern of shadows, etc). A monster with broken LOS has to come up to one tile away from you (if it's a tight 90 degree turn) or even next to you (if it's a tight 180 degree turn) before it can fight you again, and this lets you maximize the amount of time you are meleeing them from if you want to kill them, or maximize the amount of time they can't see and thus shoot at you if you want to run away from them.
(also, don't forget about lure/split - you might want to not stop at the first corner/door, but back up 8+ tiles to a corner/door closer to the stairs, so you're not just breaking LoS BUT splitting the group at the same time)
Weapon swap trick. This only works on monsters that have a slower-than-you-can-take-a-step melee attack, due to having a very heavy melee weapon in their hands (ogres and their clubs are the most common reason). Here's how it works: After said monster swings, it takes more than 1.0 of a turn before it can take its next move. With the monster next to you, swap weapons or take off/put on one piece of jewellery (both actions take .5 turns or 5 aut) until the monster swings. Step away. A gap will almost always form. Why would you want a gap? A few good reasons are 1) You want to take the stairs (if the monster is not next to you when you START taking the stairs it cannot follow) 2) You want to cast conjure flame or otherwise make a summon in the tile between you both that requires an open tile.
Btw, a monster with a weapon in its hands is a lot more dangerous than one without, instead of doing 1d(hands damage) then subtracting 1d(your AC) it does 1d(hands damage + base damage of weapon) then subtracts 1d(your AC). And brands work for enemies the same way they work for hands, so a monster with a glowing/runed/shiny weapon might be packing electrocution or distortion.
7) Monster blocking tricks. There are a few ways you can get monsters to unhelpfully block other monsters:
7a) If you're standing next to a sufficiently 'respected' monster that is not hellfire resistant, enemies won't cast hellfire at you (because it is area of effect) (in particular, deep elf sorcerers are not themselves hellfire resistant, so they will never hellfire you in melee, except maybe to suicide?) (there are some other kinds of area of effect attacks that this will work with, but hellfire is the most notable example because it's really dangerous)
7b) Monsters that are approaching you tend to funnel towards the orthogonals ('enemy funneling rule'), so if there is an enemy on that orthogonal, enemies behind it will lose LoF and not be able to cast LoF requiring spells at you (you can also do this on a diagonal, but it's really stupid to visualise if it will work or not, so it becomes probabilistic trick if you don't have a lot of enemies on that diagonal for blocking)
7c) Stronger monsters will push past weaker monsters to get into combat with you... BUT, if the monster is confused/paralyzed/petrified/constricted/netted/batty (bat, harpy, unseen horror, etc) then the monster cannot be pushed past!
8) Folly of friendship trick. Monsters that are animal intelligence or higher, if they see another monster behind them that would like to join the melee but is chokepointed and can't reach you, they will step to another tile adjacent to you so that that monster can also attack you. So imagine there's two orcs next to the 'elbow' of a corner and you're fighting the first one on the diagonal. Eventually it will decide to step into the elbow of the corner instead of attacking back so its friend can step in. Now take a step back. You have essentially gotten a free hit without retaliation when this happened. Doesn't sound like much - until you realize that if you have a large loop of sharp corners to pillar dance the orcs through, you can do folly of friendship trick over and over.
(The corollary of folly of friendship trick is that you should never stand in the sharp elbow of a corner while fighting a group of enemies, because eventually the front enemy will move to trap you into that elbow - but being in the sharp elbow of a corner is bad for other reasons too, it's usually a wasted move that would be better spent cutting the corner with a diagonal so you are moving/escaping/breaking LoS faster)
This is a minor trick relative to the previous 7
9) Hack and back. This tactic requires you to attack (thus know your weapon delay) faster than the enemy moves, so it usually only applies to zombified/skeletal enemies, elephant slugs, goliath beetles and early game worms. If you wait near a slooow monster until it steps next to you, hit it with your sufficiently low delay weapon and then walk away and repeat, it will never hit you once.
