Blxz

Indeed. For the most part I'm too lazy to muck around with balancing and fine tinkering. I like simple, direct, repeatable commands. What prompts me to improve is a disastrous battle that wipes out my army and proves my tactics are obsolete which forces a rethink, a win (naturally) and then another stagnation further down the line. Basically, you will see my tactics jump around. Having never played the game I have no idea of a 'best' way and having no interest in trawling through guides I have no doubt I've been sub-optimal (such as the point of intelligence I realised I could have received from Rawal early game...). Still, I assume that is the pleasure some people find in watching another player play a game they are familiar with. EDIT: And a small update if anyone is ghost reading the forums and waiting for more videos. I have a fan on backorder to my remote country town. Hopefully only a few more days to fix this cooling issue and then some more videos can be recorded and uploaded.

The G1/2 shaper robes were awesome. I liked the simplicity. The later ones are ugly, but not nearly as ugly as the lifecrafter robes.

As a non roleplaying philistine my vote probably doesn't mean much. The only thing I actually recognised there was shadowrun because I once owned a Super Nintendo. But yeah, I'm open to killing things in any number of rulesets.

The joys of Geneforge, the game is exceedingly bad at giving me control over volume settings so there is little control over inappropriately loud or poorly timed background noise. I do, however, get better at video production over the course of this entire LP. At some stage in the future (I don't recall which episode) I will begin to play around with reducing the background noise as I record it in a separate channel to my voice and have more control over each individual sound level. All I can do is restate that this is a learning experience and I am endeavouring to make sure each video is better than the one previous. As for the difficult fights, I'm really enjoying them. I think I am finding my stride with this game. I didn't play a shaper in my last Geneforge game so it took me a while to really get into the feel. Once you catch up to the current vids you'll be seeing me dropping buffs and using items and getting a little more effective in general. I also start to trend towards a more balanced damage type army....gradually.

No need to be passive aggressive about it. To be fair, debating in absolutes, which is what you have been doing, really isn't the best way of approaching a topic when you apparently don't know about the most recent third of the source material. I'm not saying I disagree with your assessment but then again I have yet to finish G5 either. I think it would be a stronger argument if you could actually refer and refute the things that other people are quoting with concrete evidence.

Haha. Anti PR indeed. I'll have to check out the blog wherever it is. sounds like thats how you guys keep abreast of events.

Keeping up with this series so far. It's actually really interesting. How are you planning on handling party members? Now that you have tested them all out will you be deciding on a permanent party or will you just mix and match as the fancy takes you from now on?

Ignoring the fact that Jeff hadn't invented them yet, I think the fact that the high creations were only created later in the game through story reasons (war, drayks self shaping, etc.) gives a good explanation. As a reference, Issac Newton was a genius possibly beyond many other people alive today and he invented calculus and did all those problems on paper by hand but that doesn't mean that he could make discoveries that are as deep as the ones we make today simply due to technological difference. Gravity waves and stuff just could not conceivably be measured in his time. And ugh...neither could gazers and eyebeasts.

I'm a bit sad to think that this may be his last IP. I want to be selfish and keep consuming more stories from his wacky mind. (preferably of the geneforge persuasion)

I feel that the collapse had a great number of factors. This isn't really the time or place to go into the huge range of factors that contributed to the fall but I am under the impression that slaves, or the lack thereof would have played a very minor part in that fall.

The games are really well designed around the shaper class. As a word of warning, Geneforge 1 to 4 tends to have very VERY squishy shapers. Often a single hit can and will kill you from the midgame onwards. You need to cultivate a strong army and keep in mind that you are not the fighter. Play to the strengths of your class. Geneforge 5 is much more forgiving in that respect in that HP values have been scaled right up. For the record, 1 and two are my favs and playing through the whole series from start to finish is an absolute treat. Have fun!

Just to confirm, the full, best, unaligned ending requires: - no canister use - all for faction leaders dead (Barzahl, zakary, some taker drakon thingy and probably tuldaric) - not to be a member of a faction - 'followed up' on shanti (which I assume means that thing that happens in barzarite lands?) - anything else? I'm keen to attempt this one myself soonish but would hate to get all the way through and miss out a key point.

