Venatrix Avia

You are wonderful, thank you! I'm still working my way through A:EftP, but I imagine that once I move on to 2 I'll be very grateful for this mod. With 1, I have gone in and manually changed some of the .ogg files that I found too sharp (usually just by replacing them with copies of more acceptable sound effects from the same folder), so I suspect that we may well have very similar auditory issues. Having the environmental noises louder overall in comparison to the other sound effects is something that I've actually idly wished for on more than one occasion while playing this game. Thank you so much for putting in the work and generously sharing it here.

Parchment stacks and isn't very heavy, and by that point in the game I had a lot of money to burn, so I just loaded all four characters up with as much as they could carry to sell to her. Also, there's that weird 140-count inkwell you can find somewhere in western Krizsan, I think in one of the barracks in Delis. Between those two factors, I had a *lot* of writing materials for Alzon by the time I got around to her. I received my money, but no XP. The text box *claimed* I'd earned XP, but my character info said otherwise. I was puzzled. Then I played around with save-and-restore, dropping pieces of parchment on the floor until I figured out what the problem was. It seems that the programming can't handle a character leaping two levels up at once, so if you earn enough XP in a single discrete action that this would happen, then the game copes by just not registering any gain at all. I ended up leaving the hundreds and hundreds of excess parchment sheets that I had dropped on the floor for Alzon as a gift. I always have had a soft spot for bureaucrats. And sure, she *said* she didn't need any more, but I know how much paper *I* can burn through, even in a relatively short period of time, and even living in the computer age. I figured she'd be wanting it sooner or later. She's out of luck if she needs more inkwells, though. 'Cause those don't stack.

Very cool. Just a note, though: you can't level up more than once by selling writing supplies to Alzon. (I think that was the Spineridge jobs dispatcher's name?) If you try to sell her a sufficient quantity of parchment that it would push any of your characters over a single level gained, you wind up getting no XP at all -- although you do still get the cash. Ask me how I know. I think the same may apply to Walner, but unlike Alzon, he's an ungluttable market, so you can just keep on going back to the well to get XP from him if you want. ("Psst. Levy! Forge me smmore of them research tomes, will ya?") I could never find a way to make those augmented toadstools do anything for me either. I'm pretty sure that, like all of the augmented ropes, stone blocks and other non-equippable items, they're just flaky flavor, probably the result of some caffeine-fueled late-night coding. I've enjoyed following your saga. You have far more patience than I have, to be sure!

Thoukydides, I've duplicated your experiment and got the same results. A character with DEX 10, all other skills reduced to their default, and no special skills or traits (no Gymnastics, no Elite Warrior, no Fast on Feet, etc.) seemed to have about a 90% chance of resisting stoning. Level seems to matter as well. I first tried this with a character at level 10 (just because that's where my characters were in my first save that had them anywhere near a basilisk), and his chances were even better than your stated 90% -- on average, he was only stoned every one in fifteen gazes. Then I realized that you probably used a character at Level 1, adjusted my trials accordingly, and got the same results you did -- about 1 in 10. - VA

Structuralize THIS has it right, Trenton. I was referring to the Ancient Crypt in the tunnels southwest of Motrax's Lair.

That's dedication! Since I have a nasty cold and am not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, I'll see if I can duplicate your results. Since I never go anywhere near a basilisk without loads of crystal equipment, I've not noticed how my unprotected characters fare against them -- other than "usually, very poorly." Hence the avoidance behavior. I'll load up an old save and see if I get similar results when I pump up someone's DEX.

How odd. How do you know what your resistance percentage is? Does it appear in the text box when you resist an attempted stoning? Two odd A1 bugs that I've stumbled across are the cloth/ore and horn/scroll bugs. I find it hard to believe that these aren't well-known, but I never see them mentioned anywhere. Have I just missed all reference to them? On the off-chance that nobody's ever noticed this before (extremely unlikely, I know): Both of the special ore-buyers, the smith in Blosk and the Mayor of Bargha, are incapable of distinguishing bolts of cloth from bags of ore. They will buy all bolts of cloth, even the little cheapie 10-coin ones, for the same price as they offer for bags of ore. The same thing applies to Benth at the Castle and horns. He mistakes horns for historical scrolls and will buy them for the same price that he offers for historical scrolls (25 coins each). Since unlike the ore-buyers, Benth is an ungluttable market (he never stops shelling out for historical scrolls), and since you can buy horns from Jason at Fort Duvno for only 12 coins a pop, this means that you need never run short on coinage in A1. Not that you likely would anyway, of course. Anyway, probably everyone already knew all about the ore/cloth and horn/scroll bugs, but on the off-chance that someone didn't...

