...are from Tibus

5 hours ago, Randomizer said:

Part of your problem is Geneforge 4 was made with Windows 2000, but Geneforge 3 was Windows 98 and Geneforge 1 was Windows 95. You are probably seeing a compatibility problem.

G1 came out in 2001.  Surely the PC version was tested with Windows 2000?

And Avernum 4 doesn't use the same engine.  A4 came out 5 years after G1, and while there are certainly parts of the engine that are in common, there are large parts that are very different.

16 hours ago, alhoon said:

 

So, before you get access to Drayks and the good stuff, you have to steal from the Radiant college? That does eliminate the issue of getting tier 3 creations too early. 

So, I think, a good route would be to go to the Awakened, not explore the harder zones there and then make a quick line to the Barzhites, learn tier 3 (canisters around their areas or that guy that trains you without requiring to be Barzhite in Radiant college) and then sabotage the Radiant college. 

Cutting through the warbred Serviles in Rising would be actually challenging, I think, as you would be lower level and not have top creations. 

There are some other ways to gain access as well, but none of them are possible to access that early in the game.

22 hours ago, Randomizer said:

Overrun mod has an additional requirement that you have to do a faction quest after joining a faction before you can be trained by Tuldaric. Original version doesn't require that/

Only on Veteran or Torment difficulty.

Overrun does not impose that requirement on Normal or Casual difficulty.

(Shanti explains this in the opening.  It is also in the codex.)

Overrun does make a whole pile of changes.  Absolutely respect wanting to play without "reading the manual," but just be aware you may encounter other differences and be surprised.

fwiw, almost anything you download through steam is a full install that can be run without steam.  you just find the place it was installed and run the game directly, rather than launching it via steam.

That's only true if you send her away.

The option should be there.  If you've refused to pronounce Emily's fate at all, that might be holding things up somehow.  You might need to do that so Zakary will give you his cue on the next piece.

I'm just going to say again, the quote above is out of context and I object to it.

That quote was pulled out of an extremely specific context.  It was not a categorical statement, as you have presented it here, and it does not belong in this topic.

Regarding the other things you say:

- Weapons and spells do not have the same base hit rate.  (This is easy to see, as otherwise, weapons would always be more accurate than spells, but obviously this is not the case.)

- The healing from the Vampiric Lance is not very impressive.

- If you haven't invested in magic at all ("I have battle magic 1") then no, low-level spells are not going to outdamage a high-level missile weapon.  I don't understand why this is confusing.

You may also be ignoring other bonuses and penalties to accuracy, which can make a difference:

- War Blessing is +10% to hit, you want to cast this (and other buffs!!) before any difficult battle

- If you get cursed in a battle and don't bother to cure it, that's a -10% penalty

- Some armor comes with penalties to hit.  Weigh the bonuses and penalties of your equipment thoughtfully

- You get tiny bonuses from other skills; unless you're a Guardian, you will probably do better with spells (Firebolt is effectively free) than the Vampiric Lance

10% doesn't sound like that much but it can add up.

What level are your creations?  If you're making low-tier creations with low shaping skill, they'll be at a lower level and will have accuracy problems.

However, with your PC at level 17, your PC's personal attacks shouldn't really have accuracy issues.  (On any difficulty!)  If you yourself are missing 70% of the time, something else is going on.

Basically, it's only worth increasing Priest Spells or Mage Spells for the purpose of being able to cast new spells.  You do get a small damage increase from those skills, but it's not much, and it doesn't scale very well since it stacks additively with so many other sources of damage dice.  There are better options for where to put your skill points, including:

- survival (Hardiness, Resistance)

- utility (weapon skills so you can use Adrenaline Rush)

- damage (Spellcraft, which may be less noticeable than P/M Spells at low levels, but by mid/late game the reverse is true; also, Spellcraft helps out with buff/debuff duration, which P/M Spells does not)

> "Giving everyone some of everything makes tactics quite flexible."

The 4-stat system kind of makes this not work so well for most offensive skills, especially because of accuracy.  You can mix Priest and Mage spells just fine (though both have perfectly good attack spells on their own, so if you're mixing those it's probably to get more healing).  But there isn't much point to having a mage who has a weak melee attack instead of a completely pointless one, if it's going to make him worse at the main thing he does.  Similarly, there's not much reason to have a melee fighter learn a few mage spells -- they'll never do great damage, they'll miss a lot unless you invest a lot into Intelligence, and his melee attack will be weaker and less accurate.

> "By doing that you can wear/use heavier armor/shields ... and by doing 'that' you don't have to put a bunch of skill points into resistance"

Resistance and Hardiness are arguably the two strongest skills in the game.  Swordmage does not in any way replace them.  (It also isn't actually required to equip good armor, since you can wear 10% encumbrance and still cast if you equip a longbow for the +5%, and there are a number of great magical heavy armors with low to zero encumbrance.)

