ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Do you have a fast, risky gameplay or do you prefer spending all the time you need to enpower your character at the cost of hours of potential boredom wiping out an area from those <put here the name of your most hated breeding monster - I don't want to be spoily>?

(In case of multiple wins or doubt, use the value which best reflects your game-style. Newbies like me: use the first option thx)

(You can find the exact number in your high-scores. Sorry for the unrealistic range but I have really no idea.)

[Edited for bad language -- Maylith]

I'm slowly learning ToME (for more than 2 years) and I've yet to win!

My average turn count for my three winners is around five million. I think I'm a pretty slow diver and I also like to kill everything I see. But of course I'd like to hear from other winners to see how slow I really am.

Yikes Keeper, 2 years? That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in us newbies:) I'm happy I've made it to Mirkwood!

Maybe we need a new poll on how long you've been playing without a win.

Hoom... it ain't easy to get data like this after so many versions of ToME, but I managed to find an old scores file which kept the scores and turn counts of my first seven wins. Cool. A little research also shows that number of game turns and number of game-time days spent by a character is proportional. It seems that number of turns = roughly 1.15 * 10^5 * number of days.

My average winning time is 39 gamedays ~= 4,5 million turns, but it includes one of my early characters, who had a turncount of 8.8 millions. oh boy. Anyway, I tend to finish in around four million turns, more often hitting 3,5+'s than 4+'s. Quite slow, but I'm not racing ;)

I haven't won yet, but my best char so far (level 50 dark-elf sorc) has a move count of like 4.6 million, and he hasn't set foot into angband yet. Trying to get good equipment in a certain dungeon first...

Yeah, I don't pay any attention to turn count (I haven't won yet either, although I've at least managed some successful lvl50ers). I've never been able to shake my desire (I think imprinted from rogue/moria) to try to clean out levels as much as possible, rather than raid vaults and then sprint for the stairs. It's like the critters are a big infection, and I'm the cure. The apparently increased respawn rates (not a spoiler - just my opinion/suspicion) make this harder but hey. Needless to say, this fixation is probably why my guys end up dead most of the time, but at least they die like men: wearing hard leather and full of un-ID'd potions of booze.

Besides, I think there would be something anti-climactic about charging after Sauron and Morgoth ASAP rather than thinning out the ranks of their minions first. It'd be like cornering and killing the bad guy in the first 20 minutes of a movie. And lastly, going from level 0 and hiding in Bree to level 50 and storming Angband in a week game-time is a little silly. Heck it took Sam and Frodo like a year (or more) to get to Mt. Doom and they only bothered with Moria and Cirith Ungol on the way.

>2 years? That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in us newbies:)

When I was eight or nine years old I was introduced to Moria 2.something on a monochrome screen by a mainframe programmer who worked at my fathers company. Over the years I worked my way up through the various 3.x's and 5.x's...played the bugged version in which all the stores permanantly close after a number of turns...I remember being surprised the first time I saw "UMoria" instead of "Moria"...time and time again I was killed by offscreen AHMD's breathing their unresistable gas. For variety I dabbled in Nethack until finally I found Angband about four years ago...and those AMHD's started being replaced by Farmer Maggot's dogs and Wormtongue. Oh! The terror I felt the first time I saw a "B" playing Vanilla! Eventually I started dabbling with variants...Cthangband, Pernband...and finally stumbled upon ToME around version 2.2.1, and have been playing that since.

Call it twenty years.

In all that time I have yet to win any roguelike.

>Maybe we need a new poll on how long you've
>been playing without a win.

Yes...maybe. But prepared to be very, very scared by the results.

I've never won ToME yet... but when I do (yes when, not if ) I probably wont take many turns. I find killing hoards of easy monsters to level up or search for good artefacts really, really boring, so I'm always going in WAY over my head to keep myself interesting. Amazingly enough, usually I can still rescue a character from almost any situation when I do this (of course, then I die to something trivial like a trap when I'm not paying attention).

Looking at my three winners' numbers it looks like I might getting a little faster. The most recent one (and the only one to become an ultimate winner) is well under 3 million turns. (Ok, she was a munchkin though. A Lygrog demon from Theme.)

Most of my winners have been sorcerors. I don't have information on all of them (there are 10 on the ladder), but with one exception the ones I know about have all taken in the range of 1.4 - 1.8 million turns. Weasel the Yeek Hermit Sorceror took more than 5 million. Most of these winners killed Melkor as well as Morgoth.

Of my other two winners, my geomancer in the competition took more than 2 million. I don't know how many my swordmaster took, but it was probably more than that.

I play fast at first- it usually takes me about 15 minutes to get to level 25. Of course I get killed a lot too. Once I have a character that looks like a winner I slow down a bit. I am usually most of the way through Mordor before my stats are maxed and in Angband when I hit level 50. This style explains why most of my winners have been sorcerors.

(scratches head) Man, I must be doing something wrong. My one and only winner racked up 21 million turns. Admittedly, she was an Alchemist, but even Bjorn (the second one, who died in Dol Guldur) got up above 9 million turns. Am I miscounting or something? The turn number in the high score listing is what we're talking about, yes?

Zizzo wrote:(scratches head) Man, I must be doing something wrong. My one and only winner racked up 21 million turns. Admittedly, she was an Alchemist, but even Bjorn (the second one, who died in Dol Guldur) got up above 9 million turns. Am I miscounting or something? The turn number in the high score listing is what we're talking about, yes?

Yes. Maybe your always-clear-the-whole-level playstyle isn't the most turn-effective Not that it's something wrong, it's just different.

I generally take longer than I should, but that's because I have a bad tendency to worship Eru and he rewards those that aren't in a great rush.

My turn count on the "Earth, Wind, and Fire" competition is typical for me.

vstat wrote:Yikes Keeper, 2 years? That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in us newbies:) I'm happy I've made it to Mirkwood!

I've made even past Mirkwood but I'm really scared of dying horribly after many days of careful development of my char.
Just look at my latest char.
When I'll find some free time I'll continue playing him (finally with my brand new 17'' LCD @ 1280x1024, so I can keep many ToME windows open without hurting my eyes ).
May be I'm too underconfident?