Skill training
1) Your first priority is to raise your offensive skills that you use to kill monsters. Once you can comfortably kill everything you're encountering, train defensive skills to prevent dying too quickly. When you need more offensive power later on, return to training offensive skills. Offensive skills are your weapon skill, or any magic schools which directly kill things. Defensive skills are generally armor or dodging, and sometimes shields or various magic schools which increase your survivability. Fighting is both an offensive and defensive ability, because it raises your hit points.
1a) Once you've decided what to train - train only that skill. There are some cases where training two skills might make sense, and it won't be that much less ideal. But you never want to be training 6 skills at once. Focus on what is the most important, raise that, and when you have it at a good level, move on to the next skill for a while. It is recommended you use manual training instead of automatic.
2) Melee weapons have a concept called 'min delay'. Examine the weapon and look at what its delay is - every 2 skill for that weapon, it will drop by 0.1, until it reaches 0.7 (if it is 1.4 or heavier) or half the original rounded down (if it is 1.3 or lighter, e.g. a 1.0 weapon reaches 0.5 after 10 skill, and a 2.0 weapon reaches 0.7 after 26 skill)
The closer you are to getting a weapon to min delay, the more rapidly training it and using it gets better - until you reach min delay, after which the benefits of further training that weapon skill are a lot more marginal, so unless you can find a heavier weapon to swap to, you should train defensive skills for a while.
Also, the advantage of a heavy weapon's higher base damage isn't just a constant addition of damage - the base damage is multiplied by your skills, whereas enchantment and slaying damage is just added on unmultiplied, so heavier weapons will hit a lot harder than the numbers indicate, if you can get them to respectable minimum delay/
Also, random comment, the skill 'evocations' improves elemental evokables (that go in the misc category of your inventory), rods and wands by a LOT, but ofc if you're training evocations that's exp not going anywhere else, for something that can run out, so it's an opportunity cost thing, but a bit of evo makes wands a lot better
3) Unarmed combat is a fairly different from weapon combat - it starts at 1 turn (10 aut) delay and goes down to 5 aut at min delay. However, it doesn't decrease by 1 aut every 2 skill levels, it takes 5.4 skill levels to do so. This means it won't reach min delay until level 27, which requires a tremendous amount of experience. It starts at 3 base damage and increases by 1 damage each skill level, which means that it rapidly improves as you get the first levels into it. Skill 9 punches literally do 4 times the damage of skill 0 punches, on races without claws, before multipliers. If you're going to use unarmed combat to fight things, you generally train only unarmed from the start until you reach around level 10 or so, when you can start training defenses. Keep raising unarmed from time to time - it still improves rapidly all the way up to 27 (you are not aiming to reach min delay - it is a smoother power curve). Remember that skill costs rapidly increase for each additional level, so you don't have to take it all the way to 27 if you still need to train other skills.
Unarmed combat also suffers a unique penalty to attack speed depending on what body armor and shield you are using. Heavier armor can add delay to your attacks, which is typically very little delay, but can spike to high delay depending on the roll. In practice this isn't that important, you can train armor skill and remove a lot of the penalty. So while throwing on plate right away with 0 armor skill can be risky, as long as you have appropriate armor skill you can eventually use any armor you'd like. Shields add two types of delay: one which is can be removed entirely based on your shield skill (on a normal sized race: 5 for bucklers, 15 shields, 25 large shields), and a 50% chance of 1 aut delay which cannot ever be removed. Using a shield will also prevent you from hitting with offhand punches, but offhand punches are not as powerful as your main hand. Deciding to use a shield with unarmed depends on your race and how much you value offense vs defense, and is often a judgement call that can go either way, depends on how good your shield is, etc.
Identifying items:
1) Read all unidentified scrolls when you're not in danger to ID (the floor is 100% cleared - otherwise teleportation could put you in the middle of angry monsters)
2) Use identify scrolls ASAP on unidentified potions in your inventory, don't quaff potions to find out what they are unless it's literally the only way to not die left
3) Once you have most/all of the potions out of the way, you can start using identify scrolls on other stuff
4) AS LONG AS you have one or more remove curse scrolls available, don't use identify on weapons/armour/jewellery to identify them, put them on first to get a wear-identification. (The only thing you need to worry about are weapons of distortion, so don't wield random junk ego weapons unless you'd be happy with being stuck with them as distortion until xl18 or so)
5) Zap unidentified wands the moment you see them, if you're playing 0.14 or later you don't need a target, they identify automagically.
