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GiantFriendlyTalkingSpiderman

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Posts posted by GiantFriendlyTalkingSpiderman

  1. It took me forever to find all 4 stones in Blades of Exile. You get a Gold ring of protection for the trouble, not too shabby.
    This scenario has some very hidden secret areas in the overworld! Many of them only having bronze weapons or cursed items tough. 😑

  2. Just started replaying "A mild rebellion" on BoE recently and I stumbled onto the first of these stones. Couldn't find any other mention of the quest but here, I'll be sure to post what the reward is in the BoE version.
    Also, it is much harder to find these spots in BoE because there is no stone overworld graphic for them, the first stone was just on a random pathable forest space.

  3. I still want to do some work on OBoE, but I'm still living in the same sorry state of poor health. And when I recover, I have other priorities such as completing my education, getting a proper job, and working on my potentially lucrative projects.

  4. - Soon

    A lot happened to me over the past few months and as I've finally found myself some time to start up Queen's wish I remembered about this and figured that I should post something.
    It's been so long I have no memory of where I left off on this project (although I do have thorough notes), and I kinda just want to start queens wish right now. The last thing I need in my life at the moment is more stress, so I'm putting this on hold until I beat queens wish. Who knows, maybe Queens wish will inspire some new additions to this mod...

    The upside for anyone who happens to be eager for this mod is that I have a new deadline to finish it, since I may be using the game for a project with some friends, and before we start that I want my mod to be done and tested. It's not a difficult feat since the mod is mostly done already, but I may not find time for it until early next year.

    For anyone curious what I've been up to for the past half-year:

    Spoiler

    I tried getting 3 jobs to earn back some tuition money, all 3 jobs shorted me on the hours they promised. I was only working a total measly 15 hours a week, far cry of what I needed. I had to borrow money so I could continue my last year of education. In September I had a month-long relapse of my medical condition and had to drop out of classes, further delaying my education another year. I'm feeling better now, but we're still trying to find out why I had the relapse. Thankfully I still have two of those jobs and one has started giving me more hours... still a far cry from what I was promised and I'm not earning a living wage. So I'm still looking for proper employment as I slowly suck money out of my tuition funds.

    I'm shelving my game design ambitions for now and am considering writing a novel out of the plot I had for one game in an attempt to escape this financial cascade.

     

  5. Sorry for the lack of clarity. When I said, "creatures in the game that resist energy damage", I was referring to special resistances. All creatures that have bonus resistance or immunity to a damage type have attributes nodes for that. I'm merely concerned about abilities or event scripts that may also grant energy or elemental immunity, and aren't immediately apparent in the code.

     

    Also for the balance of blunt weapons, I did simply mean that they scale with endurance instead of a weapon skill. This makes a bigger deal depending on how many points you normally put into endurance.

     

    First I need to mention that blunt weapons don't scale as much as most weapons, this is to prevent them from being overly strong early game. (I tried lowering their base damage first but it didn't help for reasons I can't quite recall at the moment).But lowering their scaling means their damage falls off harder late game. 

     

    So if I made a fighter that used blunt weapons, the number of damage dice he can potentially have on each swing is limited by his PC level, base stat points, and trait points.
    But if I made a fighter that used a sword of equal level, the number of damage dice he can potentially have is limited by his PC level, base stat points, trait points, AND skill points.

    This is another factor that reduces the potential damage of blunt weapons in the late game.

     

    BUT if I were making a tanky fighter that has just as much endurance as strength then he might actually get more dice than he would with a sword.

    This also means that blunt weapon users are dissuaded from unlocking later weapon disciplines, because it requires them to sink extra points into a weapon skill that inherently provides nothing for them.

    A priest or mage with any points in endurance would also inherently be better at using a mace than a sword, without any investment, hence why I proposed that they made nice back-up weapons.

     

    I think the easiest solution is to make a late-game energy hammer, (Mjolnir?). Since energy damage is often better than fire or cold, it helps balance the smaller damage output it would have compared to the flaming sword.

  6. On 5/7/2019 at 12:23 PM, LastShade said:

    I just wanted to thank you for your mod... it was needed, and it's good work!

    Thanks, I'm glad your enjoying it! The next update will add a lot of new stuff you can do and fix some bugs. I plan to port this mod over to Avernum 1&3 after I'm done. It shouldn't take very long to port the mod but I'll need to do a test playthrough to ensure I didn't break anything.

