Just echoing what Zombo77 said; the usefulness of a number of skills is dependent on whether you are doing SC or HC. This includes your clovering strategy, but also things like managing yellow rays. I was never good enough to get crazy speed in HC but I did make SC leaderboards for a spell (3/550 or so type runs. My best was 3/527, iirc). I switched to SC before getting super serious about speed. Maybe I’ll go back and try some HC runs at some point. Anyway in HC you have to find your own consumables. The food/booze crafting gets much more important there. Even having 5 booze summons can be important because sometimes they don’t match up with the base booze you find at all (though the more likely outcome is to fail to get the ideal number of super cocktails for your mainstat). And there’s really a whole weird thing when you start breaking actions down into whether they improve turncount or day count. This really brings back memories, man.
Seriously, KoL has one of the best remort systems I’ve ever seen in a game. I did a significant amount of my ascending back before the Valhalla overhaul (where if you did a SC run, you got to SCPerm a skill, and HC gave you a HCP. And the options were Teet/whatever the no food path is/Oxygenarian. And then later Bad Moon). It’s even cooler now, since you can elect to HCP in lieu of SCP for a higher karma cost, and there’s things you can do in run to get extra karma (meaning you could perm an extra skill every nth ascensions).
Yeah, I did all my buffing in the Modifier Maximizer. Maybe KOLProxy does things better?
Even after a lot of ascensions I had a gazillion kolwiki windows open while playing, it’s more manageable in HC though.
Just downloaded mafia and after running svn update my combat looks like this:
I think this is the Batbrain, it lists all combat items and their effects.
I question whether the cocktailcrafting booze remains relevant for people who have hardcore-accessible IOTM sources, though. Like, my fist turkey drops five bottles of Ambitious Turkey a day if I adventure with him equipped, and that’s definitely better than the advanced cocktailcrafting drinks. Maybe not better than superhuman, I never actually have made any of those, but…for those you need to be a Moxie class. All the charters sell pretty good food and booze, too, although I’m not sure how efficient farming the currency for them is, especially if you didn’t pick up love bugs.
(Apparently there’s two other kinds of Turkey booze, level-based, and they’re not quite as good, but still.)
And while cooking seems more generally useful (because it’s a more complex system with a larger range of recipes and those hi meins look pretty sweet still), I still can fill up pretty easily on snow crabs and This Charming Flans from my Winter Discontent Garden and Smith’s Tome. I guess I might have to mix it up more if I played every single day, though. I dunno. I can’t speak remotely authoritatively on the subject, especially since my runs so far are all Ed the Undying, who has 5 stomach and 5 liver and is thus very easy to fill up on random quasi-decent stuff that comes my way. And aftercore is anyone’s game.
That looks really neat, if perhaps too easy to make play the game for you. It’s not Mafia, though, it’s a script you use through Mafia, and one that I wasn’t familiar with. So I stand by my statement that Mafia, in and of itself, doesn’t really provide that information in an easily accessible way. But that’s the beauty of script extensions, I suppose. :)
Your choices are KoLmafia, KoLProxy and vanilla with greasemonkey scripts.
Mafia has a builtin script manager that lets you install and update third party kolmafia scripts. It’s updated often and when scripts break the first thing you should do is grab a newer version from http://builds.kolmafia.us
Some useful mafia scripts are WHAM for combat automation, counterchecker to keep track of special adventures, EatDrink for food/drink automation, Universal Recovery to restore mana and HP, Batman RE for manual combat. Scripts that modify the UI are under the relay category.
Harvest is a pretty cool farming script that’s great for using up your adventures when you don’t have time to play your daily turns.
Cocktailcrafting does not seem that relevant anymore but apparently reagent pasta and hi meins are still viable in bleeding edge runs.
Check out this 2 day HC log: http://alliancefromhell.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=6350
I guess the most important IOTMs I’ve missed are the Smith’s tome and the Fist Turkey, I might have to sell some of my softcore stuff.
Wow, exactly the info I was hoping for with a comparison link to boot! The list of worthwhile mafia scripts is perfect, thank you. While I know lua and scripting might be a fun change of pace, it is hard to beat a built in script repo right in the client.
I’m still sort of kicking myself for skipping the Smith’s Tome, but then again, I play lazy-core (which works well with HC challenge path) so it isn’t as much of a concern for me as it is for the speed players.
Ultimately with enough meat you can just buy the stuff that’s crafted from its summons. But apparently between that and the Winter Discontent garden and one or two other things I lucked into buying some of the most useful IOTMs currently out there while they were in the Mr. Store.
My mall multi was rich enough to buy the Smith’s tome and lovebugs, I still have a couple old IOTMs and things like TPS that I don’t really need that I could pawn off.
I’m not sure how to feel about Type 69, on the one hand it kinda levels the playing field a bit but apparently my gardens expire this season and I don’t have a way to copy monsters anymore.
I’ve been chaining 3 day HC Ed ascensions for the last few weeks with this script: http://alliancefromhell.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=6363
It needs lovebugs but you can get around that by editing the CCS if you don’t have them, the other required IOTMs might be more or less optional too.
Worth checking out if you don’t have enough time to play every day but still want that sweet Ed karma, it rarely breaks and seems to work much better than KoLproxy and bumcheekascend.
I’ve been leery of fully automated ascension (because I mean, it’s a game and if I’m not playing it myself what’s the point) but that is kind of tempting.
Yeah, it’s a bit like playing Progress Quest but without it I would just be farming Barf Mountain. It did make me a worse player because I’m so rusty now, my one attempt at a 2 day Ed run so far was a desaster.
I’m very comfortably chaining 4-day lazycore Ed runs, and that’s without most of the IOTM toys. I still feel like the 3-day barrier is a ways off though, so I’m sort of curious what I’m missing. Probably I’m not getting stats fast enough–I think XP is still my main bottleneck.
Do you get the astral belt? Running as much ML as you can survive seems to be really important, it’s even worth it to use lash to get some more ML gear in run (for example serpentine sword, buyobuttons, badge of authority).
You can also powerlevel to 6 somewhere, unlock the scribe and put 5 imbues in it to get the +5 mys stats per combat passive gift.
What zombo77 said. Xp is a big deal because when you run 40-60+ ML from the get go, those stats add up over hundreds of combats. Also, when doing runs like that often level 2 Protips are involved (e.g. the old Nuns trick for doing a 5 sidequest battlefield where you get 4 quests cleared before you even start, greatly speeding up the process).
+ML is great if you can survive the combats, which I can’t. I can probably survive after buying enough Ed upgrades, but I decided to experiment with unlocking the Scribe first, which is causing a critical Ka shortage.
