> I wonder if this is the first Enchanted Forest question to ever appear on the Hint boards? About darn time if so, I say.
>
> Gremlinn, it scares me that your top scores were created by going for "high on average" totals, and not with all-out, high-risk approaches. Do you mean you think much higher scores than your top ones are feasible?
>

I aim for maximizing my chances of getting over 100,000, really, but it works out about the same. Actually, though I think it's possible to get very high scores a bit more often than I do, I don't think the highest feasible scores are much higher. The reason is that for games in the mid 130,000s and up, it's usually the case that you do well right from the start, and *do* end up fighting a large percentage of fights and opening almost every chest. So in these cases you don't lose much by starting out intending to play conservatively, because you really don't get the chance. I hope that makes sense.



> When I play EF2, my goal is to get a very high score. If it becomes evident shortly after playing that that can't happen, I abort the game. (Or before playing: I often have to abort several games before I find a tree pattern I like.)
>

I never abort, because this is never an option when you're trying to raise your average score. If I did, I'd probably miss out on an occasional game in which I might have recovered and done fairly well.

One thing to consider, though, is that you save time this way, so if you're trying to get lots of high scores it might be faster overall to prune out those ones where you start poorly.

> I feel like my EF2 strategies are just about ideal, and have never been able to figure out how you've been able to score so high so many times. There must be something you're doing that I'm not, but I can't figure out what it would be. (But then again, maybe not; I've certainly had a number of games that looked like they would have been new records, but then something very bad happened to cause an early death.)
>

You probably know all of the basic stuff, I'd guess. Do you pay attention to where the leviathan and pixie move throughout the game? Every square they step on eliminates a square you have to search for level boosters. By putting off catching the pixie, you can speed up the level booster search a bit by having the pixie scout out the corners of the map for you (this is also great for figuring out where the Mirror is).

Also, my general strategy for purchases is to stock up on (normal) saws throughout most of the game, saving them for use on level 5 (the average payoff is 180 gold/saw, so at a cost of 100 gold/saw, you make on average an 80% profit, whereas you average a 20% loss with magic saws). Sometimes I pace it a bit to keep from buying more saws than there are trees (this is a fairly rare case for me). At the very start, I like to get about 8 to 12 teleporters stocked up to prevent against getting trapped early or being chased down by the leviathan.

Then there's strategy about how you move around. That's pretty simple though, as for the most part it's just visiting a sector at a time until you get 4 level boosters, keeping your distance from the leviathan in the meantime. I usually pay attention to the general area where the blackstone is, but don't make it the highest priority to get it immediately (I'll usually finish off getting the booster for whatever sector I'm working on before going for the blackstone). You don't want to put off getting it for too long, though, or you'll have less time to get whitestone clues.

The bonus square? I always (okay, 99.5% of the time) take the gold.

Most of the rest, I guess, is your strategy for picking a cutoff gold/hits ratio for fights, and your strategy for buying potions. I usually end up getting the 100 hits potion/50 hits potion about half the time each, throughout the course of the game.

Beyond that, I guess it's just luck, and for me, the fact that I've played so many games.



> By the way, does anyone know when the high scores will be back up?
>
> -- Trip

The high score lists seem to be up now (I noticed this a couple days ago.)

-- grem "If someone tops my high score(s) at this point, I won't put up a fight. More important things to do now" linn