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Author Topic: [M|Ao100|77%|YAVP] Second gold badge, glee!  (Read 3672 times)

Damerell

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[M|Ao100|77%|YAVP] Second gold badge, glee!
« on: September 17, 2010, 20:30 »


--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (v.0.9.9.1) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 Kirsty, level 19 Cacodemon Warrant Officer, completed 100 levels of torture
 on level 100 of the Phobos base.
 He survived 304863 turns and scored 534652 points.
 He played for 2 days, 7 hours, 48 minutes and 40 seconds.
 He didn't like it too rough.

 He killed 1394 out of 1774 hellspawn. (78%)
 He was an Angel of 100!


 The world crashed on him once.
 He saved himself 4 times.

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  UAC Star (bronze cluster)
  Centurial Gold Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  .......B................h.h.V..h.h...+.........[..........0
  .....^..B...............h..V.hh.h........###########c......
  .....B..}...#############.h.h..h.......+.#=========#.......
  ......#####.#......+....#..hB######......#=========#.......
  ......#...#.#.#...+#..#.#....#....=......#=========#.".....
  ......#...#.#.#[...+....#....#....#=.....#=========+.......
  ......+|..#.#.#.......#.#....#0...#.=....#=========#.......
  ......#0..#.+.#..O.O|.#.#....#....#==....#=========#.######
  ......#...#.#.#..OO..|#.#....#....#.+....#=========#.#.....
  ......#...#.#..#.####.O.#.0..#&.+.#......###########.#.....
  .....R#...#.#...........#....#=...#..................#.....
  .}....#...#.#############...==....#.....#######......#.....
  ......#####........^...[....==#####.....#=====#......#.....
  +...........................==..........#=====#......#..0..
  ...}........A..............=.......0....#=====#......#.0...
  ....."............[...0..===..XA..;.....#=====+......#.....
  .........................=.=............#######......######
  .............................0.............................
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 120/60   Experience 314962/19
  ToHit Ranged +4  ToHit Melee +4  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +0

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

    Ironman          (Level 1)
    Finesse          (Level 2)
    Hellrunner       (Level 2)
    Tough as nails   (Level 2)
    Son of a gun     (Level 3)
    Eagle Eye        (Level 2)
    Dualgunner       (Level 1)
    Dodgemaster      (Level 1)
    Intuition        (Level 2)
    Whizkid          (Level 2)
    Badass           (Level 1)

  SoG->SoG->DG->EE->TaN->TaN->Bad->SoG->Fin->Fin->WK->Iro->HR->WK->EE->Int->Int-
>HR->DM->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   modified Cybernetic Armor [10/10] (200%) (ABP)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   modified pistol (2d6) [6/6] (P2T3)
    [c] [ Boots      ]   modified plasteel boots [8/8] (96%) (AP)
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   Trigun (3d6) [6/6]

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] modified rocket launcher (6d6) [1/1] (B1S1T2)
    [b] modified nuclear BFG 9000 (8d10) [19/68] (B2P2)
    [c] modified Railgun (8d8) [52/52] (B1)
    [d] 10mm ammo (x84)
    [e] 10mm ammo (x100)
    [f] rocket (x10)
    [g] power cell (x50)
    [h] power cell (x50)
    [i] power cell (x50)
    [j] power cell (x50)
    [k] power cell (x50)
    [l] power cell (x50)
    [m] power cell (x50)
    [n] large med-pack
    [o] large med-pack
    [p] large med-pack
    [q] large med-pack
    [r] phase device
    [s] homing phase device
    [t] homing phase device
    [u] homing phase device

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    89 former humans
    191 former sergeants
    151 former captains
    90 imps
    27 demons
    26 lost souls
    75 cacodemons
    192 barons of hell
    55 hell knights
    127 arachnotrons
    4 former commandos
    2 pain elementals
    107 arch-viles
    112 mancubi
    94 revenants
    13 nightmare imps
    6 nightmare cacodemons
    22 nightmare demons
    11 bruiser brothers

