...are from Tibus

Note for casual readers: Most people finish the game somewhere around levels 19-23, what's described here is not sane. Via Pigeon on discord, looks like it is in fact possible to hit level 29 without any cheating. Steps: 1. Reach level 26 by killing the Door Golem repeatedly. Note that this will take somewhere around 2500 kills, so "tedious" doesn't even begin to describe it. 2. Kill all exceptionally high-level targets that won't anger the Servants or Barzites. This includes the denizens of Gazak-Uss and other high level zones, as well as all the Takers, Learned Thani, etc. 3. Learn each creation type besides the fyora; read all codexes; turn in all Shaper Records and all Iron Bars; complete Zensital's quest. (You need to have not done any of those things previously.) 4. Finally, kill Zakary, Barzahl, and anyone else you had to leave alive. Steps 2 through 4 provide enough XP to go from level 26 to to level 29. If you kill literally everything there's even a little wiggle room. As an additional point of amusement, if you do this, it's possible to shape a level 50 creation, specifically an Eyebeast. You need to be a Shaper will all skill points put into Magic Shaping, Shaper Robe equipped, with all 5 points of Create Gazer, and purchase all the augments for said Eyebeast:

You don't. Alhoon likes to discuss things you can do by hacking or modding (or that the developer could obviously change) as if they are things any player could do.

Per usual, if you initiate combat via a conversation option, the rest of the zone doesn't turn hostile. That option does exist here... it just doesn't appear unless you've completed the Emissary's quests. In this case, it looks like this was done so that the option can be witty. Attacking a friendly creature in combat mode normally turns the whole zone hostile, so that's not really a surprise.

do any characters in any geneforge game actually refer to Fire, Magic, or Battle shaping in dialogue? I'm not sure, but I can't think of any. it's certainly not a distinction many shapers appear to be at all concerned with.

I'm curious about editing scenarios to fix bugs and compatibility. It seems like, with so many scenarios, if there are compatibility issues, it would make more sense to just fix them on the engine end? Even if it's in a clunky way that's equivalent to patching changes on every scenario. That seems like it would be a lot less work, and it sidesteps any questions/effort about getting in touch with authors, keeping original versions available, etc etc. But maybe I'm misunderstanding what's in play here.

Well, if they really wanted to stop the chaos, they would have needed to destroy the vial. Giving it to Thrackerzod would be more negligent than leaving it with Yu-La IMO. Frankly he seems even less capable of hanging on to it than she did.

Alhoon, you played 15-year-old games in backwards order and expected everyone else to cater their independent conversations around you. Frankly, it was ridiculous, and bringing that up definitely does not support the argument for avoiding spoilers.

you are welcome to look it up yourself if you don't believe me. in fact that would be a lot more helpful than just asking "are you sure?" all the time and expecting somebody else to put in the effort. (but yes, i am sure.)

Unfortunately, the Helix Ring and Frosted Annulet upgrades are completely hardcoded, so there's no way to mod those. (At most, I could have the anvil replace them with non-hardcoded versions, but that would remove any chance of using their unique effects, which are the only interesting things about them.)

OG1 training was uncapped -- remember you could max out Luck with Dig? -- and skill point costs were fixed, so there was not actually any way for canisters (or anything else) to affect it. I have a vague memory of maxing out Parry during the OG2 tutorial so that the free point from Shanti would be worth the most skill points, so maybe that was a thing in OG2 after all.

I agree with alhoon, at least to a degree. The Takers are not around after G2, and while obviously they are the direct predecessor of the Rebels, there's very little direct cultural continuity between the Takers and the Rebels. Also, neither group is particularly monolithic. Astoria doesn't really represent Awakened ideals. She represents pragmatism. Obviously she's the G5 faction that the Awakened would find least repugnant, but she's not an idealist. (Re spoilers, although I'm sympathetic to people who want to avoid spoilers, G5 came out 15 years ago, and these forums are full of posts that spoil things about later games in the series, because they have 20+ years of posts on them. If you want to avoid spoilers, this forum is a bad place to be, and that's hard to change.)

