Slariton

I agree that Mass Haste is very unbalancing. However, the unbalancing thing is really the effect of the buffs, which is (intentionally) huge in all SW games. You can frequently cast lots of individual buffs just before a big fight. So for the most part, Major Blessing just allowed you to spend less time in that annoying spell dialog, though it was also (in Exile anyway) cheaper than all the individual spells combined. There are some notable exceptions though, mainly tough special encounter fights on the overworld -- Major Blessing helped a ton on those. In Geneforge it is a little different since Speed uses so much energy. In the early game you can't multicast it much at all and in the late game it could still eat up most of your spell energy. On the other hand, in Geneforge you only have one character who can do *ANYTHING* other than attack. So mass haste can basically just boost your damage output. In E/A -- especially Exile, with all the spell variety -- it can increase your strategic options tremendously.

There seem to be ample suggestions that many creations come in reproducing and non-reproducing varieties. Battle alphas are a good example. Also, we all know how easy it is to turn an individual reproducing creation into a non-reproducing one... snip! (Unless, say, vlish reproduce by casting spells or something, which is possibly even dorkier and stupider than tentacle sex.)

Yeah. I think the max per round is higher, though. When I was carting around seven Artila, they seemed to max out around 90 acid damage per round.

Hmm. That's true. It seems like the easiest way to test this would be to grab something with 1% or 2% armor and take a bunch of hits, and see how much it blocks.

They are definitely cumulative the same way armor is, for a total of about 36% reduction. That I can say for sure. Also, I'm skeptical that the randomization would be per point of damage. In that case, wouldn't we expect naturally very low damage outputs to hit 0 damage post-reduction every so often with enough armor? Yet that's extremely rare.

I voted that way as well... and ditto. If I really felt the need to martyr myself in the face of every evil, unfair situation I was confronted with, I wouldn't have made it very far in the world, or helped much of anything. People with power generally do awful, wretched things. But unless I actually have the power to stop them, I'm not going to add throwing my life away to the list of things I blame them for.

So, I've done the first set of (potentially) many tests to figure out what effect different stuff has on damage. I used 12 data points per scenario, which is not really enough to be statistically sound, but I'm going for breadth over depth here... and there are so many things to test. Possibly as a result, there are a few confusing results. My default test subject was a naked Lifecrafter, level 61 (the hardcoded max) with all stats at base except for Endurance pumped to 20, on Torment. The class and level shouldn't matter; the difficulty setting should matter for the data itself but not the underlying formulae. However, that could always turn out to be wrong. There was enough variation that 50 tests apiece would have been better. That makes sense, given the large number of die rolls involved in computing initial damage (before defensive modifiers). Oh well. My default attackers were the four Thahds at the east entrance of of the Northforge Gates. Anyway, here's some of what I've concluded. 1) Most damage reduction effects move their damage to the resisted number. Some, however, just remove it quietly without increasing the resisted number. Parry is quiet. 2) Str, Dex, QA, and Luck all have no effect on damage taken. Endurance probably doesn't, although that's mildly unclear in my data. 3) Armor reduces damage exactly as the manual says: each piece does its reduction separately, at face value. (i.e., wearing a 20% and a 10% piece will reduce your damage taken by 28%, not 30%.) HOWEVER, this is true only ON AVERAGE. The actual reduction to each blow varied from 9% to 30% when wearing one 20% piece. When wearing one 34% piece it varied from 24% to 44%. However, I didn't test weaker armor. I can't imagine a 2% piece of armor ranges up to 12% reductions. 4) Parry's a little weird. 10 Parry will reduce damage by about 17% (not counting the chance of blocking it entirely). 20 Parry will reduce it by about 38%. And 29 Parry (the highest I could easily get) will reduce it by about 42%. The numbers are a little odd. My best guess is that the 20 Parry test run got a little lucky, and that each point of Parry acts like a separate piece of armor at 2%. That would give us expected reductions of 18% at 10, 33% at 20, and 44% at 29. Note that the blocking percentage is capped at 50%, which is achieved at 25 Parry. Between the damage reduction and the chance of blocking, 10 Parry will reduce the damage you eat by about a third. 20 Parry will reduce it by nearly two-thirds. Even ignoring Parry's reduced effectiveness against magic attacks, this means that Endurance is generally a much better value. (That doesn't take ease of healing into account, though.) 5) One thing, at least, is sane. Spells. Protection gives a FLAT 20% damage reduction to all phyiscal damage, period. Steel Skin does the same thing, and the two effects are cumulative. Essence Shield, Essence Armor, and (unsurprisingly) Elemental Shield all have NO effect on physical damage taken. The first two do help your dodge rate by quite a bit, though.

