Getting enough money for protection?
Magni
far and then YASD'ing with Valkyries...figure I ought to die a couple
times early game to get it out of my system. :-p), and I was wondering
how people got enough cash to do the whole protection thing. I
generally grab a knife and some armor ASAP, and let my pet do most of
the killing. I head down to minetown as fast as I can, and then realize
that I have an obscenely small amount of gold in order to do the
protection thing, even if i'm still only level 1-3 (which I usually
am.) Any special techniques on how to get enough gold before heading
down to minetown to grab some protection, without gaining too many
levels in the process? Thanks.
Geoduck
wrote:
>Any special techniques on how to get enough gold before heading
>down to minetown to grab some protection, without gaining too many
>levels in the process? Thanks.
Get a pickaxe (or some way of digging..) and tunnel into a few vaults.
You get special messages if there's one on any given level.
--
Geoduck
Want a WinHack tile set that fits the screen?
Go to:http://www.olywa.net/cook/nhack.htm
JPD
Magni wrote:
> Any special techniques on how to get enough gold before heading
> down to minetown to grab some protection, without gaining too many
> levels in the process? Thanks.
If your pet is trained for shoplifting, use the shops in Minetown.
Sell everything back to the shopkeeper over and over again until he is
cleaned out - they usually have thousands on hand. Obviously, repeated
selling of expensive items is going to get you there quicker, and it
would be even more helpful to have a second pet standing outside the
shop to guard you.
--
JPD
Lars Kecke
> So i've been playing more wizards lately
> Any special techniques on how to get enough gold before heading
> down to minetown to grab some protection, without gaining too many
> levels in the process? Thanks.
Unless you start with lots of money, what wizards don't, there is
- robbing shops (sell your spellbooks/rings and let your pet bring them
back)
- robbing vaults (look for those ad areatum(?) signs, bring a pickaxe)
- self-leveldrain to get back to 1 ("new man" polyself, wand/spell of
draining, or throwing Stormy upwards)
- killing shopkeepers (once you arrive at minetown, your pet should be
big enough to attack them, bring healing/sleep spells).
- selectively IDing and selling hard gems (engrave-tested)
- finding gold in solid rock (especially in the mines)
and a few I have forgotten.
Lars
me
news:4gjj8oF...@individual.net...
Another is if your game has a magic portal to Ft Ludios (I don't think
it's guaranteed to appear). The portal will be in a vault. I just cleaned
out Ft Ludios, and got about 35K in gold. Also got some white DSM
(will do until I can get better DSM later on)
Kent Paul Dolan
> So i've been playing more wizards lately (I've
> tired of getting really far and then YASD'ing with
> Valkyries...figure I ought to die a couple times
> early game to get it out of my system. :-p), and I
> was wondering how people got enough cash to do the
> whole protection thing.
[Note in advance that both The Protection Racket
and Credit Cloning are controversial in this
newsgroup. The first, correctly, is controversial
for being dangerous to unskilled players, the
second is controversial, incorrectly IMO, for
being "abusive" of existing game mechanics. Since
you can already do the first, part of the time,
and "need" to know how to do the second, to
satisfy your goal of early cheap protection, I'm
ignoring the controversy hereafter in favor of
answering your question.]
The very first rule of having sufficient money is to
keep small what counts as "sufficient": always
arrive at the Mines Town altar at XL 1, where 10
points of protection can always be purchased for
less than 4000 zorkmids. Even a single shopkeeper
can have up to 4000 zorkmids to scam away, and Mines
Town has several storekeepers.
Level up even once, and you've doubled your need for
money.
Since you say below that you arrive in Mines Town at
"level 1-3" you obviously _can_ arrive at XL 1, so
make that your goal. The biggest aid to doing that
is to keep your pet alive and add more pets as you
go along, so someone not-you does the monster
fighting. The second biggest aid is always to move
carefully, and use G<direction> to move long
distances, so you don't accidentally hit monsters
you encounter and gain eXperience Points you don't
want.
> I generally grab a knife and some armor ASAP, and
> let my pet do most of the killing. I head down to
> minetown as fast as I can, and then realize that I
> have an obscenely small amount of gold in order to
> do the protection thing, even if i'm still only
> level 1-3 (which I usually am.) Any special
> techniques on how to get enough gold before
> heading down to minetown to grab some protection,
> without gaining too many levels in the process?
