Slawbug

"Several people" does sound like an understatement.

I'm pretty sure that Leadership does not affect the ending. This comes from peeking into G4 resource forks at the complete ending corpus. The ending has three major branches, depending on what you did with the Unbound. There are minor ending differences depending on: - If machinery was damaged in the Shaper attack - Power flow settings on machinery - If Unbound specifications were given to Shapers - Akhari Blaze lives/dies - Greta lives/dies - Alwan lives/dies - Miranda lives/dies - Litalia lives/dies - Canister usage - Reputation among the Shapers and Rebels For the last item, it talks about things you did early in your quest. I'm not sure what exactly this is based on. My guess is it's based on which side you chose to help in the Caravan, Moseh, and Monarch quests at the end of the first three chapters. It might instead be based on the one hidden reputation score. Of note is the fact that the Trakovite ending uses the Rebel scheme for this last item. So you are much better off helping the Rebels and then sabotaging them, than helping the Shapers and doing the sabotage. This probably accounts for the drastic differences in opinion as to the satisfyingness of the Trakovite ending.

Well, there's one challenge for which the Warrior is 100% optimal. The Trakovite Royale -- no creations, no canisters, AND no magic. The Warrior and Servile are the obvious winners here, and IIRC the Warrior's HP bonus is 2 HP higher than the Servile's. So he just barely edges out the Servile.

The Smoky Crystals were only used in BoE. That was one of the few differences between E3 and BoE. E3 used a special item just like E2 did.

Well, that would explain why I never used it in Avernum 2.

I haven't used it in A2, so perhaps it was weaked, but Mindduel was a real killer in E2. It was, after all, designed to be the reasonable way to defeat the final boss. A2 took that last bit out, which annoys me tremendously.

Actually, EE is much better about that now. Last month I labelled pretty much everything that is not based directly on the games as apocryphal, with a box at the top of the entry warning of it. Now, the vast majority of the pages are based only on game canon, and anything that isn't is clearly labelled.

The Archives of Akhronath are still up, and has a brief history of Exile 1-3 at: http://members.aol.com/zzhou22876/history.html EE is by far the best source to go to if you're looking for details, but big-picture overviews are unfortunately lacking.

And don't forget about the chitrachs. Really, what is all this talk about singletons being challenging? They require different tactics than a full party, and I suppose the first half hour could be challenging in theory, but...

museumfreak is correct. Synergy pointed that error out to me a month ago at least, and I haven't had time to get around to fixing it. I can't help it if G4 ended up being less engrossing than emulated Nethergate!

Looks neat. I'm not sure it's necessary, given how easy it is to edit the item scripts, which are in fairly plain language once you look up the stat ID numbers. But it looks nice. I'm pretty sure there is a maximum number of it_stat_to_affect x variables you can use. I'm not sure if there is a combined limit for pc stat variables and pet stat variables, or if each has a flat limit.

For #2, it definitely affects the level of characters you encounter. This in turn affects their Str, Dex, Int, End, Health and Spell Energy. Those in turn affect their hit and dodge rates and the damage their attacks do. As far as I know it doesn't affect anything else, but I could be wrong. It DEFINITELY does not affect experience, item drops, characters encountered, quantity of monsters encountered, quests, dialogue, etc.

Applause.

Thuryl, this challenge is proving far too easy for you. So it's obvious what the next one has to be. The Trakovite Royale. No canisters, no spells, *and* no creations.

I am pleased to see that Glaahks are continuing to be useful in this challenge, despite being more vulnerable than Wingbolts.

Quote: Originally written by Cryptozoology: In hindsight, that fight would have been a lot easier if I'd had a Charged Vlish.