First character:
I also think that your first win should be Minotaur or Gargoyle Berserker, because they and their god's abilities are tuned for melee fighting and it forces you to make use of all melee tactics and positioning techniques, while at the same time not having to worry very hard about skilling or building your character (just always pick dex for the stat, always wear the heaviest armour you can find and the biggest weapon that you've trained to mindelay, train weapons until mindelay then swap to fighting/armour and later dodging, maybe evo if you find good evokables, that's basically it already!). You can of course do your first win with anything, but then you are learning two things at once, both how to play Crawl and how this specific start needs to be built and played to survive well.
When to run:
Also, in Crawl your HP melts very fast and restores very slow
If a fight could potentially go south, at 100% hp you should already be acting cautiously/safely, making sure you have a good retreat line to the stairs, thinking about what you'll do if it starts to get hairy, etc. At 75% hp you should already be ready to use consumables/abilities/powers or think about retreating. At 50% hp your life is in danger and you should treat the situation like it could kill you right now. Don't let it drop any lower because then you don't have any 'buffer' left at all, a lucky hit can do 20~ and later in the game 50++ damage.
Certain powerful monsters and uniques have access to spells like crystal spear which can hit for 80+ damage. It is very possible that any character without above average hp could in theory be killed in 3 turns by an ancient lich. But crystal spear can be blocked by shields, dodged by EV, and its damage is reduced by AC. The ancient lich also will only cast it roughly one of 10 turns or so. So on average, you won't take that much damage per turn. But if you are down to 60 hp and within range, you are technically only one turn away from death, and you need to react appropriately. Do not continue to fight as if you are safe, just because you were able to dodge most of the monster's previous attacks.
1) Crate's Law. Crate's law says that you should almost never move towards an enemy that is in your line of sight. It's not due to one reason, but it's a heuristic due to a few different reasons. In general, you usually want to retreat from an enemy you have just seen rather than approach it.
2) How noise works: Stuff like melee that isn't stabbing, most offensive spells, monsters shouting and you shouting creates a noise that radiates out in a circle and tries to alert monsters. Monsters alerted will be in a 'hasn't noticed you' state, but will be awake and will beeline towards the center of the noise, and then start wandering. If that brings you to their LoS, then they're only a stealth check away from starting to hunt you, but if it doesn't, they won't go looking for you because they don't know where to look, they'll just go back to random movement. So there's no such thing as 'pack coherence' in that you can get the attention of the first orc you see, beeline on a retreat path, and after 8+ tiles let it come to you and engage, and the other orcs will either have gone to the original noise and given up or not noticed at all.
This leads to the general framework for dealing with monsters that are or may be in dangerous groups: 'lure/split'. The moment you see a monster, stop moving towards it. If it hasn't noticed you yet, throw a stone/other ranged attack at it so it notices you (a trick called shoutless - if a monster is in wandering state and you hit it first, it never shouts, it always just silently goes to hunting state). Now back up 8-16 tiles towards a safe escape path (towards stairs, doesn't go through/towards unexplored territory), breaking LoS with corners/doors if you can. Let the one or two monsters come to you. Deal with them as an isolated, safe incident that you know won't attract anything else with the noise. Rest, repeat.
If you don't do lure/split, and instead run at monsters on the edge of unexplored territory and fight them then and there (or even nearby), you'll feel like every battle is an endless torrent of enemies and huge groups streaming in, because the noise of the battle 1) attracts enemies in the unexplored territory 2) they see you 3) they join in the battle guaranteed.
Doing lure/split also means you can use things like berserk/all your MP in more comfort and safety, because you are almost guaranteed that no other enemies will show up after the battle ends.
