[slashem] Give up wishless conduct in late game?

[Janis Papanagnou]

My Tourist explored the whole dungeon and just prepared to get
the Book, fetch the Amulet, and do the home run. And I noticed
that up to now I have gone wishless. Something quite uncommon
in my Slashem games at that stage; usually I at least talk to
Gypsies to obtain a wish, or go for a fountain or throne wish
to obtain something crucial that I am missing. My "problem" is
that I am Neutral and I often have swarming incidents by Angels
of all ranks at the Plane of Air, and these are usually deadly.
One preparation for that is a wish for a c'trice corpse as soon
as I am at the portal to Air. Entering the Plane and making the
decision for a wish then means to lose two or three turns which
may already be fatal in these experienced summonings cases. But
having a wishless Slashem game in my ascension list is tempting.
Hmm... - Any other [wishless] options to mitigate the risk?

Janis

[Chris Bowers]

I use wand of teleport, even on plane of air in vanilla nethack. It saves turns gets things away and makes a path. Even with wand of teleport nerfed in nethack 3.6.x to only teleport half the stuff away, I still just collect more, polipile for more and do it anyway.

I would suggest you do some experimentation on the plane of air in explore mode. And with angels in explore mode. Find our what makes them tick before you try to go wishless.

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 17.01.2022 08:59, Chris Bowers wrote:
> On Sunday, December 12, 2021 at 10:06:19 AM UTC-5, Janis wrote:
>> My Tourist explored the whole dungeon and just prepared to get
>> the Book, fetch the Amulet, and do the home run. And I noticed
>> that up to now I have gone wishless. Something quite uncommon
>> in my Slashem games at that stage; usually I at least talk to
>> Gypsies to obtain a wish, or go for a fountain or throne wish
>> to obtain something crucial that I am missing. My "problem" is
>> that I am Neutral and I often have swarming incidents by Angels
>> of all ranks at the Plane of Air, and these are usually deadly.
>> One preparation for that is a wish for a c'trice corpse as soon
>> as I am at the portal to Air. Entering the Plane and making the
>> decision for a wish then means to lose two or three turns which
>> may already be fatal in these experienced summonings cases. But
>> having a wishless Slashem game in my ascension list is tempting.
>> Hmm... - Any other [wishless] options to mitigate the risk?
>>
>> Janis
>
> I use wand of teleport, even on plane of air in vanilla nethack. It

> saves turns gets things away and makes a path. [...]

I use these wands a lot as well. But for the Plane of Air that will
not help in summon storms. The free path is immediately filled by
adjacent monsters the next (monster-)turn, before you can even make
a step. Breaking a wand (ideally one with only 1 charge[*]) instead
is slightly better, but the summonings are so efficient that one
can be lucky if he could advance more than one square. Slashem is
probably a lot harder than Vanilla here because of the many types
of high level spell casters you typically meet there.

[*] It would help better if the radius of the teleport effect of a
broken wand would depend on the number of charges left; I think it
would be a good change if, say, 1 charge would affect the adjacent
monsters, 4 charges the next circle and 9 charges another circle.

>
> I would suggest you do some experimentation on the plane of air in
> explore mode. And with angels in explore mode. Find our what makes
> them tick before you try to go wishless.

Actually that game (from last year) is already terminated. After I
inspected the logfile and saw that (without noticing) I already had
ascended a couple characters wishless I decided to not risk it and
(so I think to recall) wished for that stoning corpse. At least the
endgame log reports for the game from around that date: "You used 1
wish."

Janis