Brogue

This contest is now over.

Hey everyone, welcome to this weekend's contest! This is our 29th Brogue contest.

The seed for this contest, created from stock market indices and a bit of hocus-pocus, is 377723.

How to compete:

1. The contest begins right now, on Friday September 14th, 2012 at 22:00 UTC (6:00 PM EDT). You can start your game any time after this. The contest is open to anyone.

2. Start a game by control-clicking "New Game" in Brogue v1.6.4 and entering the seed. Verify that the screenshot below matches what you see on your screen.

3. Play through the game. You only get one chance. We are all on the honor system here.

4. Once you are finished, record your score and post the details of your game in this thread. Minimum requirements for consideration include your score, cause of death and lowest level reached. However, the thread is open to all spoilers, so feel free to add screenshots, game recordings, character dumps, strategy tips, etc. You do not need to wait for the end of the contest.

5. The contest will run for 60 hours and ends on Monday September 17th, 2012 at 10:00 UTC (6:00 AM EDT). You must finish your game and post your results by that time to be considered in the contest.

6. As a result of point 4,

PLEASE DO NOT READ THE REST OF THE POSTS IN THIS THREAD UNTIL YOUR RUN IS FINISHED.

As always, honor system.

7. Good luck! Have fun, etc.

Results

Only 13 players competed in this week-end contest. The winner is tinyrodent who ascended with 3 lumenstones. Congratulations! Cybermg could have taken the victory, but his rogue made a single mistake at a depth where single mistakes are deadly. I managed my second ascension, but did not dare stay too long to grab lumenstones.

This seed was trapped; the first few levels contained many cursed items. Six of thirteen players fell to the trap, and died very early. Other than the early trap, the seed was noted for giving end-game weapons early, a lack of potions of detect magic, a lack of scrolls of protect armor, and a loack of offensive staffs. To balance that, it had a wealth of regeneration rings, and was generous in allies. Some nice runics were to be found, including a spear of slowing, a dagger of quietus, and a scale mail of dragon immunity! Only five players managed to go lower than depth 10, three of them reaching the amulet. Let's hope the next contests will have less early deaths, and a bit more participants!

Here is the list of contestants, ordered by score:

Code: Select all

===========  =====  =====  ================================================
Contestant   Score  Depth  Cause of death / Victory
===========  =====  =====  ================================================
tinyrodent   73000    28   Escaped the Dungeons of Doom with 3 lumenstones!
boa13        63753    27   Escaped the Dungeons of Doom!
Cybermg      31244    29   Killed by a phantom, amulet in hand
Creaphis     15121    19   Killed by a dar blademaster
TheKing30     7614    15   Killed by a troll
thedrin       4306    10   Died from poison
triklod       4191    10   Killed by a wraith
jonathanmcc     80     3   Killed by a pink jelly
sciolizer       80     3   Killed by a pink jelly
mstephans       80     3   Killed by a pink jelly
enderale         0     3   Drained by a cursed ring
ais523           ?     6   Died from poison
ds_creamer       ?     ?   ?
===========  =====  =====  ================================================

4306: Fatally poisoned on level 10.

A combination of dar blademasters, a spider, and a bottle of poison gas I deliberately "a"pplied. All 5 enchants into the +3 ring of regeneration. I put on another uncursed but unidentified ring of regeneration hoping that it would be enough to circumvent the poisoning. Now that I think about it, doesn't regeneration cease while poisoned? All potions of healing used due to reckless play. I'm surprised I made it to level 10.

15121, killed by a dar blademaster on level 19. Recording.

UP: Around depths 4-6 I start finding useful tools to survive the midgame: a staff of conjuration, staves of blinking and conjuration from vaults, and an ogre ally. I'm not a big fan of ogre allies but one ogre is better than none. When I start running into enemy ogres I start putting enchants into the staves of poison and conjuration, which make for an effective combination against single targets.

DOWN: On depth 9, I overestimate the combined combat power of my ogre and me and we assault a large party of worshipping goblins head on. Finding that we're rapidly losing health and gaining no ground against a wall of shielded goblins, I signal our retreat by throwing a potion of poisonous gas into the mix. The ogre chooses to stand in the gas to deliver some parting shots and never quite finds his way out of the cloud.

