Slariton

Technically, they aren't immune to either. The poison/acid "immunity" is at 80%, so they should still take some damage. Plus, it's a BUG -- ancillary poison and acid resistance is calculated with the magic resistance stat instead of the appropriate ones.

 

Their mental resistance starts at 90%, so it's unlikely anything will ever affect them. However, that's true of all the other 4th- and 5th-tier creations as well.

Whoever posted it wrote just like you, and use the graemlins just like you...

Jeff has implied five recently.

Hmm, you're right. Whoops.

I have to say, I'm not sure why even bother with the Stun mechanic the way it's implemented in G4. It just doesn't do much of anything.

That's not true at all. You CAN have the skill set, but it requires sinking a BUTTLOAD of points into useless skills first. Dexterity isn't very useful if you are going the Resistance route, as you will never have the skill points you need to pump your dodge rate up significantly. I guess you can use it for bows, but it still costs 42 points. The Hardiness is good, obviously. But buying 6 points of Endurance is a retarded waste for any build. It costs 36 skill points and returns practically nothing once you consider the 2 free (therefore not applicable for Resistance) points of Endurance you can get and the HP bonuses from Augmentation and Essence Armor.

 

After all that, Resistance then costs a huge number of skill points to buy. Those start to add up. Even buying 2 from Thompson, which means you are going a long long time with no Resistance, it will be hard to get over 10 in the score without neglecting everything else. I'm not sure if 10 Reistance actually reduces elemental damage by 40%, or if the individual 4%s multiply and it reduces it by ~30%. Either way, that effect is useful, but not really worth the total lack of effective offences you are left with after such a huge investment.

Yeah, the all caps font is horrid. Not only is it hard to read, it's spaced so oddly that it just doesn't look professional.

It is somewhat problematic that attacks with melee weapons and attacks with pole weapons are both called melee attacks. There is no difference between them other than the Melee and Pole Weapons skills, though.

Reapers have no "reaping" effect. They just do a lot of damage with a nice sound effect.

 

As SoT mentioned, stunning is somewhat random. However, it should be noted that Glaahks only have extra stunning power in G1 and G2. In G3 the way status effects were implemented was changed somewhat, and Glaahks cause slowing rather than stunning. The same is true of G4. This is a very unfortunate change, as they can no longer debilitate a creature even if they can't damage it much. In G3 in particular it makes all their attacks inferior to a Vlish.

Surely that isn't Cormac? Meh.

I think at one point there was a vague assumption of a double trilogy, but I'm pretty sure Jeff posted once to say that G5 would wrap up the Geneforge story.

Synergy just said "Geneforge Arena".

 

...

Clearly, Geneforge needs Chocobos.

Given that G5 is supposed to be the last game in the main story arc, and given that each game has been in a new location, I'd be very surprised if the Ashen Isles were revisited -- especially since they were the site of the game with the least critical acclaim.

 

The only location I could realistically see being revisited would be Sucia Isle, and even that seems extremely unlikely.

I actually find a do a HUGELY greater number of reloads when running a Lifecrafter. Until Drayks, your creations are quite fragile, and while you can always use tactics to protect a single character, it's harder to keep eight alive every time in a big battle. Even once you hit the tougher creations, occassionally something will manage to die.

 

A disposable creations model might require even less reloads than a singleton. But that also doesn't require a Lifecrafter. An Infiltrator can run it nearly as well and far more flexibly.

I imagine pumping lots and lots into mental magic will make Daze almost always work on everything in the game. This was the case in G3, certainly.

Hah! Now that is a challenge. I wonder if it's doable without cheating if you stay in combat mode forever.

Right, Trianus gives you the reward either way. That's why he is listed (and his reward is listed) under both options, while Crowley is only listed under one.

 

I guess that is somewhat confusing. I put the whole thing together with an eye to the reputation scores, so I always separated rewards and actions out based on them first.

It indeed starts at 100.

 

Red Mage refers to the "powergaming" munchkin strategy that maximizes earned bonuses -- whether you can get rewards from both sides where applicable.

http://minmax.ermarian.net/g4/g4q.html

You know, I thought about doing this. However, I did out the math, and even with maxxed skills, armor, and magical buffs, you will never block more than about 90% of damage (physical or magical). And for most of the game, you will be a lot closer to 50-60% than 90%. The thing is that you can get almost as good reduction with no skills, and just armor and buffs - about 80-85%. If you train up Resistance, I'm not actually sure you'd have enough skill points left to get both Mage Spells (for Dispel) and Priest Spells, anyway.

Furthermore, even if you went that path, training Resistance is a huge waste of skill points. Given that you have to invest in 6 points of Endurance, which is almost a complete waste, you have to buy a huge amount of Resistance before it becomes more cost effective than just training Hardiness more than is sensible.

Finally, remember that A4 uses the stun rules from G1-3. If your only way to avoid being hit in melee combat is Parry, stunning is going to be a problem. High stun resistance armor might fix that, but I dunno.

Thuryl's right. Lethal Blow would actually useful when you are at very high levels, if you could get enough of it (10+) to make it somewhat consistent. Blademaster would be parallel to Sharpshooter, if not for its craptastic unlock cost.

 

I probably *would* buy Magical Efficiency if it cost 1 and had no unlock cost. However, that's about as high as I'd go. And since you can buy 2 points for gold, that means I wouldn't really buy any with skill points.

 

Resistance would be quite decent without an unlock cost, though perhaps still slightly too expensive (it starts at what, 6?). Reducing nearly all magic damage by 4% isn't bad. If nothing else it would open up new builds for singletons.

The selling cursor is a very good suggestion. Alternately, just making the place you have to click bigger would do wonders. This is an example of an easily fixable interface problem.

Some of those blurbs have been practically unchanged since Exile 1 even though the game engine has changed a lot. Geneforge has a few that were copied from Avernum, I think, even though the stats are different. But Str and Dex have been incorrectly described in multiple dialogue boxes for numerous games now.

It does have some inaccuracies when it talks about what the statistics do and other technical aspects of the game engine, but it has far fewer than anything else out there, including the little blurbs that display in Geneforge 3 itself. But the FAQ is generally excellent.

Actually, you can change skill point costs, more or less. It would be fairly simple to create a dialogue script that exchanges skill points for skills, at the appropriate, dynamic rate, after checking to make sure you have enough. That would bring us back to Exile-style, talk-to-the-trainer training, but I don't see a big issue with it -- particularly if it's only used for special skills, for which it isn't unrealistic to require a special trainer.