Slarzahl

@alhoon Aodare. And yup, G2.

Yu-La doesn't make any effort to hide the fact that she met other Shapers, nor their location. That fact that neither the other Sholai, nor the nearby serviles (the nearby very inquisitive and highly cautious serviles) would ever get a clue about this, even if she didn't go out of her way to say so, seems weird. Thrackerzod is also so close geographically to Masha's group, and in uncontested territory the Takers can easily surveil. It's not impossible for them to be completely undiscovered there... it just seems unlikely and isn't really explained. Whereas every other group is organically placed and feels integrated into the whole scenario.

Shanti remains the best character in all of Geneforge.

I was really irritated by that retcon -- it's a big shift even if on a minor point, and Thrackerzod in general seems very incongruent with the game world. (It's also just weird that the serviles freak out so much about both the PC and Goettsch, but have zero interest in Thrackerzod's crew of multiple shapers at all.) Either it was a kickstarter backer insertion that was poorly vetted, or it was a moment of Avernum 4 syndrome.

Yeah, I don't think that's what the OP thought. They posted a bunch about Geneforge: Mutagen back in 2021, so clearly they played it, and from those posts they clearly never played the original Geneforge games. I think they simply heard "original GF2" in this thread, without context, and thought "original" meant it was another name for Mutagen. The confusion is representative.

You can open or close the text combat log - in the settings menu - or by pressing 't'

I mean, it's two games from the same series, so gameplay and mechanics are very similar. Items, similar. Races and creatures, similar. (The tutorial is also similar, because the mechanics are similar.) This is all... pretty standard for games within a series, isn't it? But I don't really understand how "only a small difference" can even apply to the storyline, the locations and maps, or the NPCs and dialogue... those are completely different. (Also, just an observation, but you've made an awful lot of posts here complaining about Geneforge. This is a lot of effort to put in to talk about a series you don't seem to like very much...)

Sliths have... I guess analogues in standard fantasy, but they are kind of the polar opposites of traditional dumb, mundane lizardmen. So I'd give some credit there too. The others less so. Slimes are pretty much a direct lift from ad&d. Most of the monster list in Exile is straight from ad&d, which isn't surprising given that (a) this was true of the vast majority of 20th century RPGs, and (b) the whole premise of Exile originated in Jeff's tabletop campaigns.

It's definitely a step further away from mainstream expectations for RPGs. A step backwards, absolutely not. It's also hard to argue whether or not it's a step backwards without any specifics to talk about. What about the gameplay, combat, and inventory is worse to you? I'm with Mechalibur on the combat balance points mentioned above. It certainly has more depth than the very fun but wildly imbalanced mechanics of the original Geneforge games. (And Mutagen came out after QW1.) The graphics are... well, I don't think anyone completely loves them, but I do appreciate going back to a top-down perspective. So that complaint I understand at least. As for the stories... it's worth pointing out that the central Avernum stories (1-3) were written from 1994-1996, and Geneforge was written all in the early to mid oughts. 15-30 years of real life (!!) passed between those stories and Queen's Wish. The world has changed, and so has the person writing them.

I suggest emailing the email address you quoted and asking.

Hi! What part are you asking about? This is basically just an announcement that the old policy is kaput (as of 2015) because it isn't viable to give previous-owner discounts in the modern app-store-centric world. If you're wondering about the free hint books, I'd suggest emailing the support address listed in the announcement to ask.

They don't have the same odds. They use the same lookup table in their functions (charm_odds), but there are steps taken both before (in this case, dividing the monster's level by 2) and after looking up that value (in this case, using a 0-to-70 RNG), and those steps are different for charming and for capturing, which results in different resulting odds.

also, worth noting, although this is the same odds table that Charm and a few other effects use, they don't necessarily use the same formula with it. I know Charm takes the caster's level into consideration, for example. So it's not actually that charming is twice as hard or anything, it just scales very differently.

