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Minion

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Posts posted by Minion

  1. When playing the Queen's Wish games on Torment, one tactic I used to conserve energy and not be swarmed was to use always start fights by retreating and attacking with missile weapons. If you retreat from the enemy as far as possible and use your final action point to fire your missile weapon, most enemies without ranged attacks will never touch you, or only a few of them will reach you and be injured once they do, even on Torment. This remains useful all the way to the end, though after a while you don't have to worry so much about energy and you have more efficient ways to spend it, like Charm or area effects/attacks.

  2. One tip for solving the more complex gem puzzles is to start with one set of stones, trace all probable paths between them, then move on the next one and repeat. I found it easier to visualize and discover the frequently convoluted paths you need to trace if I already had a number of possible paths to tinker with by adding a single gemstone here and there, rather than try one set of paths and then erasing the board and starting over when they don't work. You can replace any gemstone any number of times, so you are free to experiment.

    Sometimes, a single tile would stubbornly remain blank no matter which gemstone I tried to place on it. If you encounter this bug, just exit the board and open it again.

  3. 1 hour ago, quasius said:

    $100k tier makes me a bit nervous.  Is that an attempt to bring Queen's Wish customizable portrait art style into Geneforge?  It's not a deal-breaker or anything, but I think the character art in Geneforge 1- Mutagen and the current GF2 trailer look significantly better than the QW customizable portraits.

     

    It says "an entirely new system" and I'm guessing that those 20,000 dollars would buy something slightly more advanced than a paper doll system.

  4. I am a bit late to the party playing Avadon, but I thought this trick may come in handy for any other latecomers. To avoid having to fight Zephyrine and the golems at the same time, you can use Battle Frenzy to lure her away from her lair. If you go far enough before attacking her, the golems won't reach the fight in time. I led her all the way down to the ruins in the southeast corner of the map and locked the gates behind her, which may have prevented the golems from even walking towards the fight since they couldn't find a clear path. The golems still grant her blessings, but they fade eventually, and they can't heal her. Incidentally, if you exit the fight after leading her away, she will start walking back to her original position and any gates or doors in the way are opened automatically (or maybe she opens them).

    I was playing on Torment and probably hadn't optimized my party enough since I could only get her down to one golem before my party was wiped out, but I still felt like clearing the quest to save the Wyldrylm village. Oh, and you have to go back to her lair to trigger the message about claiming one of her teeth and make the dragon tooth appear among your Special Items. If you are fast enough, you can even run circles around the golems and loot her hoard before they catch up with you. 

  5. Once you have built forts in any of the three regions outside of the Haven Lands, you can recruit people from each respective region when creating new characters (you don't have to be in the region you want to recruit characters from). These characters will have unique Cultural abilities, just like your main character, depending on the region they are from. Any new characters are the same level as your main character, and you can delete and create characters freely with no penalty (though you should probably remove any equipment from characters you are about to delete).

  6. 8 hours ago, Owenmoz said:

    Yeah this deff is a good option the main reasons im hesitant is
    1- I don't have a lot of time on my hands nowadays so committing to that would take me a good while.
    2- The Nisse Battle was hard on me because it was like some.. 4 consecutive and by no means easy battles with no real refresher and i remember spending a good while trying to get to the very end of those which i dont want to do again anytime soon. 
    I mostly am interested in the blessed ending for the Ahriel because i didn't like the trench town one. Which doesn't change even if you give the favoured status.

     

    You can always play set the difficulty to Casual to make experimenting with the different endings easier once you have played through the game once.

  7. If you play it smart and complete as much of the game as you can without committing to any faction, which is mostly everything the game has to offer, you can keep a save file from before you start picking allies and enemies and view most, if not all, endings, i.e. where you side with either faction in the three client states, where you deal with the Nisse, fight them or just ignore them, and so on. That's what I did after I had cleared the game the way I wanted to, and it was a matter of hours to quickly try out the different combinations. Keep in mind that your respective choices in the three nations and the Nisse don't really affect each other. For example, regardless how you deal with the Nisse, the Mascha-Owen conflict will play out the same depending on which side you pick, and in turn won't affect the consequences for Sacramentum of how you deal with the Nisse. That means you don't have to try out every combination of alliances and every way of dealing with the Nisse to view all the different ending stories.