    I've had some distractions lately but I'm still hoping to put out the next update before the end of the month.

    I have a small dilemma though; Since I'm adding blunt weapons I wanted to consider that blunt weapons are more effective to armored enemies. So I thought maybe they should deal energy damage? Can anyone think of any notable drawbacks to this? There are almost no creatures in the game that resist energy damage, but there are a few!
     

    Also if that sounds broken, know that the scaling on blunt weapons is pretty bad. In play testing I found they are best used as a back-up weapon since they only scale with base stats. I tried building an all endurance priest on my test run and he's feeling like a jack of all trades. Not enough armour or deference skills to make him tanky, hard to heal with all of that HP, and his melee damage is still less than my archer-mage. (I'm trying some "out there" builds to make sure I didn't make anything too abuseable).

  7. Here they are.

     

    Basic stats and skills

    Spoiler

    0=STR

    1=DEX

    2=INT

    3=END

    4=Melee skill

    5=Pole skill

    6=Bow skill

    7=Throwable skill

    8=Hardiness

    9=Blademaster

    10=Parry

    11=Quick Action

    12=Sharpshooter

    13=Gymnastics

    14=Riposte

    15=Dual Wielding

    16=Lethal Blow

    17=Sniper

     

    18=Mage spell skill

    19=Priest spell skill

    20=Spellcraft

    21=Arcane Lore

    22=Resistence

    23=Magic Efficiency

    24=Tool Use

    25=First Aid

    26=Cave Lore

    27=Luck

     

    % modifiers

    Spoiler

    200 Melee resistance

    201 bonus Action Points (flat bonus not a %)

    202 Hit chance

    ! 203 I Don't have this one!

    204 Hostile Effect Resistance

    205 Energy Resistance

    206 Fire Resistance

    207 Poison Resistance

    208 Acid Resistance

    209 Curse Resistance

    210 Mental Effect Resistance

    211 Evasion

    212 Cold Resistance

     

    213 Melee Damage bonus

    214 Magic Damage bonus

    215 Damage bonus against Demons

    216 Fatigue Recovery chance

    217 Blessing/Curse bonus

    218 Unused (Placeholder for Damage bonus against Giants)

    219 Healing bonus

    220 Missile Damage bonus

    221 Critical hit chance

    222 Parry chance

    223 Riposte chance

     

  8. The main point of me doing things this is that it's actually less work for me. I'm already intimately familiar with this games inner workings and story. I'm short on free time lately and don't want to study a new campaign or learn new tools. The players also wanted a hands-free experience, (They are watching the stream on their phones). I also enjoy enemies being out of my control, it's nice to have a little bit of surprise on my end of things.

     

    That said I'll be sure to look into those programs you suggested after were done this campaign.

  9. Lately I've been wanting to try DM'ing and was feeling very nostalgic for BoE's default campaigns, (my entry point into SpiderWeb games). I had some friends overseas mention that they had interest in D&D but didn't have the time to learn how to play or attend long sessions. Knowing that my friends had never touched any SpiderWeb games before, I proposed that I use the game to organize things and replace die rolls to speed up sessions. So I stream part of the game window and some other stuff like the world map on the side.

    So far it's been fun making new dialogue NPC's that I'm familiar with, and I have to admit that when a player asks to do something dumb like, "dig a big hole and fill it with holy water", I'm glad I can just tell them, "Sorry, the game wont let me do that". That said I'm always looking for quick ways to fudge the game values and have more freedom and control over the game world. I'm already messing with save data, but I would like a consistent way to spawn enemies on command, like if the players make a loud noise in a dungeon, it should attract the monsters.

     

    The only big hiccups so far is that I tried directing the players to a false wall, only to realize that I miss-remembered where it was. We also can't split the party too well. I tried splitting everyone up when we entered a town but the players didn't like how the camera was jumping back and forth every two steps. Also one of our PC's has chronic disease, which is very fun to deal with, (it get's a lot of laughs). I can't delete him and re-add him with ease because I need to keep his status ailments intact; and if the party does split, they want me to do everything in town mode, and all the backtracking required to pull that off means a lot of disease proc's for this guy.

