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Slarti

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Posts posted by Slarti

  1. 46 minutes ago, Randomizer said:

    Jeff wanted more creation use in his games

    I mean, this is nothing new, creations have been either the strongest or equivalent-to-the-strongest option, by a mile, in every Geneforge game.  The only real competitor was broken Parry in OG2.  Daze was extremely good from OG3 on but it paired too well with creations to really count as competition.

  2. DoT sources - is this list missing any?  (thanks for the additions!)

     

    Shocked:

    - Weapon Shaping - Essence Lash

    - Magic Shaping - Glaahk passive (unreliable)

     

    Burning:

    - Battle Magic - Essence Purge

    - Fire Shaping - Drakon/Ur-Drakon ranged attack

    - Volatile Thahds and Pyroroamers, with upgrade, on explosion (lol?)


    Acid:

    - Magic/Battle Shaping - Rotghroth, Rotdhizon, Searing Artila, Iron Clawbug, Cockatrice (unreliable)

    - Searer

    - Weapon Shaping - Searing Spray

    - Spray Crystal

     

    Poison:

    - Magic/Battle Shaping - Artila, Searing Artila, Clawbug, Iron Clawbug, Ornk, Stalkthorn
    - Searer (low level)

    - Poison Baton

  3. I think boosting control for casual/normal difficulty was definitely the right move.  Maybe even one step up.  But for Torment I think it was unnecessary.  Still, not really a big deal.

     

    Speaking of creations, the Mutagen creations are mostly identical in Infestation, but here are some subtle changes that took place:

    - Reduced essence cost for Iron Clawbugs, Cryodrayks, and Battle Betas (which were all quite weak in Mutagen) (...and still aren't great)

    - Minor boost to base level (mostly +1) for both Artilas, and for Iron Clawbugs, Cryodrayks, Battle Betas, Ur-Glaahks, and Cockatrices

    - Minor stat boosts (+1) to all 3rd-tier creations

    - Boost to base HP for both Drayks, and to Battle Alphas, Glaahks, and Cockatrices

    - Boost to HP multiplier for regular Artilas and both Vlish - Vlish went from x0.9 to x.12.  NB Searing Artila did not get this

    - Ornk AoE switched to a worse version (bhahaha)

  4. 1 hour ago, Grzegorz Kowalski said:

    I've looked at problems reported for previous Geneforge games and a lot of similar problems were reported (jerky animations, sounds etc.). It seems to me that it's something wrong with game engine as it is going many years back.

     

    The game engine doesn't go back that many years.  The original Geneforge games were published in 2001 to 2008 (and that engine underwent some pretty drastic changes throughout).  The two recent games (2021, 2024) are remasters of the original series with a completely different engine, and the only two games published with this new engine.

     

    I have seen plenty of weird resolution issues, letterboxing, etc., but few if any reports of jerky stuttering graphics and sound -- for the Geneforge remasters.  What you are probably finding when you google are problems reported for the original series being played on modern systems -- there have been tons of those.  The first few of the series in particular run into some crazy problems with jerky animations and stuttering when played on machines with operating systems that came out 15+ years after they did.  If you play them on an XP machine, that doesn't happen.

     

    A few thoughts:

    - Your CPU was relased in 2017.  That's not recent.  That's not necessarily the issue -- my CPU is also from 2017 and I have had no such issues.  But if you have a massive amount of stuff going on in the background, that could be contributing.

    - You're on Windows 11.  One of the things that popped up googling it was that your CPU doesn't support Windows 11.  Maybe that's irrelevant, but it's hard to say.

    - Two quick suggestions for more data: 1) try running with the Steam overlay turned off and see if anything changes; 2) open Task Manager while the game is running and choppy, and view the first tab sorted 3 different ways, by GPU, CPU, and Memory.  If any of those are unusually high, that's plausibly your problem.  And if a lot of the activity is coming from something besides Geneforge, try closing or disabling those things, relaunching Geneforge and seeing if things are better.  Feel free to share screenshots if you're not sure what to do with the numbers.

    - Also, since turning sound off helps more than turning graphics down, maybe you're having a weird audio issue.  Do you have any kind of unusual audio setup going on, either in terms of software or hardware?

  5. It does seem a little silly.  Control wasn't even a big deal in Mutagen on Torment, but it wasn't completely irrelevant at least.

     

    Thinking about it... I bet, though, that there's a subset of semi-casual players (but not playing on Casual) who had intensely negative reactions (like "ragequit and write an angry review") to creations going rogue for a turn in the middle of combat when they didn't expect it.  So I wonder if this is in response to that.

     

    Seems like it could have been gated more by difficulty level, at least.  But oh well.

  6. The remasters don't take as long as the new games, though.  And remember that the previous Nethergate remaster was literally completed in three months -- SW's fastest game ever.  I don't think it's impossible to do or to wish for.  It's just a question of if SW thinks it would sell.  Personally I'd guess there's a better market for it now than there was in 1998...

