Here are some basic starting strategies for those who are new to this fork. Things are so different here than "vanilla" crawl, that these strategies can be quite helpful for showing the possibilities, as well as helping those who are struggling to survive in this fork.
Heavier weapons will consume more stamina, and when you are out of stamina, you will be slower and do less damage. To reduce stamina costs for attacks, you will need to train fighting and increase your strength. This means that sometimes you will be better off using a lighter weapon (a mace instead of a great mace, for example) until you can get your stamina costs low enough to effectively wield the heavier ones. You can often do more damage with a lighter weapon in power mode than you could with a heavier weapon that forces you to frequently fight in an exhausted state.
If there is a chance you will need to run away from an encounter, don't use up too much stamina before deciding to do so. Switching to quick mode [g] is necessary to escape most situations, and quick mode consumes stamina for each movement. Once stamina is gone, you can't use quick mode, and will have a more difficult time escaping.
Also keep in mind that heavy armour and shields will increase how much stamina is used while moving in quick mode, so earlier in the game it may increase your survivability to wear lighter armour.
If you are a tank type fighter, especially an axe wielder, where you want to go into the middle of a bunch of monsters to do the most damage, focus mode [E] can be very helpful, since it increases all of your defenses.
Bows consume less stamina to fire than crossbows, but do less damage. So if you are a species that has higher fighting aptitudes (to make up for the slow attack speed) and/or greater strength (to reduce stamina costs), crossbows may be a better choice. If you are a species with particularly low strength, you'd be better off with slings or bows.
Since ammo is unlimited, quiver "nothing" most of the time [q-]. Save your limited branded ammo for special enounters where they will do the most good.
Accuracy of ranged attacks drops significantly with distance. So getting your accuracy up is critical for a serious ranged attacker that prefers to take out foes before they can get close. Increase your dexterity and weapon skills to increase your accuracy.
Pay close attention to the stamina cost of different weapons. You can see it in the item description page where it says "SP Cost". For example, a long bow has a considerbly higher SP cost than a shortbow, and even when you have a longbow, it can be more effective to use the shortbow until you can get that SP cost down to reasonable levels. Stamina costs are reduced by increasing strength and fighting skill.
For ranged fighters with weak defenses and trouble with ranged accuracy (which applies to most starting hunters), playing a lot of the game in "focus" mode [E] can be very helpful, since focus mode significantly increases accuracy and all defenses (EV, SH, AC, MR). However, this comes at the cost of doubling your stamina costs, so if you are struggling to not be exhausted for every battle, this may not be an option.
One major difference here is that you can continue to cast spells even when out of magic, and even when exhausted. However, your spell power will be diminished and your failure rates higher, so you want to avoid that situation as much as possible.
If you are often running low on MP, you can reduce your MP costs by increasing intelligence or spellcasting skill. In the meantime, use lower cost spells. Since spell caps have been effectively removed, even level 1 spells can be viable and useful late in the game, at higher power levels. They are especially valuable early game, when their MP cost is usually quite low compared to higher level spells, and so can be cast with power mode on [e] (increasing spell power and spellcasting speed) for longer without exhausting you.
Beware that casting spells takes 2.0 aut unlike in vanilla crawl. So increasing casting speed should be a major concern for beginning spellcasters. You can increase spellcasting speed by training spellcasting, increasing dexterity, or wearing an amulet of quick casting. This is a big deal for conjurer type spell casters, since you can't just rapid fire attack spells without giving monsters a lot of time to do damage. So at the beginning it's a good idea to have a dagger at least (preferrably electric or venom) to attack monsters that are close, since it's so much faster than firing off a magic missile and taking 2 turns to do it each time.
For spells that are heavily dependent on spell power (such as conjurations), playing in power mode as much as possible early in the game will help, since it boost spell power, which increases damage significantly. It also reduces casting time, which is vital early in the game when casting spells is slow. Training conjurations will increase spellpower of all conjuration spells, as well as reducing fail rate. And putting all points possible into intelligence early in the game will also boost spell power, and give the added advantage of steadily reducing MP cost of spells. This should be all you need to train early game, until you start to need more powerful spells. Eventually you'll want to train spellcasting too to reduce MP costs and increase your casting speed, but in most cases you are better off wainting until you are past the early game stage to train spellcasting.
Summoning and raising dead reduces your max mp, which limits the total summons that you can have, based on the MP costs of those spells. In other words, if you want to maintain more summons at once, reduce the costs of those spells. Most significantly, don't cast those spells while in focus or power mode if you can do without, since that will cut the cost in half.
If you have a horde of undead skeletons, and you want to raise another skeleton of a more powerful corpse, but don't want to unsummon all of them, you can use [x] to select the one skeleton you want to release/unsummon, and press [q], which will unsummon that one creature, allowing you to raise the skeleton of the new monster.
You can do the same with normal summons. If you want to replace one of your summons with a different one, press [x], select that summon, then press [q] and it will disappear, freeing the magic that was used to summon it.
Summoning works very will with ranged weapons or spells, since they will pass through your summons. This only works well though if you have a low failure rate on the spell that summoned them, because each time your missile passes through them, the failure rate is checked, and the summon will disappear if the spell "fails". It's not a huge deal since you can just recast it, but you may be low on MP in a battle, so keep this in mind.