     

    Another thing is that I'm fudging the numbers on player stats and starting equipment to meet player character requests. For example one PC has a special bow and an  arrow of returning due to his character backstory, I allow this but he has to take a negative trait, (he picked chronic disease, hahaha). It's making for an interesting playthrough.

    There are also unique disadvantages in our party, one of our PC's can only cast 1 spell per day in exchange for the spell being extra powerful. I gave the PC Micah gloves and access to higher level spells for now, but later on I'm not sure what I'll do; spell damage isn't so easy to manipulate back in the exile games.

     

    I just wanted to talk about how fun this turned out to be. It really breathed new life into an old game that I love. And it's nice getting more of my friends into SW games, even if they don't play the games normally, I can at least talk with the about the games now.

    If anyone has any advice for me in this project or DM'ing in general I'd appreciate it.

  10. I recently started a singleton assassin playthrough, where I try to maximize my assassination skill first. I fight unarmed because your accuracy scales really well with Dex when unarmed. But I couldn't get assassinate to proc once! (I was level 4 and had around 6 points in assassination, I was using minor haste on myself to attack more often). I should probably check if you can even proc assassinate with unarmed attacks...

    Update: I checked the code and it seems only your first melee hit with a weapon can cause assassination, (meaning if you dual-wield the second hit of your attack won't have a chance to assassinate). So much for the unarmed assassin; maybe I'll do this again with a daggers-only run.

  11. I'm going off childhood memories here, So your probably right. But I want to think that the bow you have equipped should factor somewhere so I feel like I'm missing something. (Edit: the bow effects accuracy check).
    All of the checks in the fire_missile only refer to [ammo_inv_slot]. I wonder what formula the sling uses?

    EDIT: It seems that the sling counts as BOTH the bow AND the missiles. It's damage bonus is also its chance-to-hit bonus.

  12. My bad, I read the damage formulas recently and miss-read "AdventurerBlessLevel" as "AdventurerLevel".


    Source: http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/11501-formulas-for-damage-and-such/?tab=comments#comment-131366


    Sadly I can't find the missile damage formula.

    EDIT: Looking at the code in BoE it looks like the formula for missile damage is completely different than melee. It is also far shorter and does not seem to account for several important things.

     

    dam = adven[current_pc].items[ammo_inv_slot].item_level;

    dam_bonus = adven[current_pc].items[ammo_inv_slot].bonus + minmax(-8,8,(int)adven[current_pc].status[STATUS_BLESS_CURSE]);

    r2 = get_ran(1,1,dam) + dam_bonus;

    spec_dam = calc_spec_dam(adven[current_pc].items[ammo_inv_slot].ability, adven[current_pc].items[ammo_inv_slot].ability_strength,cur_monst);

     

    As far as I can tell missiles don't scale at all, they also don't seem to factor the bow your using which can't be true... Also they don't seem to factor for the monsters bless/curse level, only the PC's. I'm probably missing some subroutine here, I have to be.

    In my limited Exile experience I found missile damage to be quite high considering that you can fire 2 per turn without haste. And the fact that they scale from Str and Dex seems good, (I don't know the rate of the scaling though so it might be bad). I remember back in the day I relied heavily on my archer to snipe enemy mages. My mage could never match the archers single target damage... though I don't remember unlocking the kill spell so that might be a factor... I really need to replay Exile games outside of Blades of Exile so I can become familiar with the late game spells. Time to borrow my grandma's computer. She wont mind, she plays solitaire on her phone now anyway.

  13.  

    18 hours ago, Randomizer said:

    The major consideration is do you have enough of the main stat so you can hit the enemy with your main attack.

     

    The first time I played Exile 3, I didn't understand the importance of certain stats and mostly increased strength for all of them to carry items. Intelligence for spell casters wasn't raised. It still worked out okay.

    As I've come to realize very recently. In the exile games your PC's level effects your stats and damage output at least as much as your skill point allocation.
    This is why my archers always managed to do fine despite me not giving them any points in strength back in the day. (although missile attacks do get a damage boost from dex as well from what I hear).

    In the avernum games your stat allocation has a much stronger effect.

     

    19 hours ago, Fate's Bulwark Against Fate said:

    I don't think "the best most cost-effective traits" is an accurate statement.  Most of the base stat traits are good, at least for certain character types, but there are a number of traits that are better than basically any of the base stat traits.

