How long does a game take you?

[scud]

Originally Posted by MattB

Mind you, in my one and only win, the Morgoth battle took about three hours.

:jawdropsmiley:

[fizzix]

15 hours 59 minutes and 25 seconds (including 7 minute epilogue.)

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by fizzix

15 hours 59 minutes and 25 seconds (including 7 minute epilogue.)

You recorder an session?

[Derakon]

He recorded Elly, the latest competition, and won.

For my part, I don't measure how long I spend in-game (especially since I usually leave the game running in the background), but considering that I'm usually done in a bit under 100k standard turns, I can't imagine that I'm spending that much time on the game.

A couple of notes:

1) You should try the "no selling" birth option. It increases the gold you get from money drops, in exchange for making the shopkeepers only ever buy things for 0AU. As a result, you don't have to worry about the cash value of "crappy but good" items you find (like a Spear of Slay Giant, say), and can instead dedicate all of your inventory capacity to potentially-useful items. This also means you can spend less time in town and more time in the dungeon.

2) Don't be afraid to take risks. The game is inherently risky, so the longer you spend playing it, the more likely something is to go horribly badly that you cannot possibly account for through cautious play. On the flipside, you can sometimes greatly speed things up by taking a calculated risk. A handful of calculated risks is better than a hundred unconscious risks any day.

3) The groupthink of the old days was pretty silly. "Don't go past 1650' until your stats are maxed." "Don't go below 2000' without poison resistance." "Don't go below 1000' without basic elemental resistance, FA, and SI." We forced ourselves to do a lot of grinding because we imagined that instant death awaited us if we passed these imaginary thresholds without being sufficiently equipped. How wrong we were. You can dive as much as you like without poison resistance; you just have to avoid poison breathers. Ditto with the basic elemental resistances. FA is a bit harder, since most of the time getting paralyzed will still kill you (though it is marginally less lethal than it used to be, so you might recover). And you need SI as soon as you can't deal with being attacked by monsters you can't see, and not a moment sooner.

[Oramin]

Hmm, I'm a slow/conservative player (but then I've won with most of my recent characters). A couple of months per character averaging between 10 and 20 hours a week - best guess would be between 80 and 160 hours per Winner.

As an example, I've spent the last 10+ hours with my current Mage on levels 97/98 trying to find Kelek's. Could I win without Kelek's? Sure. But it is the principle of the damn thing. My fricking endgame Mages are supposed to have fricking Kelek's and I'm *going* to find it.

Note this is 3.3.2 and they've supposedly fixed the drop rate in the newer versions.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

You recorder an session?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_caN...f9GYhk1-MP_S9x

I was kind of sad that there were no "expert-ish" videos of angband play, instead of videos of newbies grinding levels 1-5 and then getting killed by an umber hulk. So I decided to do something about it.

[Scraper]

Originally Posted by fizzix

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_caN...f9GYhk1-MP_S9x

I was kind of sad that there were no "expert-ish" videos of angband play, instead of videos of newbies grinding levels 1-5 and then getting killed by an umber hulk. So I decided to do something about it.

Thank you for doing these videos. I'm looking forward to going through them all. Especially the later ones (I'm on 6 atm).

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Derakon

3) The groupthink of the old days was pretty silly. "Don't go past 1650' until your stats are maxed." "Don't go below 2000' without poison resistance." "Don't go below 1000' without basic elemental resistance, FA, and SI." We forced ourselves to do a lot of grinding because we imagined that instant death awaited us if we passed these imaginary thresholds without being sufficiently equipped. How wrong we were.

In old days those were not that stupid advices, mainly because game limited your detection a lot more than it does now. First of all you had only one screen, and it was rather limited size, detection gave you information only of the screen you were currently seeing. No extra info about monsters your char sees, and no information about items other than symbol onto screen. You couldn't even look beyond what was in your actual LoS and color selections were far more limited, so something like plasma hounds and fire hounds looked identical. IIRC running didn't stop when your char saw monster, only if you saw it. That resulted a lot more surprise off-screen breaths. At 1000' or so you could easily enter in LoS of Ancient Red Dragon without knowing about it and without fire resistance get yourself burned to crisp. Fog of war-effect was much stronger in them.

This obviously is now long gone, and advices from these really old days were given far too long, far beyond their expiration date.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

This obviously is now long gone, and advices from these really old days were given far too long, far beyond their expiration date.

Yeah, I was thinking of the 2.8.x days, when we had the "expand the power of the look command" option and so on, but the groupthink was still incredibly strong. Such advice might have been better in the 2.4 days, but then ISTR that grinding also didn't take so long in the 2.4 days because the item generator was more generous.

[Scraper]

Originally Posted by Derakon

A couple of notes:

1) You should try the "no selling" birth option. It increases the gold you get from money drops, in exchange for making the shopkeepers only ever buy things for 0AU. As a result, you don't have to worry about the cash value of "crappy but good" items you find (like a Spear of Slay Giant, say), and can instead dedicate all of your inventory capacity to potentially-useful items. This also means you can spend less time in town and more time in the dungeon.

Thank you so much for this. In my latest game I am playing with no selling and it is making a vast difference to how my early game is going. I don't think I will ever go back to a selling game.