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  On level 9 he found the Trigun!
  On level 24 he found the Railgun!
  On level 25 he found the Cybernetic Armor!
  He nuked level 27!
  On level 38 he found the BFG 10K!
  On level 40 he found the Butcher's Cleaver!
  On level 45 he found the Malek's Armor!
  On level 82 he found the Grammaton Cleric Beretta!
  On level 87 he found the Revenant's Launcher!
  On level 100 he finally completed 100 levels of torture.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 You enter Phobos Hell, level 99.
 Argh!!! Lava!
 Argh!!! Lava!
 You start running!
 There are stairs leading downward here.
 Just one more! Just one more! Will you die here? Press <Enter>... 
 You enter Phobos Hell, level 100. There's the smell of blood in the air!
 There is a lever (Armor depot) here.
 Argh!!! Lava!
 Argh!!! Lava!
 You are hit! Boom! You are hit! You are hit! You are hit! Argh!!! Lava!
 The arachnotron fires! You dodge! Boom! You dodge! Boom! You dodge! Boom!
 You dodge! Boom! You dodge! Boom! Argh!!! Lava!
 The arachnotron hits you. There are stairs leading downward here.
 You did it! You completed 100 levels of DoomRL! You're the champion! Press

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 Before him 50 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 36 of those were killed.
 3 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 2 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 Some rumours though, say that the Cyberdemon was killed already!
 Is he immortal? 9 souls claim to have killed him...
 8 killed the bastard and survived.
 1 showed that it can outsmart hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I've been trying a number of Ao100 approaches, and mostly have been revolving around "no master trait". Master traits tend to be highly weapon-specific (both by what they do themselves, and by what they block), and if you're going to make it through the ammo crunch, you want to be able to use multiple kinds of ammo (or I guess Ammochain, but being able to fire off infinite ammo with a lousy hit chance doesn't really appeal). That said, if I'd known I'd find the Trigun, I might have taken Gun Kata anyway - I'd half expected to be using pistols with at least one bulk mod and have less need to reload in combat than I did - but I certainly didn't regret having Badass.

Most of my attempts have been based on using a combination of the chaingun and plasma rifle and taking trait selections to maximise damage per round fired - Eagle Eye and Son of a Bitch. This noticeably failed to work. I was torn between taking Intuition early and dying because I didn't have enough damage output, and delaying it, coming round corners, and getting oneshotted by mancubi.

A side thread was trying shotgun-oriented builds - maybe even taking Army of the Dead and living without Hellrunner - and hoping for a super shotgun to turn up; when I did Angel of Shotgunnery in 0.9.9 I remember a power-modded double shotgun did tremendous execution and a super shotgun would presumably do about 3/2 as much. While your supply of shells is low, the damage per shell fired is very high, making good use of the available ammo, and your entire supply of plasma is free for anything else you find that makes use of it. This, sigh, also noticeably failed to work.

About then I had a flash of the blindingly obvious; Angel of 100 is harder in the early game than regular DoomRL! Who knew? You don't get the special levels, and assuming you correctly assess whether or not special levels have an expected positive outcome (this is not always true for me - I wouldn't have had my first gold badge were it not for thinking "The Mortuary? Banzai!" in an Angel of Haste game, which was clearly a bad plan for all that it ended well) that's an obvious benefit in stuff and XP.

So my next thought was, why not pistols? With a tricked out pistol build you can fire 10mm ammo as fast as a chaingunner for more damage (and you can stop every two bullets, so you burn up less ammo there), you only need three traits to get decent damage going, and between Son of a Gun and Son of a Bitch your damage per bullet could get quite preposterous (although in the end I didn't take levels in SoB); and of course the uniques and exotics that might turn up in pistols are a lot better than the minigun and laser rifle.

I tried a couple of games with Eagle Eye first (still fixated on early Intuition) but that didn't work; hitting consistently or not, you're still tickling people to death with one pistol. This was my first SoG->SoG->DG attempt and it all worked out beautifully.

It was already looking pretty good when I found the Trigun on level 9, and then I was laughing, modulo reloading being a pain (you want the Trigun primary so if you don't have time to dualreload you can reload your biggest gun, but then you can't dualreload at all, so it has to be secondary). I don't think it made any difference in the long run (I'd otherwise have had two B1T2P2 pistols, with an even faster firing time and bigger clips) but it's getting through the early game that matters).

It's around here that I made some of the stupid "should have used a phase device" errors that can kill you but in this case didn't - surviving a couple of fights with 16% and 4% health. After that I started paying attention.

With 2 levels in Finesse and 3 in SoG, and a T3-modded pistol, my firing time was absurdly short. If I spotted an archvile, I would expect more often than not to blow it to bits before it could attack me. Of course, the reload time was painfully long, but I could generally duck back behind cover if the enemies weren't dead - the knockback helped here because it meant they had a long way to come to get me - or if engaging at maximum range, fire, knockback out of sight, and use single reload and swap-weapon actions to let the enemy back into range. Obviously a blaster would have been nice to replace the pistol, but one didn't show up.

