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Thread: First Ultra, CEKTA the Gnome Wizardess

  1. #1
    Join Date
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    Red face First Ultra, CEKTA the Gnome Wizardess

    Hey guys, so after my first win with dwarven wizard i thought of doing ultra and trying something new, so the r/c of my choice was gnome wizard. Haha.
    Highlights:
    1) Bought AOLS in HMV for a bit more than 3000 gold, saved Khelavaster;
    2) Found potion belt in FGJ caves. I play really spoiled by wiki and discord (ty guys), so I knew what to do with it. Suddenly after a few dozens of POGAs I drunk exchange potion and it made my willpower very close to 100, so i stick with this result.
    3) First kill was mugger in the outlaw settlement town, somehow during the game I killed one more, so Filk was on the level 2. Thanks, Monster Memory Service;
    4) Boar and farmer was made with the bow of hunting, although I wished for Food Preservation beforehand, i like that skill;
    5) Till the middle game I somehow had big troubles with food. Cooked lizards were not enough, no stable herb patterns, and so i even restocked Terynio shop a few times. Later on found a few stable stomas in fungal caves and it was done;
    6) Made the Cat Quest for the first time; while cleansing a greater undead vault, liches summoned cave tigers so I took the ring in the backpack and murdered em all.
    7) The most tedious things in the game for me: trying to enter the Assassin Prince level (i think, multiple controlled teleport intrinsics should reduce or even remove the number of tries for that!), fighting the Merchant Guild dragon while caster (so it's only Magic Missile and for that reason I skipped killing Sharad-Waador), reading Wish standing in the rich flavour room while having teleportitis;
    8) Truly disappointing that the scintillating cave bottom level and the PlAnE in tiles look like common dungeon, while mini map showing the true beauty of those places as ASCII does.
    9) Mega truly disappointing is that I finished with less points than my regular winner.
    10) This run I enjoyed very much, because I had room for a bit grinding (herbs, potion belt, blink dogs in ID) while visiting a new places (all ultra stuff actually) and missing way less artifacts on my way than the previous run, as I actually identified all the items in vaults and such.

    178 hours into the game now.
    Thoughts on the next run:
    1) Farming fate decide;
    2) Aiming for 50M points no matter how;
    3) Aiming to reach ID:100;
    4) Winning without ever changing alignment.
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    Last edited by anp; 12-08-2018 at 09:02 AM.

  2. #2
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    Nicely done!

    Quote Originally Posted by anp View Post
    9) Mega truly disappointing is that I finished with less points than my regular winner.
    Yes, for some reason ultra victories result in a low score. If you want to break 50M, your best bet is to go for a low-turncount normal victory.
    You steal a scroll labelled HITME. The orc hits you.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
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    Quote Originally Posted by grobblewobble View Post
    Yes, for some reason ultra victories result in a low score. If you want to break 50M, your best bet is to go for a low-turncount normal victory.
    Just lawful and neutral ultras. If you look at the roguelike leaderboard, 18 of the top 20 scores are chaotic ultras. The two high-scoring normal wins are there due to XP exploits (walden-saccing and shambling mound), not low turncount. The highest-scoring turncount speedrun comes in at number 21, and is blatantly memory-edited and save-scummed.

  4. #4
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    Oh. So chaotic ultras are rewarded and N/L ultra is punished? Do you have any idea what the reasoning was there?
    You steal a scroll labelled HITME. The orc hits you.

  5. #5
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    Well, they are the most difficult. Chaotic ultra has to delay crowning, can't pray on the chaos plane, and gets corrupted fastest. Lawful ultra is the easiest, since it doesn't need to go into the chaos plane corrupted. Now does a 100 million point difference in score between the ultras makes sense? Not really, but neither does the rest of the convoluted nonsense that makes up the score formula.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2016
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    To add to this, I recently did a chaotic ultra to get the scoring achievement, and I got 121M points doing everything optional except the cat lord (minotaur maze, puppy dog, rift, Blup, bug temple, thieves guild, quickling tree, ice queen). Quickling tree, ice queen and rift isn't listed in the final summary, so they may not affect score except through less corruptions upon victory thanks to PoCC and SoCR. I even forgot to do the unicorn quest before getting crowned.

    I don't know for sure if leaving out any of these could have a significant enough effect on score to get you below 50M, probably not. And if you start out generating the puppy, doing all these is mostly a matter of persistence and real life time if you get 7LB and AoL reasonably early. The only real pressing point for me was doing the bug temple early enough to get SoMM for the maze. You need a wand of fireballs, potions of boost willpower, booze and play cautiously.

    In any case, you don't need to quit over killing a cat, and can probably even skip the maze and do the bug temple at level 50.
    Last edited by Lowkey; 12-09-2018 at 01:53 PM.

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