ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So here I am, excited to be back in the Far East and seeing things I have never seen before. I dive to the bottom of Eruan and a quick Vision/Sense shows me Guren and the Portal to Mount Doom. Cool! I start clearing the level, but within a few turns at the bottom most level the game slows down noticeably and I see the stdout (I have it in a terminal to the side, not dumping to a file) scrolling past furiously. Well I am an archmage so I cast Sense to get an idea of what is going on and I see what can only be described as a ritch explosion centered on poor Guren. I counted approximately 53 ritch hive mothers, and this is after blasting at the mob for a while. Can hive mothers summon other hive mothers by chance? I am not sure how I am going to handle this particular case, but it seems broken to me.

Yup, they can.

On the rare occasion that I make it to Eruan, I either make a point of killing ritch mothers ASAP, or use magic map and make a race for the stairs. Never seen Guren having trouble like that, but I can believe it..

Rise, thread, rise!

So, I've just got my first character to Eruan, a fighter, and now I have a problem. The farportal at the end of the area can only be used when there are no enemies around, but every single time I've entered the level Guren has been SWAMPED. I've even tried burning through teleportation and controlled blink scrolls to get to him as quickly as possible, but three times in a row he's already covered by hordes of ineffectual, non-damaging, CPU-destroying ritches. In the end I have no choice but to head back to the stairs - burning MORE scrolls to do so - and pacing around the fourth level of Eruan until enough game time has passed for the fifth level to be repopulated. What's a single-target, no area-of-effect-capable adventurer to do?

Your luck is bad, I guess...

I'm not sure area effect spells would help a lot -- the first time I made it to Eruan, I hit Guren with an area spell intentionally ("shoot first, ask questions later" was my motto ), and then spent forever dodging him round the level, before I figured out that he was literally invincible..

Phew. On take 4 I managed to quell the ritchsplosion just before it got out of control. Now for Mt. Doom... I found the Blood of Life and "Gems and Their Uses" on the way back to the Sunwall for supplies.

I can hear the RNG sharpening its knives.

Hehe, the RNG way just have been rewarding you for your persistence. Have ritch queens been nerfed the same way drakes have been (in that they cannot summon other ritch queens)?

Nope. Seeing as they're more fragile than dragons and the like it's not that much of a crisis when you're facing them, but I'd like it if they didn't attack and breed around Guren, since he does next to nothing when it comes to pruning them.

Mt. Doom went without a hitch. Using disengage as an impromptu afterburner is fun!

I have added some trees around the lake to reduces his LOS

Burb Lulls wrote: Mt. Doom went without a hitch. Using disengage as an impromptu afterburner is fun!

That's a pretty nifty application of that talent. Guess i should scum for boots