Here's an idea: Has there ever been a comp using Vanilla where the goal was to kill not only Morgoth but also every other unique? Might be an interesting wrinkle.

Actually, yes. An NPP comp a while ago had the winner criteria based first on whether Morgy was killed, then on how many uniques were killed.

Hunting down all the uniques is painfully boring (i've done it once...and only once). That being said, I wouldn't mind comps with shorter or different goals, something like:

Kill 1000 orcs is a nice goal IMHO.

And you're required to listen to this song while doing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVcYsT9WPcs

I'm surprised by this -- the times that I've won, I've always made it a point to kill all the uniques because, well, they were there, and I also figured they'd have good drops. But I looked at my character for comp 119 and sure enough, not many of the items I use came from uniques. Do most people just avoid the tough uniques and *destruct* them when they get summoned at the final battle? No wonder I'm so slow by comparison!

It's certainly what I do. There's too many "I'd rather Morgoth not summon this guy" uniques out there for it to be worth my time to actually prevent him from summoning them, so I just deal with it when he does.

This doesn't necessarily work equally well in all variants. I believe that NPP assumes you're going to kill all the uniques before fighting Sauron. But NPP's spellcasting is considerably more intelligent than Vanilla's (to the point that when fighting enemy spellcasters with healing spells, you basically have to drain their entire mana pool before you can actually kill them).

It isn't quite assumed, but it does offer a distinct tactical advantage. With all uniques killed when Morgoth or Sauron cast "summon uniques" nothing appears, they are charged the mana and their turn is wasted. IIRC in older vanilla versions with all uniques killed greater undead are summoned instead, so it was preferable to allow several low-level uniques to live before the final battle.

That's still the case. I must say I rather like your alternative. Especially once we put in monster mana (any year now).

Just do what I did: fork from NPPAngband (one of the 2004 versions or later) instead of Vanilla, it already has the 4GAI built in!