Right. It's virtually impossible with the base mace. I've made it deep before, but you're not beating up tough monsters with that weapon without some tricks up your sleeve. Slow monster or polymorph being two of the biggies.
So it's actually more or less possible to win the game with a mace? Provided you've got enough other tricks? Otherwise, I was thinking of applying the advice of fames from the first page of the topic and only starting the game that gives me a 2H sword outright
I even tried that, but never succeeded in starting a game in a room with a 2H sword. Or any other weapon, for that matter.
Good news! I made it to lvl19!
Yay! My record has been lvl17 up til now. But my first ever griffin killed me. I don't remember much about that game, they all kind of blend together for me. I made it to lvl16 twice and lvl15 once, too. It's too bad that the Retro Rogue Collection (with the Epyx version) doesn't have recording so I can't analyze what I did wrong. Or rather it does in a sense, you can replay a save, but the problem is that it (naturally) deletes the save when you die, so there's nothing to replay.
But I still didn't see any infamous medusas, I just rushed through the floors. I bumped into something called Ur-Vile (?) but it was killable. The griffin was not, but I fail to remember the circumstances. I probably had no tricks with me.
In one of the games I wore a teleport ring after identifying it, thinking that if the identification didn't say so then it wasn't cursed, but apparently it's always cursed. It didn't work the way I hoped, too, teleporting me immediately to safetely. But somehow I dispatched of that troll on my own. The ring proved to be rather helpful, though, teleporting me round and round and helping me find the stairs faster. I think that's how I made it to floor 19.
Got to lvl14 twice in the UNIX version, too. Again I don't remember much about the games. I don't know how you managed to write such detailed accounts of your games in the thread.
