In what order to explore rooms

[fph]

Originally Posted by PowerDiver

One of the skills to be learned is in what order to explore rooms so that you can use what you have to escape when necessary.

Interesting... I have never cared much about the exploration order. It would be great if Eddie or someone else could elaborate on the matter -- it's a bit of "advanced strategy" that I have never heard about!

Thanks in advance for the tips, I'm sure they will be very useful.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by fph

Interesting... I have never cared much about the exploration order. It would be great if Eddie or someone else could elaborate on the matter -- it's a bit of "advanced strategy" that I have never heard about!

Thanks in advance for the tips, I'm sure they will be very useful.

I'm not sure what Eddie is getting at, but here's what I can come up with.

Know where the stairs are and the paths to them. The stairs are your most solid escape.

Go towards easier sections of the dungeon first and harder sections later. This way you get a comprehensive appraisal of the total danger of the dungeon. level.

Vaults are an exception to the above rule. You can always escape a vault by phasing out. So you never have to travel too far from a vault. It's ok to take out a vault as soon as you see it, especially if there are stairs nearby that you can escape down after you finish.

The fear of teleporting is that of landing in a large room with time or gravity hounds. Teleporting will usually take you to a room on either side of the map. If you can ensure that there aren't hounds in these rooms you can pretty much teleport with impunity.

[topazg]

I also tend to gravitate towards edges and corners, and try to quickly work out parts of the map that are "safe", as in, relatively few places that can get to them and hard to be snuck up on.

Routes to stairways are crucial to get mapped out early, particularly for players like me that don't use connected stairs. Corridors that double back on themselves have very useful strategic value too.

[Derakon]

At the depths where this is liable to be a problem, I generally find myself choosing rooms based on the enemies present, not the local terrain. Kill the easy enemies first, so that if/when you tackle the hard ones, a) the easy ones can't wake up and add their weight to the fight, and b) there's room to escape to if things go sour.

(Note that "easy" in this case mostly means "I can kill you before other enemies wake up, and you can't summon. "Easy" monsters may well still be credible threats, and you definitely don't want e.g. a great hell wyrm stopping by just as you've nicked Lungorthin on his big toe.)

This does tend to also mean that I stay away from the sectors that have hard monsters in them, to reduce the chances of them waking up, or if they're already awake, pathing to me.

[RogerN]

Optimum order of exploration is going to depend heavily on your short-term goals and the availability of detection. If you're going for low turn count, or if you're playing with disconnected stairs, it's important to locate that next staircase as quickly as possible. In order to cover lots of ground quickly you'll probably want to head directly for the nearest map edge and then circumnavigate the dungeon - this tends method tends to reduce backtracking and wasted turns crossing the same rooms multiple times.

If safety is a big concern or detection is lacking, you might need to spiral outward from the staircase so that a short escape route is readily available.

I would imagine that the most dangerous exploration plan is to traverse the center of the map horizontally. Although this allows you to detect a lot of stuff quickly, it's also a good way to get yourself surrounded as monsters converge on you from above and below.

[PowerDiver]

The main thing is to avoid being surrounded. You want to be able to retreat without running into anyone. The logistics vary too much based on where you start and which monsters you detect and which monsters you cannot detect, so there is no single answer. Every so often ask yourself if it is possible someone might be coming up behind you. If the answer is yes, try to figure if a different approach would have been better.