Dungeon 7 Turn 3
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While Kamau continues to block attacks (taking no damage this time), the rest of the party clears out the remaining chickens without issue. With all of the nearby enemies defeated, Ricki stashes two of her thieves’ tools with Molly and picks up the lone corn cob and the two eggs that drop as loot. After just one fight, they’re already almost a third of the way to having all the produce they need! Also, although each of these items looks delicious, they don’t really constitute a full meal that would restore HP. Maybe there’s a way to change that?
Perhaps seeing that there’s nothing left to eat here, the crows above fly off to the right.
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CORN
Treasure
Can be used to grow more corn.
Weight 1 (Stack 5), Cost 1
EGG
Treasure
Can be used to grow more chickens, who in turn will lay more eggs.
Weight 1 (Stack 3), Cost 1
Kamau: Go right and Interpose.
Everyone else: Go Right and Attack the Corn! Lohk should use her Torch to Attack and Molly shouldn’t use her Kick Ability.
Edit: Molly shouldn’t attack at all unless attacking without Kicking makes anything funny happen, like Molly chewing the Corn’s arm.
Reason: Everyone (Except Kamau) attacking at once should OHKO the Corn unless it has an Ability that makes it always survive one attack. It might have an Ability like that because “Corn is … a mighty warrior.”
The reason I said everyone instead of everyone except Molly is I want to see what happens when she tries to attack without using the Kick Ability. 😛 (I know nothing happens. I just want to see if Molly is drawn doing anything.)
Nothing happens, as she has no atk and def. In fact, your order as stated might make her use her kick ability prematurely.
Edited to say Molly shouldn’t Kick.
I know Molly attacking without Kicking won’t cause anything to happen. I just want to see what LSN draws if he even bothers drawing Molly doing anything when aksking her do do something everyone knows will do nothing. 😛 (My hope is chewing on an arm or something like that.)
I don’t think it’s true that nothing would happen – if Molly attacks, she is just attacking with +0 meaning she becomes a combatant and could be the target of attacks or take AOE damage.
That is something I fear. Probably the tomatoes don’t do splash damage (Else the dungeon wouldn’t be Kamau-accessible at all) but I dunno.
Even if they do splash damage, everybody has armor. Unless it’s armor piercing splash damage or a huge amount, we should be fine.
Squirrel and Molly have neither armour nor defence and Daisy has no armour and only 1 defence.
Good point about the pets. I did not think about them, beyond the fact that having Molly risk injury to do 0 damage for the memes would be a bad idea.
On one hand, I’d like to have Lohk start picking off squirrels. On the other, crows fighting squirrels solves two problems.
Eight magicrows (4 blue, 2 green, 2 orange), four squirrels. D5T26 showed the blue magicrows shooting beams, probably somewhere around 3 damage since a beam and a hand-crossbow bolt dealt 0 damage through 6 Def (Ricki 1, wolf armour 2+1, shield 2). Green and orange magicrows do something different, but it’s unclear what that will be.
Looks like crows will continue onward, and we’ll either run out of scarecrows or the bull will knock one down. I’m a little worried about smiffing the spear while it’s one of our only ranged attacks against flying enemies with ranged attacks. I’d still like to smif the bat armour into a Silver Ring of Protection, but that will need some shuffling. We also have the option of smiffing a Silver Ring of Evasion with a Shield; evasion isn’t as consistently great as defense, but with massive groups of enemies like those chickens and Kamau drawing all attacks, maybe it’d be useful. Scaling would also matter, I expect evasion rings to give 10% dodge chance per +1 of shield, but if the +2 shield gave us a 30-40% dodge ring then that’d be more interesting.
I think the magicrows “following” us are LSNs new/current way to prevent that we’ll leave stuff lying around as much as we did in the past because he’s fed up having to keep track of that all (he did already get rid of a lot of such things with the zombie knight last dungeon, after all, and the insane amounts of guards chasing us in the kobold warrens also made sure that we couldn’t return and grab things later much.
We -might- be able change that to being able to keep (edible) stuff lying around by fighting and annihilating the flock of them, but apparently we gotta -earn- that. Provided the 8 magicrows wouldn’t mean TPK, if we fought that group alone, that is).
Therefore I believe it’s quite possible/likely that they won’t fight the squirrels at all.
I am very inclined to find out how smithing a silver ring compares to smithing a copper ring, but we need something to smith, too. And giving up the only ranged weapon we have is not an option I favour at the moment. Nor is experimenting with smithing shields with silver ring, when we don’t know what it does with a copper ring, so we wouldn’t know the increment/difference.
Maybe we could have Macadamia talk about what he thinks he can do with silver rings (now that he has the skill)? It did work with him explaining about the copper rings (eventually, after we left most of the stuff we could have USED to smith behind. :P) in the warrens.
Completely unrelated:
Hrm, I kind of wonder if both here as well as in the sewer dungeon treasure/produce that we would sell mid-dungeon with the paw to Paws would count towards the goal of 3 treasures (sewer)/10 produce goal, or not.
