Golgolath

I sometimes feel nostalgic and replay the original Avernum 2 and Avernum 3, but the lack of a quest tracker in the original Avernum 1 sadly kills the game for me. I'll probably never play the original A1 due to that. Luckily, the Escape from the Pit version of Avernum is magnificent.

Now that I've beaten A3, I was pleasantly surprised with how bow/melee DPS worked out throughout most of the game. Obviously, it can't even compare to my priest popping adrenaline rush then wiping out entire areas with multiple Divine Retributions, but against single targets, dual wielding with at least one weapon having an elemental attack (like a frozen or acid sword), or using bows with lots and lots of Sniper procs was actually quite effective for single targets. Having said that, shields are still a bit of a head scratcher for me. In my mind, wearing a shield should do two things, 1) massively increase the power of the Challenger trait so that your character can well and truly hold the enemies' attention, and 2) make them nearly invincible. A character with a shield is going to do next to nothing in terms of damage, and it feels like currently, shields aren't nearly effective enough to justify building a "tank" type character.

Disclaimer: I have never played Avernum 4-6. I have no idea in the slightest what happens in those games. In Avernum 3, the plagues created by the Vahnatai admittedly do a lot of damage to Valorim, but the fact remains that they are pretty easily nullified by a single group of people. Later on, the Vahnatai suffer a devastating defeat at Rentar Ihnro's keep at the hands of the same small group. Lore-wise, it is repeatedly shown throughout the series that individual Vahnatai, while dangerous, cannot go toe to toe with larger forces without being wiped out (see: Ornotha Ziggurat). The most powerful Vahnatai was, for all practical purposes, defeated in combat by a single human arch-mage, and their Crystal Souls were easily nullified and destroyed when they were fought in the golem factory. Based on that, I kind of wonder just how dangerous they really are. It seems like in a head-on battle between the Vahnatai and even Avernum's forces, the Vahnatai would probably have lost. Certainly it doesn't seem like they could possibly have stood up to the Empire in a straight fight. They seem more like "very dangerous commandos" who couldn't survive a set piece battle against a real army. It seems like what defeated the Empire in Avernum 2 was less the intervention of the Vahnatai than Avernum completely crippling the empire's logistics by destroying the portal. Curious about people's opinions: 1. Could Avernum have won the war in Avernum 2 without the Vahnatai's help? 2. Could the Vahnatai possibly have survived a war against the Empire?

It's also possible that logistically, trying to move that many troops to a single continent is difficult. I'm not sure how long the plagues have actually lasted before Ruined World begins, but I got the impression it was weeks at most. That's not very much time, and most of the Empire forces in the area are up in northern Valorim, fighting and containing the most dangerous plagues (golems, alien beasts). In Crystal Souls, despite having a massive military, the empire is not able to bring it to bear against Avernum before the souls are recovered and the Vahnatai/Avernum forces are able to cut off the Empire's logistics and defeat them. This suggests that even with portals, there are significant limitations to how fast the Empire can respond to things.

Having played through most of the game fairly inefficiently and without making any sort of special allocation for time, I'm at day 70 with all but the golems completed, and I've found that most of the destruction isn't all that bad. I didn't prioritize ending the plagues over other quests, but even still, I never "lost" a single town. Actually, seeing them get more and more beaten up over time is kind of interesting. This isn't really as bad as I thought it would be. I probably won't overly stress about the date in future playthroughs, it seems well balanced enough to just be an interesting bit of added flavor without compromising overall enjoyment of the game.

I'm most of the way through the game. I've saved all the towns I care about. I'm pumped up and ready for the Tower of the Magi battle. In the original Avernum 3, this is the point where I would use the editor to jump forward to about day 155 or so. But it's a hundred days away. Aside from leaving the space bar held down for hours or running up and down the continent like 30 times, is there any faster way of advancing time? Like sleeping in an inn, or some other special encounter that takes up a large amount of time at once and can be repeated?

Thanks! Even when I was in that room pressing U to look for hidden switches, I STILL managed to miss it. Shame there's no Dark Wyrms there in A3:EW. Those things were terrifying and very interesting to fight

In Grindstone Caverns (one of the lower levels of the giant caves), there is a large area in the SE corner of the zone that I haven't been able to figure out how to reach. In the old Avernum 3, you could get there by walking through lava, and it was full of Dark Wyrms. In this version, I can't figure out how to get there anymore. Anyone know how to do this?

Awesome! I've had this on my iPhone for years but never knew where it actually came from.

I know certain things can be extensively modified (like items) by tweaking the various data files used by the game. Is it possible to modify the amount of XP granted by mobs in any way? Context: It's way too easy to out-level content. I haven't even finished the bottom half of Valorim and I am already at level 30. Nothing I kill gives much of any XP, which is turning combat into a chore instead of something exciting and entertaining. If I could say...half the amount of XP each mob gives, that would probably help my enjoyment. I thought about just making Sliths, but the human racial bonus is just too good to pass up.