I found a gothic armour early and settled on a mix of two approaches; either use the gothic armour and soak a bit of damage, or use A-modded red armour and try not to get hit so much. I took one level in Whizkid to have three red armours, one BP, one AP, one AB to be used as appropriate; then a second level to make them all ABP, at which point the gothic armour was only really useful as a large reserve of armour durability. Obviously I hoped to find gothic boots.

Then I found the Railgun. Oh, the Railgun. What a perfectly delightful use for plasma cells. Later I would find a laser rifle which I suspect would otherwise have been a reasonable use for them, but under the circumstance I ditched it. Of course the Railgun's firing time was pretty lethargic by comparison with the pistols, but it could two-shot practically anything except a bruiser brother and the big clip lets you do a lot of execution before you have to reload. I'd then use the Railgun for vile-and-bads clusters (since you can zap the vile whether or not something's in front of it) and the pistols for blowing away single monsters when exploring. Initially I was short of ammo for the Railgun, but once arachnotron levels start being common it's not really an issue provided you aren't trying to kill everything with it.

You may imagine my delight when I came around a corner on DL 50, Railgun in hand, to find three archviles standing in a row. "Surprise, deathogram!"

I found the Cybernetic Armour, which I kept with me in the hope of the Onyx Armour Pack showing up. You know why Ao100 walkthroughs say not to do that because you'll put it on at some point? Well, now I know why.

I didn't keep any unique I found after that. The Cleaver seemed pointless now ammo was in plentiful supply, Malek's Armour I found before getting stuck in the Cybernetic, but it was clear my modded red armours were getting restored by shards and megaspheres fast enough that I wasn't going to run out, the BFG 10K was a way of burning precious Railgun ammo, the Revenant's Launcher offered nothing over my Sniper-modded rocket launcher, and the Grammaton Cleric...

The Grammaton Cleric caused me to think for a moment. You can't dualgun it with the Trigun because of reloading comedy, and you've lost the T3 pistol that lets you burn off rounds like lightning. It does less damage in singleshot than the Trigun (indeed, it does the same as a P2 pistol, so a P2Tanything pistol would be a better weapon, clip size aside), and the 18-round clip is nice but doesn't match up well with the regular pistol. Semi-auto is a good way to burn up ammo and give high-armour monsters a gentle tickle. Full-auto is like that but more so. So - normally unique/exotic finds in DoomRL are either "wow, great!" or "phooey, junk". This is the unusual case where you think "wow, great!" but then realise actually, it's no use at all.

I did find and B2 mod a Nuclear BFG 9000, which was not without its uses for crowd control. I was hoping to B3 mod it at which point the magazine must be getting close to two zaps' worth, but got it too late to find the mods.

So, where was I? Oh, yes, putting on the Cybernetic Armour on level 61 (or thereabouts) and using a series of hearty Anglo-Saxon expressions.

At first, I thought "well, this is it, I'm screwed". I've worn the Cybernetic twice before, died of it once, and scraped through on a Max Carnage victory. However, on reflection, while it was a mistake, it wasn't that serious a mistake.

An obvious difference between Ao100 and a regular game is that at the end of a regular game you have to fight Simon whether you like it or not; furthermore in a regular game you probably don't have Intuition 1 telling you where all the armour shards and megaspheres and invincibilities are - and you don't have Intuition 2 telling you where all the monsters are so you can look for the stairs somewhere else if you're not invincible, or rush straight to them like you're Santa Claus and all the presents are fatal bullet wounds if you are invincible. Not only that, in a regular game you don't have a huge supply of modpacks and Whizkid 2, so you probably won't have it ABP-modded.

And it does have upsides. The obvious one is that all of a sudden you've freed up four or so inventory slots you were using for spare armour, letting you gorge yourself on ammo when you hit former captain or arachno clusters, or letting you glom up extra homing phase devices and just skip levels where Intution doesn't show you anything you want, or...

The other obvious one is that a Badass in P-modded Cybernetic is basically impossible to kill. If you know there's a megasphere coming elsewhere on the level you can stand in front of archvile clusters soaking up the rays and giggling.

A less obvious advantage is that if you're anything like me, you were probably fighting stuff you didn't need to. With the Cybernetic on, my focus changed dramatically to what I ought to have been doing - find the stairs with a minimum of fuss and leave, only clearing levels when a convenient invincibility turned up.

The last few levels were quite anticlimatic; in particular, I found an invincibility on DL 98 and was still invincible when I finished the game, hence the final message log.