Yep. Credit cloning is a splendid way to arrive rich
at the altar, and there are several shopkeepers in
Mines Town to scam out of their hard earned
zorkmids. You just need some seed cash brought in
from levels above.
Since several other answers have described fairly
wimpy ways to scam shopkeepers, let me describe my
patented speed-scam credit cloning.
This technique involves startup, a buy-sell loop
within a credit-cloning loop, and end actions,
making it pretty hard to describe linearly, so let's
start with the Cliff's Notes version, before going
on to the muddled-in-Manhatten version:
* START: Create credit by dropping cash in the shop.
* Repeatedly buy and sell the same goods until
that credit is exhausted, while converting a
fraction of that credit into zorkmids, which
you keep dropping after each sale, and, which at
the end your pet will steal for you.
* Clone the cash into cash plus more credit by
having the pet steal the cash, bring it to
you outside the shop, at which point you create
more credit by taking the cash back in and
dropping it again.
* Repeat the above two items until the shop is
bankrupt and you own all its goods.
* END: Carry out desired goods, let the pet steal
the cash one last time.
STARTING STATE: You have a little cash, or else some
goods you own that you can sell in this shop for
cash, the shopkeeper has a lot of cash you want, and
you are in a shop with some merchandize on the floor.
CLUE: The first big thing to understand is that pets
are for hauling _money_ out of shops, not
merchandise. One trip with money equals lots of
trips with merchandise.
To get a pet to bring out money, put the money two
steps into the door of the shop, leave the pet in the
shop, leave everything else in the shop in a single
pile [with some pretty-surely cursed item on the top
of the pile so even if the pet steps "reluctantly"
on the pile, it won't pick up the only item
available to it (unless it is eating something in
the pile), the top one], step one step outside the
shop and wait for your pet to pick up the money and
bring it to your feet.
NOTE: Treats to keep the pet circling near you, and
to reward the pet for fetching, a leash to keep the
pet close to the entrance and pull it out once it
picks up the money, or a magic whistle to draw the
pet back near the money and out of the shop once it
has the money are all useful to speeed up this
process.
NOTE: Also, while large pets will carry out pretty
much any amount of money, smaller pets seemingly
can't lift a big stack of coins, in which case you
may need to split the stack of coins into two or
more stacks.
Once you have dropped your money inside,
establishing _credit_, and the pet has brought it
outside, turning it into _cash_, while it also
remains as _credit_ in the eyes of a shopkeeper who
is blind to your pet's behavior, it's time to clone
that credit.
Carry the cash back in, gate your pet out so it can
go hunting to keep arriving monsters in check and
itself fed and improving in Hit Dice, and drop the
cash on top of the stack of goods, which gives you
that much more credit. You've now cloned the credit,
but what you want is cash, so you need to convert
the credit to cash. That's where the buy-sell loop
comes into play.
The way to convert credit to cash is to sell stuff
to the shopkeeper, and you're standing right on top
of a nice pile of "stuff". Trouble is, it belongs to
the shopkeeper, not to you.
Okay, back to the beginning. To start, go in, pile
up the goods of the shop in a heap, with something
suspected of being cursed on top, and drop all
your cash on the heap to establish a starting
credit balance. Now you're on top of that stack
you just created, and we can go on.
But hey! You've got ***CREDIT***! Pick up as much of
the "stuff" as you can, usually most expensive per
weight first, being extremely careful not to pick up
the cash or you're going to waste a lot of effort.
Pay for it, itemized, so you can answer "y" to every
"sell it?" request, and just skip over the stuff you
can't afford, without thinking about it much.
NOTE: This is the point where you realize that
establishing the stack of goods and cash against a
wall where a "y" won't _move_ you lets you just hold
down the "y" key and let autorepeat buy the goods.
Once the goods are yours, sell them back. You are
going to take a loss on the transaction, but you
DON'T CARE, your credit was scammed for free, you
are just trying to convert some fraction of it to
CASH, your goal to steal. So, drop all you bought
plus anything else you have that you can risk
selling, and when asked if you want to sell what you
dropped, reply "a" for "all" and get money for what
you drop.
VERY IMPORTANT: At the end of the transaction, every
time, DROP the money, creating more credit. If you
don't drop the cash, you'll be handing it back to
the shopkeeper when you next buy stuff, defeating
your goal of getting the cash _away_ from the
shopkeeper, peacefully.
