Edgwyn

The humans are leaving because without the "magic" mushroom life in the caves is much less pyschedelic.

I try to play with all of the companions in rotation to force me to equip them well for the end game.

As soon as you complete your current quest by reporting in to Redbeard he will give you your final quest, so you need to make sure that you have everything else you want to complete done first.

I would not choose to leave my family, friends and fellow humans behind, I do not think that I could maintain my sanity in that environment.

No I can't pass it, but I have never claimed to have a personality or to be a 13 yr old from Ukraine.

That was it Lilith, thank you, I have been struggling to remember what it was for a while now.

Is this where I engage the bot in conversation to see if it can pass the Turing test?

I am a fan of the Civilization series (and its off shoots) which have a degree of randomness to them. I have not played any random CRPGs in a long time. I seem to remember one on the Mac in 1987 that had tile based graphics with random drops of loot. The potions were identified by color and what a particular color did one game was not necessarily what it did the next game. Unfortunately I cannot remember what the name of the game was, but I did find it enjoyable. The rest of the CRPGs that I played had distinct plots and while they had some random encounters and items, they were pretty fixed.

You will find piercing crystals in different treasure areas as you explore, in the strategy central area there is a post of Synegizer's Item List that can tell you where each one is located. The key from the Goblin Shaman will open a door in a different dungeon that you will get to in a quest from the mayor of Formello.

I would categorize it as [rating]good[/rating]. I found the rebels excessively evil, with the empire as a whole portrayed much more positives than Exile 1/A1/A:EftP it was hard not to stay loyal. I do think that spells are a bit overpowered.

Years after the original modules were published TSR (or Wizards of the Coast) had a couple of authors turn several of the classic AD&D modules into novels. I expect that the process of doing that would be very similar to turning a SW game into a novel. As I remember, they added personality and backstory to the protagonists and simplified the adventuring piece.

One of the reasons that I tend to stay loyalist is that most of the answer to the OP is 2. None of them seem to have a good post Avadon plan.

I found the scenario to be good. It is expansive and I did not need to follow the sequence in the hint book until the end. However, I see some balance issues. Enemies spells are too powerful, almost to the instakill level. Additionally, there are two optional encounters that are just too over powered. It would have been nice to be able to purchase more spells, but the mix of items to find and purchase was good.

I do remember them, but there still needs to be more from the protagonist. I do think that it would be possible to flesh out the story of the evil empire exiling people into the underground cavern and the various things that happen. For that matter, there is even room for a couple of prequels, but it would be as Alorael said, a lot of adaption. I do think that it is possible that SoT's "essential ingredients of a fine story" are there, but there would have to be major additions of dialogue, protagonist development and backstory.

I think that the various Spiderweb titles could be turned into novels, but I do believe that more dialog would need to be added. Most novels provide some insight into the characters during fight scenes (dialogue or character thoughts) that Jeff, true to the RPG trope leaves to the player. In my opinion, if any game had some much dialogue that it could be turned straight into a novel, there would not be much point in playing it as it would leave nothing to the player. Avadon would be a little easier than Exile and its spinoffs simply because there is only one blank slate without a personality in Avadon versus 4-6 in the Exile series'. I do not think that you could write an interesting novel without fleshing out the blank slates that are the PCs by providing them personality and dialogue (which I assume that the players do in their heads, but a reader is less likely to do).

You are not mistaken, A:EftP is more modern (developed) than A6. It is a remake of A1, which is a remake of Exile 1, and reflects a much more refined user interface due to it being recently re-programmed. A:CS will come out towards the end of the year and is a remake of A2 which was a remake of Exile 2 and will have the newer user interface as well. Jeff is slowly modernizing the Avernum series so that it runs on modern computers which provides a side benefit to us of a better user interface.

With Avadon 1, you were not expected to beat Redbeard, that was an optional ending. For Avadon 2 and A:EftP, I would suggest looking at some of the tactics guides in these forums. Do you do the side quests? If you do all of the side quests you will max out your characters abilities prior to the final fights, especially in Avadon 1 and 2. I would also suggest holding back on using many of the expendables to save them for the final fights, which is more doable on normal or casual than on Torture. I do not believe that starting on torture would make it easier to win in the end, I suspect rather the opposite, but I only play on normal.

I have a two year old MacBook and a six year old IMAC so I use both a laptop and desktop at home. At work, I use a laptop with a docking station so the user experience is very desktop like. I passed on our latest tech refresh as the new laptops were very small and I do not want to deal with a very small screen and very small keyboard on the road.

I have finished as a rebel and as a loyalist. I basically did the rebel version just for Silke. While I am convinced that Avadon is a problem, none of the various factions opposed to it have managed to convince me that they are anything close to the solution.

My answer is very similar to Aloreal's in that I end up using a trackpad for a lot of games but prefer a mouse if I need precision. I do miss the games that I used to play with a joystick or paddles. My laptop does not have a numeric keypad which would come in handy for some of the games that I play. Lilith, when my daughter was a baby, I had read somewhere that a trackball was easier for a little kid to manipulate. So I would put her in her highchair in front of my computer with a trackball w/four buttons to play her sesame street game. Most of the time that meant I was playing my games with a trackball also since a couple of extra steps would be required to change input devices.

