First, apologies to those fed up with the outerworld/peering/ambushing
thread. However, since I can't post to the merchants group, I have to
put my new comments here (it's possible other's will be interested).

I've had a quick test of peering again, to check ep usage. For me,
at least, the ep used is pretty small. A chance of 1-3 ep (or thereabouts)
every time I peer. I probably lose around 1/3 ep per peer.


As a merchant, I peered a lot in order to look for mineral deposits.
I didn't really notice the ep loss from a bit or peering, but, since
any ep loss for a merchant should be avoided, I can see why heavy
use of peering is less than ideal.

As a merchant I set up some commands to automatically peer to either
side of my location looking for minerals etc. This allowed me to
snake backwards and forwards viewing a strip of 3 rooms thick at
a time. This meant that searching for minerals was considerably
faster and required considerably less ep. I didn't look ahead
and was occasionally ambushed. However, when paying attention,
the danger was pretty low. I was a dwarf merchant with some sabre
levels and pretty much always survived the few ambushes I was caught
in (when I was paying attention).

If just wanted to avoid ambushes, I could peer in the direction I
was heading (and then look). 3 peers per move, maybe 1-2 more ep per
move doesn't seem unreasonable to reduce the of times that one is caught
in an ambush. Of course, as other people have pointed out, there are
other solutions. For a start, being a merchant does not necessarily
mean that you will be both vulnerable to many ambushes and have to
spend a lot of time trekking through the outerworld.

Finally, my personal opinion is that, even if there isn't a great
justification for dangerous (ambushing) mobs to not always appear
on the map, the outerworld should not be completely free of danger.