UP: Somehow I manage to survive the next few levels ally-free, despite falling through a few trap doors and encountering at least a dozen ogres including a shaman's party, about three dar duets, a few groups of acid mounds and many other revolting denizens in terrifying combinations. I've dumped the rest of my enchantments into my staves of poison and conjuration, negated the cursed banded mail to make it wearable, and protected my war axe (which is still slightly better than my starting dagger even though I'm 4 strength levels too weak for it). My light at the end of the tunnel is a dar blademaster ally on depth 11 - not earth-shatteringly powerful, but better than an ogre.

DOWN: My blademaster and I fall through a trap door almost right away, between two guarding trolls and a worshipping ogre band. I leave my blademaster for dead and try to make a break for it, but become hemmed in by a jelly that joins the fun.

UP: Retreating into a side room, I find the items and traps I need to subdue the trolls. The ogres are still mostly obliviously worshipping. I rescue the captive troll that the other trolls were guarding. Now we're talking! I bring him back up to depth 11, crack open some vaults, and add a ring of clairvoyance and staff of discord to my bag of tricks.

DOWN: In a mystifying display of situational incompetence, my troll proves to be utterly helpless against salamanders, attacking and missing as many as 12 times in a row. Even with all the spectral blades I can summon to attract attention and speed things along, the troll dies a horrible death between a salamander and zombie when the former sets the latter's noxious gas on fire.

UP: On depths 15 and 16 I'm able to add two fresh trolls to my party of one. Despite not having the depth advantage of my first troll, these two have the remarkable ability to actually hit what they're aiming at, though imps still prove bizarrely dangerous. On 19 I rescue a dar priestess as well, and add some enchantments to my ring of clairvoyance to help me keep an eye on her. It's looking like I just might be able to make it to the amulet!

DOWN: I let my trolls into a room where a dar party is sleeping so they can silently dispatch the whole bunch. Somehow, one of them catches a glipse of me through the door, standing still in the shadows, while my first troll enters. When I see the dar blinking around in the edges of my clairvoyant vision I realize that things have not gone as planned. I enter the room myself to push my non-discordant troll back to safety. I'm slowed, burned and and hacked to bits in a single instant.

I have a bug to report (will also post in the relevant topic).

Anyway, killed by a wraith on level 10 with 4191 gold.

The problem was that I was resting to have my hallucinations fade, and as I was doing that, the wraith came, started killing me but the game did not break my rest. As I was unable to respond, the wraith finished me off.

But I really was getting at it. I had a heavily enchanted war axe, had just donned an enchanted plate armor, had a couple of good staves and wands as well as a ton of untested potions. Also, VERY IMPORTANTLY, I had identified both a scroll of summon monsters and scroll of aggravate monsters (and also scroll of cause fear and scroll of negation which can destroy an ally build) and was generally looking pretty good.

I wielded the warhammer to kill some sleeping kobolds on depth 2 or 3. Cursed. Then I put on the banded mail. Also cursed. No longer being able to beat a rat in a fight, I started reading scrolls. The first was protect weapon, and let me switch back to my dagger. When a monkey proved threatening, I read another scroll. Summon monsters, game over.

Killed by a pink jelly on level 3 with 80 gold.

Got caught with 2 cursed rings on (one wisdom, the other unknown).
I read all the scrolls I had and none were anti-curse ones and then a pink jelly took me out in a corridoor.
Normally the dagger would be good enough to win this fight so the other ring must have been nasty.

Drained by a cursed ring on level 3 (0 gold)

I was almost not going to post because I thought this was such a poor and careless playthrough but I've never died like this so I thought it worth a mention. My guess is that the cursed ring was either transference or regen, but considering i was fighting a jackal I'm guessing transference. Nasty.

Killed by a pink jelly on level 3. 80 gold

I guess it's a good idea not to equip stuff when you've already got one cursed item?

Died with cursed armor and two cursed rings. -3 ring of transference and cursed armor is a bad combination.

Succumbed to poison on level 6 (not on the high score table). Don't really want to talk about this one: went back to get the ring of wisdom, and it turned out to be cursed, and I as I was relying on the conjuration staff, that meant trying to explore deep with basic equipment.

The actual death was a result of being trapped between a vampire bat and an arrow turret, and I eventually had to resort to unidentified items. The wand of slowness helped; the potion of creeping death didn't ;)

EDIT: Wow, those cursed items seem to have got almost everyone. I know I dumped four cursed items, not having tried anything on the floor on without magic-detecting it first, but took the risk in the vault, as my stealth wasn't helping, and I knew I wouldn't be able to make it through the midgame with just the staff of conjuration unless it was recharging faster either from enchants or the ring; I assumed taking the risk would be safer on average than diving, having only just about managed to survive the goblin warlord vault, but it seems I was wrong.

