petercordia wrote:A technique which may help you not take on too many monsters at once is this:
When you enter a new level, take all 3 different downstairs. Then connect the downstairs via manual exploration. Then use auto-explore.
Note that in some (possibly rare) situations this is suboptimal. The first time you enter a level, you get the first turn, letting you respond to whatever creatures you see immediately. On subsequent times entering a level, you don't have that advantage. If you enter a level and are safe, leaving it and entering it again from another staircase has the potential to put you in a very dangerous situation before you have the possibility of responding.
A slightly more robust solution to 'not taking too many creatures on at once' is to explore very conservatively around your initial entrance (assuming it's not dangerous when you get there) and lead anything you see closer to your cleared out area around the starting point before attempting to fight them. If you want to be extra paranoid about this, you should expose as few tiles at once on every step, and always expose the tiles which you can expose while having the shortest distance to a safe up stair case. I don't recommend being too paranoid in this fashion, as it's a whole lot of effort for very very minimal gains, but fighting things one at a time, closer to already-cleared-out areas is a very powerful technique.
In practice this usually looks like trying to 'spiral' from your starting point (generally speaking) and if you come across something, get it's attention (stand there, throw a stone at it, whatever), and retreat 2-3 LOS towards your explored upstairs before trying to kill it, (if it's close to your staircase, you might just retreat up the stairs to kill it, if it's the type that you'd kill in melee range)
Also, each time you go down an unexplored staircase, you reveal an entire LOS's worth of tiles, each one of which could contain something dangerous, doing so as few times as possible reduces your risk by some small margin. It *might* be worth the risk to explore a new staircase, if the path back to a safe upstairs gets sufficiently long that it's unlikely you could escape from even a single dangerous creature should it become required, and starting at a new staircase would give you an advantage in shortened escape path greater than the reduction in risk from having a known-cleared area in which to fight, and the reduction in risk associated with revealing fewer tiles at a time (and thereby being able to usually fight fewer things at a time)
Also, I do agree that since auto-explore is highly suboptimal in terms of avoiding risk, if you're going to use it, don't do so until you have a majority of the level cleared (or are sufficiently confident that you don't care about suboptimal exploration)