ex post slarto

All the data files that aren't in the "Scripts" folder are in a format that's not really interpretable or editable to players.

There's an extra button hidden near the stairs that opens the gate you need opened.

Quote: Originally written by Dr. Johann Georg Faust: The world is rural and not heavily populated, so first names would suffice. But this isn't true of any historic rural worlds with an Ermarian level of civilization. Furthermore, much of the surface is heavily populated by the Empire, and people clearly came to Exile from there. Names just aren't use much. That's all. And the games give us Erika Redmark, Rita Cskany, Carol Hamer, Patrick Padraig, Cecile Vidican, Gabor Krizsan, Mariann Krizsan, Tor Gunston, Jordan Bojar, Gilda Radner, Genevieve Radner.

Trainers have annoyed me -- a LOT -- since G2. I have taken to playing spidweb games with one of the following cheats, because my compulsive min-maxing makes the games suck if I can waste so much time thinking about trainers: 1) If I use sp on a stat early on that I could later train, when I reach the trainer, give myself credit for it and go shopping with the editor 2) Infinite gold, this solves the trainer problem by allowing me to use them as soon as available and also means I don't have to spend forever picking up and selling @#$%@# trinkets... I tend to use this one with singletons, who are unlikely to have anything they can't afford by game's end anyway but have no room to carry stuff.

Um, zero. It works the same way as all trainers. If they train to 1 you can only buy it from zero.

That said, I did some more practical testing. I took a Roman, levelled him up and gave him all the best pieces of armor (using the editor). Average percentage of damage blocked (and these were fairly consistent) were: 63% - 0 Armor Use 81% - 10 Armor Use 86% - 20 Armor Use I also tested Protection and found something interesting: the percentage of damage blocked does not change at all with Protection, but the damage (both damage taken and damage blocked) DOES change. It appears that Protection just lowers that number by a set amount rather than a percent. That explains why it can block all damage against Normal goblins but is barely noticeable against even midgame enemies on Torment. Anyway, I'm no longer sure this character can do well. Even blocking 86% of damage is not enough against many enemies. When a hit does 150 damage before armor you'll still take 20 damage... which is fine if the enemy is alone, but if you're fighting a group, you'll die in one turn; or, if you pumped Endurance, you'll die in several, since you can't heal much in one turn while still attacking. Since you can't kill things quickly in Torment either, I think the use of summons and charms becomes a complete and total necessity. It's simply the only way to survive, outside of the 4 game-breaking potions. And that means a Celt will be much better off. Eventually a Celt will take an extra third or so of damage over a Roman, but the 48% and 52% armors that Celts can't use aren't easily available anyway. And better charms and summons easily make up for that, I think.

How about a Chitrachslayer Blade? Wait, that's actually a good idea. How about a Chitrachslayer Blade? Please.

There are a few pieces of flame-resistant gear early in the mines. Those plus RT + Luck make his flame lance a joke. The shaman on the first floor is tough and will require a potion or two, but after that you have better gear and have gained more levels. Without magic some of the tougher individual enemies DO require using potions.

Torment REQUIRES survival tactics. You can't play like in Geneforge or Avernum 4 and just ramp your magic or power up hugely and kill things before they kill you. You NEED some way of staying alive. For Romans that means armor and healing, for Celts it means summons.

You don't even have to wait for the floaty wand... in my game, I haven't yet been able to beat the bridge to Nethergate, but I jumped down using only Luck to survive. (In original Nethergate you could never survive a fall with Luck!) The bracelet was worth it. I do notice that Charm Beast is remarkably ineffective for me. I suspect the cause is my low spell power (1 Int, 6 Druidism, 4 Beast) and not the Torment setting, seeing as my charming scrolls work great. The spell mostly just works on lizards and rats.

My initial build looked like this: 5 Strength 6 Armor Use 5 Roman Training 2 Luck Fast on Feet Mighty Warrior Strength is to carry stuff, kill stuff, and bash down the very common 10 strength doors. Armor Use is to stay alive. Roman Training is to kill stuff especially with slings. Both are cheap. And Luck is Luck. I like Toughness, but in the end its protection is cheaper to duplicate with Armor Use and Toughness than Mighty Warrior's bonus is with offensive skills. Fast on Feet is essential to surviving many fights, especially outdoor encounters. I found the first dungeon to be quite doable without magic. Geneforge Agent style sniping tactics can get you through nearly all the goblins and rats, though I had to save the wights and drake for later. The Ruined Hall was harder, especially Dolojan. Dolojan sucked. I reloaded a lot to avoid blowing too many summoning scrolls. The reason to postpone magic is that the first few levels of high cost skills get you BY FAR the most bang for your buck at traders. (Money cost always increases 1x, 2x, 3x, ..., whereas skill point cost increase 3, 3, 4, 4, and so on.) So as much of a hassle as it is getting to Hagfen without magic, it's a hassle that's worthwhile. Those extra skill points add up -- 2 each in Druidism, Health and War is 18 skill points!

