Penumbral Thahd

Quote: Originally written by Cake: I would personally ditch nimble fingers for divinely touched. The latter trait is far too useful, based on my experience on torment. And like the last poster said, ditching haste makes the game unnecessarily hard. I'm almost done my torment game, and GOOD GRIEF!, some battles take 30 minutes even with haste! I have a second computer nearby so I can surf the web while I wait for my party to finish the battle. PS, if there's a way to speed the battle animations, please tell me. I certainly thought about divinely touched. I don't plan on using melee or spells with this guy, so I would be taking a 30% xp penalty or so for some extra armor, sharpshooter, and fatigue removal. I also hate putting points in tool use. Just let the computer do it for me. Yes, haste is makes waste of your foes. It will be missed. I have to say that I am eager to see the revamped buff system in geneforge 5. I find it tedious to pants up my guys before/at the beginning of every fight. Casting haste on everyone, bless, shield, prismatic shield, and arcane shield just to fight some random cave worms on torment sucks. I guess I can play on normal if I want to.

...smite. Just got it. Forgot about it. It does a whole lot of damage. Probably still needed the ranged skills for a back up and battle skills. onward...

I'm giving it a go. I went with: (1)nephil - deadeye, nimble fingers - focusing on bows, dexterity and defense, I might get gymnastics later. (2)Slith - pure spirit, divinely touched - focusing on pole, priest, and hardiness. (3)nephil - pure spirit, divinely touched -focusing on bow, priest, and a little in intelligence. (4)nephil - pure spirit, divinely touched -focusing on thrown, priest, and a little in intelligence. I figured I would need to sneak out the nephil artifacts because I am giving up so much. I am playing on hard. My primary archer (1) gets the nephil warblade and tries to dodge blows with huge bonuses - anything that increases dexterity, defense, or gymnastics. The slith hits hard and cast a few spells as needed. I plan to use him to cast my long duration spells (enduring shield and steel skin) and little else. The two priests make ranged attacks and heal all day. I plan to cast divine restoration once per turn when I get it. That spell is awesome. I will save all speed potions, and most wands and scrolls and use as needed. Probably some reasonable boosts to endurance are in order. I will play straight up anama (no mage spells). So far so good, in the northern rapids. The summon shade spell has been huge so far. More to follow...

It seems to me that a human natural mage/divinely touched is a good route to take. My nephil mage never used his ranged attack, instead opting for firebolt, later on. The spell point cost of 2 (or often 1) makes it a permanent option at 200+ spell points. The only concern is getting 5 battle points so you have mighty blow or whatever. The sorcerer starts with melee 1 so you need to buy/train a few points and then forget about it. Something like: melee 2/3, bow 4/6 will do nicely. You can train most of it and exploit spells damage. In the situations when you need physical damage he can bless and heal (priest 1 and huge bonuses) or use a bow with sharpshooter bonuses. You can squeeze out a few extra levels this way.

This is an effort to focus the inquiry from my other topic. What reasonably could be done to 'fix' the shock trooper, if it in fact needs fixing, while still keeping in the spirit of the character?

Quote: Originally written by Spidweb: If you are posting about this based on your experience as a beta tester, bear in mind that I gave the shock trooper much higher starting stats only a little bit before the game shipped. I am interested to hear what happened for people who weren't in beta. - Jeff Vogel What I saw in one of slarty's spread sheets indicated that the shock trooper had fairly high hp, the highest essence, and strangely high energy. I would assume this (high energy) was done to support frequent healing and would guess that this was a pretty recent change. My experiences with the other games would lead me to believe that the problem is the amount of focus you have to have to get combat effectiveness and the large effects you can get from generally small investments in magic. Once you can cast blessing and shielding they don't really get better, they just last longer. Same with speed. The battle magic definately scales well with additional points. As for mental magic I have found that when I could cast strong daze (with minimal investment) it took out half to all of my creation enemies. Combat skills, however, put me under the constant pressure to crank up 3-5 skills. Would it help the shock trooper significantly if he started with a 1 in blessing magic (possibly with or without a decreased cost for just this magic skill)?

Perhaps due to the severe emotional, psychological, and physiological imbalances I have that modern medicine can not correct I will play a shock trooper in G4. Perhaps because I have not played the game I do not fully cognate the masochism I am condeming myself to. Is there any hope? What are their starting stats?

My efforts have shown what many respondants claim. Early on it is good and effective (largely because the relative cost of intelligence is large compared to essence) and later on it is not really meaningful unless you are hitting certain 'magic numbers' for creations (it makes the differance between 1 or 2 gazers say). Anyway I am sure that when I play G4 I will start with 0 int creations untill they hamper me.

Has anyone experimented with zero intelligence creations? The only reference to them I found was dull thahds as meat shields for agents. I recently began to replay geneforge III while waiting for geneforge IV and decided to try something different. Instead of pumping intelligence with a shaper I pumped fire shaping to 10 as early as possible and made some really strong really dumb fyora and roamers (I am on the second island - harmony?). I am playing on torment and haven't had much trouble with them. They pretty much do what I would have them do anyway. It actually was easier than I remember. I figured that fire shaping would be the best for this approach since they are 'well rounded'. My plan is to spend excess essence, when I get it, to increase the physical stats of my stooges and see how the game plays through.