Not particularly Avernum related, but I often listen to this as generic, pleasant, background music for many games, including this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXjRbDpjKqc

Aha. The missing link was to actually leave the Manse. I kept repeatedly running outside Lorelai, waiting for like 30 steps, then walking back inside and going to the Manse. Took less than 10 minutes to get the sword after I did that

How do you get Marjorie's various scripted events in the Manse to trigger leading up to whatever the A3:RW equivalent of the alien blade is? I've always had trouble getting this to actually do anything, but I'm having more trouble than I did with the original Avernum 3 version. I've wandered around every corner of the house dozens of items, I've slept in the bed multiple times. I even held down the space bar for over a minute to advance time by a day or two but nothing happened. What am I missing here?

As much as I personally enjoy melee and especially archers in games, around midgame in A1:EFtP and A2:CS I would always find myself getting rid of my melee and archers and replacing them with priests, since pretty much nothing could compare to chain casting Divine Retribution to wipe out entire rooms at once. Given how extreme the damage cap and mitigation of melee/bow damage seemed to be in the last two games, I never found it worthwhile. What I would have liked would be a system where melee and bows were murderously high single target DPS, and spells better for AOE damage, but it always seemed like spells were always the correct choice. Is the balance any better in this game or should I just have three priests (one with endurance and tank traits) and a mage?

I bought those because I thought the game was too cheap and would have paid $100 if it was an option in steam. It comes with some fun wallpapers and also a PDF containing a surprisingly huge amount of useful information, including maps of some of the dungeons, descriptions of exactly how to start and complete the five major artifact quests, lists of towns, and a full overworld map. I loved it, I probably won't even need to bother with FAQs for this game in the future, I'll just refer back to the PDF.

I personally never liked the day-based destruction mechanic in Exile 3 and Avernum 3. It's fine for people who are into that, but I like taking my time and exploring 100% of the game's content by slowly crawling my way up Valorim, without having to worry about missing content. Every time I played Avernum 3, I would frequently reset the day counter back to 0 so I had more time, and would only jump it ahead to day 160 once I'd done most of the major quests and was ready to do the tower of the magi event. Is there any way to reset this counter using the editor? If not, when you got that list of data, were all those in a single script or spread throughout dozens of scripts? I suppose I could always just find those entries in my files and add a few 0's onto the end of the numbers

In Avernums 4-6, do the heroes of the previous Avernum games ever show up in anyway? In Avernum 2 and 3, there is the occasional reference to the characters from the previous games, but nothing more than that. Do the heroes of A1-A3 ever appear in-game in A4-A6?

Is there a version of A2:CS where the hit chance is capped at 95%? The steam version of A2:CS seems to cap at 90% which I assume was true with all versions of it.

Just started another A2:CS playthrough and wow, the problems with accuracy in this game are so much worse than I remembered, it borders on absurd. I frequently miss 3-4 times in a row with melee and spells when the game is showing a 90% chance to hit. Exile 2 and the original Avernum 2 are among my favorite games, and while I really loved the A:EftP remake, the problems with Chance to Hit in this game are so omnipresent that I frequently want to uninstall it and go back to Avernum 2 instead. Did anyone by any chance ever figure out a way to mod the game such that accuracy isn't such an issue?

Something has always bothered me. Avernum 1 and 2 are actually pretty challenging on Torment difficulty. Avernum 3 is bafflingly easy. The first time I played Avernum 3, I noticed that I was consistently one-shotting everything I fought, which I'd never done before in an Avernum game. Even at the very beginning of the game, I would have to set the difficulty to Torment just so that enemies could start doing noticeable damage. Even then, nothing posed any real threat in the entire game except Dark Wyrms, which is very different from the experience I had in Avernum 1 and 2. I'm curious, I only recently started coming to these boards again. Did Jeff ever comment on why this was? Did he deliberately scale back the difficulty of Avernum 3? Or was it the result of tweaking a bunch of internal damage equations (Avernum 1 and 2 used similar damage ranges, but Avernum 3 was totally different) that never ended up being balanced properly?

Do Divine Retribution and Move Mountains scale with dexterity? Or are they intellect based? I read something that implied that Move Mountains was a dex based spell, and something that said Divine Retribution might be. Are they?

I personally used haste until I got Battle Frenzy, then had my tank run in to trigger traps while the others waited in the outside hallway, then pulled the enemies back into the hallway where I could take them one by one

I've been a role playing game enthusiast since I was 5. I have disliked missing since the first time one of my characters took a swing at an imp and missed in Final Fantasy 1 As for Avernum 2: How to work around enemy that melees extremely hard: Attack from range, apply debuffs, use knockbacks when they get close, have someone with high defense tank How to mitigate enemy that spawns lots of other mobs: Use terrain to funnel enemies and the properly shaped AOE spell to deal large amounts of damage. Daze/stun if they aren't resistant How to survive situations where you have to run past large numbers of enemies while being chased by Quickfire: Cast Haste until you get battle frenzy, enter combat, run each player individually, avoid entering melee range of enemies where possible How to survive enemies that are far too strong for you: use the above strategies if possible, try to take on enemies individually, use debuffs, reload saves where needed, or just plain run How to avoid missing enemies 10% of the time no matter how powerful you are: ... There are ways to deal with all the other scenarios, so that they do not become a problem, and don't significantly detract from your gameplay experience. Nothing, nothing at all, can mitigate the 10% miss rate. Maybe this is just a semantics argument, but I see a fundamental difference between encountering obstacles that force someone to play intelligently to survive difficult encounters, and being continually annoyed by a random number generator.

