Weekly Reddit Challenge (8/24-8/31)

Dredmor fans, there's a new challenge for you! Reddit's /r/dredmor had one last week, I won it, and so this week I get to make the rules and here's what I set up. Join us, and let the friendly competition begin!

Reddit Challenge link!

 

The king is a she?

 

I'm not entirely sure if the Pharaoh title is unisex (never heard of the feminine title if so, but I have heard of Hatshepsut prior to this) but as for the Polish king...

Why a king and not a queen? I always thought that the queen of the country was simply the female ruler, usually the husband of the king (obviously not so with Queen Elizabeth). I guess not.

 

In progress on floor 4 with this. Also, floor 1 is known as the "OMFG, get OUT of my WAY diggles!" floor for vegans, ugh.

Without saying too much, because I want others to think on it, I just want to say I can tell this was a *really* well thought out challenge build! There's some tough, tough choices to make for build order, and the optional skills can each add something interesting as well.

Helpful tip to others: TURN OFF the auto-attack on movement when playing as a vegan. You'll thank me later.

 

Uh oh, political issues. A large part of the political power potential in Poland lied within the hands of nobles, and if she were a queen, it would be easy for them to arrange for someone subservient to them she would have to marry so that there would be a king, and she would lose the remainder of the political power she had. Calling herself a king was a not-so-subtle "eff you" directed towards them, and the only way for her to be able to actually rule on her own.

Poland is a rather crazy country, with most of its problems in its later history coming to existence because its nobles held too much power and were too corrupt. Heck, the country disappeared from the maps for 120 years precisely because of that reason (well, there were some other reasons, but if not for Polish nobles being corrupt, the country would have at least been able to openly fight against that) and that speaks for itself.

 

So it was YOU who beat me last week /fist shake

It's AWN. >:]

 

Now on floor 6....wow, I had no idea Unarmed (esp when combined with max vegan) could hit so hard. Both of the special moves have short cooldowns and do knockback, and they seem to hit twice for some reason (kind of like the CK rocket punch if done at point blank range)? It's so easy to just kite stuff and then turn around and whack it with one of the cooldown moves, rinse and repeat to kill things with low risk. Casters are another matter, but there are answers for that with the trees provided.

Also loving how max vegan/unarmed makes puny little throwing weapons hit for non-trivial damage. Also, WTB a freaking crossbow...still haven't seen one this run, and I have 100+ bolts sitting around.

The more I play this, the more it feels like there is almost too much synergy between the trees. It's a fun run, but it isn't quite as challenging a build to work with as I thought it would be. I foolishly leveled Tourist worrying that I'd starve to death without it as a vegan without a heal spell....waste of skill points, I could have gotten by a smarter way.

Update: Still no crossbow. Floor 7.
Update: Found an awesome crossbow, currently on floor 8 zoo. Def going the distance barring something stupid.

 

Whoa. What their is a subbreddit for dredmor? How long has this been going on?

 

Good, I can feel your anger. I am defenseless. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!

Or perhaps, YAY!!! I love friendly competition Jacq does that mean you're "Jaqland"?

 

yus, that is me.

Currently on floor...2. Stupid job.

edit; Though I found a named Crossbow on floor 1, and the first Krong has it make monsters drop money. If only I can master Bankster (never played it before) and stop kicking diggles I should be alright for a while.

 

Floor 10, at the zoo. If I don't get totally randomly owned by multiple ranged mobs I should be ok....

 

I'm just on floor 4 - haven't even touched the unarmed tree yet. Got a 12 damage polearm early on, and a bullet belt that grants me 3 - so I've been focusing on the Bankster and Vegan trees. I love Toxic assets! And with my parachute pants on, I don't mind that I'm still running just 4.

My death-weapon of choice is still softballs - I have plenty of cash to buy all of them, and with all my and they hit really hard.

Biggest decision I need to make is whether to max out Mathemagic or Tourist for the escape button...

And hello cakepie! I checked out your blog from the reddit link - good stuff! May I humbly suggest my own blog at strangedesign.typepad.com?

 

Vegan is really hard. After making it 3 squares into floor three and dying, I've blown through like 6 iterations of Granger mcDosh.

 

Learning to play vegan is a bit of a mental jump - absolutely. But once you understand it Vegan puts the game on Easy Mode.

 

Dred's dead baby, Dred's dead.

Final score: 1314608. The gauntlet has been thrown down!

http://imgur.com/yRW6F
http://imgur.com/Dhui6
http://imgur.com/YWCc5

 

Yeah, once you learn how to work around the annoyances it makes a big difference having a good chunk of the enemies be non-hostile. The most annoying thing was clearing the zoos....but I found ways to deal with that as well.

All said and done, the build was a LOT more powerful than I was expecting. I liked that there were tough choices what to level up first, but there was so much synergy between trees it was hard to really go terribly wrong. I'm expecting a bunch of us will kill Dred this week with little trouble.

 

Oh snap, somebody else has already blown my score away. But yeah, not a shocker.

 

Since score is mostly based on XP, I suspect that Archeology builds will be trouncing the Magic Training builds...

 

Thanks, I was wondering that. If I wanted to be cheap, I'd reload my last save and go hang in a corner and spam "Meet Interesting People" and kill all the hostile ones for XP....but that kind of goes against the spirit of things. There isn't quite THAT much on the line.