Qalnor

Wasn't this team pretty hard early on? I can see it being pretty unstoppable after you get enough magical efficiency, but I think you'd have to do a lot of running back to town.

A6 sounds pretty great. I just recently started playing A5 and I wanted to make a suggestion. Perhaps other people have noted this, or perhaps not. But one thing I dislike about A5 versus the previous Avernums (at least 1-3, not 100% sure about 4) is that you can walk through and displace allies who have already moved. This isn't a huge deal since I can just not do it, but I personally think it removes some of the tactical challenge of combat. My only other suggestions are probably unreasonable, so I'll just say briefly that I miss the game being more keyboard friendly. I'm sure Jeff's decisions were made for good reason there, but I thought I'd throw it out there in passing.

I visit for awhile after a finish each game, and thank you.

Nevermind.. I finally found it on my charactersheet.

Maybe I'm being dense, but after 20 minutes of trying to do this by reading the manual and pressing buttons at random, I am unable to discover how to change the order my characters are walking in. I apologize if this is vastly more obvious than it presently seems to me.

Even if you could some how work out transferring it from scenario to scenario smoothly.. the core idea is beyond complex. The idea of a 'backpack' I would go as far as to say would probably be impossible. Some sort of limited storage item... maybe.. but we would be talking about a whole ton of scripting just to save a handful of inventory slots. If you really want a backpack, just load up notepad, and write down any items you're 'owed', and use the character editor to add them in when you need them. This would be a million times simpler over the course of your entire life than even setting this up on the most rudimentary level. It's a neat idea, in theory, but in practice? It just can't work. As far as the treasure trove scenario I pondered that myself when I first started, but essentially the scenario would need to edit itself to allow this.. a thing which is not possible.

No.. it's not the wav files. Let me look at something. It was a call to sndplay in sound.c that was causing the trouble. It may exist in msvc, but when I looked it up on the web it was in regards to metrowerks which iirc is codewarrior, so I assumed it was specific to that and just eliminated it. shrug.. Sound's not that important to me in any regard, I'm still stuck on the anim_ticks.. Edit: I managed to compile it at long last! I kind of cheated though with the anim_ticks and I probably will regret it if it ever catches up with me. I just defined anim_ticks instead of trying to bring it in from an external source, but I assume it's some sort of system timer used for some graphical purpose. No problems yet though. If anyone is interested I'll put up a copy of the modified source that compiles nicely under cygwin-g++ with the understanding that A) sound is presently disabled and anim_ticks aren't presently in the mood for doing much ticking.

I've had a good deal of success compiling in G++. There were a few dozen minor adjustments to make, but right now I think the only thing stopping me is compiling the resource file.. the compiler for which does not generate especially helpful errors. Actually that's a lie, I finally managed to get the resource stuff compiled in a backwards sort of way, but it didn't seem to solve the problem. It seems there are some sound and graphics references that need defining. Further update: Well I handled the sound by removing it entirely. As far as I can tell the functions used are specific to codewarrior, but maybe msvc has an equivalent.. shrug. Anyone have any idea what anim_ticks are?

I would not change the editor in any way that would change how scenarios actually end up, only how easily they get there. Even if for whatever reason some change you make to the final product seems to work, there's no guarantee that it will always work in every possible way.. and even on the assumption that you could somehow know that it will always work, there is absolutely no way to know that a future patch to the game won't make it impossible. And if that happened, any scenario made with your editor would suddenly require fixing.. and while this might be fine if you only use the tool yourself, if you distribute the modified editor to any extent, people are probably going to be miffed in your general direction.

Try downloading it off their web server? http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ftp/win/BoAEditor.zip

Ah there it is, I was pretty sure it wasn't the same between Mac and Unix.

hmm.. don't unix systems use the same system as microsoft and not apple? I may be mistaken on this but I tried opening the stuff in pico and it also came out rotten.

Save yourself and others the effort of looking it up and just set your day back to 0 if you don't want to play the scenario fairly. Failing that, you won't find it in the editor, find the script file associated with one of the poppyshroom patches and open that up in a text editor.

I encountered a problem like this once, perhaps yours is the same, though I can't swear my solution is the only one. In any regard.. I haven't experimented with it extensively so this may not be perfectly accurate, but I believe the town needs to at least be 3x3, and it may need to be a perfect square. If you have a smaller one the game does not check what direction you were moving when you entered the town, but rather what square you entered. And how is it to decide which is north, south, east, and west if there are only two available options? It chooses the default. If you want to limit the number of entrances to your town, I think you have to block off some of the squares. Anyhow I don't know for sure that this was your problem, but hopefully so.

It would violate your license on the original games, but it may not technically be a violation of BOA's license. I would however encourage people to avoid derivitive works in general. Paying homage to something in a scenario is one thing, but recreating anything not in the public domain and distributing it publicly is generally a violation of the law. Perhaps someone from the BoE community could comment on how this was handled there, as I am sure that in the time BoE has existed this issue has come up on a number of occasions.