Scientific consensus does not equal understanding. There are many things where there is scientific consensus based on observed reality, not understanding of the mechanism that causes that reality. While in this debate I said it for climate science, I would also make the same statement if we were discussing quantum physics, evolutionary biology, astrophysics, etc. A more concrete example is Dark Matter/Dark Energy which have been theorized without observation to explain the discrepancies in observations. Most scientists agree that it exists, but they have not observed it, nor do they currently understand it (at least from my biases sense as an engineer not a scientist). There is scientific consensus (90 - 98% agreement) that global warming exists and that humans effect their environment. If you understand a process, you can build an accurate model of the process. Currently we do not have an accurate short term model of a long term process, much less an accurate model of the entire process.

Sylae, industry is caused by consumers (the average person). To me, too much of the environmental debate has been fueled by politics and poor science. Unfortunately there would not have been much environmental progress without popular outcries. Too often, the enacted "solution" to a particular problem is ill thought out. That gave us "green" lamps containing relatively high concentrations of Hg far outweighing the drop in CO2 generation. It gives us wind farms that kill endangered species and solar farms thats useful life is shorter than their payback period. Where fission power generation could buy us some time, the political process in the US (driven by the supposedly greener of our two political parties) has prevented the design and construction of safer nuclear power plants and the completion of a high-level radioactive waste storage site that is orders of magnitude safer and less likely to cause environmental damage than our current practices. As near as I can tell, nobody on either side of the climate change debate actually understands the earth's climate. I do think that we are closer than we were when I was a kid and the predictions were of the next ice age, but I don't think we are there yet. The earth's climate changes due to a bunch of natural processes that we do not fully understand and do not cause (like the 17,000 year global warming trend). Do I believe that it is likely that our production of CO2 is causing an increase in global temperatures over and above what occurs naturally, yes. I will be more convinced that we can quantify that difference once that is a model that actually fits observed facts for the past hundred years of our 17,000 year warming cycle. Should we reduce the amount of CO2 pollution we generate? Of course. Will completely eliminating all production of CO2 stop global warming? Probably not. Do we need to figure out how to survive on an earth that is going to be warmer and has higher sea levels in the next hundred years? Yes. Going back a bit to the original post: I use a thermostat with a clock, reusable grocery bags, LED and CFL (I try and find less nasty ones) lamps, have upgraded the windows in my house and recycle paper, aluminum, glass and plastic (which is very debatable).

All right, prefacing this with a couple of caveats: I graduated over 20 years ago, and all of my academic experience is in the US. 1. I am very glad that you want to make your parents proud. Ultimately, they will be proudest of what you do with your life after university than getting into the best university. 2. To expand on Randomizer's answer, and to paraphrase Sun Tzu, you need to know the test and you need to know yourself. There are several parts to this: a. Is time a factor, are their more questions than an average test taker can work in the allotted time, and are there more questions than you can answer in the allotted time. If the answer is yes, then you need to know if there is a penalty for guessing and if not be prepared to spend your last few minutes bubbling in random answers. b. Is your first answer usually correct? If there is time, checking your answers can be very useful in tests where you can make objective errors (e.g. multiplying by 4 instead of 5), but a lot of people find that when they are uncertain between two answers that can be correct, that the one they picked first is correct more often than the one they changed it to when they reviewed the question. You need to know if this is true for you. c. How does stress affect you and how do you become stressed. Most people do not take tests as well when they are stressed out. People stress them selves out by building up the importance of the test in their minds. You need to study for the test, but not so much so that you are overly stressed about it. Likewise most people do better when they good night's sleep before the test instead of trying to jam some more studying in. You need to know if you are one of them d. You need to know how to answer the type of questions on the test. I have taken standardized tests where there were three dimensional shapes to evaluate and wiring diagrams to follow. All of the instructions that were needed were there in the test booklet, but someone who already knew how to do what the test was asking would spend less time figuring the test out and more time answering the test questions properly. e. Finally, you can study for the test like Randomizer said.

Is the entrance exam the only tool used to determine who is accepted or do they use a combination of measures (grades, community involvement, etc)?

Alorael, I do not deny the existence of sexism in various aspects of the human endeavor. However, my objection to the hypothesis from the first thread that has now appeared again in this one is that these vampire stories represent the bulk of YA fantasy or SF. There are plenty of examples of modern YA or Adult fantasy books (I even provided a couple of examples) where the mentor is female. I believe that we have taken a sub-genre (YA paranormal romance) that is marketed to teen girls with the emphasis on romance and taken that un-representative sample as evidence to prove the hypothesis. My hypothesis is that modern mainstream F/SF (which used to be/is marketed towards teen boys) is actually more accepting of females in protagonist and mentor roles than the various sub-genres of romance that are marketed to teen girls and women. That said, despite the objections that some of us on this forum have to Twilight, Ms. Meyer obviously gave her audience (a subset of teen girls) exactly what they wanted. Ultimately, while I object to certain of the themes in Twilight, just like I object to some of the themes in romance novels, the reality is that there is plenty of good fantasy and SF out there that does not fall into the Twilight pattern.