    Your right, I shouldn't have said that. I was thinking back to some debates between specific traits, ignoring the must get ones.
    My main point was that you usually get a lot of base stat traits and ignore a large amount of the list including 3% damage boosts which pale in comparison most of the time.
    Also being able to invest in the same trait 5 times is a bit excessive.

  14. Time and again people have mentioned that the base-stat traits are close to the best traits.
    On my second playthrough I invested solely in them and could really feel the advantage my human characters had over then non-humans.

    Many of the other traits fall to waste providing only a small fraction of what a base-stat point does.

     

    When starting the Avernum 2 over and over testing out stuff for my Giant mod, I started to long for a playthrough where I use different traits. Next time I do a legit non-testing playthrough of these games I'm going to try a run without using any Base-stat boosting traits. I imagine this will increase difficulty too. (I find torment mode to be a bit of a slog so this might be a nice in-between).

    Although a few traits have already been indirectly buffed by my mod, ("strong back" went from pointless to necessary due to Armour weight changes; And "Summoning focus", builds are also a thing now).

    Has anyone already tried a run without taking these traits, does it change your build at all or is it just a slight handicap?

  15. On 10/15/2018 at 2:16 PM, Muscleguy said:

    Why do they animate with a two handed spear when they have a one handed sword equipped? After all this is supposed to be that spears are one handed?

    This is unfortunately a hardcoded part of the engine. All two-handed weapons will cause your PC to look like they are holding a spear. The only way to correct this is to change the actual sprites in the game files, but you would need to change that every playthrough depending on your builds.

     

    On 10/16/2018 at 3:37 AM, Muscleguy said:

    And the strength levels needed for armour are ridiculous. And the blade sweep discipline is also ridiculously strong. A blade sweep cannot be too strong as it would get stuck in the first target. You don't seem to understand that. 

    Yes Armour is heavy, because in real life armour is heavy. People almost never walked around in great helms and full plate mail, and if they did it was very slow and awkward.
    If you want to rock a full suit of heavy armour the "strong back" trait will do you wonders.

    Very little is realistic about the weapon disciplines in general. Sadly there is no way for me to determine the order targets are being hit. At best I could make the initial target take a different amount of damage than all of the other targets, but then the skill would be too similar to "well-aimed blow" which has guaranteed cleave.

     

    I'm not going for absolute realism in this game with magic and talking spiders. I'm mainly focused realism that adds more gameplay depth and build variety. Also I have to settle some personal pet peaves like, "Why can't my ensnared PC just throw a rock or something?".

  16. Most of what you complained about is fixed in the latest version of the mod(v0.4) which I will post sometime this month.
    I held back from posting any new releases because I broke half the the priest spells and became too ill to continue progress on the mod. But my health has improved and I've found the issue that was breaking the priest spells.

     

    The 0.4 release will be near-final. Here are some things to expect:


    - It will feature many new items (replacing unique sale items)
    - The ability to hire some familiar mercenaries.

    - Heavy spell rebalancing.

    - Weapons that siphons mana or health from your enemies, (perfect for paladin builds).

    - Two new weapon types: Rapiers and Flails.

    - A potion that removes fatigue.

     

    Things I'm still working out:

     

    - Light sources now have a use.

    - Alcohol now has a use.
    - I want to find a use for first aid outside of minor convenience.

    - Personally I've always preferred single target spells over AOE, I am considering having some spells start as single target and upgrade to an AOE.

    - I would love to do a total ground-up overhaul on the spells, but I'll probably do that later as an alternative mod that provides a fresh new experience.

  17. I could be wrong but I think some of these sprites are still holdover from the isometric games. I fully intend to replace the image files for this game with stuff from the classic Exile series. I've stated before that I like the low res graphics of that era because it gives your imagination more freedom.
    A blurred image that vaguely looks like a tree can be any tree you can imagine. But seeing the same detailed image of a pine tree over and over again is just that.

  18. It is possible Jeff wants to simplify character building so that it doesn't take away from the complexities of the new town building aspects.
    I also suspect(hope) that item customization will be a thing. Like enchanting your own gear with unique traits instead of just finding unique items. If this is indead a feature I imagine character builds will be just as flexible as they were with 12 equip slots.

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