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Kelandon

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Everything posted by Kelandon

  1. Kelandon

    Alcohol

    I think this is true. All three kinds of juice that I get (white, red, green) are probably sweeter than ordinary wine. They're still far richer in flavor than any other juice I've ever tasted, especially the red, and the green has a kind of sourness to it, but they are sweeter than one (I) might expect from (the smell of) wine.
  2. Kelandon

    Alcohol

    Well, I've been told that it tastes like wine, but I can't vouch for it personally. It sure smells like wine. But if you want the exact details, no, I can't give you the exact details.
  3. Kelandon

    Alcohol

    I honestly can't compare the two, because I've never had wine. But it has a much richer taste than ordinary grape juice.
  4. Kelandon

    Alcohol

    No one else for gourmet grape juice? It's awesome. You all should try it. And tell me where you're getting it, because I can only find one American vineyard that actually makes it, but I know that it exists outside that one vineyard.
  5. Second the advice on Parry, and second the advice to start with GF1. These are plot-heavy games, and the plot is better to watch as it develops. At some point, I want to do a replay of GF where I play from 1 to 5 straight through. Maybe I'll have time this summer. But I feel as though the effect would be pretty powerful. I played most of the games years apart, so the building up of plot was a little diminished.
  6. Both GF4 and GF5 have some discussion as to why you're different from everyone else. You use the Geneforge at the beginning of GF4. Some other Rebels do this, but they also gain strength rapidly. In GF5, you're... someone... who's forgotten it all. But I agree that neither makes this the central plot point that it could be. If Jeff tried to eliminate the "do both" option, he failed pretty badly. Doing both is always clearly the way to go in all the games. This means getting way out in front on Leadership and Mechanics in the early going of at least GF4 and GF5, and then letting your combat skills catch up, but it seems clearly superior. He did a better job in later games of making stealth a legitimate choice, though. It was clearly a bad path in GF1.
  7. If you water down your posts' contents too much, they'll drown in their own lack of content. Spam kills. Spam kills posts.
  8. Try making the script yourself and ask for help on parts that are getting you stuck. If it's just stealing an item from the party, use a char_has_item() to determine whether the party has the item, then use a char_take_item() to take it. If you're slick, you could use a take_all_of_item() call to do it in fewer steps.
  9. Corallus: Ellipses are not periods. It's hard to read when you use "..." where you mean "." and we respectfully request that you attempt to differentiate better.
  10. Kelandon

