Re: MEPBM: One Ring

From: Patrick F. McGehearty <patrick@convex.COM>

Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 00:00:00 +0000

In article <58l82s$b6v@excalibur.avalon.net>,
Eric R. Johnson <foolkiller@avalon.net> wrote:
>
>     I am about to send in Turn 20.   As the Dunlendings, Elharian is now a
>147 mage with a 204 challange.  To this
>point I've been using him to track down Pectoral (failing miserably) and am
>considering a couple of options.
>
>1) Look for  the One Ring
>
>2) Learn Curses and join the Noldo hit squad.
>
>Some things to note on this game:
>
>1)  I'm free and we are crushing everything inside of Mordor, I anticipate
>a dark servant drop soon.
>
>2) I have an agent company which has been moping up characters that get in
>my way.
>
>3)  Elharian is good enough that if he joined my agent company he'd have
>excellent protection and the company would have a challenge character.
>
>I'm not sure what I want to do at this point.   My main question is when is
>the One Ring available.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Eric
>

You don't mention whether you are playing a 2950 or 1650 game.  In the 2950
game, the One Ring can be located quite early, but it is in the possession
of a Bilbo Baggins, and he moves around every few turns. :-)  So even if you
locate it, you still have to get to the hex quickly and steal it off him.
I had not heard that there is any particular point where the One Ring can be
located, just that it usually takes some time to get someone trained enough
to be able to find it.  You don't mention what Elharian's skill at Locate
Artifact True is.  If he is having trouble locating Pectoral, I would not
give much for his odds on locating the One Ring.  GSI has said that more
powerful artifacts are harder to locate, and my experience matches that claim.

Assuming you are correct that the DS will drop soon, then you might try
experimenting to learn more about game mechanics.  If you could put a bit
more of challenge boosters on Elharian, you might want to try your hand
at dragon slaying.  The claim has been made that characters with 230
challenge normally win challenges vs dragons.  If this claim is right,
you will have an opportunity to boost Elharian's mage rank (up to a max
of 100 natural), and gain the bragging rights of having slain a dragon.  If
wrong, you lose lots of character points for your victory condition.

A multiple strategy choice would be to put him in the agent company, and have
him try to Locate the One Ring whenever there was noone to challenge.
Or you can put him in a safe popcenter, and have him learn some of the key
scrying spells, especially for locating popcenters, characters, and armies.
Then he can be used to help track down those last few DS nations if it
should happen that a few of the DS nations don't drop.  In one grudge game,
we had it essentially won on turn 16 (several DS nations were out of
action), but it took til turn 26 to eliminate the last DS nation.  If a
couple more had stayed active, it might have taken even longer.

- Patrick McGehearty
patrick@convex.hp.com

References

MEPBM: One Ring
foolkiller@avalon.net (Eric R. Johnson)
Wed, 11 Dec 1996 00:00:00 +0000