Leslie wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2017 12:52 pm
I remember that in the original games (DM, CSB, DM2) non-magical ranged weapons always seemed pretty useless to me. Sometimes I used them on the first mummies / screamers, but later on my entire ammo did not even kill a single monster.
Are they really so useless? Or should I just have trained Ninja skills a little higher than focusing on magic attacks?
Back when I was a tween, and DM2 did not exist yet, I came to some conclusions about ranged attacks. Some might be wrong, but my playstyle reflects them to this day. Oh, and as far as I know, CSB was never ported to the Apple IIGS, so I did not get to play it until around 9/11/01 when I found dmweb.free.fr and the port that allowed me to play it on my Windows 98SE computer (that I would not replace for several more years).
Anyways, it seemed that missile weapons and thrown were mostly ineffective against short monsters like rockpiles, magenta worms, and pain rats and useless against flying enemies like wasps and wizard eyes. I recall that you could shoot or throw at those enemies and the object would land on the floor, and I recall spending a lot of time picking up and throwing at a wizard eye (protected by a fireshield) to no avail. Wasps tended to be too dangerous to try this with, but I did try it with the wasp on level 4 until I ran out of VI portions, then I used a quick LO poison cloud to kill the thing. Then drank some VI BRO potion and had everybody refill the flasks.
However, they were really useful against mummies, trollins, and gigglers. In the "Creature Cavern" on level 3, I would dispatch everything there by throwing the clubs the trollins dropped or throwing missile weapons (and shooting rocks, you don't get the bow until the next level unless you take Linflas)
Skeletons seemed a bit odd. Conventional missile weapons like arrows, poison darts, and shuriken did not seem effective. I don't recall if rocks fired from a sling seemed effective or not. However, clubs, wooden shields, falchions, and even scrolls seemed quite effective against them. On the levels with skeletons, you get a lot of wooden shields and falchions lying around, and I found picking them up and chucking them at another group of skeletons was extremely effective, and helped build ninja levels.
I never did figure out how effective they were against scorpions, otius, or vertexes. I knew they had some effect since I once killed them that way, but never figured out how much. I never really tried with the latter other than throwing some drumsticks, a scroll, or other disposable item, they went down to a few good hits from my fighters.
Nor did I figure out if they did any damage at all to animated armor or stone golems.
For demons, I never bothered. I mostly ignored the demons since there were too many of them that were always respawning and my focus was on Lord Chaos.
As for The Red Dragon, I never even tried. I'd prime some MON fireballs, get full mana, and then prepare all my FUL bombs and items with charges like Boltblade, Fury, stormring, along with a few MON or PAL level VEN potions and a few magic boxes.
Then I'd freeze the dragon, chuck a MON level VEN potion, and start raining FUL bombs on him. When the VEN started to die down, I'd chuck another, and if the magic box wore off I'd use another. After the fUL bombs are gone, let him have it with the fireball spells, then when mana is down to 10%-25%, start with the charged items. I almost never needed a third VEN potion or third magic box as I'd be munching on dragon steaks before that.
Kinda over-prepared, but I remember being disappointed in how easy the Red Dragon was because of that strategy.
I had a friend who introduced me to DM, but it was about nine months before I could get my own copy. I needed to buy more RAM for my Apple IIGS and for a 10 year old that was expensive in those days. RAM upgrades cost more then than it does now without adjusting for inflation but adjusting for the change from kilobytes or later megabytes to gigabytes. Anyways, he was complaining about how tough and powerful the dragon on the lowest level was, so I horded all the consumable items for that fight, then let the dragon have it and my over-preparedness turned it into an anti-climax boss. Overkill? What overkill?