Congratulations on finishing. I think you underestimate Torment; N:R has difficulty stepped up in general from previous games. The problem in this case is that everything has so much extra HP. Even Clouds of Night won't kill things in one hit, but you WILL sometimes die in one hit, so you will have to rely heavily on summons and charms in addition to direct damage. A Celt has more flexibility than a Roman, but summons and charms on top of magic are expensive, and the game will become a nightmare of SP management.

Basilisks on Torment, btw, are the end of the world, as they have fairly high HP and can no longer be easily despatched. I think Charm Beast + reloads may well be a necessity against them.

Synergy, you can get around the problem in your Celt game. Just look up the SDFs Cartimundus needs to accept your quest as complete (you certainly have the crowns!) and use the character editor to change them. I'd actually recommend putting points in Strength and Armor Use first. There's very little elemental or magical damage in the first dungeon (until the very bottom of it). You get similar returns from Strength as far as melee damage, and it also allows you to bash doors and carry sufficient weight.

Not really. Swords do about 80% the damage of comparable pole weapons, but allow you to equip a shield.

That's what not being in combat mode is for.

Really? I don't think I've fought a single rat from the overworld map. Regardless, they are never concentrated as badly as the chitrachs, and frankly, a Vapor Rat is more distinct from a regular rat than pretty much any of the chitrach varieties are from each other.

When is a double post useful? When it avoids a double topic... So I've started a Roman singleton on Torment, named Colossus in honor of the Colossus of Nero , though I have to admit my original inspiration was Piotr Rasputin (link breaks ubb). This is the damage reduction build described above. The most important stats are all untrainable (Armor Use, Roman Training, Str, Luck, Endurance) so there's no mucking about with trainer min-maxing. Mighty Warrior and Fast on Feet are obvious. I briefly considered Toughness (which seems to reduce damage by about 16%) but decided FoF's initiative was more important. Things started out well enough. Goblins hit annoyingly hard on Torment, and the higher level rats are brutal, but by halfway through the mines I had Armor Use at 8 and was already resisting nearly 2/3 of my physical damage. The nice thing about Roman Training is it boosts missile attack damage too, so I've been using a lot of hit-and-run tactics with my sling. Shoot, back 3, shoot, back 3, shoot, back 3, then close for the kill at melee range. Fire resistance is at 50%, so I was all ready to take on the drake on the bottom floor. But wait... did I say the rats hit hard on Torment? Mozannos hits for 70ish before armor and has multiple attacks. Even shielded and heavily armored he occasionally kills me in one turn. This game is definitely harder on Torment than any of its predecessors.

With 0 Armor Use, a Blessed Large Shield (listed at 24% protection absorbed an average of 15% damage (range: 5-26%). With 10 Armor Use, it absorbed an average of 28% damage (range: 15-48%). With 40 Armor Use, it absorbed an average of 49% damage (range: 29-72%). Getting to 10 Armor Use costs a mere 30 skill points for Romans and DOUBLES the value of your armor, at least up to a point. This is the equivalent of having permanent, 50% damage reduction. (Do the math -- it really is.) Actually, it costs 18 if you train up to 6. Sheesh. 20's very doable. On Normal, with good armor, this means single digit damage all the time. Elemental and magic resistance can be pumped high as well using Roman Training, Luck, and Endurance. Throw in some buyable spell circles, enough Strength to carry stuff and hit hard, and the Icy Longsword -- which now heals plentiful amounts of HP, when you don't take much damage -- and I think we have a viable recipe for a Torment singleton.