Stuff I thought of after writing that:

I only really used the rocket launcher as a maniac's lockpick. I'm not a big fan of rockets in general combat - they don't actually do _so_ much damage (especially given that they're single shot and reloading takes approximately one week) and they destroy the precious cover that's keeping you from standing in a circle of revenants, at which point comedy will ensue.

I encountered, as you might expect, nightmare imps, pinkbeasts, and tomatoes - and bruiser brothers - but they posed no serious challenge. I daresay they are bad news in absolute terms, but by the time they turn up - almost invariably solo - practically every level has multiple clusters of archviles and other monsters waiting to piss pain all over you, and by comparison they are relatively mild.

Nightmare imps, in particular, died to a single pistol volley; nightmare pinkbeasts are no threat if your weapons do respectable knockback; and nightmare tomatoes are not appreciably worse than single barons of hell (and at the point they show up, near the end of an Ao100 run, you eat single barons of hell for breakfast). A bruiser brother is basically a baron of hell that takes four Railgun shots to saw in half rather than two, and by then you're seeing enough arachnotron levels to not fret about plasma ammo.

I also owe this victory to Lamb's delicious Navy Rum which provided valuable moral support during the run from about DL 50 or so.

Why can't I comment on any other item in the Century Lounge?
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Game Hunter

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Re: [M|Ao100|77%|YAVP] Second gold badge, glee!
« Reply #1 on: September 18, 2010, 01:20 »

Holy crap, dude, serious wall of text. Still, it's your first post, and your first A100 win, so I can't really complain.

I've been trying a number of Ao100 approaches, and mostly have been revolving around "no master trait". Master traits tend to be highly weapon-specific (both by what they do themselves, and by what they block), and if you're going to make it through the ammo crunch, you want to be able to use multiple kinds of ammo (or I guess Ammochain, but being able to fire off infinite ammo with a lousy hit chance doesn't really appeal). That said, if I'd known I'd find the Trigun, I might have taken Gun Kata anyway - I'd half expected to be using pistols with at least one bulk mod and have less need to reload in combat than I did - but I certainly didn't regret having Badass.
Yeah, MAc is usually the way to go on A100 runs. I've done a no-MAc, no-Int run on HNTR, and that was really hard until I found some nuclear weapons. A2 clears up any aiming problems on weapons (some players, myself included, are happy with A1). Trigun's an awesome weapon, and it's a shame you couldn't get MGK...it really is the perfect pistol for that trait.

To comment on your previous attempts, a lot of people often have success early by using the combat shotgun, then switching to their primary weapon after establishing enough traits. It's not uncommon to keep lots of shells handy until MAc/MCe, and it's always a nice secondary weapon with pistols. Unfortunately, ammo conservation is a big problem on A100 runs, and careful use of Arch-vile/Former packs is the only way to sustain bullets and shells in many cases.

About then I had a flash of the blindingly obvious; Angel of 100 is harder in the early game than regular DoomRL! Who knew? You don't get the special levels, and assuming you correctly assess whether or not special levels have an expected positive outcome (this is not always true for me - I wouldn't have had my first gold badge were it not for thinking "The Mortuary? Banzai!" in an Angel of Haste game, which was clearly a bad plan for all that it ended well) that's an obvious benefit in stuff and XP.
Yeah, the scaling on A100 as a result of no special levels can cause some problems, but again, combat shotgun is a great no-trait weapon. Pistols aren't a bad idea, I admit, since their DPS racks up pretty quickly, especially the PS part.

I found a gothic armour early and settled on a mix of two approaches; either use the gothic armour and soak a bit of damage, or use A-modded red armour and try not to get hit so much. I took one level in Whizkid to have three red armours, one BP, one AP, one AB to be used as appropriate; then a second level to make them all ABP, at which point the gothic armour was only really useful as a large reserve of armour durability. Obviously I hoped to find gothic boots.
Yeah, ABP red armor is pretty superior to gothic, although AP gothic is pretty awesome, too. If you're looking for zero knockback, for instance, gothic is the way to go, and P-gothic's 8DR is heavenly.

I found the Cybernetic Armour, which I kept with me in the hope of the Onyx Armour Pack showing up. You know why Ao100 walkthroughs say not to do that because you'll put it on at some point? Well, now I know why.
Haha, I don't suppose you're referring to my guide, are you? Same exact thing happened to me, with rather painful results (especially when armor shards are only 25%). As awesome as 200%/10DR is when you ABP-mod it, that 200%/10DR can get eaten up REALLY fast.

