Edgwyn

Yannick is too crazy and powerful to let live, but Red Beard didn't accept my explanation of "he just needs killing" so I had to keep him throughout the game.

It was that way in A:EFTP also if I remember correctly.

No you are not, Slartibus and Dantius seem to be trying to make the rest of us check our vision.

I am currently around Level 15 with a party just like yours and it is still enjoyable, but I am playing on normal. I think that a key part of the answer is what difficulty are you playing on?

I am not sure what research you have done to determine what people buying from Spiderweb are looking for. I do know that what I am looking for is a little different than what Slartibus is looking for, which is a little different from what Sylae is looking for, which is a little different from what you are looking for. It sounds to me that you are looking for a more tactical experience (which is more modern than what SW provides) than what I am looking for. While good tactics can help you beat an enemy when you are punching above your weight, they have to be using bad tactics (or at least tactics not as good as yours) for that to happen. Or, you need to get lucky and they need to get unlucky. Successful combat is about being better than the person you are fighting at the time and place that you are fighting them. Attacking a more powerful enemy and hoping that they will fight stupid so that you can beat them with superior tactics is just another form of gambling.

As one of those "old guard" types who started with D&D (among others) and text adventures then moved up to Wizardry 1-3 and Ultima 1-4, I do not see an excess of randomness in A:CS. A long sword (essentially the default fighter weapon) did 1d8 damage in D&D. Some of D&D's competitors did multiple d6s for damage. Wizardry's basic healing spell cured a d8. Most of Jeff's stuff uses d3s. That is far less variation of damage than the "old guard" games that I played. For that matter in many of those games that was random variation in your characters basic abilities, originally based on 3d6 not by assigning skill points. I grew up expecting to miss and consider it realistic that sometimes the characters hit, sometimes they miss, sometimes that get a lot of damage, some times a little. That sounds a lot like real life. I like turn based games for a lot of reasons, including the OP's statement that I can stop, think and plan tactics. To paraphrase the elder Von Moltke, no plan survives contact with the enemy. I would find a game boring if everytime I decided to kill these four goblins, those four goblins died, no more, no less, my characters never stumped, they never shined, everything stayed right in the middle of the bell curve. I don't know why Jeff changed the accuracy cap. It could have been to make the game a little harder. It could have been to reduce the effectiveness of the min/max approach to putting all of your points in just a few skills. I do not see that it had much of an impact on my play through so far with a non-optimal party on normal, which is after all the type of party that a majority of his customers are likely to have. I am at the point now that I wish he had not so that I could stop hearing about how the sky is falling. There have been a couple of different threads in the forums lately for people who do not like randomness in their games. That is fine for them, but there is a huge amount of randomness even in the game of poker that you mentioned and some of us like randomness.

There is a whole thread that is essentially on the topic. BL is that 90% is your maximum to hit chance, and it seems to work properly, so you may be unlucky. Here is the thread Avernum 2 combat is ruining the game for me

Alorael, I strongly suspect that you are correct. For example, I do not see Sid Meier giving up as high a percentage of his revenue to have Civ V on steam as Jeff does to have his games on Steam. Which from a pure business model makes sense as Civ V sells a lot more copies than A:CS does, so Steam can cover its costs with a smaller piece of the action.

Slartibus, is that with the Negotiate trait? Also, does that negotiate trait stack, where it makes sense to not sell anything until your whole party is level 8 and you have given each of them Negotiate? Thanks

If you want to support Jeff as much as possible and cannot buy it from his website, they buying A:CS from Steam before the price drops is the most supportive thing that you can do. If you wait for a sale, Jeff will get less money, but then you might be able to afford Geneforge as well and then Jeff might get as much money, depending on the total price of A:CS on sale plus the Geneforge bundle.

Of a slightly different category, I enjoyed the reference to the hot springs quest from A:EFTP. The note that construction had started was nice. I realize that there are a lot of NPCs that carry over between the various games, but to see the results of what was really a throw away quest carry over was nice.

I would classify Barbarian, Kingdom and Empire as good on your chart, but others did not like it.

I have just started my game on normal with a Slith tank and a Kitty priest as well. So far it has been fine with my Slith doing good damage with his spear and my Kitty good damage with the bow. I usually play through with decidedly sub-optimal builds anyway.

You can also use it to make your arrow heads denser, improving their ability to penetrate enemy armor.

Aleck, the graphic does not make a lot of sense to me either. Actaeon, I think that is exactly it, some people build up feelings of trust to people that they have only met on the internet and then find out that people are not their internet personas. Of course on a lot of other websites, there are a lot of people that I never want to meet if they are anything like their internet personas.

As is typical of the species, the bureaucrats are more concerned with what you have done for them, not for the big picture. This is a big does of realism on Jeff's part.

The auto-move into range thing can definitely be annoying. I was fighting one of the early encounters right outside the walls of Fort Ganrick when one of my characters ran off the map and pulled us out of the encounter into the outdoors when I tried to shoot an arrow.

From Wikipedia, the definition of Phyrrhic is "A Pyrrhic victory is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat." It has to do with some Greek victories over the Romans around 2300 years ago. Sometimes the warnings are subtle but the effects are not.

I just tried to in several different locations in Fort Ganrick with no luck, so I would assume that there is not a version control issue with theft, just with attacking friendlies.

I just went under Ft Draco to see if I could find a GIFT but no luck.

I just opened up A:CS that I purchased directly from the SW website for my Mac and was able to recreate the second image in Superba's first post. That is with full version 1.0. I moved near a guard, clicked on the peace sign to switch to combat mode and then clicked on the friendly guard to attack him and got the same results as what Superba has uploaded. Combat ensued, but since that was a save where I had barely started the game it was depressingly brief.

If you are handling it with gloves and keeping it intact (not breathing in dust from it) it shouldn't be too bad (with bad being a relative term) as Uranium is primarily an Alpha emitter. Effects resembling acid would be more likely from Thorium or another Beta emitter and poison like effects would be more likely from a strong Gamma emitter. I suppose that depending on the history, age and size of your Uranium sample you could have all of the above coming from it in high dosage, but it would be an interesting case.

I didn't find A4 particularly hard to play for the UI, I do not like the blending of indoors and outdoors. That said, the earliest that Jeff could remake A4 on his current schedule would be for a Spring to Summer of 2017 release. By then, windows 11 will be in a beta form and who knows what Apple will have changed, so I think that Jeff will need to do an A4 remake as either the release after A:BW or the release after the release after A:BW, leaving room for him to start remaking Geneforge.

If it made sense then we would lose less of our sanity while playing, we can't have that. While I vaguely, sort of, maybe subscribe to the idea that Genefore and Avernum are related, I believe that N:R takes place on a different planet than the others (which would of course not prevent the GIFTS from moving from Avernum to Nethergate).

Thank you Randomizer. Earth Empires, yes I have gotten the Giants treasure in the center of the map and I have killed everything in the map except for the Chitrachs.