hello, I play DCSS on and off and I am an aspiring-ish win-streaker. When I got inspired I started playing online to track my games and try my hand at streaks. I managed to get 7 unique wins, and it was fun, didn’t seem so bad for a first attempt. I could probably could manage to reach double digits on a good second attempt, but I had and still have a problem with the length of my runs. My winning runs take 9 hours to complete on average, which really takes a toll on my stamina, raises the commitment it takes to play a single run and overall reduces how many runs I can play in a given timespan. I don’t like that, all of those things directly get in the way of the goal of attempting to streak and make playing slightly less enjoyable to me in general.
The problem is that I simply don’t know where I could even save the time. When I play I rarely ever feel like I’m wasting time anywhere. The time goes on carefully exploring early dungeon levels to minimize risk of getting caught in a bad spot. Managing skill training and evaluating which skill should be trained up at any moment. Very carefully evaluating the threats and determining if I can simply kill the monster at hand, if I should avoid it or how many resources I should spend if I fight. Luring enemies back to a cleared and explored area to fight them there, preferably one at a time, over and over. Slowly pressing movement keys to not get surprised by monsters showing up. I do all of that kind of thing and try to make sure I don’t make mistakes, and I just don’t know where corners could be cut to save time without compromising consistency. I know it’s possible, for example Sergey takes around 5 hours to complete wins and they play well enough that way to be on a world record streak, but I’m not there yet.
I want to ask, do you have any advice on how run length could be brought down without hurting quality of play? I figure most likely it has to do with experience, playing enough of the game until I can answer most questions the game regularly asks on intuition and previous experiences alone, but I’m hoping there’s anything more you can suggest beyond playing more. thanks!
Slowly pressing movement keys to not get surprised by monsters showing up.
Ctrl+direction will prevent movement if any enemies show up. Same goes for auto-explore of course.
Very carefully evaluating the threats and determining if I can simply kill the monster at hand, if I should avoid it or how many resources I should spend if I fight.
Aside from red background enemies and uniques, you can easily take out any enemy one-versus-one. There are a few exceptions (banishers, paralysers…) but they are a few and you will learn to fear them in no time.
You can also set tile_show_threat_levels += tough to give “tough” enemies yellow background, leaving “trivial” and “easy” enemies with no background.
I actually don’t have that much trouble with accurately telling if an enemy is dangerous or not. Given enough time I’ll be able to tell if I can kill that enemy or if I should fear it. My guesses are not terribly off often, it’s just that I need to take some time to tell, but this part of the game doesn’t take too long for me. Instead most of the time spent on enemy encounters goes into getting their attention, luring them back to a safe explored area and killing them there. I find that micro-handling of enemies to be a level of respect that almost all of them deserve. Even an easy enemy should be pulled back, because fighting it where you see it on the spot risks getting the attention of much more enemies nearby than initially anticipated and turning the fight into an uncontrolled mess. Trying to save time by respecting the mundane enemies less always resulted in bad things for me so far, so this is not where I’ve managed to successfully cut corners yet. I need to take it slow all the time so I never have fights unexpectedly turning into group beatdowns, and to give myself enough time to spot enemies that really could potentially be threatening before I get owned. Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re suggesting that I’m not doing yet