In future, perhaps I should consider hauling a whole load of items up to a vault floor to magic-detect them and the vault at the same time.

80. Ditto on the Cursed RoT and Cursed Banded. Read and drank everything, found Gain Level and one healing. Then found summon monsters. Died to a Pink Jelly, deciding to die killing it instead of running.

73000 Escaped the Dungeons of Doom with 3 lumenstones!

Early game had a ton of loot and when I finally quaffed a Detect Magic, half of it was cursed... but there was an uncursed war pike, war axe, and plate. After a while I put +4 into the plate and ran with +0 war pike. Eventually I got tired of lugging around so much crap and put +4 into the war axe, leaving behind the pike.

Meanwhile I picked up an ogre ally which developed nicely with protection and haste spells. Along with a couple of trolls we cleared out the levels without much difficulty down to about 19. Lost the ogre somehow, then the others. But there was a caged ally room and I set everyone free with a wand of teleportation, giving me a nice little dar pack with priestess and naga. Later there were several more dar, an ifrit, imp, maybe others... I left behind some pixies and a dar battlemage.

Around this time I found a dagger of quietus and decided to dump all remaining enchants into it. I had no way to defeat revenants at this point so it seemed a good choice. I kept the axe for a bit longer but didn't use it very often once the dagger got up to +4 or so. It finished at +7, I didn't put enchants into any ring or staff.

The ally crew continued to grow in power and size making the last few levels rather easy. Finally on 27 I was fighting a tentacle horror when a dragon approached from behind my allies. They were all lined up in a row and several were burned to death before I could step in and polymorph it. Only 3 allies remained so I decided to head up to the surface.

Gold 7614 killed by a troll on depth 15

You are bathed in sunlight as you throw open the heavy doors.

Score 63753. Escaped the Dungeons of Doom!



This is my second ascension, also my second in the context of the contest. Deepest depth reached: 27.

I managed to avoid all the cursed items from the first few levels, waiting for a potion of detect magic to finally show up. I use-identified one on depth 4, finding that I had an uncursed plate armor, war pike and war axe among all the cursed lesser gear. It would turn out to be the only potion of detect magic I found in the whole game by the way.

On depth 6, facing a black jelly and lacking attack power and defense, I decided to dump the three enchants I had in the plate armor, knowing that this wouldn't be a waste, whatever build I would tend to develop later. On that same level, there was a +3 ring of regeneration in a vault. Once I identified it, considering I had not found anything else particularly interesting, I decided to try a regen build, and dumped all other enchants I could find in the ring. Several times in lower levels I was tempted to enchant some of my other gear, but ultimately I stuck to my choice and exited the dungeon with a +16 ring of regeneration that gave me 20 % of my health every turn.

This ring allowed me to take advantage of many dungeon hazards to fight enemies. In particular, I was able to stand in clouds of poisonous gas and be lit aflame without particular trouble, which was key to winning against the strong enemies of the depth. I retreated many times to traps I found, voluntarily stepping on them as enemies were closing on me.

I was able to protect both the war pike and war axe, and started wielding them as soon as I could. Thankfully potions of strength were regularly found as I dived in the dungeon. By the end of the game I was mostly using the axe, switching to the pike in a few corridor cases. I only found a scroll of protect armor on depth 23; I had managed to only lose one level of enchantment on my plate before that. I also found no proper offensive staff; it turns out there was a staff of firebolt in a vault on depth 20, but I killed the vampire holding the key while it was flying over lava; oops. So, to handle enemies immune to physical attacks, I had to rely on a staff of poison [3/3], my allies, and the afore-mentioned dungeon traps.

Speaking of allies, while I managed to have an initial team of a protect-casting ogre and troll survive quite a few levels, I eventually lost them to a badly handled pixie, and then entered a pattern of finding new allies, and not managing to have them survive very long. I'm particularly sad about an ifrit, which died very quickly to a revenant. Ultimately, I managed to keep a dar priestress alive until depth 27, where a dragon roasted her on the spot.

