Early game Unangband

[Derakon]

I've killed myself with a mage in Un using my favorite mage keymap: target nearest enemy and cast basic attack spell. The problem being that if there are no enemies in LOS then this targets the square you're on, and in Un you can hit yourself with your own spells...

(Or at least you used to be able to; I think this was changed after I complained)

[Napsterbater]

Tried enchanting a stack of 7 spears using the town service, not a single enchantment would take.

[Napsterbater]

Fruit Bats: the bane of any non-combat character. Couldn't hit one once with a +9/+9 Broad Axe.

[Ashkir]

Un is meant to be an extremely hard and challenging variant, though I agree some aspects are very annoying. I've never played a bard and the only hobbits I have played tend to be casters.

Annoying critters right off the bat ....... yep things like bats and faeries, knobble sticks and animated limbs can completely evade successful melee attacks, so even if you have a substantial bonus to hit, the evade check seems to be made after any hit attempt and therefore even a critical hit can be completely nullified by the evasion.

I tend to get around this by using aoe attacks, for example, a stinking cloud spell, throw an oil flask at a wall or floor next to the creature or target the floor beneath it rather than the creature itself. The spores you can collect from the corpses of mushroom patches are useful in this respect too as they effect an area once thrown. Again target a floor space or wall in case you miss the creature or it evades.

Haste is pretty easy to come by early game too. Shrieking Mushroom Patches go down easily, can yield Mushrooms of Haste and are common enough.

As for meleeing, first thing is to charge your opponent taking advantage of any damage multipliers the weapon wielded has ( a charge needs a 2 space move into an opponent to take effect as far as I know ) another trick after this is to press '5' on the number pad. This puts you into blocking mode, i'm guessing giving a bonus to defence obviously...... what is less obvious is that it also gives a sustantial bonus to hit while active ( good for 2 attacks ). I'm not sure if it is just melee that this bonus applies to or if thrown and missile attacks are boosted also. I seem to remember reading somewhere that it also gives you a much better chance of disarming traps too!!!

( I've been trawling through the Un help files trying to find out where the hell I read this stuff or found it out from and cannot for the life of me find it. Andrew will probably now post and say ignore this idiot's babblings!! )

Like I said, I have no experience of bards and even melee oriented classes have trouble with many starting creatures, I simply tend to ignore faeries and bats, but these little things have helped many a starting character of mine make his way out of Bree and into Rivendell and beyond.

I hope you stick with it as Un really is a first class variant with a hell of a lot of flavour and depth to it.

[Napsterbater]

Ahh, so I turned on Wizard mode and checked to see what I could do with a Hobbit Thief and a +9/+9 weapon. They seem to be fine as soon as they hit clev3, then they can survive the lower levels alright, but they still have to be careful not to face more than one monster at a time otherwise things get real dicey. Getting to clev3 though is a real challenge. It would be nice to have some speed to escape monsters with, maybe I could buy agility and go with a +9/+0 weapon at first, and get it up to +9dam later.

The thing you want to do with a Thief though is dive. I think I'll try a Wizard mode Thief and see how well he does diving.