Bhavv

Avernum: Escape From the Pit is the first game in the series remade with an improved engine. Theres not much point point playing older ones now, you can start from the beginning of the story with AEFTP. I cant wait for Avernum II: Crystal Souls, as Elile II Crystal Souls was my favorite previous Spiderweb game.

I started off playing on torment and tried a sword / shield melee, ranger, mage and priest setup. It was abysmal and not enough damage. Then I started a new torment game with two dual wield fighters, mage and priest and the fighters also had a single point in priest spells and though its still tough it became doable, and the fighters can usually finish off a single foe in each combat round while the mage spams daze + haste. It was made a bit easier because I knew where to quickly find bronze broadswords and iron shortswords at the start of the game, but enemy casters on torment still take loads of reloads and luck to beat, while I'm trying to finely balance strength vs endurance, and hardiness vs melee weapon skills to make sure the fighters can still hit things well and survive (having to swap stats around a lot in character editor to test, but not using any additional cheated stats). My two casters I just leave as pure int focuses, and no priest splash on the mage as using him to heal instead of daze is just a waste of a turn. Having just 1 point in priest spells on the fighters though meant that I could use them for curing any poison, as a single priest just couldnt remove all the poisons and heal at the same time. But their heal is too weak for combat use, but good to use outside of combat to save my priests mana. Even with no investment in intelligence, they still start with 45 mana, and +5 per level, so its good to put that to use on Torment difficulty. Its reminding me of how brutal the zeboyd RPGs were on insane difficulty (Cthulhu saves the world, Penny Arcade 3), I dont like it as much when I can just breeze through everything with no difficulty which is what happens on hard difficulty.

I couldn't open the Zip file for Exile 2 using anything as its 16 bit, and dosbox wouldn't do anything with a zip file. I tried using windows 8's hyper V virtual network thing to install a 32 bit OS, but it doesn't let you copy files between it and the actual OS making it completely unusable for this.

I dug straight into Torment difficulty, I dont like being able to win everything without any effort. I dont need any help for the games, I want to suffer through torment while discovering everything myself. I spent ages looking for how to get the 16 bit Exile series working on Win 8 64 Bit, but completely gave up after I couldnt figure out how to copy files into a 32 bit virtual OS I made. I was reluctant to buy Avernum after trying Avadon and Geneforge, but now I'm glad I did. I think the things I didnt like about the other series was that they either start with a single party character, have too simple or too long a tutorial, or just arent in a familiar setting and I just cant get into them.

Hi, I just picked up Avernum: Escape from the Pit yesterday on steam. I'm not new to spiderweb games though, when I was a kid I came across the exile games on the computers at my school and had been hooked to those for ages along with Baldurs Gate, but for some reason I wasnt fond of the first series of Avadon remakes, mainly due to seeing the party size reduction from 6 to 4, and I preferred to carry on playing the Exile series. Recently I tried out Avadon and Geneforge series on steam, and I dont know why but I just couldnt get into those games, as I was specifically interested in wanting something that felt and played just like the Exile games did, and they seemed too different to me. I just picked up the latest Avernum, and it turned out to be exactly the game I was looking for all this time, the only thing I still dont like being having a party of 4 instead of 6, but I can make do with that I suppose. I cant wait for the next two games in the series to be remade as well, Exile II was my favorite one, and I think that Avernum II is meant to be a remake of that game.