Re: CF: More levels

[Christian Stieber <stieber@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>]

Anthony Thyssen (anthony@cit.gu.edu.au) wrote:

> | In fact, level 10...15 in the basic skills are generally enough to
> | allow some exploring... you'll die every now and then, but that's life
> | :-)
> | 
> Now for the big question -- where can you get money :-)
> 
> After dieing a few times you really need those expensive
> potions to raise your stats.

Hm... that's a difficult question I'm not really prepared for (I try
to avoid dieing). Dragons leave gems --- and some gems don't
burn. Also, don't waste money by selling stuff without identifying it
first. After you have aquired the identification skills you can can
save a lot of time by identifying stuff in the dungeon and using
alchemy to turn it into gold nuggest. You'll loose 10% or something
like that, but it gives you a lot more money in the end since you save
a lot of time.

And, of course, sell valueable objects. No need to pile up 100
bonecrushers or skullcleavers or whatever. Apropos bonecrusher: DO NOT
IDENTIFY BONECRUSHERS!  They yield _much_ more money when
unidentified!

On older servers you can use the create food spell to make money.

And, last but not least, there is always the hard way: kill zombies
and sell their (identified) bodies. I've maxed out the stats of new
characters this way --- it's time consuming, but gives you a good
start (esp. for a barbarian --- they just don't get anywhere without
a decent wis, and fail too many books without a decent int).

If you have a server with my private apartments, or a server that
still has free apartments, buy one! It's actually the first thing I
buy, long before I even consider buying a potion or anything else. You
can use the apartment to store valuable items that you don't need to
carry around, or to make piles of objects to identify and sell later
on (to save money).

You have to be a little careful with collecting items to identify and
sell --- it can crash the server if you are using the client (the good
old "big pile problem") --- and you will loose the items.  The same
trick can be used to reliably crash the server, of course: bugs that
won't be fixed are always nice, esp. if you can make up for the loss
of playability by using it in a profitable way.

In general money tends to be a minor problem for characters that can
kill some decent monsters --- not considering things like buying a
ring of Elrond or Power, although you will generally be able to buy
your ring of Elrond before you find one.

Many players like to start "seller" characters --- usually elves. They
roll full charisma for them (18+the cha bonus), and use this character
to identify some things, and buy/sell items.

A classic way to avoid some deaths is to use a "test" character to
enter buildings, say passwords etc. Depends on your patience, of
course --- if you have already completed maps 1-10 of some series, you
might not want to run your test character through those 10 maps just
to find out what's behind a door :-)

You can also improve your chances of surviving by making a key (I
generally use the ESC-key) that does something like
  apply amulet of lifesaving;apply healing potion;apply potion of fire
  res;apply potion of cold res;apply potion of magic imm (or shock imm)
You should also have keys for
  cast immunity to fire;stay fire              for fire immunity
  cast <your best healing spell>;stay fire     for healing
  apply healing potion                         if you can't use the spell
You should also have keys for the basic sttack spells and prayers ---
crossfire is an action game, and having a proper set of keys is
mandatory.

Christian


-- 
Christian Stieber        http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~stieber
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