  7. Reference Lists

    • Cheat Codes (to be replaced with G2, but probably most of these work)

     

    Game Mechanics

    • Coming soon

     

    Strategy & Tactics

     

    Mods and Technical Info

    • Coming soon

     

    Work in progress.  If you have a question about the game, please make a new topic (or ask in an existing one).

  8. Based on some script grepping, locations with leadership checks requiring more than 6 (6 itself is quite widespread and encountered very early):

     

    Leadership 7

    Gheth, Research Halls, Gheth Gates, Old Bridge, Phariton, Misfits, Infested Farmland, Geneforge, Canister Factory

     

    Leadership 8

    Medab, Radiant College, Creation Holding, Zhass-Uss, Benarii Power, Benarii Holding

     

    Leadership 9

    Barrier of the Winds, Clockwork, Benarii Entry

     

    Leadership 10

    Pit of the Bound One, Clawbug Canyon, Rising

     

    The earlier-encountered ones on this list are mostly checks to skip faction-joining quests.

     

    Some of these appear to have changed since the atlas was compiled.  For example, Learned Pinner's highest leadership option is 8, not 10.

  9. Huh, that's pretty cool!  Neat.

     

    (Battle disciplines were mostly the same in A5/6, there were some slight nuances -- notably in A5/6, they were mostly "modifier" effects to the next action rather than their own action, so you could apply +25% damage to any single target action for example -- even a spell.  So I guess closer to how they are here.  But they did have cooldowns rather than energy use, yeah.)

  10. Weapon Shaping... is basically just Battle Disciplines (from A5, so predating the end of the original Geneforge series) with a new name?  Huh, wasn't expecting that.  That feels slightly anticlimactic.

     

    It might be worth clarifying for those less used to SW systems: Intelligence does not really increase "all spell effects" - it just increases the ones listed for each magic type.  A new player could easily interpret that as making buffs stronger, or increasing the chance of success for applying debuffs, but as we know, it doesn't do those things.

     

    There is another place in the post where it says max leadership needed is 9.  I too see up to 10 in the scripts.

     

    The Weapon Shaping durations and % effects listed here look really off compared to the scripts.  I don't know if I'm misinterpreting something, it's possible, but maybe worth double checking?

     

    Lifedrain applies a status, it's not just one attack.

  11. ...okay, so this is extremely weird.

     

    I didn't have AEFTP installed on this computer, so I downloaded it again and looked at the scripts.  Erika indeed does not have a dialogue option for training skills, at all, just as Traute has discovered.

     

    However, there's lots of documentation from the game's release of people saying she did.  Synergy, Randomizer and myself all put it in our lists and guides, it's on the AEFTP Annotated Maps, and there's casual discussion of it on the forums as well.  We paid a lot of attention to trainers on release because in the initial Mac version (remember when the Mac version always came out first?  nostalgia!) training the second level cost double price, and it was harder to afford everything... so I really don't think that was just a propagated mistake.  Erika is the only trainer for some of those skills, so it would be a really strange communal error; we'd have had to invent prices for them out of thin air and everything.

     

    Notably, Nlambert also has it in their index... which was posted in 2018!  So if it was (inadvertantly?) removed in some version upgrade, it has to have been in the last 6 years... or possibly it was simply never in certain versions to begin with?  Either one is weird.

     

    The file in question (t66ErikasTowerdlg.txt) has a last modified date of November 14, 2011, which is shortly before the game was released.  So it wasn't changed later, though maybe an older version was mistakenly packaged in at some point?  I dunno.  This whole thing is weird.

  12. 3 hours ago, alhoon said:

    Killing moderates is understandable, though. It happens in all civil wars: the middle people are killed first.

     

    The point is though that the Rebels force you to do this, but the Shapers do not, which is one of the things that makes the Rebels harder for the player to digest.  I see your point on strategy, however, considering how incredibly un-strategic most of the Rebel goals in G3 are -- mostly just a lot of spreading destruction for its own sake -- putting myself in the PC's shoes, it's hard to take that too seriously.

     

    3 hours ago, alhoon said:

    it is better for the Rebellion, even for an Awakened-typed one, for Khyryk to die

     

    I don't see how it would be better for the Awakened.  Khyryk is closer to them ideologically than he is to the loyalists.  If the Rebels did not exist, Khyryk expressing his views would only increase support for the Awakened -- it wouldn't make it seem like they were extreme and crazy.

  13. Going Rebel 100% forces you to kill Khyryk in order to progress to the final island.  I think this really epitomizes the problem.  In a game that deliberately forces you to choose between terrible extremes, Khyryk is the lone sympathetic bastion of even-handed reason -- and the Rebel path forces you to kill him, but the Shaper path doesn't.

  14. In Mutagen, when you shape a creation, you don't just pick a creation, you have various options to augment it.

     

    One could imagine the same sort of thing for spells.  Commit essence to improve a particular spell in different ways -- maybe it costs less energy, lasts longer, does more damage, hits a bigger area, adds a chance of a secondary effect, changes its element, changes its effect entirely, etc.

     

    While this could be done on a per-cast basis, what I'm imagining is more like with creations: you spend the essence once, and that essence is committed -- augmenting that spell in your head -- until you release the essence (just like until a creation dies or is absorbed).

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