Not that we’ll have this problem, because we couldn’t afford to buy the paw (at 15 gold, what’s up with that? RL inflation affecting this game or will the paw get more and more expensive to buy, so the “profit” will get smaller and smaller until it simply won’t be cost-effective anymore? Not that we really got a lot of value out of the last time we used it. So many items not getting sold that could have been, and all because Paws didn’t want to pick them up from the floor – which wouldn’t have been a problem in the “original” rules of the game, because it would have been a free action to pick it all up at once and sell whatever we want to sell. *sighs* But I digress. A LOT.)
Paw gets 10 more expensive everytime it’s bought. It drops in price by 5 every time a dungeon is completed back down to a minimum of 10. It’s in the description of the item.
Thanks a lot for relaying that info. 😀 I’m not sure whether or not I did read the description at some point in the past, but if I did that info wasn’t there yet. Probably didn’t read it, though.
completely unrelated idea: Oooooh, I wonder if we could take the scarecrow with us somehow…
Everyone: Go Right
Ricki: Climb the tree into the tree house and bypass the web if you can (or cut it if you can’t) and attack the Spider. If pointing out traps doesn’t count as the action for the turn, also point out traps in the Turnip patch if there’s any.
Kamau: Interpose under the tree house.
Maca: Attack the Corn!
Lohk: Cast Ray of Frost on a Squirrel
Daisy: Attack the Corn!
Squirrel (The Pet Rat): Attack the Corn
Explanation:
We can’t Kill the Corn in 1 Turn unless everyone attacks it at once, but we want to do other stuff too so this plan does other stuff while Maca and Daisy weaken the Corn. Lohk can snipe Squirrels and Ricki can 1v1 the Spider without Kamau. Pointing out possible traps in Turnips is for when we need to cross them.
Kam should tank as much as possible. He goes down after 5 damage is taken by the party. Put him at the front, tank as much as possible, and minimise damage to the rest.
Kamau staying under the treehouse is so the other Squirrels don’t see him yet and Ricki has enough Defense to take nothing from the Spider.
Reluctant though I am to post on a Saturday, and this will be too late to matter anyway…
the “charge now, because we’ll be weaker” argument, though understandable, is simply wrong – it’s actually an immediate net loss, and consistently loses dps indefinitely. The longer we wait before crafting, the more damage we give away.
To keep it simple: Mac right now is contributing 2 Atk with his spear, instead of creating a ring that adds 2 Atk. If he’d spent the first turn crafting, his relative output total would have been -2, -2, -2 over the first 3 turns, because he’d have been doing the same damage either way, i.e. we gave up the first turn, but since then it’s been a wash.
If he’d done that and been given ANY weapon though – I’ll use a spear again to keep it simple – his relative DPS would have been -2, 0, +2, +4, and so on, increasing indefinitely.
Since we happen to have the idle Swiftblade, it would actually have been -2, -2 (transfer of item), +2, +6: that is, a large net win after just 3 turns, and huge win after only 4. Since it continues to increase from there indefinitely though, at +4 per turn (2 for the spear, vs 6 for Swiftblade (+1 +3) and the ring (+2)) we’re giving up a ton of damage, and that’s with the weapon still UNenchanted.
The only time at which that ever makes sense is if there are multiple enemies that in total provide more damage than we can soak, and Mac can actually kill one, and doing so reduces the damage below Kamau’s Def. The first area was that, but from here on every single turn that we do the Wrong Thing is costing us 4 damage, and the associated HP loss on Kamau from enemies living longer.
Since we obviously don’t want to waste actions giving him Swiftblade as it is and then having to trade it twice more to get it enchanted, we want to take care of that ASAP too. The “right” time to enchant the sword is “Not later than the turn Mac smifs on”. Since enchanting is probably an action, and not something Kamau can do it while in combat while interposing, the right time for both of those things is now, before we start the next fight.
We’ll have made this mistake twice by Monday, but such is life. Given that, the next credible opportunity would be after the Corn Warrior and Tomato are dead, at which point even Lohk can tank the squirrel attacks. The important piece here is that we don’t make the mistake a third time too just because everyone’s adrenaline is up.
It’s a bit more complicated than that in practice, but the premise remains the same.
Our first round of crafting, by the time we get to it, will occupy 3 of our 4 chars: only Ricki will be idle, and she can scout that turn if we want her to. Even if she doesn’t though, the additional firepower pays for that single “lost” action almost immediately, and then continues to profit indefinitely after that.
Yaknow, this whole thing doesn’t have to be mathematically optimized. It just doesn’t.
That’s rollplaying.
It’s a game. We can play well or poorly, and part of the fun is playing well.
I agree that the tone of this observation was adversarial, calling current decisions “wrong” and only backing that up with abstract numbers instead of showing what we could have accomplished under the alternative decision, but the math isn’t the problem. The disagreement here is in what the goal should be.