The Grammaton Cleric caused me to think for a moment. You can't dualgun it with the Trigun because of reloading comedy, and you've lost the T3 pistol that lets you burn off rounds like lightning. It does less damage in singleshot than the Trigun (indeed, it does the same as a P2 pistol, so a P2Tanything pistol would be a better weapon, clip size aside), and the 18-round clip is nice but doesn't match up well with the regular pistol. Semi-auto is a good way to burn up ammo and give high-armour monsters a gentle tickle. Full-auto is like that but more so. So - normally unique/exotic finds in DoomRL are either "wow, great!" or "phooey, junk". This is the unusual case where you think "wow, great!" but then realise actually, it's no use at all.
Juggler could have potentially fixed your problems by allowing insta-swap between your two unique guns. It's an odd workaround but better than nothing, I suppose. Trigun/Grammaton is an absurdly lethal combo, too.

I only really used the rocket launcher as a maniac's lockpick. I'm not a big fan of rockets in general combat - they don't actually do _so_ much damage (especially given that they're single shot and reloading takes approximately one week) and they destroy the precious cover that's keeping you from standing in a circle of revenants, at which point comedy will ensue.
That's usually how I end up using the rocket launcher as well, although it can be a nice way to disperse crowds (and, especially in N!, killing corpses at the same time). The fact that you're going to lose any ammo that might have dropped is really what kills it for me. I keep meaning to try rocket-jumping, but I just never remember.

Why can't I comment on any other item in the Century Lounge?
Threads are auto-locked in all the Post Mortem forums after a week and (I think) every other forum after two months. If you feel like asking about something, though, Discussion or PMing the mortem-maker would likely also work.

Once again, congrats on your first A100. Looks like you've already had tons of luck: 50 tries and 9 wins is pretty hardcore.

EDIT: Before I forget again, it took you HOW long? I imagine a lot of that was AFK, even if you saved it four times, but maaaaan, I don't think I've seen a longer playtime yet. I myself have about 9 days' worth racked up, and very little of it was spent not playing.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2010, 01:26 by Game Hunter »
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Damerell

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Re: [M|Ao100|77%|YAVP] Second gold badge, glee!
« Reply #2 on: September 18, 2010, 08:52 »

Yeah, MAc is usually the way to go on A100 runs.

Well, so they say, but I'm not convinced. Of course you can add accuracy mods, but on an Ao100 run, every accuracy mod is a slot you didn't fill with a power, technical, or bulk mod, none of which you would be complaining about - and you're also blocked from Badass. I'm more concerned about survival when it all goes pear-shaped, and having twice the health is just the ticket for getting out alive.

I'm also less convinced because I didn't really see the ammo crunch, and I suspect a chainfire build that tried to maximise damage per bullet wouldn't have to either (mind you, that was noticeably not working for me, so who knows?)

Quote
To comment on your previous attempts, a lot of people often have success early by using the combat shotgun, then switching to their primary weapon after establishing enough traits. It's not uncommon to keep lots of shells handy until MAc/MCe, and it's always a nice secondary weapon with pistols.

Well, with chainfire, sure, but with pistols? I just wasn't chewing through bullets that fast - if I'd literally had to do the whole game with them I'd have been in trouble, but of course you're bound to find something to use up plasma at some point. And once you've got Dualgunner, pistols are just better than the combat shotgun.

Quote
Haha, I don't suppose you're referring to my guide, are you?

It's not the only place I've read it, but yes. On the other hand, it turned out so well I might consider doing it again.

Quote
Juggler could have potentially fixed your problems by allowing insta-swap between your two unique guns. It's an odd workaround but better than nothing, I suppose. Trigun/Grammaton is an absurdly lethal combo, too.

Juggler would have done (albeit at the cost of a trait pick, but then there's that Ironman that doesn't really do anything), or I could have held the Trigun primary and single-reloaded through 18 volleys until the Grammaton was empty (I'm less than convinced by semi-auto against high-armour monsters), but fundamentally the thing is that the Grammaton isn't absurdly lethal as late as I found it. It does 2d6. So does my P2T3 pistol, but a P2T3 pistol not only does it much more quickly but magically makes the Trigun faster as well.

Quote
Once again, congrats on your first A100. Looks like you've already had tons of luck: 50 tries and 9 wins is pretty hardcore.

What is not obvious is that, although that's the play from my 0.9.9 install, I've been playing off and on since the release in January 2005; the combat shotgun design was suggested by me. So those ain't quite my first 50 games. :-)

Quote
EDIT: Before I forget again, it took you HOW long?

If I'm not somewhere convenient to save I'm quite happy to leave the game overnight, and I often have to leave my laptop running rather than hibernate it (and in any case what does the game do if the machine hibernates?)
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