Escaping from (and avoiding) trouble

From CrawlWiki

Introduction

Sometimes you can't win a fight, and the best thing to do is to run. Knowing how to escape from a deadly situation (such as an unexpected monster wandering into view when you're low on HP, or a situation that has spiralled out of control (such as an enemy caster summoning a large number of deadly demons) is a vital skill to survival in Dungeon Crawl.

This strategy guide is based on a discussion on the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.misc, particularly the comments of erisdiscordia. Discussion begun by an experienced Angband play with the handle Magnate.

Magnate: My problem is that when I realise I'm outmatched, I can't get away... I seem to end up with the bad guy(s) following me up the stairs, and I'm limited to... teleport scrolls... what am I missing? Is there a way I can get away from a tough monster without teleporting, or is there a way to play the game without getting into that situation in the first place?

Options when in immediate risk of life

Heal wounds/wand of healing, which will heal but only a few HP (about 30)
Scroll of blinking/controlled blink, which (on teleport-controllable levels) can allow you to instantly blink to any visible square
Uncontrolled blink, which moves you to a random visible square. You may want to move or go into a corner first for better chances at getting away. Beware that spell/evocation failure!
Teleport, which is however delayed and may be risky if uncontrolled. This can be combined by other means, such as teleport, then wand of healing until it kicks in or blink+teleport.
Speed, either by potion of speed, wand of hasting, Okawaru's Haste, Haste or Swiftness spells, Kenku flight or berserk with resist slowing. This will let you run away but you will be subject to ranged attacks in the mean time
Berserk, which will haste you and double your HP at first but slow down later and can be used either to kill the monsters or run away. To run away or if you are not sure about the outcome, only use when near stairs. Alternatively, first teleport, then berserk while it kicks it. This may be dangerous though.
Lugonu's banishment. This will save your life immediately but reduce your max HP.
Borgnjor's Revivification spell. This will fully heal you but reduce your max HP.
Zin's sanctuary. This will protect you but prevents attacking. Combine with another method to get away.
Death's door spell. This will make you invulnerable but leave you with very little HP. Tradeoff like berserk, but you can act and you are much more likely to die if it expires in a dangerous place.
Paralyze/confuse/slow at the enemy. This will be effective in the early game, but in the late game, most dangerous monsters will resist them. Outside of the early game, it's best to act on yourself.

Magic - Useful Escape Spells

Blink

Sure it's uncontrolled, but since the chance is the same for landing on any square in view, you can semi-control it by waiting to cast it until you're standing in a corner or at the end of a "funnel-spout." I'll illustrate this with a corner:

              ------------------      Int: 15
              -@!!******XXXXXXXX      Dex: 16
              -!D!******XXXXXXXX      Gold: 3090
              -!!!*****XXXXXXXXX      Experience: 17/175944  (9)
              -********XXXXXXXXX      Level 2 of the Lair of Beasts
              -********XXXXXXXXX      a) +1,+3 orc halberd (chop)
              -*******XXXXXXXXXX
              -******XXXXXXXXXXX
              -*****XXXXXXXXXXXX
              -**XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

By waiting to blink until you reached the corner, you've maximized your chances of landing out of melee range (for this situation type; the absolute best chances are in a good funnel situation) all the way up to 53 vs. 7 (a bit better than 7-to-1!). Blinking can also be used to give you time to teleport - blink, activate a teleport and then start running away - even if the monsters are faster than you, they can only gain one square a turn if you're running, giving teleport time to kick in.

It is also useful to remember that Lugonu grants you the ability to 'Bend space around yourself' which is effectively the blink spell.

Mephitic Cloud

What others have said. Note that even if you're not poison resistant, mephitic cloud can even be used against an adjacent enemy if you can create the right situation:

.....###.......
.....###.......
.....##Y.......
......@XXX.....
.......XXX.....
.......XXX.....
...............

By targeting diagonally from the yak, you've still managed to catch him in the cloud radius, without catching yourself.

Also note that risking self-confusion is sometimes worth it. If worse comes to worst, you can always drink a potion of healing (which you might have been wanting to do anyway). The enemy can't.

Conjure Flame

Conjure flame is very, very situational. At best, it's irreplaceable. At worst, it's a waste of slots and of the turns spent casting it. Experiment with it and get a feel for it and when (if ever) you wish to invest in it. Understanding who fears flame and who doesn't is important here. Practice when you're *not* in a crisis.

Swiftness

Cheap at twice the price. ~~Note that levitation, which handily is present right alongside it in the Book of Air, doubles its effect.~~ Levitation used to double its effect, but in Stone Soup it requires controlled flight or the Fly spell to do the same.

Passwall

A spell people love to underestimate (though for good reason -- it *looks* at first glance to be a crap spell). If you notice your trouble early enough, though, and you've mapped out your area beforehand (deep dwarves!) and found a 1-thickness wall to pass through towards safety, this is like a controlled teleport, thousands of turns before you could cast controlled teleport.

