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[rumpel]

Wow, what a kind move. No need to imply I would manipulate the save file, if you don't know why I'm asking. Just fyi, the game in the browser lags on my netbook unlike the downloadable file and that's why I was asking. But seems I have to stick to the browser version to keep track of my games.

[flame99]

...I really, really don't think they were accusing you. Just that it was a possibility, and hence why the DCSS dev team doesn't allow it.

[miauw62]

"Offline doesn't count" is a common in-joke in the DCSS community, but yeah, there's no way to play offline and still have your statistics count.

[rumpel]

Nah, I didn't want to play 'offline', but rather online through the tiles desktop client. But it's reasonable that it doesn't work.

I was having a nice hill orc fighter game with some ancient artifact armor until Menkare showed up. That guy literally killed me with like 3 hits, do you have any tips to kill him when I find him next time?

[IcyTea31]

He's an undead mummy, and his gimmick is halving your hp with death magic. Wear rNeg, and use fire or holy wrath against him. You might also want something to remove the curse he places upon you or your items when he dies. If you can't survive fighting him, run away, just as with any strong enemy.

[Robsoie]

Risk in dungeon crawl is something you'll have to learn to evaluate :
What is a no risk situation, what is a a minor risk or what is a major risk, and what's just impossible.

No risk can be on D:3 your level 3 human fighter run into a rat, the rat isn't going to have any hope to hurt you and you're probably going to one shot it.
 
Minor risk , on D:3 you run into a single Orc with your level 3 human fighter, your character should be able to dispatch that Orc, but his weapon could be good enough to hurt you if you're not lucky with how the game generated that Orc.
But what's important to keep in mind is that Orc are sometime not walking alone, and behind it in that unexplored part, there could be an Orc Priest just waiting to see you and smite you to death from afar.
If there's a priest, the minor risk become a major risk of your character going to die : if there's an orc priest just run away.

Major risk, on D:3 you run into an Ogre with your level 3 human fighter , if you decide to fight, from there 2 thing will happen : you win or you get crushed.
The thing is that in situation, if you still insist to fight, it's a major risk because you winning at that point will require a -huge lot- of luck, the Ogre instead is more likely going to hit your level 3 human fighter 2 times in a row without a problem and it's game over due to how high damaging Ogre are at that point.
Now if you win, you're nearly 100% sure to gain a level and gain a level for a couple of your skills, but you have so few chances of winning that it's not worth losing a character.
The best option is : run away.

But if by chance before running into that Ogre you had found some blowtube with poison needle, or some good wand of Fire or Cold (not to be confused with a wand of Flame or Frost that only shoot weak), suddenly the major risk is relegated to minor one : you can actually kill that Ogre with only minor chances of things going bad. Just avoid having that Ogre getting close to you. Because Ogre in melee is still major risk, even if he's poisoned or you can zap him.

Then you have the impossible situation, on D:3 your level 3 human run into Sigmund, you didn't had the luck to find someg ood wand/poision, at that point don't even try to have illusions of winning, Sigmund will turn invisible, will confuse/paralyse your character and will destroy you in no time.
Only solution when facing impossible odd in Crawl : run away, don't try to play heroics, remember Crawl isn't about heroics, it's about running away.
Cowardly characters are the ones that can win at Crawl, heroic characters are the one that die early.

[IcyTea31]

There's another one of those: the unknown risk. The first time I ran into a rakshasa, I knew from mythology that it'd probably make illusory copies of itself, but that was it. I threw my character at it, and my high-level Gargoyle Fighter proved defensive enough to live, but too inaccurate to kill the bugger. I tried out different things in my arsenal, and I learned: the next time I face a rakshasa, I should use, for example, (a wand of) Magic Dart to remove the illusions.

While Crawl is a game of cowardice, it's also one of learning from mistakes.

[Robsoie]

The 1st time i ran into a Rakshasa , there was Mara on the same screen.
So while it was fun, it was rather short lived

[EnigmaticHat]

You know, I can't remember the last time Sigmund killed me.  I think its because everyone makes such a big deal about how dangerous he is, I always take him 100% seriously.  I never get killed by things I actually expect to kill me in this game...

[Damiac]

There's another one of those: the unknown risk. The first time I ran into a rakshasa, I knew from mythology that it'd probably make illusory copies of itself, but that was it. I threw my character at it, and my high-level Gargoyle Fighter proved defensive enough to live, but too inaccurate to kill the bugger. I tried out different things in my arsenal, and I learned: the next time I face a rakshasa, I should use, for example, (a wand of) Magic Dart to remove the illusions.

While Crawl is a game of cowardice, it's also one of learning from mistakes.

If you try to use a wand of magic dart against a rakshasa, you will learn another lesson very quickly.  The illusions have just as many HP as the real one, so a wand of magic dart might as well be a wand of passing your turn against them. 

A wand of fireball might be reasonable, although I forget if they have fire resistance or immunity.  I usually find whatever I've been killing everything else with works pretty well on them too, but just running away is also a valid strategy. 

Sigmund is basically an extra strong orc wizard.  Orc wizards are already fairly dangerous early in the game, so obviously an extra powerful one is extra dangerous.  Getting confused without curing potions is really bad, and invisible enemies when you can't see invisible are also really bad.   I usually just avoid him, although drinking a lignification potion (once you're in melee range with him) seems to work fairly well, since the bonus AC blocks most of his damage, and the bonus damage kills him extra good.

[Robsoie]

It was older versions of Crawl that had rakshasa illusions having only 1 hit point, so indeed the magic dart tactic will not work anymore.

And speaking about those rakshasa creatures, it looks like not only they made their illusions much more strong, but they changed those creatures spellset a few versions ago , and they have now Mystic Blast available , and of course all the illusions created can cast it too anytime !

In the nerf game, it looks like the rakshasa got the whole opposite.

[heydude6]

Can someone explain to me why crawl has this design philosophy about not making the game too big and always removing perfectly good features during updates? I just don't understand what the game stands to gain from removing things such as item destruction and racial gear for example.

[EnigmaticHat]

Because they add nothing to the game and are annoying.  Racial gear gets mentioned in a lot of places but has little effect on gameplay, item destruction encourages annoying busywork like dropping all of your scrolls before entering a volcano.  Plus its just frustrating.

[Robsoie]

Of everything that got removed from the game, item destruction is definitively one that i don't regret at all, that removal resulted in less annoying gameplay as you didn't had to drop most of your stuff everytime you spotted an item destruction-able monster.

Still regretting the Hive removal though, it was a great place to visit when you had your AOE spells learned

[monk12]

Because they add nothing to the game and are annoying.  Racial gear gets mentioned in a lot of places but has little effect on gameplay, item destruction encourages annoying busywork like dropping all of your scrolls before entering a volcano.  Plus its just frustrating.

To elaborate, Crawl is very big on the idea that all of your choices should be meaningful and fun. Racial gear and the food system were/are by and large meaningless; there's literally no reason to spend any time thinking about those things, which means they tend to bore experienced players and confuse new players into thinking they actually impact the survivability of their character. Item destro created an environment where optimal play would suggest you spend a lot of time doing fiddly inventory management (multiple stashes, equipping/dropping items solely to deal with an item destro monster and then going back to your optimal kit, etc) which isn't very fun, so they axed it.

In short, "perfectly good" is maybe not how I'd describe those mechanics, and Crawl values elegance in design over theme or a Big Box of Thingys. When I feel like the latter, I play Dwarf Fortress. When I want the former, I play Crawl.