Oo, interesting. Yeah, Easss doesn't actually mention "vial" or "goo," but he clearly says he stole the Geneforge sample from Yu-La, good call. A correction though -- the G1 PC does not retrieve the sample for Yu-La, the PC is simply a courier who brings it from Yu-La to Thrackerzod. And since in canon G2, Yu-La takes it off the island and the Takers steal it from her, it seems that the G1 PC did not perform that task and actually has nothing to do with that vial making it to the Takers. If the PC had had more concern for the Sholai and/or the inutile, they might have prevented it, though. (Also, it's red, not orange.) (It's also not clear that Yu-La knows it's a sample of the Geneforge -- if she had, then as a greedy trader, presumably she would have bargained for a lot more in exchange for it.)

Really glad you enjoyed it Lorn! Thanks for the suggested additions. FWIW, your points 1, 2, and 3 have absolutely nothing to do with this mod. Point 5, and your drayk confusion, would be addressed by reading the codex. It's a little weird to complain about things, where you have refused (repeatedly!) to read the mod's own explanation of how it works. I don't really know what to tell you. Point 4 -- Thornstalker's quests are absolutely completable. I've actually gotten a lot of positive feedback about them. They definitely do require exploring all over the place to find enough thorns. There are 4 separate thorn quests (all listed in the text log, as I have now pointed you to three times ) plus a final reward for completing all of them.

I don't think canisters ever factored into skill point cost in any version of Geneforge, did they?

That's deliberately left for the player to figure out. Minor spoiler: Sometimes in games you have to put 2 + 2 together, rather than having somebody give you a quest marker.

AFAIK there's exactly one reference to the vial of goo in G2, and it's extremely vague and gives zero context to anything. Am I missing something too?

"I am not a Taker!" "I will probably script my character" because I don't like the options the game gives me... *looks at Easss*

"this is supposed to be a Guardian's most fundamental ability besides whacking something" Where does it say that?

He also said he never wanted to design the Tower of Magi again. Famous last words...

No, I think that would also feel weird. Since your initial complaint is basically just thematic, not great to solve it by making the thematic elements in other parts of the game unintuitive.

Yeah, evasion can be pretty different on different difficulties. First because of the chance, but also because of what happens when a hit does make it through -- if that's a light hit, and you evade most of them, you can just ignore it, you're unstoppable. But if it's a 1HKO, 80% evasion probably counts as "not good enough." Taking a step back, though, it's a non-interactive game mechanic, with the problem that it becomes dramatically more valuable the more you have of it. If you go from 90% dodge to 95% dodge, you cut your incoming damage (and statuses) in half. But going from 50% to 55% is much less impressive. The build strategy thus becomes "all or nothing." And it's almost impossible to make it interesting, because you don't want it to break the game if somebody goes all in on it. This is essentially what happened with the original incarnation of Parry, in OG2. This was a common balance issue in mid-era SW games. In Avadon 1 IIRC, putting all your stat points into Dex and wearing evasion items resulting in almost never being hit, even on Torment. So evasion was nerfed in Avadon 2, and you could no longer get it up to a consistent level at all. This is a little silly. The energy costs of weapon shaping skills are 10, 20, 15, 15, 20, 20, 25, and 15. Those are quite low -- your per-round energy regain will pass most of them pretty early on. Also, Intellect does not improve your rate of recharge, only your max energy.

https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/indie-postmortem-1-geneforge-2-infestation "Eighteen months ago, we released Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor. This was an all-new title, the second game in what I had planned as the Queen's Wish trilogy. This game sold very poorly. This was a shame. I'm really proud of the game. It's the sort of game I want to play, and I really liked playing it. However, in my advanced age, I may have fallen out of touch with what people want. When I was younger, I always said, "I write the sort of games I want to play. If people don't want what I like to play, I'll quit this business and sell shoes." Luckily, since this didn't happen until I'm old, I'll do remasters instead. (I WILL finish the Queen's Wish story somehow. I'm still figuring out a way to make it viable.)"

Just to be clear, the conclusion of my quoted post was not "1.5 years"...

What difficulty?

Wait, did he actually talk about a Nethergate update? That's amazing. I hope so!