Nemelex start challenge

[omegasean]

So here's the challenge:

start an artificer - any species, mine was centaur.

take Nemelex as your god - immediately sacrifice two meat rations.

he should grant you a deck of wonders which will hopefully grant you an experience card.

show the results ! my photo is shown.

[omegasean]

um... i got a second experience card...

[Blade]

I've done this with a vpar online and gotten stealth to 27 and dodging to 15 in about 3500 turns.

[cerebovssquire]

27 stealth on D:3 on my naga win!

[Deimos]

Is there a reason we have to use a Artificer? Is it for the starting evocations?

[omegasean]

I suggested artificer for flavor purposes.

but no, you could be any class that doesn't start with a god.

artificer starts with some evocations which is pretty neccessary for decks of summoning and making destruction decks more powerful.

[tasonir]

with regard to the naga who had 27 stealth on D:3, the reason you can get that much stealth is because at low levels you haven't yet raised other skills. For every skill you raise, raising more skills becomes harder. Because in the late game mobs give much more exp, the amount of exp to raise skills goes up to keep it somewhat linear. So if you had high armor, fighting, a weapons skill, etc and then tried to raise stealth with the same amount of exp cards, you'd probably end up at level 10. Or even lower, if your skills were high enough.

This is why you can't scum pan for 27 in 10+ skills. I mean, you could, if you spent 500k+ turns, but you can't in a reasonable amount of time.

[BlackSheep]

I believe it's based on character XP, not skill level, but it's the same premise. The farther along you are, the harder it is to train skills.

[Blade]

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/mikee ... 210418.txt

It's harder, yes, but there's also a lot more xp available in the postgame. XP cards don't do nearly as much, certainly, but this op demonstrates the viability pretty well (23 skills maxed in 160k turns)

[sir_laser]

Well, the +5 aptitude also means that Nagas only need ~10+K XP to get Stealth up to 27. Since Experience @ Power level 2 grants 20K XP...well, this made sense to me.

[Igxfl]

Hey, so if skill gain is faster for low level characters, is it worth occasionally zapping yourself with a wand of draining to improve skill gain? That seems off.

[cerebovssquire]

Hey, so if skill gain is faster for low level characters, is it worth occasionally zapping yourself with a wand of draining to improve skill gain? That seems off.

Total experience as in total XP in your skills (which is independent from experience level-related XP) is unaffected by draining. This is also the reason why draining is a trivial threat.

[Deimos]

I think if Draining might have a large, temporary skill reduction, it would be more interesting.

[mageykun]

I think if Draining might have a large, temporary skill reduction, it would be more interesting.

I've heard this idea tossed around before, and all it makes me think of is the tedium of having to check and readjust your skill training every time you get hit.

[BlackSheep]

Why would you adjust your skill training because of a temporary effect?

[mageykun]

...I totally missed the temporary.

That could work. The micromanaging is only an issue with permanent losses, because you have to keep redirecting xp to skills you'd finished with or turned off because they were at a threshold you wanted.

[Deimos]

Yea. A permanent reduction just wouldn't work and increases micromanaging of skills and tedium of gameplay around draining attacks. However, looking back at my idea, I think one issue with temporary draining might be how it would choose which skill to drain. If it was a specific skill, how would Crawl know? If it was a random skill, would that encourage people to just spam level 1 of every skill to decrease the chances of it draining something important?

Thats a little roadblock, methinks, to having skill decreasing spells. The only workaround I can think of is giving skills weight for which one draining would prefer, with only a bit of randomness involved around two skills of the same weight. That's a bit of work though to change something that already works... decently. Draining could be improved upon, but I'm not sure if that's the way to do it.

...or maybe a reduction of all skills equally. Heck, this isn't even the right forum. I cant think at this point

[Jeremiah]

Maybe potions of restore abilities could also restore lost skills.

[Southpaw]

Yea. A permanent reduction just wouldn't work and increases micromanaging of skills and tedium of gameplay around draining attacks. However, looking back at my idea, I think one issue with temporary draining might be how it would choose which skill to drain. If it was a specific skill, how would Crawl know? If it was a random skill, would that encourage people to just spam level 1 of every skill to decrease the chances of it draining something important?

Thats a little roadblock, methinks, to having skill decreasing spells. The only workaround I can think of is giving skills weight for which one draining would prefer, with only a bit of randomness involved around two skills of the same weight. That's a bit of work though to change something that already works... decently. Draining could be improved upon, but I'm not sure if that's the way to do it.

...or maybe a reduction of all skills equally. Heck, this isn't even the right forum. I cant think at this point

It should be fairly simple, actually.

Crawl could keep track of how much XP you've assigned in the last X thousand experience to which skills and weight the skills based on how much of that experience they've been allocated. This has the benefit of increasing the chances of draining the skills you've most recently trained (which makes sense, since you're losing your most recent experience) while also implicitly preventing the basic scumming techniques of training all skills to one and turning off all important skills and turning on useless ones to prevent the "good ones" from being drained.

Alternatively, crawl could just drain levels from a skill and then automatically restore those skills as the player gains experience again (perhaps even in addition to the skills they currently have turned on).

[omegasean]

This ogre hunter is off to a good start, he gained three levels and 30 hp / lvl 14 in maces all from sacrificing some food. ah tis fun.