This was my first semi-serious melee conduct run, where the basic rule was to always be focused on melee as the method of attack, avoiding other weapons except where necessary.
I've done a few melee runs on my own (not streamed), though when I do that there's pretty much no planning involved, just lots of weapon slots, multiwielding lots of melee weapons for the followup attacks, and haphazardly charging at and chopping up everything I see.
Overall this was a great stream with a great crowd, I guess also because it's been a while since I streamed a run, as I was out of town for the
Roguelike Celebration where I gave
a talk.
Melee is usually a decent (or even really powerful!) strategy for the latter half of the game, but kinda mediocre in the first half because all the entry-level weapons are impact-type, and these can take a little longer to pound on targets due to their reduced chance of core damage. But hey, we have to follow the rule, right?!
So coming out the first floor we had our hammer build...
(I tried to keep on wheels most of the time, for the extra carrying capacity and because maneuverability is important for melee combat--better to avoid slow propulsion!)
Then in -9 I took an exit to what I thought would probably be the Mines, but it ended up leading to Storage! Okay, we can roll with that... Picked up a room full of allies who trashed the place, but little did I realize, my core was getting dangerously low. This is another issue to be aware of with early-game melee, since your weapons won't take any/many hits and instead that damage goes to the core.
Anyway, as soon as the HUD went red I went into emergency mode and decided to backtrack over to the Recycling exit, otherwise I never would make it out of there. There was a Sentry after me, but my last remaining ally snuck up behind it and took it out
Whew, safe. And the detour would only mean sacrificing (skipping) -8/Materials, so everything turned out okay.
Coming into -7/Factory I had some friends and a
ton of melee weapons, certainly more than I needed--picking them up was kind of a joke
Shortly after that I also picked up a pair of Arm. Huge Wheels
. But I ended up putting those in inventory as backups for later after finding a cache of hover units for which I dropped some storage and rebuilt for speed/stealth/melee. My long-term strategy was to visit Zion and get imprinting support to help supplement intel, allies, and maybe melee resupplies. So I ducked into the -7 caves, and this was my build for much of the mid-game:
The two Phasing Sabres picked up in Z were amazing, being some of the best mid-game melee weapons and I was still only at -7 at the time. I don't even have any good melee util support and this build one-shots almost anything. Notice that I do also have the Sensor+Interpreter combo which is something I pretty much never have, but this plus hover plus melee is a pretty deadly combo, always being in the right place at the right time
Basically what we've evolved here is a ninja build, aw yeah...
Looking at the world map, it's been a pretty circuitous route up to this point!
The stream decided that we should make a visit to DM as well, so I headed out there from -6, where I picked up Cmb. hover schematics and built a pair of them on a low-level Fabricator upon returning to -5/Factory.
With those combined with Programmer remains it should be fairly easy to remain a melee hoverbot. From there I headed straight up to -4/Factory, at the entrance of which I stopped for now, in a state more or less like the image above (+2 utility slots). Will have to finish the stream with part 2 tomorrow. I'd like to go for the Gladiator achievement, but we'll see, 200 is a
lot of hostiles to cut down.
