Slawbug

A4-A6 sound like they are in the "actual remake" category along with the rest of Geneforge.

I was sitting on 60+ tools for the whole second half of the game, and I only manually raised Mechanics to 5. (I did make a point of grabbing the Mechanics+ items, but only when I was in a nearby zone anyway.)

He does? That's not what his script says. Are you sure? I believe the only requirements for the Good Unaligned ending are - kill Barzahl - kill the Taker leaders - no current faction membership mike's plan seems fine. Note that the Awakened Applicant quests don't really affect anything so you can safely do those; there are 4 points of Leadership from later items so raising it manually to 8 is unnecessary.

> "under 90+leadership" doesn't quite seem to convey "only if reputation minus leadership is less than 90" per the corresponding script). I think it does? If your reputation is less than (90 + leadership) you meet the qualification. It's just a much simpler way of putting it.

Amazing! That's great. There are a bunch of smaller ones that aren't dependent on faction membership. - Some of these are obvious: if you complete Kill Twini you can't complete the quest Twini gives you, for example. If you complete Kill Tuldaric, you alienate the Awakened forever. - There are things faction membership cuts off (or enables) that aren't quests, like Taker membership denying you the Fort Muck raid with its irreplaceable drop; also merchants and trainers - There are also things that have nothing to do with factions. If you kill key infernals before getting the special rod from Shandoka, for example, you can never complete those quests or get their rewards - nlambert's Index lists a few other quests as faction-locked not on the list above; not sure which is accurate. for example, Recover Mutant Drayk is listed as Takers Only.

What's unfortunately a bit more complicated to sort out in the scripts is what faction membership and quest completion enables and locks out, simply because there are so many weird little dependent variables, most of which do nothing, but a few of which lock something out -- sometimes indirectly.

Playing as a Shaper definitely isn't required. Agents are very good. They just require a different approach. With a Shaper you can charge ahead using brute force, and defeat enemies by overwhelming power. Agents will always be worse at that than Shapers. They can become spellcasting machines, though, and not having a big party (potentially even playing solo) gives them some extra tactical options. Be careful how you enter rooms with big fights; find ways to position yourself (stealth can help) so you don't face everything all at once. Often, you can use status effects (Daze is huge, early on; Airshock is amazing later) to disable extra enemies and pick them off one by one. Wyx is a very hard fight for early in the game, and is not intended to be fought that early. Class has nothing to do with it. On higher difficulty levels you essentially can't. Re-upping on essence is annoying wasted time, since you can (almost) always just leave and do it without penalty, I agree. For that reason, you might consider the shift-D code "rechargeme" to be less of a cheat and more of a timesaver. YMMV.

A fourth version of the original trilogy? Lol. But that is admittedly a much simpler job. (Number of times Jeff has now created a Tower of Magi map, which he once swore he'd never do again: 15 and counting...)

I think that would get awfully confusing.

Suddenly I regret liking the first post in this thread...

One exception: you can voluntarily leave the Awakened by going to Learned Pinner, because the Awakened walk the talk when it comes to individual freedom.

Old topic, old verison; please see new version here.

Keep in mind that Randomizer probably did a lot of other things optimally. If you're making viable rather than optimal choices in all areas, a mixed-shaping-type party on Torment might be well below 80% to hit chance in those fights. On Normal, agree it should be viable regardless.

Yeah. This is incredibly annoying -- these tooltips have been misleading ever since the first Geneforge more than 20 years ago. I don't know why Jeff refuses to change them to something clearer.

It's also hardcoded for zones further out. Try it and see.

This is what I get for filtering for z*.txt. Very glad you pointed that out, thanks!

If you dismiss her before you enter the tunnel, she will be back in the Mines and can be recruited again. However, she seems hardcoded to leave when entering any (?) post-tunnel zone. I guess someone else had the same bright idea I did and Jeff closed that loophole.

Rot spray does pathetic damage compared to their attack. I can imagine circumstances where a gazer's AoE is useful even if I don't consider it worth buying, but a Rot's is truly not good. Innate Haste is mostly wasted on them because their attack only uses 6 AP. Haste (of any variety) will never get them an extra attack if they start the turn within 1 square of their target, or if they start the turn more than 4 squares away. That limits its utility significantly. Okay, this is interseting approximating math. One thing this does bring up, is that it's an option for a way to mix shaping types. Not a super efficient one, but better than trying to pump lots of different shaping types. I don't think it would work out super well (and notably, it works poorly for the eyebeast, who maybe would be the most tempting out-of-type "single grab"). But any levels you can get from essence don't require investing solely in one shaping type. The issue there, I guess, is that you're limited to a small handful of essence-based levels (especially before you start investing in the less useful stats, which realistically is everything beides the primary attack stat). But it's something, I guess. (...actually, you can use items, like Sharon's robe, to shape the higher-difficulty-required creations, and then take them off. But having the resulting level 12 eyebeast is just kinda funny.) ...the more I think about that though, the worse it sounds. Does fire/magic gain that much by having one Rot in place of a Drakon/Glaahk, to make up for lower levels? Not really. (Fire AoEs you really want to go all or nothing on IMO, and the math on this is worse for magic creations.)