Depth 26 was strange. The amulet was far away from the stairs, but as a potion of telepathy showed me, there were no dragons on that level. So I was able to explore and accumulate gold. Depth 27 had lumenstones far away from the stairs too, and four dragons. Upon meeting the first couple, and while I had many ways to survive a few encounters, I decided not to chance it, and went back to the surface.

On the way back, I optimized my inventory for score (I had kept note of items abandoned on previous depths), which improved my score by about 2,000 points. I also freed a pack of dars, because I'm a nice rogue, but they all died spectacularly on depth 5 when a battlemage sent a firebolt across a bog we had just gotten through, triggering a most spectacular series of explosions. I actually went back to watch the fireworks.

Here is my replay: http://boa13.free.fr/brogue/boa13-2nd-a ... .broguerec

31244 - Died to a phantom on D:29, amulet in hand.

The early game started out tough - I wore the cursed banded mail and ended up having to confront ogres and goblin parties with absolutely no tricks up my sleeve. I had the uncursed plate mail, but my three enchant scrolls weren't enough to wear it, especially if I spent one of them to uncurse my armor (which I didn't want to do). My only choice was to put the three enchants into the staff of conjuration.

In a particularly scary moment, I had found myself between an ogre and two acid mounds in a hallway - I quaff id'd a potion out of desperation and it turned out to be incineration - so now I was also standing in fire. I really thought the game was over, but through quaffing my two healing potions letting a scale mail I had found absorb some acid attacks, I managed to just barely escape.

The 5/5 staff of conjuration turned out to be just enough to get me to the troll ally and start to develop a bit of offense with the spear of slowing I had found. Eventually, I was wearing the plate armor without penalty and was feeling a lot better about this run. The midgame was rife with allies, which worked well with the spear of slowing. Eventually they all got nuked by some encounters with some dar and a couple revenants. In the meantime, I was noting the locations of end-game items to save for later if I ever found any good items. These included the wand of polymorph in a vault and eventually several potions of telepathy.

At some point, I found some crappy +3 scale mail in a vault. I was sort of curious what it was, but almost got myself killed because I forgot to switch back to my plate in a fight. I was ready to drop it, but decided to spend one of my id scrolls for the hell of it. It was a +3 scale mail of Dragon Immunity. Having always wanted one of these, I knew I now had to destroy the endgame.

With dragons out of the way, my biggest threats were now tentacle horrors, liches, and revenants. I put all of my remaining enchants into my plate to eventually bring it to +10 to minimize the threat of horrors and make meleeing lich summons much easier. Revenants were still pretty horrible, but a 2/2 staff of firebolt I found (along with the 3/3 poison) helped a little bit. I soon learned that dragons were still a bit of an issue if an enemy ever wandered by while I was fighting them. The 9 armor was worlds worse than the 25 armor my plate brought me, and I realized it'd be game over if I were ever pinched between a dragon and a golem in a hallway.

Most annoyingly, my best weapon was a +0 war pike, which made meleeing down golems and dragons take forever, and made taking down horrors reliably into an arcane dance of poison, conjuration, firebolt, and hopefully a couple of war pike hits. Horrors had a 6% chance to hit me but it felt like a 30% chance. I never thought of going back up to D:3 to use a negation scroll to uncurse the war hammer - this would have done a world of good. As it was, it felt like I was barely taking down golems faster than the spawn rate, and progress under D:26 was painfully slow. It was quite steady though, since I had a number of escape options and consumables, and often kept up telepathy if I felt like I was in danger. It was very grindy though, and this is what got me. I was sitting with two dragons on both sides in a hallway, poking at enemies behind them with my war pike. There were swarms of lich summons everywhere, in part due to that bug where they start summoning things if you see them through telepathy. I managed to clear out a lot of the chaff, and eventually was just working on a dragon, when a phantom snuck up behind me (after telepathy expired) and killed me in a couple turns. It didn't take long with the 9 armor rating of my dragon immunity armor - I just wasn't paying enough attention. But when meleeing down a dragon with a warpike takes like 50 turns, it's hard to pay attention to each turn.

Impressive run, too bad the final grind got you.

I'm curious, what made you chose the spear and the scale mail in the vaults? In similar cases, I tend to favor the predictability of staffs and wands, or the smaller risk of rings. I generally look down at "lower" weapons and armors, because I usually have "better" gear identified, generally uncursed and unenchanted, which makes me miss many runics. Did you drop additional potions of detect magic, or just take a chance?