Yes, serious. Although I was speaking metaphorically when I talked about the shops "closing their doors." They don't actually close their doors. In fact, you can still talk to shopkeepers on the Day of Recall, but if you try to buy anything from them, you get an "all stores are closed today" message. I know this because I just hit Radiane 14th in my replay of A2 today -- and I was in Vahnatai lands. I have therefore now discovered that even the Vahnatai shopkeepers won't sell you anything on the Day of Recall! So I suspect that the Empire shopkeepers in A3 won't either. Silly nonsensical game mechanics. As for that "Day when Fort Draco opens" comment above, though -- I have no idea what that's about, but I suspect that it's a garbled reference to the Ancient Crypt in the Motrax Maze. The Ancient Crypt opens on the first of any month, but Elizabeth the innkeeper at Cotra tells you about some soldier who told her that he saw it open on the first of Radiane. At least, that's my guess as to what that's supposed to mean. I think that's from Averman's walkthrough, which is...well, often garbled in places.

Originally Posted By: FnordCola And while many soundtracks are relatively short, so are many games. Shadow of the Colossus, which does have a soundtrack that's broadly considered noteworthy, only has about 1.5 hours worth, but the game itself is only 15-20 hours long. That's a pretty high ratio of soundtracks to play time. It is, I guess, and yet... My housemate played that game back when we only had one TV, in the one public room in the house. Eventually I told him that he had three choices. He could: (a) turn the volume off, ( figure out a way to listen only through headphones, or © accept that fact that I was going to go to prison for violently murdering him. That was a truly gorgeous game. But it had a very repetitive soundtrack. It's somehow even worse when you're the one playing. Valkyria Chronicles was a game that I really loved, but the soundtrack made me want to put a bullet in my brain. It's not that it's a bad soundtrack -- on the contrary, I quite liked it -- but you hear the same damn themes repeating over and over and over and over and over again. For hours on end. It reaches the point where you get all excited whenever you hear a new theme -- not so much because it represents having moved on to a new stage of the game as because you're finally hearing something new, something of which you are not yet sick unto death. Well. Not yet, anyway. Apparently other people somehow manage not to be driven insane by this sort of thing, but I honestly don't know how they do it. I think that they must have been born with a "tune out music" switch in their brains somewhere or something. Since I didn't get one of those, the repetition of game soundtracks drives me around the bend. Thank heavens for Avernum, where all I hear is the pitter-patter of tiny feet as my little guys wander through the caves...

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires A1.1's and A4-6's engines aren't same. Well, okay, but judging by the screenshots that have been released, the graphics look very much the same to me. And since visually decoding the graphics was what I found so problematic about A4-6, I suspect that the one might well help me to understand the other. Hope so, anyway. I found it quite encouraging that I instantly recognized the ground floor of the Nephil Fortress in one of those screenshots, which then made a lot of other things suddenly visually comprehensible to me. In this play-through, I've finally come to accept that I just don't *use* wands and scrolls. In previous games, I've always stockpiled them, but then I never wind up using them at all. So now I'm just selling them all off. I'm finding this a strangely liberating experience. I'm decluttering my cache!

Yes, seriously. The Fallout 2 theme you linked is certainly one of the nicer ones -- but it's *still* not something I want to hear over and over and over again while playing a game. For a few minutes, it is indeed lovely. But I tend to play games in long marathon sessions. No piece of music can bear that much repetition without causing me, in time, to despise it.

Originally Posted By: Valdain the King I still like the story though from the original avernums and the music is epic. Hee! Was this a joke, or do you just mean those brief musical bits you get on the "Load Game/Start New Game" screen? Joking aside, one of my favorite things about the Avernum games *is* the music -- specifically, the lack thereof. I've always detested that awful, droning, repetitive background score that most CRPGs inflict upon their players, and I love the fact that the Avernum games don't do that to me.

Yes, I'm doing the same, but am lagging a bit behind you - I'm still towards the beginning of Chapter 4 of A2 right now. I'm hoping that perhaps this remake of A1 might finally help me understand the new engine well enough to play the second trilogy games. I really *want* to play them, but I've yet to make it very far into the demos of any of them. Somehow I just can't seem to wrap my mind around the new engine. I find the graphics far too visually confusing and can never figure out what anything is supposed to be. I know A1 like the back of my hand, though, so I'm hoping that perhaps the remake will serve as a kind of 'new engine tutorial' for me...

I always imagined that the candles (and the oil that the lamps and torches used as well, for that matter) were made from some kind of rendered lizard tallow. It was the only way I could justify them being so inexpensive. In my imagination, they also smelled really, really awful. And were used to keep the time.

I'd definitely recommend trying to get your mage's Priest Spells skill up to at least a 3, so s/he can learn Repel Spirit. I honestly don't think you can have too many characters who know Repel Spirit in A1. Raising it up to a 6 would give you another character who can Unshackle Mind or Mass Heal, which can also be really useful. As for priests, I like to see them with at least a 3 in Mage Spells, so they can cast Haste (and the other mage support spells too, I guess, but I rarely use any of them except for Haste). You can have your spellcasters multitask beyond that as well, to be sure. I don't think I've ever done it myself, but it's a perfectly valid option with many advantages, and it looks like a lot of people here favor that approach.