Are you sure Rhakkus qualifies? I see Syros and Akkat in the scripts but not him.

Have you tried charging it, with the required items present, at an enchanted anvil? EDIT: Actually, there's an easy way to check this. Type shift-D, then in the window that appears, type "gsdf 22 18" and hit enter. Tell us what message appears at the bottom of the screen afterwards.

You are correct about Drakons! I grouped Drakons and Roamers together, the comments are generally meant to apply to both. The top creations for every shaping type, in this analysis, are 3rd or 4th tier. If you don't join a faction early, you can't access any of them until the Loyalist Encampment at the earliest. Rotghroths are actually available there, though, as well as from Tyallea (i.e., the earliest good creation opportunity, for if you join Zakary), from Tuldaric, etc. If I were gonna do 1 of each class and shaping type, I'd probably put Fire Shaping with the Shaper. Because Fire Shaping is brute force it relies more on maxing out its essence/shaping levels, so Agents are a rougher fit. Because it's AoE, it plays poorly with melee (on higher difficulty anyway) and therefore a lot of Guardian fun. I'd stick Magic Shaping with the Guardian (who can tank for them a little, and who can rely on them for a lot of magic needs), and Battle with the Agent (who can do the reverse, supporting them with mental magic and buffs, while letting them take the hits).

No one was saying "never get any Essence Mastery." The argument was with "pick the cheaper one to increase" which would result in a wildly comical amount of essence. First off, one thing that's been ignored here is that there are five free levels of Essence Mastery to be gained from canisters, quests, etc. OK, two of those are for slaying faction leaders, but three of them are reasonably findable at endgame. Now let's look at the formula: Essence = 4 + ( (EMastery + 1) * (Level + 2) ) You can get up to around level 24, but let's just pick level 20 for a very conservative endgame level. Shapers start with 4 EM, we'll take that conservative 3 bonus levels. This endgame-but-not-actually-done character will have 180 essence without any investment in Essence Mastery. (At level 24, they'd be up to 212 essence.) You used drayks as an example, so let's look at fire shaping here: 7 drayks with key investments is 182 essence. Now, there's other considerations here -- maybe you don't actually want 7 (I personally am happier with 5 or 6, because cone positioning); or maybe you want to pay for Overdrive on all of them. And of course you want some free essence for spells. But each manual EM point is 22 essence. Just getting 2 points would bring you to 224 essence (or 264 at level 24). 2, maybe 3 points is plenty of essence even with 7 drayks. But your argument was "always." So now let's consider a team of 7 Rots, who are cheap and really don't want any augments besides a single copy of the DoT+ passive. That's a total cost of just 141 essence. That fits just fine into 180 essence, and it leaves lots of space to play at 212 essence. Now, suppose we invested in whichever of shaping skill or essence mastery was cheaper. At level 20 that's 190 skill points to play with, say 60 are thrown at spells, mechanics, leadership. That means we buy around 12 points of shaping skill and 10 points of essence mastery. That's not crazy on the shaping investment, but the essence mastery? We'll be at 400 essence. (472 at level 24.) That's nuts. EDIT: I split this all into a new topic because it's pretty much its own separate thing anyway.

The problem is that you're stuck with those sunk points in Essence Mastery for the whole game. And for most of the game, that point in Essence Mastery is not going to be preferable to an extra level on all your creations. That doesn't mean Essence Mastery is worthless, but it does mean the deciding factor should not just be "what's mildly more useful at level 4," especially if that mild advantage isn't going to make or break your progress. The deciding factor should be "what's better overall, in the long run?" A few points in Essence Mastery is fine; but in the long run "pick the cheaper one to increase" would be a pretty bad strategy.

Good point about Gazer/Eyebeast AoEs, though they are also much weaker than their main attack (in addition to being on cooldown). The short answer is no, for several reasons: (1) You probably want to stick with one shaping type for the whole game. (2) It's going to depend 100% on what factions you join. (3) The top tier creations beat the fyora/thahd/artila by enough, in G2, that you can safely replace those as soon as you have access to the better ones, regardless of your essence. The point of the "8 levels of training" is just to standardize. You could pick "3 levels" or "12 levels" and it wouldn't change much. That said, as a Shaper, it really only takes 2 levels worth of skill points to get up to a Shaping Skill of 6, and there are early armors for +1 as well. Nora is exceptional period -- unless you're eschewing other party members entirely, any party wants her around for 100% of the Drypeak area. The others mostly aren't that great from what I've seen, though there's still 1 or 2 I haven't gotten to yet. Early on Shaping skill probably matters more, and later on extra essence may or may not even be needed. Essence goes up with XP level, but creation level doesn't. Having the required skill to cast key spells, which early on might mean Group Healing or Dominate, also pretty key. If I'm running something with cheap creations, honestly, I'd either never boost Essence Mastery or give it very few boosts. If I plan on Eyebeasts etc I might give it an extra couple pumps. In general though, I'd avoid putting too many points into Essence Mastery.

I posted some analysis relevant to some of these discussions here, thoughts welcome.