    Alcohol

    I really like "gourmet grape juice" (as they call it). It's grape juice made with wine grapes but kept cool so it never ferments (and filtered to get rid of the yeast). Tastes as good as wine but contains no alcohol. Dealcoholized wine is an attempt to do the same thing, but it's nowhere near as good. This is wine that had the alcohol removed, which harms the taste, too.
  11. I don't drink, but I'd like a +1 from this thread. Hey, I just got it!
  12. Er, small problem. Custom abilities don't take targets. Items take targets. In Exodus, the way I made special spells that damaged enemies that the player selected was through a spellbook item, not through a special ability. (I had a special ability to make the spellbook, in case the player inadvertently dropped the spellbook.) It may be possible to have a custom ability that damages a specific enemy or damages enemies near the party or something like that, but you can't get a custom ability to target a specific enemy. Thus, make an item that takes a target and calls a scenario special (item ability 219). Then, in that special use a damage_char() call with a who_is_custom_item_target() call. Set the appropriate amount of damage and the damage type, and you're done.
  13. To have custom abilities in your scenario that you don't start out with, init them in the LOAD_SCEN_STATE as usual, but don't call change_custom_abil_uses() until whenever you want the characters to have the ability. You can use the latter call whenever you want.
  14. Whoever's interested in testing, have them post here. Then email it to them and get feedback. The usual.
  15. People would be interested. It's a large project. You probably wouldn't finish it. If you did, people would like it and use it.
  16. If you didn't do a beta, do a beta first. If no more suitable host comes along, I can host it.
  17. If editing the abilities takes you hours, then you're doing it wrong. Also, unless this is incredibly plot-central (all of the dialogue refers to the kind of robot master it is going to be), you can make everything else in the scenario without that monster in it, and with a finished scenario (except for one combat), you can come back and ask again.
  18. I'm now finding the same odd thing that I've been noticing throughout all of GF5: even in the endgame, I hit a wall and can't get past an area, so I backtrack to other areas that I couldn't deal with before, finish them, and use my additional strength to make it through the area that I couldn't get past earlier. I think I've put my finger on why I find this so odd, too. It draws focus. It does nothing but draw focus. I just had an exciting encounter with the Shaper Council that had end-of-game screens. They tell me to make haste to the assault on Gazaki-Uss. Time is of the essence. I'm going to assassinate Ghaldring and end this war. But what's the first thing that I do? Go back to the Mera Fens and kill Unbound. And next? I wander off to the Secret Laboratory and kill a drakon who's trying to create deadly bugs. I'm not exactly sure when I'm going to kill Ghaldring, but it's certainly not right now. And that's kind of the feeling I've had for the whole game. So next I'm going to try to get to the Dera Lost Vault. If I can't do that, I'll try to gain one more level first, or maybe craft another artifact, and then try again. After that, I may try to kill Ghaldring. Or I may stall a little longer and explore some more. But I'm definitely not going straight to the assault on Gazaki-Uss, which just feels weird to me. I think that's part of what I liked about the linearity of Avadon. Not matter what you say about Avadon, you can't say that it draws focus in the way that GF5 does.
  19. To be fair, I'm probably going to go back and clear other areas now. It doesn't appear that I actually have to go to Gazaki-Uss yet, and I'm only level 42, so I could stand to gain another few levels. I still haven't dealt with the Unbound in the Fens, and I haven't explored the Secret Laboratory at all. And optional areas? What optional areas? I haven't even found those yet. Crafting does seem to have made a little bit of a difference. My creations jumped another 4 levels with crafting items, because I had such high skill levels with items that I could reabsorb them and get them higher still. This suggests to me that I pumped Int too soon and Shaping skills too late. I kept some semblance of balance, but in hindsight, I probably should've leaned heavily on Shaping skills first and Int only later. Oh well. Too late now. Maybe I'll play through GF5 again someday with better min-maxing. Uh, being somewhat dense, I ask: what does one do with the Shaped blades and armor? Do you just stick those items with "[blah blah] enhancement" on them (such as spines)? If so, they're useless for my Lifecrafter, no?
  20. Well, I finally managed to take down an Unbound all by myself without burning through tons of spores and letting my creations die. (I'd done it previously with some assistance from nearby guards, too.) The key thing seemed to be to get it to run away enough that it only fired off a missile attack once per round, and then to back it against a wall with my Rots. My Rots could actually take one missile hit per round or two melee hits per round, though barely, and only if I healed them heavily, and only if I managed my attacks and buffs just right. I'm getting to the endgame now (Astoria faction), and I'm finding the approach to Gazaki-Uss to be more of a problem that it seems like it ought to be. It's not as though I can't make it through; I just keep screwing up one little thing, being a little too aggressive and attacking when I should fall back and heal or something like that, and then the drayks kill my PC. This is kind of a cool fight, but I'm finding that I don't like it very much, because it's too hard. This leads me to believe that I probably shouldn't be playing on Torment. I don't think I enjoyed GF5 as much as I might have, because I really should've played it on Hard. But I'm nearly done, so I think I'll just tough out the final sequence.
  21. The economics of insurance turn out to be kind of a nightmare. The most famous result is adverse selection, and there are issues arising from psychology/behavioral economics such as excessive optimism and discounting of future costs. These straightforwardly lead to certain kinds of market failures. But there's another problem that I'm not sure that I can explain very well, which is that economics tends to assume that you have a buyer and a seller, but most insurance transactions involve a buyer, a seller, and the insurance company acting as a middleman. If you get hit by another driver, your insurance pays the auto body shop or hospital and then tries to get reimbursement from the other driver's insurance. That's too many steps for the basic economic models.
  22. and got a bunch of images like this.
  23. Nik spends all day every day proving that those are not mutually exclusive.
  24. The conclusion that I'm drawing is that Jeff did a much better job of balancing GF5 than he did of balancing, say, Avadon or Avernum 1 (not A:EFTP). We get a rather large amount of disagreement about what to do in GF5. Most of the hardcore min-maxers say that creations are relatively strong and Battle creations are good, but there's no consensus around the general approach one should take. Come to think of it, the totally unbalancing approaches in Jeff's games have tended to hinge on the same thing: don't get hit. In Avadon, Dex is so strong because you don't get hit. In Avernum 1, Gymnastics makes a lot of combats a joke because you don't get hit. One of the ways people got such crazy results in BoE (I'm told) was by blessing so many times that you couldn't get hit. This is one way that a game can be broken, but not the only way. It's conceivable that you could do so much damage that it wouldn't matter whether you got hit or not, because the opponent would only get in one hit anyway. It's conceivable that you could have so much health that getting hit was irrelevant. But Jeff's games rarely seem to depend on either of these approaches. The best strategy is not to get hit. Come to think of it, that was what everyone was going on about with Parry in some set of games, but I never quite followed which ones it was. The biggest problem I'm having in GF5 is that I get hit a lot, and I can't seem to avoid it. The Lifecrafter can't seem to do anything but make creations that get hit all the time. The closest we get is having good immunities, such that some hits matter a lot less than others. But once I get hit by something that does huge amounts of damage (Unbound, Rotdhizons, Eyebeasts) or renders an effect that I can't do much about (poison, acid, lightning aura), I'm in a lot of trouble pretty quickly.
  25. This has bothered me every time I've seen the topic title, too.
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