Today I set out to confirm that stats affect melee the way I thought they did, since I was so off on spells. This time my observations were more accurate, but there's still some interesting data. I tested with the Obsidian Spear and Icy Longsword and recorded drained HP values as well (only striking when not near full health). The base character was again 10 Strength, 10 Melee and Spear skills, 10 Berserker, and NOT Mighty Warrior. The average damage (again, against enemies with no armor): Stat Change Obsid IcySw Drain + Obs + Icy + Dr ----------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Base 121.2 82.4 10.9 +10 Strength 166.7 113.9 15.1 45.2 31.5 4.2 +10 Sw/Sp 141.7 103.1 11.0 20.5 20.7 0.1 +10 Berserk 150.0 110.5 16.0 28.8 28.1 5.1 Mighty War. 141.4 99.4 11.1 20.2 17.0 0.2 Bless Spell 136.6 97.1 7.8 15.4 14.7 -3.1 First off, the drained HP varied pretty heavily and is probably entirely random and not dependent on any of these factors. The Obsidian Spear claims to do 1-7 damage per skill level, and the Icy Longsword says 1-5. However, this only seemed to affect Strength. Strength however favored the Spear more than we would expect from random die rolls (average of 4 for spear and 3 for sword, versus the 3-to-2 ratio observed). That last part could be random variation, as this data was (as expected) less well-behaved than the spell data, and I didn't feel like doing the 400 blows. I couldn't test Roman Training with a Celt. When I tested it less rigorously with my Roman, it appeared similar to melee weapon skill. That makes sense -- Berserker has to have something better about it, given Roman Training's crazy resistance bonuses. At level 14 at least, Mighty Warrior appears to be equivalent to TEN levels of regular weapons skills! Wow. That's an amazing bargain. The main take-home here appears to be that Strength is great; but just how much better it is than the other skills depends on whether you plan on using the Obsidian Spear (or whatever that crazy pike is), or the Icy Longsword.

This is only tangentially related, but it\'s funny.

I killed Raven as a Roman singleton using almost pure hack and slash, though it did require using either an Ambrosia, two summoning scrolls, or a ridiculous number of healing potions. But really, compared to Reptrakos, he was a cake walk. With enough armor and magic resistance not much can hurt you. I'd bet the scroll is intended to work that way, given that Romans don't have access to Spirit Circle, and that Jeff seems to prefer avoiding those kinds of conflicts entirely rather than having to write extra code to handle them.

I haven't been playing on Torment, but if Torment has the usual increases in monster HP, Darts of Ice must be totally worthless on Torment. Randomizer, do you have an idea of how much you need to raise magic stats for the charm spells to maintain effectiveness?

Prompted by Randomizer, I decided to do some more legitimate, empirical tests on spell damage. So I now have several pages of Excel tables. The experiment tested damage from different spells at different levels of Intelligence, Druidism, and the circles. All other factors were controlled for, with the exception that the PC always has the Druid Mastery trait -- its effects are unknown, but anyone using direct damage spells will likely have it. So, I was WAY OFF before. It's not clear that all the magic stats have the same effect, and it looks like they may affect different spells in slightly different ways. But in general, Intelligence and Druidism appear to affect magic damage identically. The effect of Spell Circles was a little erratic -- for Lance of Fire and Darts of Ice they had about 2/3 the effect of Int/Dru, but for Heartshock they had the same effect and for Ravage Life they had about 3/2 the effect. I don't think these discrepancies are due to random factors, as the data was remarkably well-behaved; unlike the Geneforge engine games, variance is mostly limited to +/- 10% of the average damage. Basically, stats are not nearly so relevant for spells as they are for melee. At high skill level, the effect of 3 points of Strength being added is still definitely visible; that's not true of adding 3 points of Intelligence. So you can be a great fighter early on by pumping stats, but you can't really coast through the game on spells until you get the good ones. Here's the average damage I got (against zero resistance enemies) with each damaging spell (at 10 Int, 10 Dru, 10 of each Circle), along with its mana cost and targets: Code: 1 2 47.4 Lance of Fire1 10 102.0 Ravage Life1 15 121.5 Heartshock1 28 159.0 Doom3 12 59.6 Darts of Ice5 14 110.2 Soul Lances5 30 222.9 Clouds of Night Darts of Ice sucks... a lot. It's just horribly overpriced. Lance of Fire is cheap, but weak. Ravage Life is a great value considering you also get slowing and cursing out of it. Also, Ravage Life, Heartshock and Doom appear to be equally unresistable, which makes Doom rather less enticing! Soul Lances, however, is clearly the turning point in value per SP spent, and Clouds of Night is perhaps better given its unresistability.

No, I'm not. As I said, the testing was meager, though it was consistent. I basically tested the duration of War Blessing (which had no variation) before and after raising Intelligence, Druidism, and War Circle different amounts. It's possible, for example, that duration is not affected the same way as damage is. But it makes sense, given that Strength has twice the effect on melee damage that melee skills do. That was pretty clear from testing.