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Thread: Overall Identification Strategy in Adom

  1. #11
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    Gym21 made an excellent summary.

    Here's some on ID gambling which is very useful in early game and generally worth downsides.

    Nr1 is a medium/large/tower shield, even a cursed medium wooden shield is useful in the early game.
    Nr2 is metal armour, unless extreme weight (which you see without id) any metal armour is a huge benefit even if cursed or have some minor annoying intrinsic.
    Leather/Studded leather is sometimes worth it but more risk/less reward.
    Nr3 is a spear, if you don't have a weapon, or dagger/shortsword, any 1h spear is decent damage (d8+) and polearms have the best defensive bonuses.

    Cloaks and bracers are safe to try and cursed isnt too bad.
    Rings and amulets are both good and bad, I rarely risk wearing them except for the ones that have fixed names.
    Metal boots and helmets are good to wear.

    Really bad things:
    Drinking potions, poison and especially disease can easily be fatal in early game.
    Zapping wands, wand of ball lightning tend to bounce and cause suicide, same goes with wand of far slaying, they are also very common in the early game.
    Wielding junk weapons, getting stuck with a cursed knife isnt fun and can get you cornered when you don't have ranged options.
    Wearing gauntlets of peace as non caster, they give -15 -15 melee and missile and autocurse.
    Wearing girdle of weight, adds a huge amount of weight when worn, a lot more than what they imply.

  2. #12
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    The above tips are very good. Generally, you can equip-ID some stuff. It's just knowing what's safe and what's not, which takes some time to learn. Here's a few equipID tricks:

    -Weapons can be identified using a ratling fencer/duelist or master swordsman. They can disarm your weapon, so if you get stuck with something cursed, just wait a few turns and they'll get rid of it for you.
    -There's only one bad amulet, so you may as well just wear whatever you find.
    -In the very early game, any shield except small is probably worth equipping even if cursed. Regular large or tower are quite decent. Unusually heavy shields (160s, 210s, 260s) are crystal and are very good.
    -Rings are generally safe to equip/wear unidentified except adamantium/onyx/ordinary group, since you could get stuck with a cursed ring of damage. Autocursing is probably ring of the fish. There's a very small chance of getting doom or weakness that will screw you over though.
    -Non-brass bracers can be safely equip-IDed always. If they don't auto-ID, then they're one of the best types.
    -Don't equip-ID any girdles or gloves unless you know curse status. These prevent you from access other parts of your equipment if cursed, and cursed girdle of carrying/weight in particular are quite bad.
    -Equip armor if it's a better PV class than what you have, and is better than a robe. So if you have leather, studded leather or better is okay to equip. If you have chain, then you're basically looking at elven chain, plate, or higher metal.

    [edit]
    A few more:
    -Wands. If you don't mind wasting charges, all wands can be safely tested a wilderness area. At worst, you'll wrench a zero charge wand and destroy it. You may not always be able to ID the wand directly, so you'll have to rely on the message output that they give, which can occasionally be a bit opaque. The only exception to this is glowing wands, which are always wands of wishing, and should never be used while cursed (as the wish may fail). These are extremely rare and not found in low level areas. At least you'll know which wands are damage wands, and which one is the nasty ball lightning wand, though.
    -Never drink ID potions unless you have literally no other choice. Most potions are harmless, but it's more likely that you'll poison yourself rather than heal yourself.
    -With scrolls, the most common are light, darkness, power, and identify, so once you get more than 3 of the same type, it's probably one of these.
    Last edited by JellySlayer; 09-06-2016 at 06:53 AM.
    Hoping to win with every class, doomed. Archer, Barbarian, Bard, Beastfighter, Druid, Elementalist, Farmer, Fighter, Monk, and ULE Priest down.

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by jonadab View Post
    So my question is, where, roughly, does Adom fall on this spectrum? I know that some roguelikes pre-identify scrolls of identify. Should I be reading unidentified scrolls looking for scrolls of identify, or not? Should I be trying to work out strategies for identifying items by using them, or should I be patiently waiting, hauling all my loot to a safe area, and looking for other clues about item identities? At the moment, I'm mainly looking for an overall strategy to get me started here, not all the fine points. (I feel like I can't start learning the details until I have some kind of mental framework to attach them to.)
    Somewhere in between, I guess.

    Long term (mid-game onwards) player typically reads blessed ID periodically. There is an early mid game (or late early game whatever player's definition sequencing is) which can ID all stuff (there are some requirements since alternative reward can be generated).

