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[Chambz]

Hey everyone, I've just recently gotten into the roguelike genre when I started playing crogue on my calculator. I recently beat doomrl on ITYTD (yeah, I know) and was wondering what people do for AoM?  I usually go SoG>SoG>dualgunner then maybe eagle eye once or twice and then it varies. I guess people thought cateye was good, but I guess they changed it because I've never gotten a monster to ignore me. Anyways, last time I got right past city of skulls and ended up running out of ammo =/ I've read up on tips and tricks and have tried lots of them, but they just don't seem like they're enough to do certain things. Such as... beat AoB. I know it's been done, but I either have horrible luck or something just isn't going right.


Tl;dr:   Strategies you use, specifically for AoM. Also, great game you have here. REALLY enjoying it.

[Titt]

By AoM you mean Angel of Marksmanship, right? Sometimes people write AoM for Angel of Masochism.

On Angel of Marksmanship I go SoG, SoG, Dualgunner, EE, SoG, EE--sometimes taking the EE earlier, depending on the game. After that I go with some levels of SoB if I have found a good artifact pistol like the Beretta and not many mods, or two levels of Finesse and then Whizkid if I have found enough good (damage is best, speed comes next) mods that my advanced pistol is getting nearly full of mods. Once you get SoG*3, Dualgunner, and EE*2, you're set up to be deadly enough that you won't need TaN or Ironman traits, since you're probably going to be at least as deadly as a chaingun-based character until the end of the game.

For purposes of learning to play DoomRL well, it helped me a lot to play some games where I got Intuition*3, though, and learned to kill things without seeing them. For Angel of Marksmanship you could try SoG, SoG, Dualgunner, EE, SoG, EE, and then three levels of Intuition--you would get to play the last few levels of the game with Int*3 in this way. Or you could play a non-challenge game, get the chaingun ASAP, and play EE, EE, and then immediately three levels of Intuition. You will need to pick up all the ammo you can find (this kind of "blind-fighting" uses a lot of ammo), but learning to fight monsters that are outside your field of vision is very valuable. After that, you will learn to do it without the third level of Intuition, by listening (with stereo headphones) to what direction monsters are coming from, and then firing into spaces they might be in that you can't see--you will hear their "pain" noise when you hit. With some practice this becomes a very valuable technique and you won't need to invest three levels of traits into Intuition to do it.

Blade often takes a level of Cateye in his posted games. I haven't found this so useful but Blade is a much better player than I am, maybe he can explain how it's useful.

Anyway, Angel of Marksmanship is much easier once you have some practice at killing monsters before you see them.

[Blade]

Blade often takes a level of Cateye in his posted games. I haven't found this so useful but Blade is a much better player than I am, maybe he can explain how it's useful.

2 levels to be correct.) But not in all games, only in tough ones, where i'm in trouble with meds and/or ammo. Why - because:
1) You don't suffer 50% to-hit out-of-range penalty when firing monsters that are outside your normal LoS, but inside your CatEye LoS. As result - more damage to them and less ammo loss for you. Also EE*2 is enough to hit quite often.
2) You can see monster without him seeing you. If you are sure that you rocks, you can start firing and he will need to spend 1 or 2 turns walking in your direction to at least see you. If you are not sure in your victory, you can fully avoid him(because he haven't seen you, so he won't follow you), or you can remember where he is standing(or approximately in which area he is moving), move several steps back, and then cover all this area with lead.

Imho it's the most usefull trait because no other trait increases your survivallence chances so greately.

[Chambz]

2 levels to be correct.) But not in all games, only in tough ones, where i'm in trouble with meds and/or ammo.

Even in the newest version? I guess I didn't know there was a cateye two... but I guess I haven't gotten that far with that build.

@ Titt, I ran out of ammo completely in my most recent run on AoMarksman. I guess I could have probably gotten a bit more ammo in the earlier levels, but I don't think much more. I also forgot about the sound thing but you can't really do it in AoM anyways... I've tried giftdropping for AoB at least which works well unless they've already decided to guard something else.

And I guess I am really unlucky or doing something wrong because I have only found two uniques ever. I found trigun once when it was completely useless to me and then butchers cleaver in AoM...

[Chambz]

Sorry for the double post, guys. I just beat AoM and with probably 700 bullets to spare...
my build was SoG>SoG>Dual>SoG>EE>SoB>SoB>EE>Cateyex2

Thing is, only unique I found was freakin phaseboots on like level 20... How do you guys find stuff??

[rekenne]

Sheer, absolute, luck. I found a Blaster early on one of my AoMr runs. It was pretty awesome. That was the run it saved my ass, as it was also one of my first AoMr runs, and I was too stupid to horde 9mm ammo early in the game.

My build tends to run toward Finesse and then Whizkid before going for Cateye.
Typically, SoaG x2 -> DG -> SoaG -> EE -> Finesse -> Finesse -> Whiz -> EE -> Cateye x2

Of course, if I somehow find 2 artifact pistols, I'll pick up EE and then Cateye, but I've never had that happen. That would just be too damn amazing.

[Karry]

Blade is a much better player than I am

Blade is also a robot. :P

Anyway, i routinely try to beat AoMr/U, and its insanely hard. By level 2 you generally get 2,5 exp.levels, and the third level always has two hell knights. Sometimes three. So unless you get extremely lucky or somehow find enough imps to get the Dualgunner - you're pretty much dead.