Quote: Originally written by Kelandon: I think after some point Pathfinder stops being useful to increase, but I don't know what that point is. Lethal Blow above 15 or so is a bit excessive (30000 damage, anyone?), but I don't know that it stops increasing in power. Lethal blow does not, in my experience, ever make you do 30000 damage. I believe what lethal blow does, no matter how high your skill level is, is either multiply your damage by 3 (possibly 4, but I would wager 3). What increasing the skill does is increase the likelihood of scoring a lethal blow, nothing more and nothing less. And truth be told even at ridiculous levels lethal blows will happen less than half of the time. To be perfectly honest, I think the skill is bloody useless. It grants a few lucky hits now and then but unless you save and reload a lot you can't count on lucky hits to take down big foes. Maybe at some point it becomes worth training it up a bit simply because everything is so expensive. This is from limited testing, but I can say that you'll never do 30000 damage strictly because you spent too many points on lethal blow.

Try: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ftp/win/BoAEditor.zip

Kel, your numbers are correct on the skill chart.. the only different one I noticed was blademaster has a requirement of 8 strength that you omitted. On a side note, this thread has inspired me to make a rather.. interesting character. He's going to be quite ridiculous at quite a low level if he works out.

Yeah I noticed that after I posted, I meant to edit my post.

An extra AP is basically irrelvent for a mage anyhow (it translates to being able to advance an extra space in addition to casting), I think the sequence bonus is well worth it personally. Picking Nephil gives a mage a minor exp penalty and a massive sequence boost which is life or death for a party, particuarly in outdoor battles.

Personally if it were me I would take a full party unless you're just looking to make the game more challenging. There is more than enough experience available in each of the scenarios to make you the highest level the scenario will easily permit by the end of each scenario.. The only slight exception is the fourth, if you start the fourth immediately after the third you may not end up as high as you might be by the end of the fourth unless you play it through twice. But if you do wish to play with two characters then I would personally say that those two would be as good as any two. I would strongly recommend that you build up a good tool use on one character or the other (probably the mage priest.. even with two competing disciplines he'll probably have more spare points than a warrior) As far as special skills go, they do not, in general, work as they did in the original game. While there are a few NPC's who will train characters in special skills, in any good scenario they will be rare and not the normal method of advancing a skill. Instead, special skills are trained in the same manner as normal skills, except for the fact that they do not exist unless your character meets certain special requirements. For example, Anatomy requires a 6 intelligence and 8 in either melee weapons or pole weapons to activate. After which your character may train it as he would any other skill. There are 9 such skills which may be discovered by increasing normal skills, and an extra 3 which require both normal skills and the additional help of some special skills in order to advance.

I think Nephil are underrated, personally I would make a Nephil mage a hundred times before I made a Slith mage. Nephil take a very small experience penalty -- they basically get fast on feet for half cost and doesn't take a slot. This to me means that they make ideal mages, because you can take natural mage and brittle bones AND get the fast on feet perk and you come out with only a 5% experience penalty. To top it all off, they get a truly free 2 levels extra of dexterity. And by truly free I mean it doesn't increase the cost of increasing dex, so the bonus effectively gets better as you spend more in dex (ie when you get to 20 dex you only had to spend 18 dex worth of creation points). Slith get basically nothing for being slith, honestly. I think the fire resistance was toned since the avernum series because I haven't noticed that my slith warrior is immune to fire in the same way that he was in A2/3. Overall I think Nephil are the most superior race choice for everyone except a pole user, my nephil usually beats out war blessed people for going first, and is only really beat out by high level haste spells. If I were to start again, I would put it on my mage and priest without a moments hesitation, first strike on a mage and priest are godly.

Yes that's correct. If you go to start-run and type c:\program files\Blades of Avernum\Data\Blades of Avernum Edit v1.0.1.exe It should run from there, with no extra sub-directories. If it doesn't run from there, you need to move it into c:\program files\Blades of Avernum\Data\ Note though, this assumes you installed everything to the default directories and on the C drive; I personally run from the D drive and you would change it to D:\ in there.. but I assume anyone who changed anything can figure this out on their own.

That's usually the error it generates when you aren't running it from your data folder. Are you sure it's in the folder 'Data' (not 'blades of avernum scenarios') and you're running the copy in that directory and not a copy you have in another directory?

Well apart from your post (and now mine) it's been dead for 5 hours.. and perhaps it intends to remain so. It's not beyond ressurection, but it's beyond the desires of most people to perform such a ressurection. But to answer your real question, the reason it lived as long as it did was because the argument heated up and once an argument heats nobody is content to say anything once, everything needs to be said until everyone is tired of saying what they insist upon saying over and over again and they are, furthermore, frustrated beyond wits end that everyone else seems to be doing the same, having not heard a bit of what they keep repeating.