    So typically ID problem exists early on unless you are on challenge (wanna stay illiterate/blind/etc).

    Early on:
    potions - basically quaff Id pots is good way to kill the char. (Might want to read http://ancardia.wikia.com/wiki/Use-based_identification for non-autoID stuff).
    Orange is always water, white seems to be always pot of rust removal (latter is poisonous if drunk).

    wands - these can be used if you know all the tricks (you can try http://ancardia.wikia.com/wiki/Mater...ify?oldid=8930, since wiki does not really allow to delete stuff ). As rule of thumb don't zap the way potential bolt could bounce into char and don't touch 4 stone wands unless you feel lucky or really know what you are doing.

    armor: scrapping your first 10PV (or something close) is really important, so you want to equip anything what gives guaranteed PV, so stuff like leather boots/leather caps/clothes is no go.
    regular gauntlets should not be touched, cause of gauntlets of peace (you can ID the latter through monsters picking and equipping them)

    amulets: well, there is little benefit of having unknown amulet on your neck, so might as well not to bother. Silver amulets are protection, which are decent, glass is light which is potentially useful and wooden I think is always prot from undead which is crap.

    rings are typically worn, to deal with potential cursed damage some players equip unknown ring left finger first.

    scrolls... well, I typically pile them on. in times of need go for bigger stack (3+ stack likely ends being ID/uncursing /power). Using scrolls upon finding seems wasteful for me.

    weapons:
    IMHO, anything with good base dice (non-whip/non-dagger) and which does not stack with other stuff should be dragged to shop for price check. cause that is how the prefixes work.
    armor with good prefixes is maybe 2x better than regular, b ut weapon might be easily be 5x (of devastation variety). Since prefixes are rare early on, anything stacking can be discarded.

    If you happen to find disarming monster (ratling fencer is most likely early on) you can cycle through weaponry, using him to get rid of cursed stuff. IIRC, these don 't disarm non-wepons, so you can't find all cursed stuff sadly.

    Shops are cute place to visit since anything you see in shop is IDed (and all scrolls/pots/tc of that type will be ID too), so early peaking in to famous black market can be somewhat useful.
    Last edited by Soirana; 09-06-2016 at 05:30 AM.
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  4. #14
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    Keep in mind that B/U/C status distribution among items is roughly fixed.
    The general rule of thumb is that with sufficiently large sample, 80% of items are uncursed, 10% are cursed and 10% are blessed.
    Thus, stacking items have a very high chance of being uncursed and are rather safe to equip-ID.

    Of course, there can be situations where you find two or three identical items that stack and yet are cursed but that is an excessively rare situation.
    "Hell is empty and all the devils are here."

  5. #15
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    Some tips:

    1) Hoard everything that is potions/scrolls/wands. Those are almost 100% useful sooner or later.

    2) FREQUENTLY but not always, the most common type of low-DL scroll you find are ID ones. So if you happen to have holy water it is usually safe to dip your largest stack of scrolls in it and read one. At worst you will read some other blessed common scroll and that is 99% safe to do. Nowadays I can even guess which scrolls are ID ones by their name. There is a pool of possible names and some are more common than others. However I have no data on this.

    3) As mentioned. You can safely upgrade your gear from robe to leather to studded armor (for example) because even a cursed one will probably be better than what you are wearing.

    4) The largest stack of any item is 99.99% of the time the most common variant in uncursed status. So the largest arrow stack you have will always be uncursed (0, 1d6) arrows (exception being when you FIND a whole stack instead of accumulating one, that stack you found can be anything), the largest stack of leather armors will nearly always be [+0 ; +2] ones, and so on. So this is another way of preventing you from equipping cursed items.

    5) Vendors give more gold for blessed variants and less for cursed ones. So if you have multiples you can guess which have the better status.

    6) If you are hoarding tons of crude knives/battle axes go to a shop and sell all but the highest value ones. Equip them safely to check why they are worth more than the rest.

    7) There is no way of predicting armor stats or prefixes/sufixes (apart from weight related ones) but I find it is good practice to always keep unstacking items for ID in case one has a valuable prefix/sufix.

    8) In a pinch, if there is NO HOPE, you can drink all potions (except white, watery and orange) in hopes of getting healing or invisibility. It is more or less safe but almost certainly a waste of potential gains from them.
    Last edited by pblack; 09-07-2016 at 03:13 AM.
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