The good news is this is DRASTICALLY easier to test for in G4, since the game tells you how much damage you take AND how much you resist. The proportion resisted is definitely not static, even given two completely identical attacks on the same PC, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out an average given a decent set of trials. I want to do this, actually. Quantifying the reduction you get from Parry in particular would be useful.

Are you sure about all of those? In previous games -- definitely in A4, and I think in older Geneforges -- having Luck would cause the status screen to display some real bonuses and also some spurious ones that were never factored in anywhere.

By 2%. Out of curiosity, did anyone ever figure out what Luck actually did in Exile other than save you from dying?

question = "Tell me how you came to Sucia Island."; text1 = "He laughs. _The same way you did. I was imprisoned, captured by Trajkov. I was being sent to a new colony, to take it over and administer it. A mild honor, at best, though not a position without hope of advancement._"; text2 = "_Then his ship slew my craft, and I swam to shore at the east edge of this island. There, I was abducted._"; Although this does explicitly state Goettsch was not an apprentice, this doesn't sound like an apprentice type thing, and indeed we know from G2-4 that it's not. I can't find any references to other apprentices, either.

Goettsch was not an apprentice! He was a full shaper, on his way to some fledgeling colony to help lead it. Diki's right though, I reread the dialogue and he's clearly not trapped. However, I doubt his serviles could build him a suitable boat. If they could, then surely the PC could just order the serviles in Pentil to build him one. One thing that's unclear is whether Goettsch thinks, as the PC does, that Sucia island is far out in the ocean and isolated, when (as the ending reveals) it's really just a little bit east of Dillame. (Yes, that Dillame.)

Yeah, but you also need a source of puresteel, which is presented as extremely rare, and you need to know how to make the canisters. By the time G4 comes around that's probably known by plenty of people, I suppose. The puresteel is still rare, though.

I must have missed the part where Barzahl didn't get killed. It worked for him in only one of many possible G2 endings, and not in the continuity used for G3 and G4.

Uh... and this is different from what you are suggesting, that he flees when forced to, how? How would the fact that the Shapers are on alert about dangerous things from Sucia going to make him seem less of a freak? Regardless, it's clear that he is trapped on Sucia in G1, isn't it?

Presumably, if he knew how to create a living craft (is that what you mean by water drayk?), he would have done so, left, and perhaps come back with more resources to get rid of Trajkov with.

Shockwave makes me nostalgiac for Tremor.

I'm guessing you could get higher. Lots of friendly characters give experience.

You can actually use the Northforge Citadel geneforge and die from it, having already used the Southforge one. It is worth pointing out, though, that the effects of the Southforge geneforge are significantly less pronounced than those of the original geneforge.

They also appeared in Nethergate, but unless I blocked out the memory, they weren't in Avernum 4.

It became habitual, though, and there were ways to tell where you needed to look and where you didn't. (This was not the case in BoE where designers put secret doors in bizarre places and nonsensical terrain habitually, but through E3 this was true.) You could do it in the course of a modified directional mash, as in 898989898.

And people complain about having to bump into walls in the earlier games. I prefer that to having to mouseover every pillar, by a longshot.

Yes, Drakons and Drayks *both* do physical damage.

That's exaggerating the difference between the classes rather grotesquely. Your Servile build was probably tighter and more focused than your Warrior build.

A couple rounds of Essence Orbs will barely take out a single Fyora unless you also have at least a moderate amount of training in some form of magery, be it battle magic or general spellcraft.