Found Beretta once, eats through ammo like there's no tomorrow. And by the time you find it you're pretty much guaranteed to have Dualgunner, which means a wasted perk, since Beretta is not dual-friendly, and has no spesial reload.

Blaster is great, but is much more of a rarity, and also not dual-friendly.

Got to level 15, tops.

[Titt]

What do you mean about Beretta and Blaster not being "dual-friendly"? I have dualgunned with each of them before, and I think it works well. If you just mean that pressing R does not give you the same special reload (reload both pistols) as when you are dualgunning with a pistol in your primary weapon slot, swap weapons, so you DO have a pistol in your primary slot, and the Beretta or Blaster in your secondary slot--then pressing R will work as normal.

Beretta does have a special reload, in a sense--it switches between the weapon's firing modes, which is very useful thing to be able to do, sometimes. Since I usually keep it in the secondary weapon slot while dualgunning, this means I only switch Beretta firing modes between fights, which is fine.

Also: Chambz, about your ammo difficulties, you should pick up every single piece of 10mm ammo until you have at least 800 rounds (8 full inventory slots) of it--I don't usually stop until I have 1000 rounds. This means both grabbing all the clips from corpses, and also unloading every single pistol and chaingun (press U, in case you don't know about this command) off the floor. Also taking at least one level of EE early on will save you a lot of ammo, since less of your shots will be wasted; and obviously taking traits which boost your weapon accuracy (EE) and damage (SoG, SoB) will save you ammo because you will have to fire less shots than if you take traits which do other things (Ironman, Hellrunner, TaN, ...). Anyway, good luck with your ammo problems--playing on AoMr does sometimes introduce some ammo problems, especially if you use Beretta, but it's typically worse if you play a chaingun-based character, since after two levels of Triggerhappy you go through ammo at a fantastic rate. You have to learn to conserve ammo at times, and to dedicate a lot of inventory slots to stockpiling ammo, and there are a few tricks here and there--like, in certain situations, letting an Archvile live for longer than you otherwise would, repeatedly killing a former captain and letting the Archvile resurrect it, because after you kill the Archvile there will be massive amounts of 10mm ammo laying around.

[Karry]

I have dualgunned with each of them before, and I think it works well.

Not really.

swap weapons, so you DO have a pistol in your primary slot, and the Beretta or Blaster in your secondary slot--then pressing R will work as normal.

And thats exactly why Beretta is NOT dual-friendly. If you stand before overwhelming opposition - swapping weapons then reloading may land you dead, whereas if you had two pistols you could reload them and keep shooting.

As for Blaster - its firing time is not equal to that of a pistol, and that means that every so often you will lose shots, because the the timing differences.

But all that is irrelevant, since you only get unique pistols maybe once in a hundred games.

[Titt]

I think Beretta is pretty dual-friendly, because you don't need to swap weapons or switch firing modes during a fight--you should keep the Beretta in whatever firing mode you need it in (probably as high of a rate of fire as you can get it in while still maintaining a reasonable accuracy, which depends on how many levels of EE you have taken; or a lower rate of fire if you need to conserve ammo). Pressing R when you have a pistol as primary weapon and Beretta as secondary weapon still reloads both. Have you tried this? Maybe in an earlier version of the game, it did not work this way, but it works in 0.9.8.10.

I think finding artifact pistols is much more common than 1 in 100 games, also--seems like I've found one in close to half of my AoMr games that got down at least as far as the Mortuary. The artifact pistols are some of the most common artifacts, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I have beaten AoMr on H difficulty while dualgunning with artifact pistols, and I thought it worked great, so I guess we just disagree.

[rekenne]

As for Blaster - its firing time is not equal to that of a pistol, and that means that every so often you will lose shots, because the the timing differences.

But all that is irrelevant, since you only get unique pistols maybe once in a hundred games.

Indeed. It's FASTER than a normal pistol. Your rate of fire is based off both pistols. I'm not sure of the exact number, but if you have a pistol that shoots at 1s and one that shoots at .5s, you'll shoot faster than if you had two at 1s.

[Chamber]

I'm a huge fan of AoM.  Everyone's mentioned very good stategies, and I won't argue with any of them.

I use a couple of tricks to keep ahead.  Firstly, I use SoaGx2 -> DG -> SoaG -> Reloader x2 -> whatever looks good.

I find that in AoM, speed is far more important than damage.  Other weapons have crazy damage stats, but the humble pistol can shoot quickly and accurately.  So I enhance the firing speed.  This leaves the reload time every 6 shots as my biggest weakness, so I use Reloader to cut down my vulnerable time.  Once this core strategy is in play, I'll either get Finesse and Whizkid to mod my pistols to ridiculous levels, or Ironman/Tough as Nails to buff up.  Son of a Bitch is good too.

Sometimes, a double reload will take too long and get you fried.  In tense multi-enemy situations, I sometimes only reload a single pistol so as not to take up too much time.  If nothing opens fire, I can then reload the other pistol, or just use one to score a quick kill.

In Phobos Base, there will always be a large source of ammo.  So just keep 300 rounds and prioritise armour and medipacks.  When you reach Hell you'll find ammo shortages, so from there on collect and prioritise every single bullet you find.

Thus, you have a great rate of fire, and reasonably good damage and accuracy ratings.  I find that I can kill even big enemies in a hail of bullets before they can fire back or I need to reload.

Hope this helps.  :)