    I think you need one save file for trying out each of the two sides in each client state, and then you can use a later save file from just before you speak with the Nisse council to try dealing or fighting with them (or just walking away without talking to them at all). Also, remember to try going back without making any alliances and bringing any client states back into the fold at all. Then there are all the different conversation options once you get back and speak with your royal siblings and the queen, which also change the ending.

    Incidentally, I did this with Geneforge 5 and was able to easily get all the different endings from the same save file with only an hour or two spent on each ending.

  8. Doesn't this forum have a rule or something about meaningless thread necromancy? On the topic of necromancy, I am currently re-reading The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by Lovecraft and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have a look at what necromancy was before it was conflated with zombie horror with hordes of shambling corpses springing up willy nilly at the wave of a hand.

    PS: To add something constructive, I wouldn't presume to speak for anyone else who plays Spiderweb Games, but I would have absolutely no interest in a multiplayer feature or endlessly running through randomly generated content. To me, that's simply not part of the Spiderweb experience, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people who feel the same way. So aside from the obvious enormous technical and financial hurdles that adding an online multiplayer feature would entail, just as the case was with the Blades of Avernum editor, there is no real sign of there being sufficient demand among the playerbase to justify such an investment.

     

    The end result, by the way? By the time Jeff kicks the bucket and his young, hip fans (like me, who only got into Spiderweb games with Nethergate back in '99) are hooked up to the virtual reality/life support systems that will take the place of elderly care in the far future, quantum computing will have rendered everything as we know it obsolete.

  9. 4 hours ago, Aleister said:

    Really don't like the delayed damage with the animation, in the old versions the character would take damage upon being hit, now from the teaser there's a pause after the attack animation has passed through the target and then disappeared before the damage loads/appears.  

     

    Since the game hasn't actually been written yet, the trailer is just a mockup so I wouldn't worry about the timing of the animations at this point.

  10. On 2/10/2020 at 5:55 AM, Aleister said:

    Awesome, been looking forwards to this for a long time. Not sure about the name "Mutagen" though. Isn't that from ninja turtles lmao? Should rename it something more epic sounding in my opinion.  

     

    Mutagen is the scientific term for any DNA-altering agent or substance. Cartoons can be educational as well as entertaining.

  11. In Queen's Wish, you have three hangarounds who tag along on your adventures, but the story is all about your prince or princess alone, which very much fits into the theme of the powerful always being alone. However, you will need those three token companions if you really want to complete the game and not just be a doormat and accede to the demands of your opponents (since you will lack the power to subjugate them by force).

  12. 5 hours ago, PkK said:

     

    What is the point of charm here? All the Nisse I saw at the top of the tower had 70% mind resist.

     

     

    Spoiler alert!

    Spoiler

    There are a few more fights after the first one. They are far easier and the enemies have less Mental resistance. Once you have beaten the first fight, just burn through your Life Scrolls and Power Potions and deal with the rest as you would with any Nisse fight (though an initial burst of Poison Rain remains effective).

     

  13. The Nisse are much like your party, they have high damage output and high resistances, but relatively little HP. My winning strategy on Torment was:

    a) have all possible speed bonus augments and speed bonus skills to get the initiative in the first turn;

    b) trigger the Nisse attack as close to the ledge as possible;

    c) run up to the end of the ledge and use Poison Rain as many times as you can while the Nisse are still bunched together (Fireball is probably great, but requires skill points I'd rather spend on cultural skills);

    d) once the Nisse split up, try to slow the warriors down using summons while you keep hitting the wizards with ranged attacks or spells (especially spells if you can hit several enemies at once), though killing the wizards takes priority, e) once the warriors get close, and the wizards need to be dead by then, use Whirlwind Attack and try to hit as many of them as possible.

