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games > pc > ADOM
document updated 16 years ago, on Feb 24, 2008
It's trivial to use cheats that destroy a game completely.  (For example, using frequent+huge HP or
experience or gold boosts)

So, obviously it's good to limit yourself to less obscene cheats.  The goal should be to over time
wean yourself off the cheats so that you can eventually play the game without handicaps. But, quite
the opposite, once you start using a cheat, the temptation to use it more frequently or to
constantly boost its strength is hard to resist.
    Moreover, even if one is resolute in using limited handicaps, it's easy to misjudge the amount
of complexity of a part of the game (since you haven't explored it enough yet to become good at it),
and to unknowingly choose a "small" cheat that actually results in whole subsections of a game being
made irrelevant.  (for instance, if you made it so you could easily "fix" poisoning or cursing in
ADOM, you'd have little incentive to explore the depths of cyclical bushes and bush identification,
or diety interaction)
        (though, to play the devil's advocate:  A less complex game is one that's easier to master,
        at which point one could -- at least in theory -- remove the complexity-hiding handicaps,
        and explore the new areas with renewed focus)


So, the below tries to identify handicaps that are more likely to result in limited and reversible
handicaps in ADOM.



Give yourself 60+ talent points at character creation
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Pros: Since it's a one-time event, allowing yourself to do this doesn't lead to the situation where
        you're tempted to keep doing it the whole way through (eg. item-duping, HP-increasing).
        Also, even when you give yourself the max talent points, the amount of handicap you get from
        this is somewhat limited limited...  while it does make it easy for ANY character to be a
        melee machine, it's not remotely as disruptive as giving yourself 30 experience levels at the
        start.

Cons: Starting with 1500+gp is a bit obscene.

      It gives you enough HP to live through the first couple levels without too much problem.
      After that, though, I think it gives you maybe too much HP.

        (it's helpful to apply this WinBeta4 patch to prevent the "Skilled" talent from
        crashing the game...  http://folk.ntnu.no/houeland/adom/

        Nonetheless, it's still a bit tedious, since the game gets stuck or crashes if you don't set
        the total talent points exactly correctly just as you're spending your last one.

        But there's an easy way to do this: pick a talent ("Ambidextrous" seems to work best) that
        doesn't create any new ones, but is as alphabetically early as possible, and save that as
        the very last one to pick, and update the total-points memory location right before you
        choose it)

            (oh cripes...  in subsequent talent level-ups, if you don't have any options available
            there either, it hangs.

                http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/cheatinginadom/message/87

            Perhaps there's a way to "remove" a talent after it's been selected, to ensure we 
            have at least one available next time?)



AdomBot:All Skills
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Again, it's one-time, and not unlimited.


AdomBot:All spells
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Okay, sure, it's one-time.  And sure, you can't actually cast them all at the beginning.  But the
fact that you can eventually cast Wish, as a fighter, is a bit absurd.