Sorry about that: like I said, I was trying to keep things simple. It’s very easy to get into extremely hypothetical scenarios, and even with good intentions those nearly always lead to strawman arguments creeping into the discussion.
It’s not really calling any of the decisions “wrong”, but it is saying that the premise of “rush now because we’ll get weaker over time” is by itself a false one, despite looking reasonable at first glance. If we continue to treat it as unconditionally valid and keep stalling the crafting, we’re far more likely than not to have ended up with a much larger net loss of actions, because a combat took an extra turn longer than it could have if we’d been dishing out 5+ more damage.
Even “only” 5 damage is enough to free up Lohk entirely and still come out ahead. It’s very nearly enough to free up 1 Ricki for every turn from now until the end of the dungeon. That’s a hell of a lot of extra actions.
It’s not unlike interest, if that helps. The longer you avoid paying down the principal on a debt the more you pay overall, even though it feels like you’re paying less because each installment is smaller.
There’s a lot of complexity and several unknowns even in just the two rooms we’ve seen so far, and action costs to crafting, and so on. We did cover some of them in Discord, which is better suited to that sort of thing as people can present their own genuine plans rather than having someone else’s guesses as to what those might be. The forum is a poor place for that sort of thing, because trying to cover even the good faith arguments can run to pages, let alone bad faith ones. Since most people are just here for the funny that’s not really a good use of anyone’s time.
The concern is less about doing it “OMG right this second!”, and more about getting to the end of this fight and then again falling into the trap of “We need to keep rushing because there’s only 2T left before everyone loses 1 Atk”, because we can keep doing that forever.
Similarly, waiting for a moment that’s “ideal” for the crafting – for example “until we find a chest for Ricki to spend her turn picking” – because we don’t want to have a loss of 1 action on 1 char is a false economy, especially when we still have almost the entire dungeon unexplored.
Mac’s extra damage frees up actions on other chars. That’s the point I’m trying to get across here.
To take the current area as an example, we have everyone attacking a single target, when e.g. Lohk could be zapping a squirrel; or Ricki could be squashing tomatoes, etc.
We need both knowledge and DPS to be able to tackle these encounters efficiently. The knowledge will come with time, but the DPS will only come if we actually invest the time to get it. Right now it looks like we’re a little too tempted by the instant gratification of not doing that, but even in the short term that approach will cost us actions overall, and that very quickly adds up to lost turns.
Not really. It’s just starting from “Rushing feels like a worse idea than crafting”, to understanding why it does, to articulating it for everyone else.
This isn’t a single-player game, so if you don’t want to just go with the flow you need to provide a better reason for it than “just because”, and sometimes math is the only objective way to do that.
Total damage isn’t the only important number to optimize. How many chickens can Macadamia kill in a turn when using the enchanted swiftblade with a silver ring of aggression? One.
We have seen two rooms of the dungeon, and still have immediate benefits from using actions, especially with the second turn we’d need to spend trading (which encourages more shenanigans like having Kamau enchant and then drop the swiftblade so only Macadamia spends the action to pick it back up). There’s a lot of dungeon to go, and putting more damage will be helpful against beefy enemies, but we don’t have to drop everything to get that online asap.
Thanks for making this point! More damage sometimes equals fewer actions, but not always.
Sure – it’s not the only number, but outside of mobs it matters enormously, and we’re already at 1+ serious enemies per screen plus the mobs. The second area alone already has us almost certainly wasting at least one action by overkilling the corn warrior, which is something we’re unlikely to have done if Mac’s damage was larger than his current damage plus Lohk’s.
Right now there’s a certain amount of wiggle room because we don’t have a great idea of enemy stats, but the objection to crafting is that it’ll waste one action on one char – so we’ve already balanced that out even if it was actually true, which it mostly isn’t.
“Corn is … a mighty warrior.”Even unarmed, this one soaked 10-14 without dying (and hit for 5). If +5 is the difference between being able to kill one in a single round vs needing two rounds for it, we’re sacrificing at least two actions every time, already.
Unless your position is that we should never do the crafting we had planned, which it obviously isn’t, that puts us at a net loss by the time we finish even just this current room. I can’t offer you anything more concrete than that right now, but that should surely be enough to understand where I’m coming from.
We have only two ranged attacks, and the only way we get to +5 is if we sacrifice that ranged attack now. Part of why we didn’t craft turn 1 is because without the benefit of smiffing the spear, it only buffs Mac by 2 damage and the enchantment, whatever it is. That came at the expense of nobody else attacking for the turn Kamau needs to enchant, and it taking at least 8 turns to kill the crows if we ever need to and they’re all ranged.The only possible benefit for the corn fight of Mac having been enchanted is that we could’ve perhaps reassigned Lohk to kill a squirrel, but it’s unclear that would’ve been safe given our range of hp and armor for the corn.
Rat climb up the pole and see if there’s anything it can shake loose from the scarecrow. Scarecrows have always got a few gold pieces or a ring or something. Maybe even revive it and help it in its quest to see the Wizard.
Did we search the scarecrow?