AndyLandy

Bit of an old topic, but yeah, I've just rediscovered my Trilogy CD and am playing my way through Exile 1 once again. It's been great fun so far. Looking forward to II and III later.

If memory serves, the rings of prot have armor values of 3, 5 and 7 for bronze, silver and gold. I believe the actual 'Protection' power was something independent. Maybe it reduces fire/magical damage? Would go nicely with an armor value to reduce melee damage. What does Protection do in Blades? Are we sure it's definitely not the same in E1?

I think the Silver Gauntlets did something like make you better at lockpicking/trap disarming, but it's been such a long time since I played that I can't be sure. EDIT: Nope, I'm talking nonsense. They have the 'Protection' ability. I don't think I ever knew how that ability worked, but it sounds neat! http://motraxlair.proggle.net/exile1/items.html

I just found this tree accidentally yesterday. It only gives you 10 sapphires. Enough to be handy for magic mapping, but not really much to get rich by!

Tatterdemalion was one of Tarl Kudrick's, if I remember correctly. There's a name I've not heard in a while. So, yeah, my original post was more along the lines of "If I finish my BoE scenario, is it worth releasing? Would anyone want to play it?" It's still a long way off, but it's coming along slowly. I might just finish it for my own sake, but if people want to play, I'd consider releasing it somewhere. The basic premise is it's set a few years after Exile III and you are a band of adventurers who have been living on the surface but are hired by the Empire to head back into Exile to help sort some unrest. I loved the whole Exile concept and was a little bit disappointed that E3 didn't really have you in 'the pit' any more, so I wanted to create a scenario that was faithful to the earlier games.

Quickfire. Seriously, what's the point? It's expensive and crazy. I do love the concept and the idea, especially when it's either auto-spawned or you have to launch some to complete a dungeon, but other than those "You explicitly need to use quickfire to do X", is there any use for it?

Hi guys, I'm fairly new here (or at least haven't been tremendously involved here until now) and I was just wondering how popular Blades of Exile still is these days? Reason I ask is I've been meaning to build my own scenario for as long as I can remember, but I'm curious to know whether there's much of a community out there who'd be interested in playing new ones. I respect Avernum for what it is, but I never really got into it, the charm and simplicity of the original Exile games really does it for me. Has the open-sourcing of Blades breathed new life into this once-great community?

Dual-wielding one-handed edged weapons really is the bees knees. A pair of flaming damage steel waveblades is awesome. I'm even luckier that I have a bugged version of Exile II where magic waveblades don't actually have the 'magic' bit set. Sure, it's cheating, but I do love augmenting those badboys! :-) Oh, does anyone know if flaming damage stacks with assassination? You only get one 'spark damage', but I'm not sure if the two effects stack or not. If not, you probably want to get +3 enchantment instead. (Anyone remember where you get this in E2?) The other augmentations always seemed a bit pointless to me. Augmenting even a steel weapon to +1 is hardly worth it since magic weapons aren't that hard to pin down. Flame augment is also a bit pointless, since flame wands are cheap and plentiful. Although you could always create makeshift wands in E3 by flame-augmenting a stick.

Archery has really grown on me. When I first played, I never messed with it. These days, I like to have one character who has some archery skill. If you train them up in it and have a decent bow (I'm using a magic bow in E2 at the moment) and you're liberal with the bless and haste spells (Who isn't?) you can do some pretty handy stuff with archery. It's really good for: those dungeons where you're stuck in 1-wide corridors. for taking out the annoying spellcasters in an outdoor encounter (because they're always miles away at the back!) taking out null bugs when their antimagic clouds stop you getting your fireballs in. Still, higher-level melee weapons are easier to get hold of (edged weapons even moreso) so I never have an exclusive archer. Usually I'll have a Nephilim who does archery and uses bashing weapons.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Here's a history of the relevant releases of all the games: (#1) Exile v1.0, brief release with only 1 AP per character per round - gray cave floor - no music included (#2) Exile v1.x, characters now have 4 AP per round and a few icons and graphics were added - still gray cave floor - still no music included (#3) Exile II v1.0, same basic graphics set with some additions mostly for the Vahnatai - gray cave floor - (awesome) music included (#4) Exile III, completely new graphics set - neon turquoise cave floor - no music included (#5) Exile v2.0, original graphics set swapped out for Exile 3 graphics - neon turquoise cave floor - also adds (Bach) music included (#6) Exile II v2.0, original graphics set swapped out for Exile 3 graphics - neon turquoise cave floor - same (awesome) music included (#7) Blades of Exile, uses Exile 3 graphics with some additions - includes gray cave floor? - no music included I've got three versions of Exile for the Mac. Two old ones with different graphics but neither has the AP stuff yet. The later version (2.0) which came on my Trilogy CD-ROM has the even-newer-still E3 graphics set and the AP stuff added in. There are a couple of cute bugs in the game where special encounters say stuff like "There is a pool in the middle of the red tiled floor" even though the tiles are white in the new graphics set. It's a shame that Jeff didn't backport the dialog mechanism from E3 to the earlier games, it always felt far more elegant than the E1/2 system of 'name', 'job' 'type pertinent word' a few times, guess one wrong, forget what you were saying and go back to 'job' and start over. I'd love for someone to upload the earlier Mac versions of E1 and E2. The shareware demos should be free to distribute and I can drop in the registration keys from my Trilogy CD-ROM. If I can find the original Macworld cover CDs, I'll try and upload 'em myself somewhere.

I definitely think E2 was my favourite of the trilogy. I loved E1 when I first played it back in '96, the freedom you had to tackle the various goals of the game in whatever order you pleased. E2 took this to another level, there was even more to do, lots more monsters, new spells, new items. Although E2 does feel like you need to grind quite a lot to level your characters up, far moreso than in E1 or E3. This time round, I've conceded to use the character editor to make things a little less tedious and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Don't get me wrong, I do love E3 as well, but it felt a little more directed: "First you do this, then you do this, now you go do that". I know there's still a lot of other side-quests in the game, but I never really felt as 'free' as I did in the earlier two games. Still, I'm quite impressed that 15 years later, there's still a place in my affections for these classic games!

Oh wow! Just found this thread and it's a great read! I'm currently hacking my way through Exile II again, having just recently finished the first game (again). I swear E2 is by far the hardest of the bunch! If I make it out the end, it'll be E3's time. My magic repertoire is fairly mundane. bless & haste for the fighters, then flame / fireball the monsters. The natural progression is major haste, bless party and firestorm and (predictably) on to M.Bless, avatar and divine thud. Still, I do love having an odd moment of insanity when I throw around a bunch of random fields, summon shedloads of cannon fodder, then sit back and watch. Originally Posted By: The Almighty Doer of Stuff If you have high strength, any door that can be picked can also be bashed. Unlock has the added benefit that it's the only thing capable of unlocking magically locked doors. In E3, you can use piercing crystals on magically locked doors. I don't know if this works in E1 or E2. They also have an additional use in E3... Click to reveal.. You can use them in the same way as Dispel Barrier in the Tower of Shifting Floors to take out the Golem-making machines Originally Posted By: The Mystic Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: The Mystic once or twice I've cursed the day Jeff decided to get rid of Recharge (I can see his point, though; it's kind of overpowered). Recharge was only in Exile 1, right? And in Exile 2; I just checked. I was just wishing it had also been in Exile 3. Recharge is in E1 and E2, but not in E3/Blades. Identify is one item for 15sp in E2, but all items for 50sp in E3/Blades. My reckoning is that Jeff decided not to build the code to cast a spell on an item into the E3/Blades engine, since they were the only two spells to use it.