     

    As for party composition, I recommend that all of your characters have wizard robes, magic swords, orbs and Havenite Basinets (except for one character who might as well use the Warp Spear), and aside from augments that grant Speed, I would recommend using the Stun resist augment, since losing a turn is fatal against the Nisse. My skill setup looked like this:

     

    Combat:
    Level 1 - 1 Steelskin, 1 Brutal Blow (bleeding is better than weakness on higher difficulties)
    Level 2 - 2 Whirlwind Attack
    Level 3 - 1 Hardiness

    Magic:
    Level 1 - 1 Magery, 1 Shock/Terror (doesn't really matter)
    Level 2 - 2 Icy Wave (for area damage
    Level 3 - 1 Raw Power, 1 Poison Rain (if you have a spare point, you can take 2 Poison Rain)
    Level 4 - Golem (for summoning obstacles and +4 Magic Damage)

    Support:
    Level 1 - 2 Healing
    Level 2 - 1 Curing, 1 Teleport
    Level 3 - 1 Haste, 2 Disrupt on two PCs / 1 Haste, 2 Restoring Rain on two PCs
    Level 4 - 1 Battle Frenzy

     

    This leaves two points per character to spend on Cultural skills. I ran a party with one PC from every region, and I made sure to have two points in Vicious Strikes and Tower of Might, and one point each in Charm and Free Mind.

  14. It's a pretty common urge to go back and relive a bit of the nostalgia of your early computer games, and why not? I have the original Nethergate running on a PowerMac emulator for just that purpose.

  15. When fighting anything that isn't immune to mental effects or has very high mental resistance, particularly normal humans like the Ukat and Vol, I suggest entering the Ahriel Woods and rebuilding at least one fort to gain access to Ahriel characters with their charm spell (and place two skill points in it). Not being able to reliably turn your opponents against each other is what makes most difficult battles difficult, even on torment, while any battle where you can charm your enemies is not going to be very difficult.

  16. I'd like to add that I can do the same thing. I downloaded the game and it's running on Windows 10. I can't say for sure if I always could retrain in non-fortress towns and dungeons by right-clicking on the character sprites, but then again I didn't realize you could view monster stats by right-clicking on them until someone posted a screenshot on the forum.

  17. I don't believe I ever encountered a hostile creature that did not immediately advance and attack as soon as they noticed my party, nor did they waste time standing around or milling about aimlessly unless something blocked their path. I played on Torment, by the way, and the key to winning battles was making sure that the enemies reached you piecemeal or not at all by a combination of retreating, summoning and charming while making good use of ranged attacks.

  18. I am trying to take the changes Jeff made to weapons, armour and other equipment in Crystal Souls and put them back into Escape from the Pit. However, I noticed that there is a shield called "Thrice-Blessed Shield" in the item scripts for EftP that does not appear to have been placed anywhere in the game, at least not as far as I can recall or according to the item index. Based on its stats, it appears to be the precursor to the Shield of the Deep, and I thought it would be neat if I could add it somewhere, preferably without having to replace another unique item and potentially messing up a whole bunch of items.

  19. 5 hours ago, madrigan said:

    Everything I ever wanted has turned out to be unimportant, and everything I didn't plan for has become crucial.

     

    That was a great way of describing the way things seem to have gone for me too, and I thought that was part of the character's journey in Queen's Wish, how they go from being recently come into adulthood from childhood and mainly concerned with the pursuit of personal pleasure to being responsible for not only their own lives, but the lives of people around them who they never even knew growing up.

  20. Having just finished Queen's Wish properly and achieving the ultimate end with all enemies defeated and all goals fulfilled, seeing my little pixel avatar travel through the portal home and be reunited with his family, and reading the excellent ending, I can't help but think back on the long years since I first started playing Spiderweb games with Nethergate at the end of the 90s, and the realization that there is so very much about Queen's Wish that I would never have grasped as a child back then, but which I easily identify with now that I am an adult, with a job and a family and the responsibilities that come with them. Heck, back then even Jeff was a happy-go-lucky shareware developer without a care in the world and no kids. Just look at how young he looked.

     

    Is there anyone else out there with a similar feeling of a great spiritual journey reaching full circle, or just feeling their age as you play a game about growing up, family, children and parents, and you look back on your own experiences and think “Yeah, that's what it was like”?

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