Ive decided to dump more than a week straight into Geneforge in general and I noticed that info was at times quite scarce or not really centralized in one place. Anyway it was hard to find. And I had some questions to which I did not find answers to this whole week while playing. Some of them may be due to me sucking at using the search and googling.
I played only shaper. Played G1 with basically all in on INT and Fire shaping and pretty much beat it with little effort on normal diff. Kinda same with G2. Really nothing to it. Got drayks, killed everything. Always used the "expendable creations" tactic. As in, went into a map, murdered everything til my creations died, ran back to town crying, made more and came back.
But somewhere I read that Vlishes were OP, til then I figured they were probably made of glass and not versatile enough, so I didnt even touch em. But they are really cool looking creations. So in G3 I went for full pumping points into INT and magic shaping. And did quite well most of the time. But by the time I reached Gull island, I got absolutely destroyed by everything. Nothing I did worked. Figured that vlishes might just be for support in this one, so mixed them with Glaahks. Still got destroyed. Absolutely not a single thing I tried worked. Since I already had 15 hours into the game I said screw it, cheated myself fire shaping about the amount of magic and drayk creation +3, made drayks and still destroyed. So I went even further and went for drakon +3 and made some drakons. And still got rekt. So I went even further, cheated a lot of int and levels, buffed the drakons up and then got through the game.
So now im in G4 and scared of putting points into anything, due to fear of mybe realizing 15 hours into the game again, that my build is insufficient to continue with.
Was G3 ment to be unbeatable as full shaper or did I have a wrong mindset somewhere?
Does the "expendable creations" tactic work on later G-s or am I supposed to keep them alive and level them, cause I really liked being completely reckless with them in earlier G-s?
Do full shaper builds work in later Geneforge games? How much is too much into shaping skill? I asked because I read somewhere in a forum that 6 in any shaping is good enough, finished G2 with 18 in fire shaping.
After my tumble with G3, I went back and started experimenting in previous games aswell. I noticed that increasing shaping skill gives rather little in basestats to your freshly formed creations. Their general lvls increase yet their stat lvls fall behind. I couldnt be fully bothered to figure out how the statdistribution works. How does it actually work?