To be fair owenrus, the romans didn't build extensively in stone either. The vast majority of houses would have been wooden. Rome did burn several times.

Thankfully future episodes get better. Then worse again, but never as bad as those few episodes. I put more effort into tabbing out and testing each episode from then on, even if that involved recording 6 times in a row....

Been a while since I linked here. But the vids have still been coming out. Links below for anyone who only links directly from these forums. - So. Many. Bandits. - More trap dodging fun. - Well, we had to move on with the story eventually. I'm trying to keep the uploads coming out but my backlog is down to 1 more episode right now. My cpu is throttled to 800mhz due to a possible liquid cooling pump failure so lag spikes are running rampant while recording and temps are sitting at 100C. Hopefully I can fix it before I run out of backlog. If not, episodes might skip a few days depending on fix times.

Had to rewatch as I had forgotten about the +2 canister. Sadly I don't think I ever held true on my promise to use it more. I may have tried it once and it failed abysmally. I'm much more about the brute force direct approach. And oh that audio quality. I had forgotten how bad that was. I don't envy you wading through that horrible background hiss. It will disappear at some point in the future and be replaced with the soft dulcet tones of my raspy voice.

They were too compassionate in the end. If they had been heartless and destroyed everything then there would be no story and the island would have been cleansed (in the 40k sense). I guess the flaw of the shapers was that they cared too much.

I really see a growth in Alwan that I appreciate. In G3 he is a little child as you indicated Slarty but in 4 and 5 he experiences some of the world and grows more capable. It is something that I feel more of the leaders should have done. Admittedly I'm not finished G5 yet and his rampant alcoholism is troubling but so far he seems calm and in control as a stable leader should be. Better for sure than the rest of the council by a long way.

This is normally the part of the game where I give up so I am interested to start watching more closely from here on out. Good luck.

I agree with idontexist42's comments above as I've discussed similarly in my LP thread recently. What really interests me is if there is any correlation between real world political beliefs and in-game alignment. Are rebels naturally conservatives in real life (or vice-versa)? Or is it all over the place with mortal real world enemies joining together and singing kumbaya on the side of the shapers?

. I find myself wading through bandits. I can tell the game engine is advancing compared to previous Geneforge's simply due to the number of enemies on screen at any given time. This is not always a good thing...

Every LP I've seen the players always want to protect their creations to the point that they reload quite extensively. I've always felt this goes against the feel of shapers so I'm being deliberately a little more careless and also trying to play as 'hardcore' (ie. no reloading) as possible without being unreasonable. This means that yes, I will spend half an episode running from unbound and losing creations rather than hitting f4 and going back in time. Despite this I have a compulsive habit to quicksave regularly. EDIT: Oh yeah, and has been released today. More of those sweet artifact ingredients. May be useful if I ever find any more mandrake tinctures. They seem pretty scarce this game.

I do indeed go back. Was quite an interesting series of vids to record. Regarding consumables, I have a real problem forcing myself to use them. Some sort of mental block. I do start to tap the pods later as the battles become more difficult.

is ready. Be aware that due to some quirks in the new recording software settings there will be some audio sync issues from the second half of the episode onwards. Slightly technical explanation below: For some odd reason the default settings are set to not record when the frames don't update which happens during loading screens and some battle turns briefly if I am not moving the mouse and there are no special effects on screen. The transition time between when it starts the audio and the screen capture are ever so slightly apart and that builds up gradually over the course of the video. Sadly this was not something I was able to fix in post editing. I have prevented it from occurring in any future videos.

was a labour of love. For some reason OBS really just seemed to collapse. Lag spikes were out of control, video quality has been slipping in the past episodes and has been pretty inconsistent and for Ep 55 it just continually froze on a single frame for about 1 min then jumped to the next while my voice continued. I've been checking episodes to try and prevent this from happening since the big stoneworks issues. Was just insane this time and I couldn't fix it. The new recording software is a godsend by comparison. It has its own quirks (episode 56 here we come) but I've got them sorted now. Has been a joy to record and I'm having loads of fun again. Regular updates resume on every odd date of the month. (and every even day has my secondary LP's if anyone is interested in those)