3) Doors are OP
3a) A surprising number of monsters can't do anything about doors. Anything that has hands can open them, but basically any animal or monster can't, even things like drakes, dragons and elephants that you wouldn't expect to be stopped by a door (the unique Xtahua is a notable exception, being a dragon that can open doors - however, the unique Prince Ribbit, a blink frog, cannot)
3b) If the monster is the same speed as you, you can close the door as fast as it can open it. This leads to a technique called 'door dancing', where as long as you and the monster are the only thing around the door, you can repeatedly close the door to recover HP/MP/stall for time otherwise.
3c) If you just opened a door and see a bunch of shit you don't want to deal with, the first step is usually closing the door to break LoS.
3d) If your stealth is meaningful, breaking LoS with an enemy is a requirement for it to forget about you/stop hunting about you, so if you close doors on enemies with good stealth some of them will stop hunting you as you keep doing this, and since it takes them just as long to open it as you did to close it, it's not 'losing turns'.
4) Energy randomization. In Crawl, for monster movement only, there is a random chance that the monster movement will happen 10% faster or slower. These 10% fasters and slowers add up, and eventually the monster will fall behind a tile or advance an extra tile. (If you see one happen, the other is likely to happen again soon, due to the energy randomization going in the opposite direction.) This also applies for opening/closing doors, but it doesn't apply for the monster attacking or casting. If a monster suddenly gains or loses ground on you, this is probably why.
This is what makes the smallest case of 'pillar dancing', where the pillar is only one tile wide, not work reliably (but larger pillars are usually fine depending on the monster), and it is also why 'door dancing' will eventually fail with the monster stepping into the door after opening it on the same turn.
5) Corners are OP. Going around a corner, like a door, is one of many ways to 'break LOS' (there is also fog/smoke/steam, allies/summons, blinking/teleporting away, wielding a lantern of shadows, etc). A monster with broken LOS has to come up to one tile away from you (if it's a tight 90 degree turn) or even next to you (if it's a tight 180 degree turn) before it can fight you again, and this lets you maximize the amount of time you are meleeing them from if you want to kill them, or maximize the amount of time they can't see and thus shoot at you if you want to run away from them.
(also, don't forget about lure/split - you might want to not stop at the first corner/door, but back up 8+ tiles to a corner/door closer to the stairs, so you're not just breaking LoS BUT splitting the group at the same time)
Weapon swap trick. This only works on monsters that have a slower-than-you-can-take-a-step melee attack, due to having a very heavy melee weapon in their hands (ogres and their clubs are the most common reason). Here's how it works: After said monster swings, it takes more than 1.0 of a turn before it can take its next move. With the monster next to you, swap weapons or take off/put on one piece of jewellery (both actions take .5 turns or 5 aut) until the monster swings. Step away. A gap will almost always form. Why would you want a gap? A few good reasons are 1) You want to take the stairs (if the monster is not next to you when you START taking the stairs it cannot follow) 2) You want to cast conjure flame or otherwise make a summon in the tile between you both that requires an open tile.
Btw, a monster with a weapon in its hands is a lot more dangerous than one without, instead of doing 1d(hands damage) then subtracting 1d(your AC) it does 1d(hands damage + base damage of weapon) then subtracts 1d(your AC). And brands work for enemies the same way they work for hands, so a monster with a glowing/runed/shiny weapon might be packing electrocution or distortion.
7) Monster blocking tricks. There are a few ways you can get monsters to unhelpfully block other monsters:
7a) If you're standing next to a sufficiently 'respected' monster that is not hellfire resistant, enemies won't cast hellfire at you (because it is area of effect) (in particular, deep elf sorcerers are not themselves hellfire resistant, so they will never hellfire you in melee, except maybe to suicide?) (there are some other kinds of area of effect attacks that this will work with, but hellfire is the most notable example because it's really dangerous)
7b) Monsters that are approaching you tend to funnel towards the orthogonals ('enemy funneling rule'), so if there is an enemy on that orthogonal, enemies behind it will lose LoF and not be able to cast LoF requiring spells at you (you can also do this on a diagonal, but it's really stupid to visualise if it will work or not, so it becomes probabilistic trick if you don't have a lot of enemies on that diagonal for blocking)
7c) Stronger monsters will push past weaker monsters to get into combat with you... BUT, if the monster is confused/paralyzed/petrified/constricted/netted/batty (bat, harpy, unseen horror, etc) then the monster cannot be pushed past!