First of all, one on one, an Eyebeast will die horribly against a Drakon. It does fire damage, which Drakons are very resistant to, and it does not resist the Drakon's breath. Its melee attack is actually a lot better, but the fear effect won't work on a drakon, so the drakon still comes out ahead. Gazers are on more of an even plane. Where the heck did you get this idea about a Gazer Collective? Gazers have always been presented as individualistic and reluctant to cooperate with others. That is also exactly why they have not amounted to anything the same way the Drakons have. Individual gazers seem to act sort of parallel to the more insular of the insane shapers, like Spharon or Shaila. They do not have the capacity for social organization that drakons do.

Do Ivory Skulls increase hit rate? I forget what they do on armor, but if that's it, then yeah, definitely. I think you'll still want Golden Crystals in the end, since your best missile options hit everything anyway, though.

I'd vote for Missile Weapons investment. There are several items which will be very useful at key moments with a little investment -- Reaper Batons, Wands of Death, Terror, Disruption and Corruption, Jeweled Wands, the wand that dazes, Torrent Gems and Madness Gems, even Ensnaring Fibers... there aren't lots of these but there are enough that you can use afford to use most of the Icy and Spray Crystals on merely moderately difficult spots. The good creations are expensive enough that, by the time you've bought a decent amount of Int, it's going to take an investment of more than 30 skill points to pay for an extra Kyshakk. At that point the cheaper levels of missile weapons are a no-brainer. You don't have any real need to pump melee, Endurance and Parry aren't really attractive once they are expensive, and you only need so much shaping skill. Not sure what else would make sense.

Yeah, normal use of Leadership and Mechanics is fine. The point of that clause is to prevent this from becoming effectively a much less restrictive version of the pacifist challenge.

I think the ST will be a little better. What tipped the scales for me was realizing how vulnerable even a well-armored Warrior will be to enemy magic attacks. Without Protection, Steel Skin, and so on, you'll be taking probably half damage even after Parry and armor. When facing multiple Wingbolts, that means even at very high levels you pretty much need creations to survive. The creations will die, so you go with the disposable creations model, which is fine. Given the disposability model, actually, I expect I *would* pick a creation skill to pump somewhat. Not sure whether to go with Fire or Magic. They each have their good points. Magic is better early on with Artila and Vlish, but Fire gets Kyshakks who sound are the best value meatshields on the market.

The extra essence is nice. On the other hand, the Warrior gets extra HP, which should also be nice. At any given point in the game, the Warrior should have (compared to the ST) approximately: +3 melee skill +3 missile skill +4 Quick Action +5 Parry -1 Fire Shaping -2 Battle Shaping -1 Magic Shaping -2 Intelligence They seem pretty balanced to me. One thing that's worth pointing out is that your creations will _not_ be blessed or shielded (let alone hasted) on a regular basis. This is different from typical Lifecrafter play. Chapter 2 sounds very painful to me for the ST, since you still don't have any creations that can take two hits without dying. EDIT: Do you think it would be doable with the additional constraint that you can't leave zones just to heal?

New results. I did some tests with magic, acid, and cold damage. Magic and cold damage work almost identically to physical damage, except for Parry. Up to about 10 Parry, Parry blocks a similar amount of damage. (The difference in parry % actually depends on melee vs missile, not phys vs magic damage.) After that however Parry stops doing much against cold and magic. At 20 Parry it blocked about 22% damage compared to about 38% for physical damage. Acid damage... yeah, about that. Acid drip doesn't do acid damage! Basically, although acid resistance does not reduce damage from a given number of levels of acid, as Schrodinger proved -- energy resistance does reduce acid drip damage! I kid you not. With 15% acid resistance and no energy resistance, I resisted 0 every time on acid drip. With 15% acid and 10% energy resistance, I resisted approximately 10-15% of the drip damage (with very wide variation, possibly because these weren't very big drips).

My thought was really that permanent creations would be extremely hard to keep alive, given that you can only heal them from spores. The lower tier ones will die easily, and even Drayks and their ilk can only take so many hits.

No, you'll definitely want to save essence pods. They net you extra disposable creations.