Darn, disappointing to hear that there's no way to tweak those kinds of formulas from scripts, although I'm not really surprised that core combat mechanics are done in code instead of scripts. One can always hope that Jeff raises the accuracy cap at some point. I don't mind planning for unexpected events in combat, pretty much every action taken by an enemy is an unexpected event, but having a huge chance to miss on every attack is quite frustrating, and doesn't really add much depth or complexity in my mind, since there is no way, through gearing, strategy, or buffing, to mitigate the effect of it (any competently geared character fighting reasonable opponents is going to be at the hit cap most of the time anyway). It just makes the game a little more frustrating to me, but I suppose not everyone will feel that way. Shame. I'm not about to try decompiling the Avernum 2 executable, so I guess I will have to hope future Avernum games have a less irritating hit cap.

This is the first time I've ever encountered this with a Spiderweb Software game. I've been playing since shortly after Exile 2 was released. This might be the first game I don't finish, because it just isn't fun to me. To put it simply, the game's combat mechanics feel completely broken, for two basic reasons: damage resistance and chance to hit. It is incredibly frustrating to melee a completely ordinary enemy for almost 600 damage, only to have them resist 550 of it. When I play this game, I frequently wonder why I even bother looking for weapon upgrades. When I hit an enemy for 60 (451 resisted) with an old weapon, then hit an enemy for 62 (485 resisted) with a new weapon, it becomes very hard to be excited about new gear. The percentage of the damage enemies resist is almost comical. Melee characters having to use 6-7 rounds to kill a single ordinary enemy is not exactly compelling gameplay. I know that spell casters have it slightly better in terms of damage scaling (not to mention multitarget attacks), but the basic, fundamental problem in my mind is that enemy damage resistance scales far faster than my ability to deal damage, to the point where killing basic enemies is like chipping away at a boulder unless I vastly outlevel them. As frustrating as I find the damage resistance of enemies, that is nothing compared to the problem with hit chance. I remember being pretty annoyed at how often I missed enemies in Avernum: Escape from the Pit with a supposed 95% hit chance, but that is nothing compared to this game. I haven't bothered actually parsing this yet, but it is very, very blatantly clear that the "chance to hit" shown in the combat text is not accurate at all. I realize that humans are a poor judge of statistical events, but I would be very surprised if I was hitting enemies more often that 2/3rds of the time at most. Having massive streaks of Missed Missed Missed Missed 4 times in a row against generic enemies with no buffs on them makes me wonder why I'm bothering to attack at all. It is profoundly frustrating that every single ability has such a huge chance of simply doing nothing at all, even against basic mobs. As a brief aside, I play World of Warcraft, and the developers of that game frequently make long blog posts explaining changes they're making. One of the more interesting posts for me was a discussion about combat mechanics. With the most recent expansion to the game, they completely removed your ability to miss mobs (unless they outleveled you or you were hit by a few specific debuffs). Every single ability works all the time, 100%. They balanced combat around the assumption that, if you were fighting level appropriate enemies, you were going to hit them. The reason they did this was because previously, every single player deliberately geared themselves so that they would never miss, never get parried, and never get dodged, which made items with +hit and +expertise mandatory. Simply put, people hate, absolutely hate, having abilities that don't work. Pressing a button and having nothing happen is one of the most infuriating things for players to experience, and it's largely unneccessary, since combat can be balanced around a 100% chance to hit and slightly reduced damage. Now, coming back to Avernum 2, the way older Avernum games handled chance to hit worked far better in my mind. It was still important to focus on raising your hit chance, but you could actually get it to the point where you stood a very good chance of hitting level appropriate enemies (I barely remember missing at all in those games). In this game, when it comes down to it, the (supposed) 90% hit cap basically means that you will always have an extremely high chance of missing in combat, and that makes attacking enemies a chore rather than a pleasure. It should be fun to take a swing at a mob, or throw a spell at it. Instead, it's frustrating and stressful, because I'm constantly wondering whether a fundamental, basic piece of in-game functionality is going to magically not work. Having a small chance of something awesome happening (i.e. critical hits) is a fantastic gameplay mechanic. Having a large chance of the worst possible outcome happening (a miss) is not, at least for me. With all that in mind...anyone know whether it's possible to tweak chance to hit or damage resistence by modifying the game's scripts? I compared Slartibus's mods for Avernum 1 against the game's default scripts trying to figure out what he changed and whether it would be possible to tweak things like this, but I'm worried that those calculations are handled in the game executable itself, not in any script. I'm assuming that modifying the game is considered acceptable, given that the scripts are stored in plain text and the game includes any editor. Anyone know whether something like this is possible? I want to love this game, and literally every single thing about it is exactly what I was looking for, except the two calculations governing damage resistance and chance to hit. It's sad to me that such basic things can cripple a game, but as it stands right now, this just isn't enjoyable for me.