Slawbug

Infestation definitely has some more challenges than Mutagen IMO, and maybe it's easier to wander into hard areas without realizing it. So don't feel discouraged. You're thinking about the right questions, and I bet you'll ramp up soon enough!

That is known, and if there's going to be an in-depth discussion of script definitions, I suggest a new topic for it. Let's keep this one just concerned with the mod itself. Additional comment: although in this case the damage numbers for that cheat are actually what I would expect with 102, the game expects skill values to be single digits, so I wouldn't assume everything is going to behave linearly when you make them that high. EDIT: the "3 squares" text is hardcoded. Not something I can edit.

In a perfect world, I'd love to have tooltips that are both comprehensive and clear. In reality, when the mechanics themselves are a little bit convoluted and there are edge cases, sometimes you can't get both of those things at the same time. Trade-offs have to be made. The priority for me is to make sure the player gets a clear picture of what the skill does so they can make fair choices about whether to invest in it. My other comment, though, is that "each point of this skill increases the damage by a miniscule amount" doesn't actually have anything to do with Searer itself. That's just how literally every damage skill works -- it's hardcoded. It doesn't belong in an individual skill description any more than "Intelligence increases the damage of this spell" does. So if anything, what your plea tempts me to do is to remove that mention from Chain Lightning 🙂

I meant everything besides level. I was going to add besides level at the end. In parentheses. I was going to. The best laid plans...

Which is interesting given that there is actual mention of other plant-type enemy creations in the story.

Oh, and Mech -- the issue isn't that spell/ability level doesn't ever influence buff duration. It depends how the definition is written. For many spells it's written in such a way that it does impact it. For those weapon shaping disciplines, it's not.

Oh, interesting! That 1% makes sense -- I think everything that used to (in older engines) give 5% accuracy now just gives 1%, right? I suppose I could change "nothing" to "nothing special."

The math on Quicklash is really bad, honestly. You give up a chance (eventually a >50% chance) of an impactful spell, that does more damage to more targets and/or applies strong statuses... for basically a guaranteed free Firebolt... and you pay out the nose for it.

My version is correct. The fourth/fifth etc points do nothing except for the same "miniscule" damage increase noted for Chain Lightning. Specifically, it adds 1 die, which is miniscule for most of the game, especially compared to the percentile increases of other tooltips. FWIW, this is the only thing extra points in a lot of damage spells have done for Spiderweb games going back 20 years now, all the way to OG1. Some of these might be unintentional, and stem from some subtle changes SW made to ability definitions. However, in this case, if the extra levels did do something else, it would be to very slightly increase the duration of the statuses they cause, which is not very meaningful to begin with. So IMO it's not worth wasting Jeff's time with. (IMO, misleading tooltips that make people invest in things that don't work are a bigger issue than unimpressive spell upgrades.) Since Mutagen -- and that was actually already in the tooltip. Not my addition 🙂 I didn't edit the Mechanics tooltip. It's not an exhausting list of what Mechanics can do, but it's a representative enough list that it won't mislead players. For Healing Craft, you are correct that Cure Affliction will technically receive a tiny increase to the number of turns removed (well, a small chance of removing 1 extra turn is how it really plays out). However, it won't change the number of debuffs removed, and only certain removal abilities get this bonus. I did think about mentioning this in the tooltip, but ultimately decided it would be too confusing and isn't really a plausible reason to raise the skill anyway. So kind of like with Mechanics, the goal was to lead the player fairly, not to force a procession of every possible edge case.

I'm pretty sure there's no way to strictly prevent the unaligned ending. If all else fails, you can just kill everyone.

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.