Hobo Elf

Necromancy is a real thing in Geneforge and it is banned by the Shapers, so my guess is that the ghosts are more than just essence echoes of people, although I don't remember if there were any flavor texts that explained them. It's possible that it is a taboo subject exactly because the Shapers do not understand it on a deeper level, meaning that there may not be any scientific explanation for it. Shapers are very touchy when it comes to things they can't control or understand.

Problem with Archery is that it doesn't offer anything unique that Wizards couldn't do much better. It doesn't have a unique role in the party; no interesting niche to cover, it just does ranged damage that is of an inferior damage type. Unfortunately I have no solution to offer as a way to make it more appealing either. I guess the (most) obvious way forward would be to give them some form of AoE and snares like what the Empire Archers use, but that wouldn't be very exciting either. Then Archers would only be lite versions of Wizards and that's not all that interesting.

I think Geneforge 1 is my favorite game in the series for all the reasons you mentioned. Resources feel scarce so you're gonna have to dig deep to get even the most basic spells and nobody really likes you and only see you as a pawn for their own gain, if they don't want to outright murder you. Since there is no Shaper presence on the Island you really have no "allies". Just you vs the Island, Robinson Crusoe style. Combat is pretty fun in Geneforge 1 because it's rather fast paced. With each Geneforge game after Jeff kept padding the enemies, even the trash ones, with more and more HP which only served to bog down the combat.

Perhaps the price is tied to the wood and not the strength of the bow? Yew being a lot rarer than cavewood in Avernum. It'd be a nice touch if that was the case.

I'd like to see the Geneforge series get rebalanced, maybe change positions for the high level Creations so that they are available a little bit earlier (maybe this will make them more useful?). I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but each time I press tab, go into my inventory filled with items or if the screen gets cluttered with units the performance gets choppy and starts to crawl, so I'd like this to be fixed as well.

I don't see the point in an Archer. It's a ranged damage dealer. Ok. A Wizard can do that as well but so much better; on top of everything else that they can do. Rather take that extra Mage instead. I never found mana to be an issue either so that's not an excuse either, really.

I don't mind the 90% hit chance cap. Sometimes you hit, sometimes you don't. It's annoying when you go through many rounds of consecutive misses even at 90%, but I just buckle down and deal with it. The one thing that really does irritate me is the high resist rate against melee attacks. I made the unfortunate mistake of taking a dual wielder and a polearm guy in my party and oh boy did the end game game start to wear me down with its tedium due to how long it took to whittle down all those highly armored empire troops. Early on they did fine, but after I left the Vahnatai region their usefulness plummeted. There was a slight incline in power once I got the Flame Sword, but it was a little comfort and didn't even work against all the enemies due to immunities. The game is too biased towards Magic-Users. It's no fun to clear a room full of enemies who take 20-50 non-crit damage per hit and have 300-500 HP. It's even less fun when you keep doing it dungeon after dungeon, room after room.

A Pen and Paper goes a long way. I make a checklist of things I have not yet reached / gotten and where they are to keep track of things just like in ye olden days.

Uranium is radioactive material so one should be careful when going on an adventure with a bar of Uranium stashed away in their strapped leather pouches.

Yes, I found quite a bit of a problem with the animal racials. Unless you use spears with the Lizards or missile weapons with the Cats you are completely missing out on their racial. And that's disregarding that the bonus human traits will eclipse whatever bonuses the animals get on top of being completely up to the player what bonuses they wish to take to help build their characters. Humans are just so much more flexible that it's kinda pointless to take the other races other than for the flavor.