Slow, Confuse, Paralyse and Enslavement

These take a big investment in Enchantments to be worth the turns and MP it takes to cast them. But many mages are looking to learn Deflect Missiles in the long term anyway, so there's something to be said for building Enchantments early.

Summons

Even a lowly rat can open up that vital 1-square space for a stair escape!

Cards

Whether you use melee or magic, don't forget your decks of cards! Even an unidentified one can occasionally be the least risk*expense solution for a problem. Note: this should be a last resort for those not following Nemelex, as a shuffle or damnation card can be much worse than whatever is threatening you.

Escaping Trouble

Monsters with a slow weapon

At first you can use the rule-of-thumb "hard-hitting = slow" (or refer to the weapon page and check its speed); later you can fine-tune this perception based on your own knowledge of weapon speeds. Monsters are affected by these just like you are, so it can happen that they take significantly more than 100% of a round to take a swing. Thus if you're lucky and if you judged right, you can take a quick action (like a weapon swap) while giving that e.g. halberd-wielding gnoll a chance to swing, then step back, and open up that vital one space of distance on the next turn, so you can flee up a staircase unfollowed. It helps to be relatively close to the stairs by this point, so you can be fairly sure that nothing else will come up during the trip. Don't be too close, though, as sometimes this method can take a couple of tries.

Note that clubs qualify -- just barely -- as weapons slow enough for this trick.

Weird stairs continuum

As of b26, it was possible to use the weapon-speed trick even against fast-weapon monsters by heading upstairs, some of the time. I never got a hang of what made the difference. Not sure it still applies in Stone Soup either.

Traffic control

With some maneuvering, you can sometimes influence which monster is next to you, so you're adjacent to a rat, and not an orc warrior. It's hard to explain; just practice. In some cases, you can even do this while pillar dancing (see below).

Pillar dancing

"The escape without having to escape." Sadly, pillar dancing is still powerful and often even necessary in Crawl, though both facts apply only in the early game. Find a "circular" path to follow, trying to make a wise compromise/choice between closeness of the path's start to where you are, its unobservability, and escape routes in case something wanders in in the opposite direction (which tends to conflict with unobservability), and ring around that rosie.

Poison and pillar dancing

Keep on the lookout for a way to poison your enemies early on, even if it's a weapon you know you will not be using in the long term. In just a few turns of melee, or even none (blowguns), you can cause enough poisoning to kill that nasty foe. (Go for one level of "even sicker"; renew if the enemy "seems more healthy.")

Zapping and pillar dancing

The best way to zap down a monster with a wand or a spell that is not stopped by hitting the monster (e.g. wand of lightning) is to zap at it at the corner of a pillar with a wall behind the monster. Due to reflection the monster can be hit at least two times. Using acute angle you can even hit more than two times.

Leading them up

Just because heading up staircases while followed is not a full escape doesn't mean it's not useful. Dealing with a nasty on a "cleared" level is much less troublesome than on one where your escape routes will often lead into unexplored territory, or wake up monsters lurking within it who can leap out to block your retreat. And teleporting on an unexplored level, that can be nasty!

Some monsters can even be fully abandoned this way at little resource cost: imps and phantoms. You may want to lead them two levels up instead of one, so they're not in the way in case you need to lead something else up afterwards. Can be tedious, though.

Triple visitation

This is only really worth the tedium on the first few levels, but it can be a lifesaver. It means entering by all three staircases before you start exploring a level in earnest. That way, if you get into trouble far from where you last entered the level, you may see a closer staircase to retreat to than your staircase of last entry.

Run early

Once you've learned from experience that a certain monster type or monster-pack type is dangerous, run before it gets into melee, and reenter the level from another place.

Bypass

(This relates to the last item, and sort of segues into the next section.) Just because it's generally advantageous to clear a level completely before descending -- see "leading things upstairs" above -- doesn't mean it's universally the right way to go. Sigmund is the classic example here. If you use auto-exploration -- which you should -- then you can block off "trouble here!" areas using excludes: visit the level map, cursor to the epicentre of the trouble, and hit Ctrl-X, making sure you are really on the level map so you don't embarrassingly save-and-quit instead of making the exclude. :-) Hit 'x' while cursored-onto an exclude to cycle among three exclude sizes. (In Stone Soup 0.5, use 'e' instead of Ctrl-x and x.)

Use your abilities

This is an obvious one that's normally forgotten. Are you a berserker? A berserk rage gives you speed, which is just as useful for clearing the 5 or 6 squares to the stairs as anything else. Worship Okawaru? Use your haste power, or as a last resort might to try to kill that monster before it kills you. Got any artifact weapons or armour? Check to see if any of them have invokable teleport or blink abilities - a sling that lets you blink is often an incredibly useful artifact, as it takes one turn to equip and then one turn to blink, rapidly getting you out of melee and giving you enough time to teleport.

