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Fort

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Everything posted by Fort

  1. Then your quest or mission would have to involve acting as a conscripted commander of the defenses or something to that effect. Sounds like RTS to me.
  2. If the game were restructured to include creating defensive strongholds and your own little guarded safe-havens periodically as a part of strategy, then maybe these immobile creations could have a purpose. For instance, suppose that randomly spawning monsters could appear even without NPC spawners around under the premise that the area is not cleared. Going back to town would be a long, involved, and dangerous process, so you need to create your own points to rest at along the way. Your own spawner, revitalizing vats, etc., would have great use then.
  3. That does sound intriguing, but of course too complicated to be put into the next game. Historically, it can be said that Jeff does not do "revolutionary." If anything, I think that implementing a true way to capture a rogue creation -- which may be an NPC, spawned creation, or one of your own -- for a short while would quickly give rise to being able to release creations. I feel a main, non-destructively unbalanced way to use these rogues would be in a battle where you want to temporarily have many, many creations on your side, with possibly some under your direct control. Those not considered a part of your party, being captured rogues, would easily change sides. I believe this would allow this type of large-scale battle to occur while preserving gameplay balance.
  4. While it sounds potentially useful to create a rogue army, whose members I think by definition are still very hostile to their creator, I doubt it would be worth the essence to shape a creation that would be less effective in combat than an equivalent one you could control.
  5. If you could not gain experience from the creation or reabsorb it for essence, why release it? Sure, you could carry some essence pods/potions/whatever so you could make lots of little rogue creations, but could that really be useful if you had no control whatsoever over it?
  6. Quote: Originally written by kaa: The timescale could be different. It isn't a few hundred days - it takes many years to advance through unsettled lands and build cities. Maybe the party starts to grow old - lose some strength, gain some wisdom. I would hate it if it took me forever to train up my super PC only to have him get rheumatoid Averthritis or something. Quote: Originally written by The Story of Quid: You have that backwards. No one in their right mind would move into a bunch of caves full of ravenous monsters. Fortunately, the Empire was quite willing to throw people in by force. Cities came somewhat later. Maybe I gave the wrong impression in my post, but the point I was trying to make is the very point you made at the end there: the First Expedition could not have been founders of the first Avernite cities not only because they were supposedly dead but also because it was quite a few years before the cities were built. My proposed deviation from canon was to have the cities be built almost immediately so that the timelines could overlap without too much magically protracted longevity for the First Expedition.
  7. Considering that many people and creatures in Avernum do not stay dead for long, I do not see their apparent deaths as problems. Personally, I would like to see some storyline that allows them to play a major part in the founding of the first few Avernite cities. The intervening decades until the Empire started using the caves as a prison could pose a problem, but some canon can be altered, right?
  8. I am pretty sure that they gain experience at the same rate as the rest of the PCs. In A1, I remember that some of their initial special skills are higher than the maximum you could ever get for your original PCs.
  9. Allowing characters to control characters other than the PCs would definitely require some effort and coding on Jeff's part, but I would imagine that the mechanics already work favorably towards such a possibility. The Exile engine, for instance, sharply divided monsters and PCs. However, in Avernum, the monsters have the exact same skill set as PCs and can wield or use items in the basically the same way. When your characters are charmed, I believe they act with basicnpc. In Geneforge, he has already managed to create two separate control systems; one for the shaper and one for his creations. Though being able to directly command a group of NPCs would be great, I really only ask that the characters who join the party be controllable. Then maybe they would be useful for once as more than mindless meatshields.
  10. It seems to me that the vampire strain has been becoming more and more powerful as each new game comes out. In E1 they could cast what, Summoning? In BoA they have fireblast and can summon themselves indefinitely. I remember quite vividly the only difficult battle I had while playing the original scenarios with my 2 PC party: the golem garden battle in Khoth's Castle. The demon golem had about 200 health left when he summoned 3 vampires. I killed the golem and then got summarily slain. But truly, I think the most fun can be had when you can successfully charm enemy Arcane Summons. I mean seriously, a single strong Control Foes spell can immediately make those 4 mutant lizards your friends.