The contest is over, the results have been posted! Congratulations to tinyrodent!

Some answers to questions and remarks from some competitors:

thedrin wrote:Now that I think about it, doesn't regeneration cease while poisoned?

Yes it does. At least a staff of poison is a wonderful help when meleeing against a troll.

jonathanmcc wrote:Normally the dagger would be good enough to win this fight so the other ring must have been nasty.

enderale wrote:My guess is that the cursed ring was either transference or regen, but considering i was fighting a jackal I'm guessing transference.

It was a -3 ring of transferance. Each blow you gave harmed you by 30% of the damage inflicted to the monster. Nasty indeed.

ais523 wrote:In future, perhaps I should consider hauling a whole load of items up to a vault floor to magic-detect them and the vault at the same time.

Yep, that's usually what I try to do. Keep as many items as you can, and only use-id potions on a floor with a vault. You can survive the first 6 to 8 depths with the starting equipment, by that time most seeds will have had vaults and potions of detect magic. I also try not to use scrolls before I have had a chance to use detect magic, so that I can avoid the bad ones.

boa13 wrote:I'm curious, what made you chose the spear and the scale mail in the vaults? In similar cases, I tend to favor the predictability of staffs and wands, or the smaller risk of rings. I generally look down at "lower" weapons and armors, because I usually have "better" gear identified, generally uncursed and unenchanted, which makes me miss many runics.

Same here. Every time I open a vault I do an "expected value" calculation, and usually the predictable bonus of a staff outweighs the slim possibility that a weapon or piece of armor will be game-changing. If there's no clear winner in the vault then I'll go to more effort to identify more items, but I still won't equip any items from a vault without either detecting magic first or having a scroll of remove curse in my inventory. Since both of those items come in limited supply I often end up carrying one item from the vault downwards quite a few levels until another !oDM or ?oRC makes it safe to do some testing, and by then, even if the item turns out to be cursed, it might not be worth the nutrition to trek all the way back up to the vault level.

I think that sticking to predictable, obvious bonuses is a good strategy if your goal is to ascend as often as possible. The interesting thing, though, is that if it's strictly your goal to win a contest, a better strategy may be to forgo the straight-forward bonuses of certain items in vaults and take a risk on the easily-overlooked stuff instead. There's often a lot of clustering in contest results; even if you play your best and stick to safe strategies, you may end up in the middle of a pack of players that did largely the same as you. If you make riskier choices then there's a good chance that you'll end up stuck wearing a cursed dagger from a vault and dying early, but there's also a good chance that it'll have a runic powerful enough to let you shoot all the way to first place. In the same way, it might be a good contest strategy to screw with the RNG by throwing items down to the next floor. You might end up just making the seed harder for yourself. You also might make it vastly easier, depending on the luck of the draw.

boa13 wrote:Impressive run, too bad the final grind got you.

I'm curious, what made you chose the spear and the scale mail in the vaults? In similar cases, I tend to favor the predictability of staffs and wands, or the smaller risk of rings. I generally look down at "lower" weapons and armors, because I usually have "better" gear identified, generally uncursed and unenchanted, which makes me miss many runics. Did you drop additional potions of detect magic, or just take a chance?

The spear was shortly after my near death experience, and I was feeling bold. This was also around D:10 or so and I really felt like I needed something better than a dagger, was willing to risk the chance of it being cursed, and was also willing to exchange it later if I found a better weapon.

The scale mail of dragon immunity was a solo runic in a later vault. I tried to avoid throwing items down pits to avoid messing with the RNG, but I assumed it was only bad to throw them into unexplored levels (since it might somehow affect level generation). I imagine my assumption was wrong, and that I was changing the RNG by throwing items into known levels. I really wish this were fixed, since I feel like it violates the spirit of the contest. In the future, I'll try to avoid throwing any items down pits, although the occasional water trap next to a pit might mess things up.

Cybermg wrote:I imagine my assumption was wrong, and that I was changing the RNG by throwing items into known levels.

Well, that shouldn't be possible, but it is possible for level generation to be altered unintentionally in the course of normal play - if you use a potion of descent or pop a pit bloat near other monsters for instance.

I did play this contest, but didn't have a high score result, so no gold score.

Died level 5 to a jackal- had equipped the cursed ring of transference -- at least I had avoided the level 3 jelly.

with the results everyone else posted...not a bad attempt!