ex post slarto

The real question is if Avernum 6 will do with the Empire-Avernum conflict what Jeff has done with every single one of his games since Blades of Exile.

Make you choose sides. Side with the Empire, or side with Avernum!

Dude. Genocide would have been the perfect answer to the chitrach mess in A4. At least for parties. Most singletons probably couldn't survive the average 798 unblockable damage you'd take from genociding 227 chitrachs.

My favourite implementation of fighting with shopkeepers is easily Dungeon Master II's. You chuck stuff at them by accident, and they throw it back at you and kill you. Great.

Garzahd wasn't really that distant, though, because he was written into the backstory of A1. He was directly connected to most of the major characters, the ones who really did have personality, so we heard lots of different, colorful statements about him.

There was very little variety in what ANYONE said about Rentar-Ihrno in the games.

And I dunno, I was pretty disappointed with Rentar's attempts to frame others. Erika wasn't a convincing villain, for the very reasons she mentions when you confront her with the 'evidence'. Neither were the dragons. It just wasn't in character.

Rentar hardly seemed like much of an ally in A2. Yes, she did provide critical assistance in a few key moments, but she spent more time talking about how she was devising ways to bring rock down on the heads of Avernite civilians.

In A3, she was disliked, but I don't think she was really hated. I for one found her to be a pretty poor follow-up to Garzahd. Rentar did become hated in A4, but that was more due to the repetitiveness of her schemes than anything else.

Windows and Mac are themselves operating systems, so it doesn't make any sense to say "every operating system known to man" if you are only talking about two of them.

If what you meant was "every contemporaneous operating system that runs on Macs and PCs" then the statement is just wrong, because there are lots of OSes that run on Macs and PCs besides Mac OS and Windows.

I was curious about all those extra spaces.

There were definitely some worse quests in every Geneforge title.

Huzzah for replays of Exile III.

At least this time, the creative trick doesn't involve the end of combat placement bug.

It has nothing to do with their territory. I believe A5 runs 9 zone scripts at a time, for the zone you are in and the 8 zones surrounding it; so if you come within 1 zone of the village zone, you'll lose the items. As it is the NW-most zone, that only quarantines you from 3 other zones, which are mostly empty anyway.

Right, but there are unintended errors that give characters an advantage that it is widely considered not-cheating to capitalize on. A good example is in the original Final Fantasy game for the NES. The Silver Swords sold in ElfLand are drastically better than any other weapons you find until halfway through the game. They also make the Fighter and Red Mage classes fairly unbalanced in the first half of the game. And the rest of the Silver items aren't sold until Crescent Lake, while the Silver Sword is the last item sold in ElfLand. It is widely assumed that selling it there was some kind of data error and not intended. But it's also widely assumed that one should take advantage of that error.

There are other such 'features' in Spidweb games as well. In A5, the Flaming Sword increases the amount of armor a mage can wear. Intentional? Doubtful, since the sword's ability is a carry-over from Geneforge 3, which had no such armor limitation.

Perhaps the best example though would be the random item shops in E2 and E3, which allowed you to obtain infinite copies of (almost) any item in the game. Is it cheating to buy six Rings of Speed early in the game? That's a more drastic power increase than what the ceremonial gear supplies.

That's true. Also, it's unclear that the surface portal just goes to Upper Exile. Since the original Exiling portal went from the surface down, presumably there's at least a possibility the the new surface portal actually goes to the surface.

The take them away thing does stop working because it's only in the script for that one zone. If that script isn't running, they don't get taken away.

The dead character thing is really smart, however. Now the question is whether that counts as cheating, since it obviously wasn't intended to be possible...

They will only disappear from your pack in that zone, and you can get them over the runes as Bryce said; the real issue is the stairs going up, as you can't change levels in combat mode.

Inevitably, impatient me answered my own question. The results of my test:

Average damage (no armor or defense whatsoever) from the tested physical attack: 48.0

For the same character with 10 Parry (counting only hits that are not parried): 38.2

Same thing vs Lightning Spray: 56.8

10 Parry vs Lightning Spray: 39.7

So indeed, Parry is quite good, and seems to compare to Hardiness in value. That settles the EW question solidly, as even a flat 10% reduction from 5 Parry beats the better armor you might use with NM. The skill points you save on Mage Spells compare at least partially to the skill points you save on Strength. And finally, the extra Blademaster (for fatigue reduction) is an excellent bonus.

I'm converting Groul now, using the editor. I don't count this as a cheat, particularly, since both traits have the same xp penalty and I didn't get any advantage out of using NM for the first bit.

Hey Random -- does Parry reduce all sorts of damage, or just physical damage? If it reduces all sorts, then I think EW is a better deal after all (and I may have to end up switching my traits).

The money values are arbitry, not calculated based on any formula, and they definitely don't always line up with usefulness of equipment. The Bloodspear is far better than the other two.

Look for buttons in the black wight area.

You can, alternately, access the skeleton/blade via boat in chapter 2.

From my testing:

+20% Shield Breaker

+25% War Blessing

+33% Battle Fury

+50% Well-Aimed Blow

+50% 10 Anatomy vs. humanoids

+100% Mighty Blow

Luck appears again to have no impact on damage.

The problem with Parry is that you can't even get it to 50% effectiveness against melee. You could, in theory, but even getting 20 Parry just grants you 45% effectiveness. 10 gives you 30%. Not so hot.

NM also gives 40+ skill pts worth of mage skill if you plan to use all spells. Less otherwise. Parry costs even more I suppose, and the Blademaster is another nice bonus for fatigue reduction.

Why EW?

Luck -- alas.

I just ran a test which, unlike previous tests, accounted for Randomizer's area loading theory. And the test still suggests Luck has no impact on item drops. I loaded, teleported into Gladwell's Keep from the portal fort and killed the three townspeople there. Each has, according to the script, a 40% chance of dropping 20 coins and the same chance to drop a dagger. Those chances were well represented, but Luck did not appear to affect the chances. Here's the data:

00 Luck: 7/20 coins, 9/20 daggers

10 Luck: 8/20 coins, 6/20 daggers

40 Luck: 7/20 coins, 9/20 daggers

Total: 23/60 coins, 24/60 daggers

Expected: 24/60 coins, 24/60 daggers

I did notice that my attacks did slightly more damage with very high Luck, although this was somewhat inconsistent.

Presumably Newsom is a base Soldier type. That creature has six random item drops, two of which are the items you mention, with a base chance of 10 each.

Yes, Hssrotis was a real pain. Lightning Spray + Firebolt (or Lightning + a summoned creature attack) would take out the three weaker sets of bats, but I did use Daze (often twice in the same turn) on the fiery bats.