Except it's not actually a percent due to the 7/10 multiplication. r1 needs to be <= 4 to succeed vs a level 24-25 monster, which will happen 7% of the time -- as even 49/10 rounds down to 4. And then level 26-27 should be 2%, since a roll of 2 also rounds down to 1. After that, as you note later, it's 1%.

pascal int Random() Random returns an integer between -32768 and 32767. The integer is from a uniform pseudo-random distribution. The seed for this function is the global variable randSeed. RandSeed is initialized to 1 by InitGraf.

You have it backwards. if r1 is greater, it fails. That set of conditionals is what causes it to fail.

Actually... wait a minute. r1 is a short. c++ rounds down by default. and that's a > not a >= in the charm_odds compare. so this means that anything above level 27 and not immune should have an exactly 1% chance to get captured, right?

And voila, here's charm_odds as CM kindly provided in a previous thread: const short cCreature::charm_odds[21] = {90,90,85,80,78, 75,73,60,40,30, 20,10,4,1,0, 0,0,0,0,0, 0}; For Capture Soul, looks like it's auto-success through monster level 13, then it starts dropping, and becomes quite harsh above level 23. Looks like level 27 is the absolute limit.

Yeah, the mechanics in all the Geneforges generally make creations supported by spells a stronger option than anything else. The only things that really ever compete are Parry in G2, or a truly focused investment in Mental Magic in the later games.

Crazy! Good catch Ess. I guess this just never came up because people rarely bothered with archery in Exile in the first place.

I wonder if it's an emulation hiccup. Saying this because there's no record of anyone on the internet reporting this before (and given how heavily E3 and BoE were discussed on these forums 20+ years ago, I can't believe no one ever tried to poison arrows), while there are some reports of being experiencing really weird things using OTVDM with BoE. Notably, there is a report of Capture Soul always using slot 1. Which slot Capture Soul picks is random -- well attested -- which suggests something really goofy is going on with the RNG call, when played under OTVDM. The same post says there are other "sometimes" glitches -- it doesn't elaborate on them, but that could also be consistent with an RNG issue. Emulation can affect RNGs due to initialization values, etc. Usually we're used to seeing old systems suddenly have better RNG when emulated (think about the old exploits for NES games where you'd restart, perform a specific series of actions, and then guarantee a particular encounter or whatever), but I guess this could be working the other way around. And it's definitely possible that something about the poison chance RNG is different for ranged attacks vs melee (maybe just in terms of order of things in the code rather than an intended gameplay difference). (The report was for BoE, but something similar could presumably happen here -- they share an awful lot of code.) There are also reports in that thread of text inconsistently missing values... which could point to something weird going on with memory read/write. Definitely a possibility with emulation, if the game is handling it in an unusual way. (Looks like OTVDM has had issues in the past with heap sizing that are attested, could be something like that.) And here's another thread that suggests truly bizarre RNG with OTVDM, this time E3 itself. I don't think E3 even had a door strength setting that could produce such low chances for success at bashing a regular door with 18 Strength. If you have a way (and the time) to try out a different emulation method (like just DOSBox) with a transferred save, it might be worth seeing if you experience the same behavior.

Weird. I assume you get the same behavior when using other bows and arrows, when attacking other monsters, when the PC has more skill in archery or poison, etc.? Just trying to think of any possible unknown edge case that could explain this... I assume from your other posts this is just in Exile III, right?

What bow and arrows specifically do you have equipped?

Poisoned arrows were definitely a thing since the very first game. The in-game tips even talk about them. (And "poisoned weapon" is just tracked by a simple status effect -- it applies to the PC, not the specific weapon.) I dunno -- can you be more specific about exactly what you're observing? You're following exactly the same sequence both times, but melee attacks are applying poison but ranged attacks never are? What do you have equipped?

Hi, thanks for reporting this! Looks like Google now wants a whole bunch of manual setup to enable this kind of thing. Not sure if it was ever working here and just never got reported till now. I've disabled Google login for the moment.