Since transmuting is usually done outside of battles, and MP isn't a significant constraint, nor is spellcasting speed, you typically don't need to train much spellcasting. Instead, you need to get your failure rate down as low as possible, since each time you attack in a different form, that spell's failure rate is checked, and if it fails, the form degrades. To minimize spell failure, add dexterity and train spell school skill (transmutation in this case). Since multi-school spells now use the maximum skill instead of the average of all the skills, you only need to train transmutation. Soon after you get your failure rates down to reasonable levels, it's a good idea to switch to training Unarmed Combat, which will increase your accuracy, and more importantly your damage significantly. Fighting skill will increase your attack speed and reduce stamina costs, but attack speed is already pretty low for unarmed combat, and stamina costs are also quite low, so training Fighting can be put off until later in the game.
It's often a good idea to play much of the early game in focus mode [E], which reduces spell failure rate enabling you to stay in your form for longer. Once you get your failure rates very low even without focus mode, you can switch to power mode [e] to dispatch enemies more quickly. If you are fighting a large group of enemies or a smaller group of enemies that take longer to kill, turn off exertion modes [c] so you can conserve your stamina so you don't get tired in the middle of a battle.
Spider form is one of the easiest forms to maintain, because it raises your dexterity so much, and dexterity lowers the spell failure rate. Blade Hands is one of the hardest to maintain, because it has a significant spellcasting penalty, increasing failure rate. It will take a lot of transmutation skill and/or dexterity to be able to maintain Blade Hands for very long.
- Although it may feel overpowered at first, they are actually a significant challenge to play, at least after the very
beginning.
- All attacks, physical or magical, "damage" the player, since stamina and magic costs come directly from it's health.
- Magic, stamina, and healing potions restore "essence", so basically are the same as healing potions.
- Ambrosia is the ultimate healing for Djinni, since it rapidly charges health, mp, and sp, which means it basically is a triple healing potion.
- Since fire damage actually heals Djinni, fire resistance actually works against you (by reducing the healing), and hence, if you are lucky enough to come across a rF- item, it's quite valuable.
- Since physical and magical attacks take from health, reducing those costs as much as possible is critical.
- For physical fighters (ranged or melee), train fighting and add strength points to reduce cost.
- For magic users: train spellcasting and add intelligence points to reduce spell costs.
- Using wands and evocables can be a life saver since they don't use your health to cause damage.
- Don't use exertion modes (power and focus) until you can significantly reduce the SP / MP costs of your attacks, since they double your costs.
- Since Djinni can't read scrolls, wear or wield-id'ing is usually a bad idea. You can sacrifice a permanent essence point, or wait until the curse expires on it's own, but it's usually best to wait for the item to id itself through the "insight" mutation, which gets better as a Djinni levels up.
- Immolation and inner flame are your friends. Use liberally.
- You are permitted to hex through enemies, unlike in vanilla crawl, so you can cast a few strategically placed inner fires, then watch the fireworks.
- Since cold damage does vast amounts of damage to a djinni, getting cold resistance should be a top priority.
- Any cold damage that gets past a Djinni's resistance is multiplied by 4.
- Avoid ice caves unless you have significant cold resistance.
- Use a lighter weapon (which means lower SP cost). You can view SP cost in the item description page.
- Don't use exertion modes (power or focus modes) as much, since they double your SP cost.
- Use [c] to cancel current exertion mode and switch back to normal mode.
- Reduce SP costs of your current weapon by training fighting or gaining strength.
- Don't leave quick mode on when battling. You can turn quick mode off with [s]. Quick mode burns stamina with every step you take, but not while you are standing still.
- Increase the size of your stamina pool with an artifact.
- Increase your SP regeneration rate with an amulet of stamina regeneration.
- Conserve your SP better in a battle by using magic more, or exertion modes less (focus and power mode).
- Make sure you are in quick mode [g]. In non-quick mode (slow mode) you can't move faster than 1.1 even if you have a faster species or boots of running. In quick mode you will move faster than most monsters (unless you are a Naga).
- Use lower cost spells. You can see the spell costs in the spell detail page [S].
- Don't use exertion modes (power or focus modes) as much, since they double your MP cost.
- Reduce MP costs by training spellcasting or gaining intelligence.
- Increase the size of your MP pool with an artifact.
- Increase your MP regeneration rate with an amulet of magic regeneration.
- Increase intelligence or spell school skills to reduce failure rate.
- Turn on focus mode [E], which significantly lowers failure rate.
- Try sticking with lower level spells which are much easier to cast until you can get the higher level ones online. Lower level spells are much more valuable here than in vanilla crawl, and tend to be useful for much longer.
- Turn focus mode on when you reach the stairs, before attempting to ascend, to increase your defenses. If the monsters can't do damage to you, they can't interrupt you from ascending the stairs.
- Get to the stairs a little faster. Make sure you have quick mode on and have saved enough stamina to pay for it. Use slow hexes to slow down the enemies or a haste potion to give you that extra few steps needed to escape.
- Keep trying if you have plenty of health. You only need to make it past 1 turn without being damaged by a monster to ascend the stairs.
- If your health is getting low, stop trying to ascend the stairs. Instead use a teleport scroll to get away.
- Transmutations test again spell failure each time you attack while in that form.
- Reduce spell failure rates, especially while in that form, as much as possible, to extend the duration of the form.
- You can reduce failure rate by increasing spell school skill (the skills that apply to that spell) as well as increasing dexterity.