8) Folly of friendship trick. Monsters that are animal intelligence or higher, if they see another monster behind them that would like to join the melee but is chokepointed and can't reach you, they will step to another tile adjacent to you so that that monster can also attack you. So imagine there's two orcs next to the 'elbow' of a corner and you're fighting the first one on the diagonal. Eventually it will decide to step into the elbow of the corner instead of attacking back so its friend can step in. Now take a step back. You have essentially gotten a free hit without retaliation when this happened. Doesn't sound like much - until you realize that if you have a large loop of sharp corners to pillar dance the orcs through, you can do folly of friendship trick over and over.
(The corollary of folly of friendship trick is that you should never stand in the sharp elbow of a corner while fighting a group of enemies, because eventually the front enemy will move to trap you into that elbow - but being in the sharp elbow of a corner is bad for other reasons too, it's usually a wasted move that would be better spent cutting the corner with a diagonal so you are moving/escaping/breaking LoS faster)
This is a minor trick relative to the previous 7
9) Hack and back. This tactic requires you to attack (thus know your weapon delay) faster than the enemy moves, so it usually only applies to zombified/skeletal enemies, elephant slugs, goliath beetles and early game worms. If you wait near a slooow monster until it steps next to you, hit it with your sufficiently low delay weapon and then walk away and repeat, it will never hit you once.
Skill training
1) Your first priority is to raise your offensive skills that you use to kill monsters. Once you can comfortably kill everything you're encountering, train defensive skills to prevent dying too quickly. When you need more offensive power later on, return to training offensive skills. Offensive skills are your weapon skill, or any magic schools which directly kill things. Defensive skills are generally armor or dodging, and sometimes shields or various magic schools which increase your survivability. Fighting is both an offensive and defensive ability, because it raises your hit points.
1a) Once you've decided what to train - train only that skill. There are some cases where training two skills might make sense, and it won't be that much less ideal. But you never want to be training 6 skills at once. Focus on what is the most important, raise that, and when you have it at a good level, move on to the next skill for a while. It is recommended you use manual training instead of automatic.
2) Melee weapons have a concept called 'min delay'. Examine the weapon and look at what its delay is - every 2 skill for that weapon, it will drop by 0.1, until it reaches 0.7 (if it is 1.4 or heavier) or half the original rounded down (if it is 1.3 or lighter, e.g. a 1.0 weapon reaches 0.5 after 10 skill, and a 2.0 weapon reaches 0.7 after 26 skill)
The closer you are to getting a weapon to min delay, the more rapidly training it and using it gets better - until you reach min delay, after which the benefits of further training that weapon skill are a lot more marginal, so unless you can find a heavier weapon to swap to, you should train defensive skills for a while.
Also, the advantage of a heavy weapon's higher base damage isn't just a constant addition of damage - the base damage is multiplied by your skills, whereas enchantment and slaying damage is just added on unmultiplied, so heavier weapons will hit a lot harder than the numbers indicate, if you can get them to respectable minimum delay/
Also, random comment, the skill 'evocations' improves elemental evokables (that go in the misc category of your inventory), rods and wands by a LOT, but ofc if you're training evocations that's exp not going anywhere else, for something that can run out, so it's an opportunity cost thing, but a bit of evo makes wands a lot better
3) Unarmed combat is a fairly different from weapon combat - it starts at 1 turn (10 aut) delay and goes down to 5 aut at min delay. However, it doesn't decrease by 1 aut every 2 skill levels, it takes 5.4 skill levels to do so. This means it won't reach min delay until level 27, which requires a tremendous amount of experience. It starts at 3 base damage and increases by 1 damage each skill level, which means that it rapidly improves as you get the first levels into it. Skill 9 punches literally do 4 times the damage of skill 0 punches, on races without claws, before multipliers. If you're going to use unarmed combat to fight things, you generally train only unarmed from the start until you reach around level 10 or so, when you can start training defenses. Keep raising unarmed from time to time - it still improves rapidly all the way up to 27 (you are not aiming to reach min delay - it is a smoother power curve). Remember that skill costs rapidly increase for each additional level, so you don't have to take it all the way to 27 if you still need to train other skills.