Resistance is actually so good that it's not a completely crazy choice to have a warrior invest in it, though it's obviously not cheap for a warrior and comes at the cost of some DPS.  But for a spellcaster it's a no-brainer.

Endurance makes increasingly little difference as your level gets higher.  So as long as you can get through the early levels, the optimal build for melee is probably all stat points into Strength.  That said, it won't kill you to put a few points into Endurance if you really want to.

On the other hand, Hardiness and Resistance both reduce damage by a huge amount.  Hardiness is a top priority for pretty much any character.  Parry is also really good for a front-liner.

For DPS output, dual wielding is just massively better than sword and shield in AEFTP.  The higher tier melee skills aren't super amazing but they do provide more DPS improvement than Melee Weapons does.

Here's a sample build I put together way back when:

All points into Strength

8+2 Melee Weapons
+1 Pole Weapons
+2 Bows
+1 Thrown Weapons (Warrior Cloak for the last 2 points to AR & BS)
10+2 Hardiness
10+2 Parry
10+2 Blademaster
7+2 Quick Action
9+2 Lethal Blow
8+2 Dual Wielding
+2 Resistance

Health Traits x3, Parry Mastery x2, Mighty Blows x3, DW Traits x2, Improved Strength x5

What Jace has discovered is basically that Torment isn't actually that tormenting, in AEFTP.  He picked up on some key OP abilities, notably Adrenaline Rush.  And that's enough to carry him.  However, there are a lot of inaccurate statements in his description.  It just doesn't work the way he says, and his choices aren't as optimal as he paints them as:

> The goal is 31+2 points in melee for the 33 damage dice and accuracy. That's basically what I'd have gotten from strength.

Melee Weapons gives +1% accuracy per level.  Strength gives +5%.  These are not the same thing.

> Then, because I know that evasion is over-powered (from experience) -- barely anything can even hit my soldiers -- I want split dexterity.

I don't know how far he is in the game but there is no way that 14 Dexterity is enough to consistently evade things on Torment.  (Dexterity also doesn't help you evade cold, acid, or poison attacks.)  This has been discussed a lot recently on the discord -- evasion isn't bad, but you really do need to pump Dex to make it work.

> This also scales with blademaster. In fact, blademaster only becomes more important for damage once the damage dice are 34+, which happens early.

This sounds like he has recognized that you get diminishing returns from damage dice (which is true!) but he seems to think he only gets damage dice from Melee Weapons.  This is incorrect -- they also come from Strength, and they also come from the weapon's base bonus level.  (EDIT: And from half of PC level, I forgot that bit.)  So he's actually hitting 34 damage dice much, much earlier than he thinks he is.  This is the real reason that maxing out Melee Weapons is not actually the way to max out damage.

You know what really makes somebody sound wise?

It's when they tell you that they are wise and that other people are stupid.

Wise people are always doing that.

According to alhoon's logic, new games don't take longer than remakes, so the same logic would suggest that a major reworking wouldn't take longer than a regular remake 😛

Yeah, SW has never done two games of the same series in a row, except for before SW had two multi-game series.

Jeff has said they take less time.  See, again, N:R for an extreme example.

Most of the steps take the same amount of time, but there are extra steps -- creating the scenario, drawing all the maps, and writing all the dialogue -- which are a large amount of work.  Touching up and updating these things simply does not take as long as creating them out of whole cloth.

On 5/25/2024 at 9:58 AM, Drayk Armitage said:

Work on different games isn't completely separated, and the timeline doesn't show seasons, so you can't specifically see which games took more work here, but Jeff has stated in the past that remakes take less work.

The data doesn't show that.  See my post above that you already incorrectly summarized.  I'm not arguing with shadows anymore.

You're completely ignoring the difference between a remake and a fresh game created from scratch.

Ah, good call on the codex entry.  Given the hundreds-of-years timeframe that most creation types have existed, "recently" could really mean anything, but yeah.

All we truly know about Stalkthorns is that they weren't on Sucia.  Maybe they aren't actually a brand new creation type, just one that didn't exist when Sucia was shut down.  That would explain why they aren't news and even the various plant-focused shapers in the Drypeak area don't have anything to say about them.

This is a 3 year old topic, so the "new player" probably isn't new anymore :-)  Let's close this up.

Alhoon, you know very well that we have lots of lurkers, lots of casual players who google questions about the game and end up here.  It is misleading at best to talk about things you can hack into the game as if it's something you can do in normal play.  This shouldn't require an argument.

(And yes, if you are editing game files directly, you are "hacking."  It's not a dirty word, and it's a very widely used word in modding communities on the internet, so if you don't like that, your argument is with the rest of the internet and not us :-)