Slawbug

I meant more customization, just like shaping for other things.

Spell shaping, please. Not holding my breath on that one, but just imagine it.

I'd rather see the game expand in other dimensions, like with weapon shaping. There's already a whole pile of creations, and it's already a struggle to have all of them be useful and interesting in every game (though Mutagen was an improvement here). That list doesn't need to get longer just because.

Yeah, the more recent new games (Avadon and Queen's Wish) seem to have favored ethnic name generators/lists rather than pulling from the names of real or fictional people -- see category 18 in that link. Makes sense that a similar source could be used for town names.

Hey RedBeard -- the user you keep tagging is not Jeff Vogel 🙂 That said, please do not repeatedly tag the developer. Or anyone else for that matter. Some people find it annoying. Just a friendly mod request. Tags probably aren't going to get you a response anyway. If you have something that does need Jeff's attention, email (support@spiderwebsoftware.com) is probably the best way to reach him.

This is impressive. I was surprised at how much each of these images immediately conjured up for me the corersponding original pixel sprite, despite not having looked at them in a look time. Honestly pretty cool. Also, I appreciate the quantity of references to Shirley as original artist. Ha.

That's understandable, but you may notice it's the same people responding to most of these topics, so you're really just making anyone who follows the forum read it twice. Speaking as a mod: please don't do this in the future. Thanks.

Please don't post the same exact thing in multiple topics. Thanks.

There may be no single best build... but there are definitely bad builds. This is not a game where your stat/skill point choices don't matter.

*faceplant*

FYI - as the ".dat" might suggest, it's a data file. The contents are not stored in text form, so opening it with a text editor won't make clear the values that are stored in it.

I'd guess they are stored in the Settings.dat file from the saved games directory, but maybe not. Did you wipe that along with the saved games?

If Anaximander is telling you you can return to the Tower of Magi then you have reported at least one plague victory to him. The question you need to ask Levy is: "Have my achievements merited a reward yet?" EDIT: I don't know where in his dialogue tree it is, but it looks like it should always be present. He will either respond: Levy looks through a large book, checks again, and looks back up apologetically. "Nope, you've done nothing yet to merit a reward. Perhaps you should do some adventuring and check back later." or e.g. Levy looks through a large book, finds something of interest, and produces a potion from under the counter. "Well done! Here is the reward for dispatching the Alien Slime." The rewards for the early quests aren't that amazing. For the slimes it's an Invulnerability Elixir and for the roaches it's a Ring of Skill. So I'm wondering if you could have already picked them up and just not realized it?

Yeah Berra is completely irrelevant to Levy. Has Anaximander directed you to go to Levy for a reward? Also, are you playing original Avernum 3 or Avernum 3: Ruined World?

Hahaha, so many shades of "I can't imagine remaking the Tower of Magi one more time." And yet...

This was discussed on a previous page; this is theoretically possible, but has some plausibility issues.

Thanks. I've just discovered that I do still in fact have the files for this. I'm not sure I have the time to deal with the last 10% of stuff necessary to get it finished, but in the crazy event that happens, I'll PM you.

Summary of the old G2 Awakened victory from this chart: The Council puts you in jail and executes Zakary if he is alive. The Awakened activate the Barrier of the Winds. Rising surrenders to them and Barzahl dies if he is alive. The remaining Takers flee. The Awakened obtain victories over the Shapers and arrange a prisoner exchange for you. You spend the rest of your life fighting a war against the Shapers; apparently neither side can obtain decisive victory, but the Shapers aren't willing to back down. I do think G4 and particularly G5 show that, if a war is pushed far and long enough, the Shapers are not beyond pragmatism. So I agree with alhoon that initially most Shapers would be willing to cross the mountain and die... but the Shapers aren't actually stupid, and the longer that goes on, the more of them won't be willing to. This is especially true because the Awakened will obviously try to communicate that they don't actually want to fight, and as we have seen, the Shapers don't really have much ability with propaganda, or much control over news; they just have their baked-in culture and that's it. When facing the Rebellion, if the Shapers stopped fighting, they would lose literally everything. When facing the Awakened, if they stopped fighting, they would lose things, but they would all be abstract: some pride, and some orthodox principles. That changes the calculus a lot. The old ending text does however establish canonically that, if the PC helps the Awakened realize the BOTW in G2, the Shapers are unable to crush them. The imagined scenario about gradual losses simply isn't what happens.

The issue wasn't that you were avoiding spoilers. The issue was that you thought it was appropriate to vehemently argue about the very same topics you were avoiding spoilers on!

But this is exactly the point. Aggressively expanding, and putting your enemy on the defensive, is one way to be successful in a conflict. Aggressively defending is another option. There are plenty of historical examples of (1) years-long sieges that never succeeded, and (2) cities or states that retained their independence despite being within reach of an empire that conquered everything it could -- and, yes, even when there were fanatical ideological beliefs held by the would-be conquerors. You also obstinately refused to even learn anything about what happened in the earlier games, all the while continuously arguing things that completely contradicted them. You don't need to remind us 😛 It's one thing to consider the question of "what it takes," period, for anyone to have a chance; but that's very different from "what it took the Rebels to have a chance" in that outcome of G2, which was not the Awakened ending. The Awakened ending is nothing like the one that led forward into G3/G4. Lots of things were different. And the time elapsed between G2 and G4 is actually quite long. You can't analyze what it would take them based on the world of G4, which is wholly shaped (no pun intended) by the Rebellion.

if randomizer's list happens to include all codex locations and which one is where (i think it usually only lists the first appearance) there might be an only slightly inconvenient way of saving those up. same for many of the creations, i suppose -- even shapers don't really need to make all of them in any one game.

Wow. That is a big pile of low hassle save-till-the-end XP then, between those two quests. That's pretty crazy. I wonder if there's a point prior to the very end where they'll no longer push any remaining viable XP sources into zero-XP territory, and therefore can be cashed in for minimal loss, but instead gaining benefit from them for longer...

At least this feels utterly thematic! Curious that there's disagreement over the iron bars. Which one of you has checked the scripts?

thanks mech! and wow, that's rather a huge chunk of XP if you save them up. tempting for sure... join the barzites, get some free levels... and then immediately kill them all.

For the XP Randomizer mentioned, unlike most (all?) other XP in the game, those are flat awards not adjusted for level. So it's a trickle of occasionally getting 25 XP many times throughout the game, or a lump sum of 25 x 29 (or whatever) XP at the end. The vast majority of those 25 XP awards won't make a difference early on -- by the time they would really add up enough to do so, they'll have reduced the amount you gain from other sources anyway. The real question is, is it worth giving yourself the chore of going back and finding every single codex (and creation type I guess) at endgame? That's a slog and I'm skeptical. The iron bars, on the other hand, might actually be worth delaying.