Keep doing this "buy, then sell" loop until the
amount of credit you create by dropping cash gets
too small to be worth the trouble. [If you're as
obsessive as I am, keep doing it until the credit
created isn't enough to buy the cheapest item.]
Alternately, the shopkeeper may run out of money;
they start their shop with a maximum of 4000
zorkmids, an average (source divers?) of maybe half
that. You'll know the shopkeeper is broke when you
get interrupted space-barring past the memos of
goods sold to the shopkeeper to be asked if you'll
"accept credit" for the next good to be sold. No,
you don't want to do that, so type "q" to quit
selling the goods, and you'll finish dropping them,
but still own them.
In either case, it's time to clone more credit. Drop
any unpaid goods you may have, make sure something
the pet won't pick up is on top, pick up the money,
put it two steps in from the door, find your pet and
trade places so it brings the money out of the shop
to you, sooner or later.
You might want to do this latter part a couple of
extra times after the shopkeeper is bankrupt, to use
the money to establish credit to buy the useful
stuff from the pile of goods before you go, then let
your pet bring out the cash one last time.
RESULTS: At the end of this process, you have all
your original money, all the shopkeeper's original
money, own part or all of the shop's merchandise,
and perhaps are carrying away a nice assortment of
shop merchandise as well.
NOTE: Nothing preents you from starting this process
off slowly, so that you try on armor the pet approves,
name as "Cursed" or "Pet Avoids" armor the pet won't
approve, kill off or evade any mimics, outrace your
pet to treats grab and pay for them, and other usual
shop stuff, before consolidating the "stuff" in a heap
and credit cloning.
WARNING: Always exclude unidentified gems from the
stack of goods you buy or sell, the pricing is just
much too far in the shopkeeper's favor for credit
cloning to include unidentified gems. For similar
reasons, always loot boxes or (real) chests in the
shop, to make sure what you are paying for when you
buy or sell them isn't gems.
CLUE: With lots of food in my knapsack, I tend to
put the gems at the "money spot" just in from the
door, let the pet steal them early on, and file them
away in my knapsack for the duration of the credit
cloning, or just leave them in a heap outside the
shop, as one strategy. With less food on hand, so
that I don't have lots of time to wait for my pet to
steal the gems, I tend to pile all the shop's gems,
plus all of mine, unsold, on a separate square, and
topped with something cursed, while I credit clone.
At the end, with lots of spare credit, I might burn
it up paying thousands of zorkmids for what turns
out to be worthless glass, just because credit is
only useful in the shop where you create it, so
leaving credit behind makes no sense.
NOTE: It can help simplify this whole process if you
have a bag, box, or chest into which to put the
goods, then you just have one item to pick up, pay
for all or part of, and drop to sell all or part of.
NOTE: It will speed this whole exercise, because the
proportion between buy prices and sell prices is
more in your favor, if you have good charisma or can
increase your charisma. Credit cloning is really
awesome with a charisma of 17 or 18, really, really
tedious with a charisma of 8 or less.
VERY IMPORTANT: Keep track of your hunger. This
process is "speed-scam" only because it's faster
than depending on your pet bringing merchandise out
the shop door [cash is a better lump of value to be
carried in one trip, so having the pet steal cash
instead of merchandise speeds the process of
acquiring additional credit]. It's still going to
take hundreds of turns to bankrupt a shop, and that
puts starving very much up as an issue.
CAUTION: Once you've bankrupted one shop, the huge
amount of cash you have makes bankrupting another
shop "easy" because you can buy and sell so much
more per transaction with a large starting credit
balance, but there are two special cases.
Delicatessans and the lighting shop are both slow
slogging goes because nothing they buy or sell costs
very much, making lots and lots of buy-sell loops
necessary, heightening the danger of starvation. A
very good "sell" operation in a big wand shop might
net you 1500 zorkmids cash in one pass; you'll be
lucky to net 150 zorkmids per "sell" operation in a
delicatessan or lighting shop. It's easier to
bankrupt a delicatessan with one or more (expensive)
unholy or holy waters to buy and sell, it's easier
to bankrupt the lighting shop with one or more
(expensive) magic lamps to buy and sell.
FWIW
xanthian.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Doug Freyburger
As soon as a wizard learns the "create monster" spell, altar
camping can generate AC points without the limits of buying
protection. Even better there are assorted other benefits the
times you don't get AC.