Forum:OrcTown

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Ugggg!!! I keep getting OrcTown generated in the mines instead of a functional village. It seems that getting this bad bit of luck is kind of crippling to early game. You miss out on all the shops, ID opportunities, lamp-purchasing, and so on.

Is there any silver lining to getting OrcTown? The last two runs where I got OrcTown, I cleared it out. Yeah, you get a lot of swag - but I still think it's a far worse deal than a town proper. The altar is ok, but it's always unaligned as far as I can tell. I think I'd rather take the 1/3 chance that it's co-aligned.

Anyways, what are your thoughts? Any way I could get 'more' out of OrcTown than just clearing it out for loot?

Thanks for reading,

Orcish Town is generally considered to be a bad change, because so many strategies rely on having a peaceful Mines level. Personally, I don't think it's bad to have Minetown specifically have an "unrewarding" variant - it helps break up strategies like the protection racket which require a peaceful Minetown to work - but yes, then there is nothing really redeeming about it the level. Note that the altar here is basically guaranteed to be coaligned if you can sacrifice and convert it. Bonus points if you break in with a wand of digging right into the temple and sacrifice all the orcs in the town.

FIQ suggested that if Orcish Town generates, it will guarantee a special variant of Mines' End which contains all the gnomes, dwarves, priest and shopkeepers that fled from Minetown and sought refuge deeper in the Mines. There are some other ideas floating around for how to fix this; see here and here for details. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 16:14, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Although, I would argue that being dependent on the protection racket is bad for a Nethack player, and not just because you might get OrcTown instead of Minetown. Flexibility is a definite requirement for a successful player. ---Ms. J. Marie Stanton, Professional Valkyrie (talk) 16:12, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the quick response. Yeah, this makes sense. I didn't think of mass sacrificing orcs, but that could be a silver lining, of sorts.