I am still not "level 11" yet but today I made it inside the compound of the Fleshdancers.
Theirs is the compound west of the one known as west end; the one with the warning sign outside its north gate and a whole bunch of orc archers guarding the approaches to the south gate.
As the above image shows, the place is populated largely by goblins. My armour class is -3, which seems to be old-time "Dungeons and Dragons" style in which plate armour plus shield is armour class 2, plate armour plus one with shield plus one would be armour class 0, plate armour plus two with shield plus two would be -2 and so on, the lower the number the less chance of being hit. Basically with a -3 the goblins have extremely low chance of hitting me. Even the few goblin chieftains I encounter here aren't really a challenge. But I could really do with an even lower armour class to deal with the warriors I find in the barracks - the long buildings shown along the south wall - because they seem to be better warriors than I currently am.
What seems to have done the trick for me as far as actually making it into this compound this time around is that I got my one handed weapons skill level up to level 6, which is enough to give me a lower "weapon class" in which like armour class the lower the number the better.
Going from weapon class 19 to weapon class 18 was enough to let me hit the two ninjas in the gate a lot more often than I had when my weapon class was 19. It gave me the edge I needed to beat them.
I also bought a hunter's bow today, since my successful campaigns against the orcs outside the south gate had given me over 5000 arrrows I figured it was time to start developing missile weapons skill. I can get vast numbers of arrows very easily now that I am able to get into this compound, as the small keeps across the street, that look just like the ones available for players in the Planetary Governor's compound, all seem to have swarms of orc archers guarding them; a plentiful supply of arrows for someone they can barely hope to touch with their puny attacks.
But the really interesting part of today's adventure is that I heard back from the Italians! I was correct in guessing Medici and Luigi were probably Italians, but a third, Francesca, was also online today. Luigi is supposed to be their "muscle", so he actually chose to be a Barbarian, largely so that he would appear as a bare-chested chap in order to "look the part". Roleplaying is a thing here evidently; even though the normal deployments one encounters of #Crossfire-RPG servers are intended as hack-and-slash videogame type games, this "CrossCiv" server (CrossCiv.knotwork.com, ask your #Crossfire-RPG client to connect to it even if you don't see it on the metaserver's list of online servers as it often isn't listed there) with its "permadeath" setting is more of a roleplaying kind of milieu. The main focus, at least of players on this Galactic Diplomacy Planet, is the larger game, the civilisations and corporations so on that the individual characters are here to represent and act as agents of.
Which brings me back to the Italians. What a depth of history there! I think I will have to write about them in more detail in another post, another day. They helped me a lot with this expedition into the Fleshdancers' compound as well as with information about the larger scales of play in the #Galactic-Milieu. For example they confirmed my idea of getting a bow, although they did point out that a longbow, if you can find one, is the best and even a composite bow, which also seems rather rare, might be better than a hunter's bow. They told me about the tower shown to the right, in the south-east corner of the compound, and how useful a bow can be in there; and also advised me to take on the warriors in those barracks with a bow and using "bowmode threewide" to shoot three arrows at a time. I did as they suggested, which was to 'a'pply the barrack to enter it, shoot a few times in rapid succession standing in the doorway and 'a'pply the door to leave before getting too injured.
I cleared all eight barracks that way, thanks Italians! :)
They also alerted me to watch out for items less heavy than normal, as those might be ones with a plus on them; I collected a number of such items in those barracks, including a shield as light as my "shield +1" I already was using and an even lighter shield that I later identified at the identify table in the second-hand-shop in the west end as a shield +2, which of course I switched to right away. :)
The Italians also suggested that until I could afford an actual residence of some kind I should get a locker in the "west end trade" building basement, very economical at only about 30 or so platinum. I stored my old shield+1 and the new one (also identified at the identify table) so hey, now I have a little bit of starting gear I can help out a friend with. Fancy joining me in this adventure? :)
I will write more about the Italians another day as talking with them gave me insights into a huge rich history of multiple worlds and dating back over a decade of planet-Earth time and centuries of game-time. One spoiler though before I finish this post: the Italian civilisation was on a planet that is now known as E29, nowadays ruled by the "E for Evil" Egyptians, a religious fanatics dictatorship possibly rather like the "egyptian god" characters of the "Stargate" mythos. Wow. Enough until next time... :)