YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me


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Blades Runner

Posts: 624

Joined: Saturday, 18th December 2010, 04:50

Post Monday, 3rd June 2013, 21:41

YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge66PP9C ... e=youtu.be

I don't see any possible ways I could have escaped dying there. Does anyone think they could have escaped that death?

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 4055

Joined: Tuesday, 10th January 2012, 19:49

Post Monday, 3rd June 2013, 21:45

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Well you could have done the right thing against the gecko (run away and let it come to you) instead of doing the worst thing you could do against it (charge it).

Once you got all those enemies to see you not much you could do, yes, but letting them all see you was your fault.
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Blades Runner

Posts: 624

Joined: Saturday, 18th December 2010, 04:50

Post Monday, 3rd June 2013, 22:03

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

crate wrote:Well you could have done the right thing against the gecko (run away and let it come to you) instead of doing the worst thing you could do against it (charge it).

Once you got all those enemies to see you not much you could do, yes, but letting them all see you was your fault.


I guess that's true... I usually don't think of those things immediately after creating a character. I've conditioned myself to always assuming D:1 is harmless, 9/10 times I can beat D:1 with my eyes closed so I don't bother being careful until eventually something like this happens and surprises me.

It's not a big deal to lose a character that lasted less than thirty seconds, but it still makes me wonder why 70% of the monsters just happened to be sitting right around the corner from the start...

Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1093

Joined: Sunday, 12th August 2012, 02:29

Post Monday, 3rd June 2013, 22:37

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

D:1 can be quite frustrating with occasional gnolls (to make it worse make them wield polearms).

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 11111

Joined: Friday, 8th February 2013, 12:00

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 06:46

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

D1 can be cruel. Dying to first monster who happened to have draining weapon is not fun.

Swamp Slogger

Posts: 176

Joined: Wednesday, 10th April 2013, 10:49

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 13:33

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

6 things come to mind:

    1) Choose your battleground carefully: Always fight well within explored territory where possible, so you know your ground and you can be sure the the noise of the fight won't carry to any other dudes - you should have let the gecko come to you and fought behind the wall. This is especially important if you're unstealthy and likely to attract attention, which, being a fighter, you were.

    2) Always look for choke points: at 23 seconds in, a small 1-tile corridor opens up at the bottom of the screen, which was closer than the escape hatch. You could have backed into there and taken them one at a time, which brings me to...

    3) Explore: Always explore as much as possible before engaging enemies. Difficult, I admit, when you're a fighter with unstealthy gear, but there was some scope for that - you could have found that choke point above.

    4) Pillar dancing: You had some pillars you could dance around. Basically, you keep going round the pillar and each time you take a step back, take a swing. If you have two enemies in melee range, dodging around the corner will fix that.

    5) Stick to decisions: You decided to take the escape hatch, but when you got to it you stood and fought (in the open), which got you surrounded, which made you take both more damage and more enemies down the hatch with you when you jumped. This is what finished you off, not Terence. IIRC Terence is a melee character, and you weren't in melee range of him when you landed, so if you hadn't had those extra 3 dudes to contend with, you could have run.

    6) Don't panic: This should be rule no.1, really. It's not a real-time game. It looked like you were moving really quickly and not paying much attention to what you were doing.
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Blades Runner

Posts: 624

Joined: Saturday, 18th December 2010, 04:50

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 17:01

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Zargon wrote:6 things come to mind:

    1) Choose your battleground carefully: Always fight well within explored territory where possible, so you know your ground and you can be sure the the noise of the fight won't carry to any other dudes - you should have let the gecko come to you and fought behind the wall. This is especially important if you're unstealthy and likely to attract attention, which, being a fighter, you were.

    2) Always look for choke points: at 23 seconds in, a small 1-tile corridor opens up at the bottom of the screen, which was closer than the escape hatch. You could have backed into there and taken them one at a time, which brings me to...

    3) Explore: Always explore as much as possible before engaging enemies. Difficult, I admit, when you're a fighter with unstealthy gear, but there was some scope for that - you could have found that choke point above.

    4) Pillar dancing: You had some pillars you could dance around. Basically, you keep going round the pillar and each time you take a step back, take a swing. If you have two enemies in melee range, dodging around the corner will fix that.

    5) Stick to decisions: You decided to take the escape hatch, but when you got to it you stood and fought (in the open), which got you surrounded, which made you take both more damage and more enemies down the hatch with you when you jumped. This is what finished you off, not Terence. IIRC Terence is a melee character, and you weren't in melee range of him when you landed, so if you hadn't had those extra 3 dudes to contend with, you could have run.

    6) Don't panic: This should be rule no.1, really. It's not a real-time game. It looked like you were moving really quickly and not paying much attention to what you were doing.


On a character that has lived for no more than thirty seconds, taking 10 steps out of the start to see 8+ monsters waiting around the corner to kill me, usually I lose interest in my character and restart. Same thing with potions of mutation, if the first potion I quaff ends up giving me "your body is deteriorating", "you shout uncontrollably", and "you are frail (-10% HP), I usually just restart. Characters that get bad things thrown at them straight out of the starting gate usually aren't worth trying to fix. I play rather carelessly for the first two floors, but that's because I don't have anything to lose if I die. I do all of the things you mentioned when I have a more developed character, although something I have a problem with is that I tend to get overconfident when things are going well with a character, which inevitably leads the character directly to its death.

As for Terence, I know he's not what killed me, but it's just the fact that he was there at all that amused me. Even if I had gone straight down the escape hatch without trying to fight, I still would have wound up landing only two tiles away from a unique, which I would have had to run away from on a floor that is completely unexplored with no knowledge of where stairs are.