Unarmed combat also suffers a unique penalty to attack speed depending on what body armor and shield you are using. Heavier armor can add delay to your attacks, which is typically very little delay, but can spike to high delay depending on the roll. In practice this isn't that important, you can train armor skill and remove a lot of the penalty. So while throwing on plate right away with 0 armor skill can be risky, as long as you have appropriate armor skill you can eventually use any armor you'd like. Shields add two types of delay: one which is can be removed entirely based on your shield skill (on a normal sized race: 5 for bucklers, 15 shields, 25 large shields), and a 50% chance of 1 aut delay which cannot ever be removed. Using a shield will also prevent you from hitting with offhand punches, but offhand punches are not as powerful as your main hand. Deciding to use a shield with unarmed depends on your race and how much you value offense vs defense, and is often a judgement call that can go either way, depends on how good your shield is, etc.
Identifying items:
1) Read all unidentified scrolls when you're not in danger to ID (the floor is 100% cleared - otherwise teleportation could put you in the middle of angry monsters)
2) Use identify scrolls ASAP on unidentified potions in your inventory, don't quaff potions to find out what they are unless it's literally the only way to not die left
3) Once you have most/all of the potions out of the way, you can start using identify scrolls on other stuff
4) AS LONG AS you have one or more remove curse scrolls available, don't use identify on weapons/armour/jewellery to identify them, put them on first to get a wear-identification. (The only thing you need to worry about are weapons of distortion, so don't wield random junk ego weapons unless you'd be happy with being stuck with them as distortion until xl18 or so)
5) Zap unidentified wands the moment you see them, if you're playing 0.14 or later you don't need a target, they identify automagically.
First character:
I also think that your first win should be Minotaur or Gargoyle Berserker, because they and their god's abilities are tuned for melee fighting and it forces you to make use of all melee tactics and positioning techniques, while at the same time not having to worry very hard about skilling or building your character (just always pick dex for the stat, always wear the heaviest armour you can find and the biggest weapon that you've trained to mindelay, train weapons until mindelay then swap to fighting/armour and later dodging, maybe evo if you find good evokables, that's basically it already!). You can of course do your first win with anything, but then you are learning two things at once, both how to play Crawl and how this specific start needs to be built and played to survive well.
When to run:
Also, in Crawl your HP melts very fast and restores very slow
If a fight could potentially go south, at 100% hp you should already be acting cautiously/safely, making sure you have a good retreat line to the stairs, thinking about what you'll do if it starts to get hairy, etc. At 75% hp you should already be ready to use consumables/abilities/powers or think about retreating. At 50% hp your life is in danger and you should treat the situation like it could kill you right now. Don't let it drop any lower because then you don't have any 'buffer' left at all, a lucky hit can do 20~ and later in the game 50++ damage.
Certain powerful monsters and uniques have access to spells like crystal spear which can hit for 80+ damage. It is very possible that any character without above average hp could in theory be killed in 3 turns by an ancient lich. But crystal spear can be blocked by shields, dodged by EV, and its damage is reduced by AC. The ancient lich also will only cast it roughly one of 10 turns or so. So on average, you won't take that much damage per turn. But if you are down to 60 hp and within range, you are technically only one turn away from death, and you need to react appropriately. Do not continue to fight as if you are safe, just because you were able to dodge most of the monster's previous attacks.
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/tasonir.html
Officially ruining greatplayer statistics since Jan 18th, 2015.
I wrote the Melee Naga Guide.
Recording of my 15 rune 40k turn VSMo^Chei speedrun!
Officially ruining greatplayer statistics since Jan 18th, 2015.
I wrote the Melee Naga Guide.
Recording of my 15 rune 40k turn VSMo^Chei speedrun!
