The best laid plans. 2nd verse is a whole lot worse.

[gut]

> (almost immediately after bug-killing),

I've almost decided to skip this step, as being too turn costly. I'll
just have to find a way to do it with an even more underpowered
guy. On a positive note though, I have totally changed my mind
about the 'good learner' talent. The reason is because it is a
prerequisit for the book learning talents. Chosing it just for the
~40% exp. boost would still be wrong though.

I have found a bookshop with an early game wizzy before, but
had no way to rob it.

[mike]

> (almost immediately after bug-killing),

I've almost decided to skip this step, as being too turn costly.

I've been thinking that, too. Not that I'm going to attempt a speedrun. What about rolling a DE wiz with darkness and killing a shopkeeper?

[gut]

I imagine you mean DE because they have 'find weakness'?
You can kill Barnabus with any PC that has darkness and a
reasonable melee attack. Elves hardly work though, as they
usually start out with something like 1d4+8, and that's true
berserking. Still, that might be better.

[Ars]

DE is also good because of alignment, you can kill shopkeeper without repercussions.

[Grey]

Poor choice for speedruns in general though - low Le and horrendous To.

[vogonpoet]

Nor is it very complicated getting to C at the very start of the game, before robbing shops. Oh shit, did I kill a small child, oh, sorry about that Village People.

[Grey]

I found this rather amusing...

I decided to give a speedrun a try, and in particular test my idea of doing bugs then DarkForge. First char I generated was drakeling wizard, Le 17, CLW and Fire Bolt, and wand of teleportation (4 charges with booze). Used starting invis potion to steal stun ray and some PV from the black market before getting to level 13 in bugville. Headed to DarkForge and led the golem above the stairs to the other side of the level before using teleport charge and descending. First teleport I use when down there takes me to the corridor to the pools - excellent.

I started sipping and got plenty of booze and then an elemental (dispatched with fire bolt easily enough) and then cursed and then sickness. Crap - HP down from 106 to an effective 36. I kept drinking, killed some snakes, and then got "what do you wish for?" Crap! I don't have many teleport charges and with sickness can't get past the stairs easily. I need teleport spellbooks... I wish for those hoping that teleport control will come later. And... it did. Christ I'm lucky.

So, teleported to armoury and found red dragon scale mail. Teleport to weapons and find SoS, phase dagger, lots of eternium stuff, and quicksilver staff. My luck is going brilliantly here. I leave the lowest value items behind until I'm burdened, but should have enough to get a bit of piety at least. However sickness is a big problem... I take the risk and teleport on the stairs - it lands on target... but next to two golems. Dead

Amazing luck... until I died, heh

[Grey]

Much better luck on the next try - stole teleport in black market, killed bugs, got TCtrl easily in DarkForge. No cool loot, but at least I got out safely. Now in Dwarftown with 43/19 DV/PV, lots of morgia (only To 12), SLBs and Teleport, Invis, Stun Ray, Darkness, Fire Bolt, Magic Missile and a couple of others. Also random teleporting from pixie corpse. 2787 turns. Pyramid/griffyard/Guth'Alak time...

Oh, and Thrundarr asked for a cave lion, haha...

Edit: And a berserking Nonnak brought me from 40 HP to -2 through 13 PV. Oh well...

[evariste]

2. 97471640 Forgetful (evariste). L50 drakish wizard (F). 110049486 xps.
7070 turns. Won on 6/1/2009.

(flg)

This game was originally an attempt at a 5K speedrun. It started out very well; I had incredibly good starting stats (Le:21 and To:21) and started out with books of Teleportation and Frost Bolt, a bug dropped Cure Light Wounds, and I successfully acquired a stack of useful intrinsics from DarkForge, including teleport control, before turn 1000.

But then I was slowed down by a combination of very poor play (including forgetting to teleport Thrundarr away to open the portal until I ran into the portal and forgetting to get wax until after entering the banshee's level...) and extremely poor luck finding spellbooks. I didn't find an offensive spellbook besides my starting one until the Casino! Lack of castings meant that I actually had to spend 400 turns doing the druid quest to get a new Frost Bolt book...

So by the time I did the ToEF (which was easy -- I didn't need to do anything on the top except Frost Bolt...) I was approximately equal in turns with my previous speedrun. This continued to be the case until D:50 despite some very stupid play on my part.

I did manage to get over 13 million xp from the AKW (28 levels!), though, and I was level 50 after killing Nurgy. I believe I entered D:50 4 turns before my previous attempt, so I possibly could still have set a new turncount record by a little bit. But I was interested in a high score, so I spent the extra several hundred turns necessary to kill all of the balors, mainly with them invisible and me slowed. This was quite a lot of xp, and I'm happy to report that the resulting score finally beats the infamous piety scumming score...

[gut]

Words can not express how cool this is.
P.S. I'm a little jealous though : )