Snake Sneak

Posts: 108

Joined: Thursday, 21st February 2013, 22:00

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 17:17

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

In general, you probably shouldn't quaff un-ID'd potions, and shouldn't quaff !mutation once you know what it is. There are exceptions (fatally poisoned and hoping to find !curing is the standard one), but usually you should just wait until you've got ID scrolls. If it's just that you really enjoy the random mutation lottery, try playing trunk, which has potions of beneficial mutation (which can still, on occasion, give you not-so-good ones, but not things like teleportitis or slow movement).

I think it's best to practice caution even early. And if you're in a situation that looks untenable, that's -- if nothing else -- a chance to see if you can work through it and improve your skills. Then when you get a run that doesn't throw sand in your eyes, you might be just that much better and able to take advantage of it.
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Blades Runner

Posts: 624

Joined: Saturday, 18th December 2010, 04:50

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 17:30

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Thalfon wrote:In general, you probably shouldn't quaff un-ID'd potions, and shouldn't quaff !mutation once you know what it is. There are exceptions (fatally poisoned and hoping to find !curing is the standard one), but usually you should just wait until you've got ID scrolls. If it's just that you really enjoy the random mutation lottery, try playing trunk, which has potions of beneficial mutation (which can still, on occasion, give you not-so-good ones, but not things like teleportitis or slow movement).


I always quaff-ID every potion I find until I discover the potion of curing, since poisoning is unfortunately the sole cause of about 35% of my early game deaths. Unfortunately, this has lead to the early death of some of my characters by drinking potions of poison / mutation. I'm not gambling with mutation potions, I'm quaffing them on accident because I haven't ID'ed them yet and I wind up with lousy mutations at the start of the game. I can see by the way I worded that how you could misunderstand me, please know that I'm not saying "the first mutation potion I quaff", I'm saying "the first potion I ever quaff, ever, within the life of a character"

Thalfon wrote:I think it's best to practice caution even early. And if you're in a situation that looks untenable, that's -- if nothing else -- a chance to see if you can work through it and improve your skills. Then when you get a run that doesn't throw sand in your eyes, you might be just that much better and able to take advantage of it.


You're probably right about that, though. I guess I'll try being more careful in the beginning and see where that takes me.
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Blades Runner

Posts: 624

Joined: Saturday, 18th December 2010, 04:50

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 17:41

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Actually, upon looking at it a bit closer, Terence really is the reason I died. He stabbed me with a trident.

You hit the giant gecko.
You kill the giant gecko!
You hit the hobogoblin.
The hobogoblin is almost dead.
You block the bat's attack.
Terence hits you from afar with a trident!
You die...
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Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1111

Joined: Monday, 18th March 2013, 23:23

Post Tuesday, 4th June 2013, 19:05

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Thalfon wrote:In general, you probably shouldn't quaff un-ID'd potions, and shouldn't quaff !mutation once you know what it is. There are exceptions (fatally poisoned and hoping to find !curing is the standard one), but usually you should just wait until you've got ID scrolls. If it's just that you really enjoy the random mutation lottery, try playing trunk, which has potions of beneficial mutation (which can still, on occasion, give you not-so-good ones, but not things like teleportitis or slow movement).

I think it's best to practice caution even early. And if you're in a situation that looks untenable, that's -- if nothing else -- a chance to see if you can work through it and improve your skills. Then when you get a run that doesn't throw sand in your eyes, you might be just that much better and able to take advantage of it.


Everything you've said here is correct. I just wanted to say that I recently got poisoned either on d:1 or early on D:2 by a dagger of venom. Drank my 3 pots hoping one was curing. In order they were poison, mutation and beneficial mutation. The mutations I got? Fast healing and rPois :) And that still wasn't enough to save my sorry asa.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 11111

Joined: Friday, 8th February 2013, 12:00

Post Monday, 10th June 2013, 10:23

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Here are my rules:
1) Don't quaff unknown potions
2) If you must quaff unknown potion now (ex. you are locked in Temple and have to fight dangerous monsters outside or your only chance to survive current fight is to quaff heal wounds/speed/might/agility), quaff it in descending order of potions.
3) If you are poisoned and have one potion, quaff it at 1hp. Otherwise you might waste a potion (if you would cure poison naturally) or commit a suicide (if it was a poison but you could cure naturally)
4) If you are poisoned and have several different potions, start quaffing them at about 10 hp.

Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1131

Joined: Tuesday, 4th January 2011, 15:03

Post Monday, 10th June 2013, 14:46

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

Don't fight monsters with glowing weapons. Be very careful with snakes (their poison is very weak tough). Always read-id scrolls, and if you find identify, always use all of them on potions. Do not drink id potions.

For me these advices helped to avoid early deaths a lot.

Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 6454

Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06

Post Monday, 10th June 2013, 15:31

Re: YASD [VIDEO]: Crawl hates me

I actually scroll ID potions until I've ID'd mutation and cure mutation (at least), then quaff-ID the rest (Typically by that point I've scroll-ID'd curing and healing) I always look at my /- un-id'd potions list before I decide whether to quaff ID, and will quaff ID if the potions left are ones which are not permanently harmful or are permanently beneficial to quaff right now (Like experience or beneficial mutation). Sometimes I risk it even if the ones left un-id'd contain things like decay or degeneration, as those have long term effects, they aren't too terribly debilitating, but that's unusual and typically happens when it's gotten pretty late in the game and I have gotten *very* few ID scrolls. (Or had to use a lot of them ID'ing beneficial potions before I got to mutation)
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