Bay 12 Games Forum

Running away from a bandit camp after being discovered in the act of trying to throw an arrow at yet another hapless bandit. A macedwarf is steadily keeping up with me (nice legs on that one). Keeps going for a while, no signs of stopping. So I throw an arrow at him.

Guess what it hits.

That's right. The right knee.

I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I started throwing arrows at the knees.

So, recently back from a break from DF due to other stuff, I gen up a new world and go for some adventuring. The first guy in the town immediately sends me off to kill a vampire who killed 1063. Reckon it's a pretty impressive number. Another vampire I was sent to kill had 298.
So, how many kills did the vampires you encountered have? Who was the absolute champion? While we're at it, how many kills have you had as a vampire, if the number is significant?

Edit: just after posting this, I was sent to kill a vampire with 1756 kills on him. Not bad.

Yeah, still getting those myself. Only found two castles that were inhabited by people over, like, ten worlds. Don't know what causes that, but the world age thing is cited frequently.

As noted above, throwing is currently better than archery and crossbow skills in every way. If thrown by hand, arrows and bolts still do the same damage as they would if fired from their respective launchers, and it takes less time to throw than to fire. You can also throw other objects, starting with rocks and sand and up to the armour and weapons of enemies and your own underwear. And don't forget the art of throwing corpses at enemies.

Do not forget that to tealth, you don't have to have any Ambusher skill. You can easily stay five or six steps away from an enemy and remain undiscovered, which allows you to use throwing wih impunity. If you find a bowman/crossbowman on your bandit camp forays, be sure to relieve him/her of his quiver, and do so with the rest of them you see. This might be cheesy at times, but really helps the survival of your adventurer in case of meeting a real night creature instead of a consort etc.

Started an elf adventurer with points in swordsman, but ended up throwing projectiles at enemies instead. After a couple bandit camps I went to a night creature lair to kill the weaker version. I wasted most of my projectiles on it, damaging it about everywhere, including most of the internal organs save for the one hit kill ones (tore both of its cheeks, even), but in the end it finally spotted me and rushed at me. Since I haven't encountered any swordsmen, I still had only the default emergency dagger as the only real weapon, so I defended myself with it. The following battle was mostly me stabbing the creature wherever I could and him, being a large creature, knocking me backwards every time it could. Eventually it almost forced me out of its lair (the battle started at the other end), when I had a slashing opportunity on its head and sent it flying with a single slash.
I had a picture similar to Isildur cutting off Sauron's fingers in the first LotR, just, y'know, with the head instead of fingers.
Yeah, large copper daggers are awesome sometimes.

Update: went back to report the victory and ran straight into a lair. Its owner turned out to be the 'real' version of the same species of night creatures, so I had to dodge it until I could stealth and started peppering it with projectiles. I was about to run out when I hit its foot and so had to approach it to actually hit, and thus began the long kiting session. I spent... quite a bit of time hurling stuff at it and picking it back up because I was running out of it. By the end of the fight, every single body part of it was red except the trunk, it had an arrow through about every appendage, its exoskeleton was shattered, its belly was blown open and its guts were torn off, it had an arrow through its skull and finally through its heart, which was the killing blow. It still spent a few turns after that crawling towards me with incredible determination. At least it was crippled enough for me to replenish my thrown stuff. Still, was an impressive encounter.

Just met the Iron Badger. He survived four direct blows to the head from a silver warhammer, numerous blows to upper and lower body, evisceration and a rib through his heart before having his skull crushed between the adventurer's jaws.

Had the problem during shorter worldgens too, but guess I simply had the luck to run into all the wrong (or right, if you look at it differently) castles. I like longer histories too. The last world was not particularly long-storied (1050), but the civs were developed enough, some rivers had lines of fortresses on each bank nearing the sea. And every single one was inhabited by horses. Guess they wiped out the previous inhabitants.