  11. Though that text was cleary added for atmosphere and flavor, if you want to take it literally then you must at least consider all possibilities. You want it to be that dazing people could allow you to steal things in front of them without them becoming hostile. However, you can use it to steal things and escape a fight. To me, that is why every thief should have it. It is not a way to conceal you crime, just a way to escape from its repercussions.
  12. The selection of high level arcane summons is not bad at all, but it is the randomness of it that makes it useless. I dare say it would be overpowered if you could select to summon ice hydras against the fire golems or the elder aranea whenever you wanted. The Daemon spell back from Exile was actually pretty good in the midgame if you could afford the spell points. It never hurt to have an extra firestorm here or there combined with a resistant meatshield.
  13. I think you missed his point. Regarding Divine Host, I think it is unfair that in the previous Avernum games this has been the highest level priest spell, described as "awesome" in the documentation, and required a huge amount of spell points when it summons shades that are relatively useless by the time you learn the spell. It was positively ridiculous, and the Arcane Summon spell for the mages was far better at the highest level. I just never saw the reason why priests could not have had a good Divine spell before.
  14. It is pretty clear that the whole idea behind removing waiting ever since Geneforge was to prevent players from having a guaranteed free turn against the enemy; however, now it is replaced by ending your turn and letting melee opponents run towards you. Either way, you can exploit some situations though overall it seems more or less the same. I personally would like for the enemies to be able to intelligently delay their turn so that instead of engaging in exploitation, the player could be said to be employing tactics. I do not know how you play, but I keep my left hand sprawled lackadaisically on the keyboard while I use the mouse. Neither hand ever has to leave its station. I sometimes miss being able to select targets using the keyboard, but Jeff likely did it because letters above the pseudo3D GF sprites looked bad to him.
  15. Do you mean the small strings of text that appear at the bottom of the world screen? I doubt there is a way to turn them off. I do not find them very obtrusive, and you need the text down there anyway because the game uses it often, like around signs and such.
  16. I believe if you put a piece of trash near your piles of loot it will disappear before any of your stuff. It could act as an indicator of sorts to protect you from overloading the item limit of the town.
  17. Have you played Avernum 4? The game brings back area-of-effect spells and you can put items into containers now. Those features are basically back, though they are implemented differently.
  18. The main difference is that the monsters have more health. I think they have a higher chance to hit and deal more damage, though you would have to confirm that yourself since I basically never play on anything other than Torment.
  19. Blades of Exile if you plan to primarily stick with newer series like Avernum. E1 and E2 can be difficult to work with if you are used to E3 or Avernum style dialogue. A1 is nice, but your aching finger muscles will appreciate A2 or A3 much more because the small improvements in user-interface will save you cramps in the morning.
  20. If you kill someone without anyone else seeing, then the town should not become hostile if this is your first crime. However, attacking certain characters will always make the town hostile and killing too many guards also has this effect. I doubt there will be anything nice in that chest.
  21. I feel embarrassed; I have not played Avernum 4 in a while so I do not remember what new effects there are. Perhaps charming and poison apply?
  22. For a dedicated fighter, it does not take many points into the appropriate skills in order to max out the hit percentage. You will put far many more points into these skills after this to increase damage, so a mere -30% is like nothing later in the game.
  23. To summarize, no one knows anything definitive, and I would be wary to trust the given resistance percentages. I can only tell you for sure that HER will protect you from effects like slowing, and it likely reduces elemental damage as well. PWR reduces physical damage in general.
  24. This is one exploitation that for some reason was introduced in this latest Avernum game. In the previous ones, NPCs still could not open doors, but at least it was not possible to attack and hide behind a door in a single round because you had to be in town mode in order to close a door. The Exile monsters, which could open doors, made things all the more challenging. However, due to engine differences, the ability for them to open doors was sacrificed for the greater flexibility of scripts instead of nodes. Sadly, it is infeasible to allow them to do that again except in very specific situations.
  25. I would not be surprised if that were true. Remember that in the previous Avernum games, dexterity only gave half as much bonus. I would be annoyed if Jeff let the description slip up like this, though.
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