Keeping Out of Trouble

You also asked about keeping out of trouble in the first place. Let's see...

Engaging ranged attackers around corners

Ranged attackers will merrily follow you around a corner where you can merrily melee them - the idea being that rather than them being 10 squares away, each one of which gives them a chance to fire at you, you take two steps to hide in a corridor nearby, wait for them to appear, then take a step or two to reach them - thus drastically reducing the number of terms they get to fire at you before you reach melee distance.

Engaging fast monsters by retreating

Doing this will keep them from getting a free hit.

Softening things up

on the first few levels, collect darts, slings, and throwables (nets, javelins, daggers, spears and hand axes), even if you don't plan to go with them in the long run (and indeed, you usually shouldn't). Turn off the relevant skills when they reach level 1 if you must, but soften the tough things up! Note that often an early retreat followed by re-approach from another staircase will be precisely what makes this even feasible.

Don't get surrounded

Duh, but it still bears mentioning. Especially important against packs of fast enemies. Don't forget the ability of your wands of digging and disintegration to create a corridor for you on the fly!

Retreat towards the known

It's often tactically tempting, because of the enemy's angle of approach, to flee "into the black." Try to resist the urge, and retreat towards a known area, even at the cost of taking a free hit or two. Retreating towards a known staircase or escape hatch is also wise, especially one in a tight corridor if you're being chased by multiple enemies - only enemies on squares directly next to you can go down stairs with you, so in a tight corridor only one of a group of monsters can follow you down a flight of stairs.

Also, if you are fighting a quick enemy, fight the urge to chase after them into an unexplored area if they flee. If you can spare a hit or two from an enemy you know will run (usually non-intelligent foes), maneuvering yourself into a position that will cause them to run into known areas is useful.

Specialize before you generalize

It's often said, but untrue in the long run, that Crawl penalizes generalists. It *is* true in the opening, though. Make sure that your skills of choice have power to spare before investing in any others. Many troublesome situations are simply due to not having enough killing power; this will make that problem less frequent. Turn skills off to this end if you must... though don't forget to turn them back on again once your engine's running, if they're useful in the long run -- e.g. dodging and stealth for a conjurer.

Learn to use marginal tools to non-marginal effect

Scrolls of fear and immolation are often pooh-poohed, yet they can save your life. Don't toss them until you're sailing smoothly! A situation solved with one of these means you've saved an instance of your simpler-to-use tools for later. You may likewise be tempted to ignore resistible wands or wands of random effects, and the same goes here, but even more strongly; these are on the contrary useful until well into the midgame. Afterwards, much less so; all the more reason to burn them early, so you're not left with depleted stocks of top-tier wands (and scroll/potion stocks) and unused resistibles right when the latter start being useless.

Explore at full HP, even if it costs food

One of the most important lessons in becoming a good novice Crawler is learning to conserve resources. One of the most important lessons in becoming an intermediate Crawler is learn to "waste" resources. Starting with food. (On the other hand, I still do not consistently follow my own advice here to this day.)

Play online and engage in ##crawl IRC

If your game's online (crawl.akrasiac.org or crawl.develz.org) and you're on chat, it's usually no problem to find someone experienced who's in the mood to advise you when you're in a tight spot.

Fighting while retreating vs. fast monsters

To some extent this can be generalized to "engage by retreating in *any* potentially difficult situation." The farther back from the black you are when the fight starts, the less you will have to wrestle with surprises jumping out at you right when you decide to exercise the better part of valor, the fewer things on average you will have queued up in the corridor behind what you're fighting, and the more likely you will have remembered to head to that corridor in the first place, assuming you've made this a reflex.

Using Corners on Large Pillars

Even when you don't have corridors at your disposal, you still may have *corners*, a.k.a. corridors lite. Consider the lowly octagon-level bigpillar:

...@..
.XXXY.
.XXXY.
.XXX..
......

Not only will fighting in this position give you a free round of fighting only one of the yaks in this example at a time, but also the mechanics of monster movement are such that you can repeat this once for every corner of the bigpillar until you're down to one-on-one.

The Lantern of shadows

The Lantern of shadows is an unholy device that can be very useful to escape from trouble. When wielded, it soaks up the light of the dungeon and cloaks the user in a field of darkness. In addition, friendly shadows keep spawning from it as the lantern is indeed a direct connection to the eternal darkness. These shadows are mindlessly attracted to their source during their limited lifespan.

In practice, this means if you just keep on running away while wielding the lantern, the friendly shadows will become your rearguard, blocking off and fighting the pursuing monsters. The Lantern of shadows is especially useful for adventurers trying to escape the Abyss, as the allied shadows can at least stall quite a number of enemies.