About "Anemo"centaurs
I like when video games expose me to new things so please excuse this aside. Anemo- is a prefix meaning “wind”, derived from the Greek word ánemos. Anemoi are ancient Greek wind gods, each one associated with a wind directions and different attributes. What a cool theme for a wind centaur who aligns themself with one of four winds for different bonuses!
The patch
When I saw the commit changing Anemocentaur to Gale Centaur, I immediately made a new character before CDI updated so I could attempt Anemocentaur Alchemist, for the silly acronym. I left myself with only one chance to win it since they would soon be impossible to create. I am not an especially skilled player so I was far from certain I could win it.
Unfortunately, I accidentally upgraded the game to the lastest version, changing my AnAl to a GCAl on D:1. Oh well. In my heart I know I won Anemocentaur Alchemist on my first try!
The game
Early Game (D1 to ~D11)
Gale Centaur has week defenses early game. Skills go up very slowly at the start of the game and offensive skills are top priority so getting significant AC/EV with skills is difficult normally but even more so with large size and deformed body. You’re defenses are very tied to finding decently enchanted body armour or auxes, you can’t just throw on any medium-heavy armor that drops! Naga and the previous barding species have a modest a scales mutation to help out with this a little and I hope GC gets something similar too! Luckily for me I found some enchanted aux armour so I had good defenses early on!
I started out with alchemist spells and transitioned to range when I found a Hep altar and orcbow. I got a bane due to fighting many drudes but I didn’t even notice until Bane of Mortality wore off! The bane only triggers when you get to 40% health and bow+ancestor was enough that that never happened before the curse was lifted!
I almost died to a swarm of bees that collected around stairs unbeeknownst to me. Scroll of summoning saved me here.
I found no upgrades to my orcbow other than some enchant weapon scrolls which I happily applied. Early on I found troll leather armour which I happily enchanted (I ended the game in that armour too!).
Mid Game (Lair to Snake/Shoals)
The Lair entrance featured guest-stars Harold, Amaemon, and Jeremiah so I read teleport scroll because stair dancing there would be foolish, at the advice of Odds (an exceptional crawl player). The teleport was safe and I killed the uniques one at a time. Shoutout to west wind stampede vs Jeremiah.
I had felt pretty cozy by the things crawl provided to me thus far and had been lax on identifying scrolls. I hadn’t ID’d Brand Weapon or Acquirement by this point and my bow needed a brand. Luckily I found both.
The chaos bow was fun but still created situations where I would use important consumables to escape and didn’t seem to save me many consumables by contrast.
Lair went by smoothly. The most dangerous part I can recall was trying to run away from several scary enemies and having my path blocked by a mountainshell. I discovered very quickly that I could not, in fact, stampede the rubble that blocked my path so I stampeded the mountainshell instead, taking me away from the other enemies.
By the time I got to Orc I had learned OTR, from my starting book so that went by smoothly. Probably. I don’t remember it so I assume it was uneventful.
In late D I found a barding. Yay! Also a Trove demanding I take Bane of the Dilettante. I love taking Bane troves but was not excited about this bane because halfing my weapon skill hurts and I have no crosstrained skills to lean on even. However, I did snake:1 and it felt easy enough that I thought I could work off the bane in Snake, using the un-baned ancestor and naga’s slow movement speed to my advantage. At the very least, Invo wasn’t one of my highest “spell” skills so I could still lean on Idealise.
Cool loot! Would get cursed again!
I was correct about Snake being easy enough for my character and the bane was removed while doing the Snake rune vault. While baned, I struggled to kill Vashnia and her minions. I managed to isolate her though and with heavy help from grandpa hexer I was rewarded with a Longbow (of freezing) yay!
Shoals went smoothly, even if the hexer was frequently dazed by mesmerize.
Late game (Elf, Vaults and beyond)
Not too much to say here. The longbow made a big difference. Ancestor could mass confuse at this point. Dimensional Bullseye pulled its weight. More xp made my defenses happier and happier.
Remember how I almost died to bees in D? The same thing happened in depths. I had seen many caustic shrikes on the floor so I took a different stairway. That stairway seemed safe enough so I went down it a second time, to find myself surrounded by Depths Bees!
I blinked away but that caused me to run into a glass eye which immediately gave me the fragile debuff. How unkind! I read teleport, a questionable decision but I wasn’t far from 8 caustic shrikes so most places were happier than my current location. That took me the Zot entrance vault where I fought a couple of dragons with draconians to come. I was not excited about fighting those while low-hp and vitrified (I should have !cancelled but failed to in my excitement). I escaped with my life after a total of 2 teles, haste and 2 blinks. I very tediously stair danced to take out the shrikes 1 or 2 at a time.
There was a cool Depths encompass vault with something like 8 mutation potions. I had a total of 17 so drank 9 of them. I had somewhat bad luck with mutation roulette but I settled on rP+ mutation with a side of genetic potential. A modest but helpful bonus. I wished to save the rest of them for Orbs of Fire.
Vaults 5 was very easy, surprisingly. I got lucky with the enemy encounters and killed the welcome party and an entire quadrant without finding any vault sentinels. This meant no mark/signal horn while clearly a big safeish part of the map to retreat to. I entered V:5 with 0 blink scrolls and left with 2. Whoohoo!
The Zot entrance was pretty tense I guess. Nothing Wand of Digging and fog couldn’t help.
I struggled to beat a single orb of fire in a damage race 1v1, while hasted and with 2 pips of rF (one coming from !resistance). This did not bode well but then I remembered that idealised ancestors could absolutely defeat orbs for you so I took a casual stroll with grandpa Cuetlachtli (which, I learned, is Nahuatl for Bear? Or Wolf?) all the way to D:1 with the orb.
Extra thoughts
Hep
Hep is my favorite god if I just want to Win The Game, which I did since I only had one shot at AnAl. I choose the Hexer ancestor using complex math to calculate the optimal choice (I let a random number generator decide for me). I know some people really like knight with ranged characters but knight might be my least favorite ancestor, though they are all good. The hexer proved very comfy with my bow-taur, confusing enemies and keeping them away from me while I mashed the p key. Uniques that I didn’t like could be solved by reading a scroll of vulnerability more or less. More generally difficult situations are solved by Idealise.
It had been a while since I worshiped Hep (my last online Hep win was Feb 2024) and I had forgotten how important it is to monitor the ancestor’s hp, and possibly flee if they die because that’s the first sign the situation has gone rotten! Usually it’s a simple decision of 1) retreat 2) let ancestor die and finish the rest or 3) Idealise, saving the ancestor and slaughtering the rest.
Hep transferance enables some fun shenanigans that I enjoy exploiting but I didn’t make use of it this time.
Stampede (west wind)
The Ranged-focused west wind is very powerful. You have to learn when to use it and when not to though. Rampage towards a line of enemies to knock them back and fire a penetrating shot at all of them. Each stampede gives you a Salvo charge which can be used to attack up to 5 enemies that you have a direct line of fire to. You can pair this with the dimensional bullseye to hit a single monster whom you despise up to 5 times as well. Used poorly stampeding can get you into a lot of trouble. In particular stampeding through groups of enemies can be OK but unexpectedly (for me at least) dangerous if they have polearms or strong ranged attacks/spells.
Morgue
https://crawl.dcss.io/crawl/morgue/rypofalem/morgue-rypofalem-20260314-012020.txt
