Slawbug

Quote: Originally written by Hypertoroid: Dark Waters never actually involves starvation. In E2 you can just cast Manna over and over and rest in between. Nope. Manna isn't available until Mancuso, after Dark Waters, and Minor Manna -- which is tucked away in the Aranea cave, so many players miss it -- isn't much better than Light Heal All at stopping starvation, IIRC.

Yes, E2 makes a big deal out of taking away all your food... and then goes out of its way to provide opportunities to pick up hydra burgers and the like. The Tomb of Delrin-Bok (Dahris? I always mix them up) can be a little scary. Also the optional Resting dungeon, if you aren't at a relatively high level. Even the Ruined River Fort has Quickghasts that used to do a number on me. I love Dark Waters, probably because your inability to access anything outside of NE Exile means that intelligent players won't automatically outclass every encounter by having sought out useful stuff all over.

I wrote up some topics on enhancements, most easily accessed by searching for "Strategy Central" in this forum.

Do they have to be FIGHTABLE villains? If not, Vinnia would easily qualify as the villain of VoDT. She used several interesting assassination techniques in a bureaucratic struggle with rather big implications...

Dex doesn't help with melee to-hit in A4, regardless of encumbrance.

Even under that system (which I haven't used, because every time I try to play A2 I end up replaying E2 instead) I imagine that a penalty of, say, 50%, would be unlikely to put you more than a few levels behind, and could easily be worthwhile depending on how advantages work in A2. And smaller penalties are almost identical under both systems: a -10% gained penalty is roughly equivalent to a +11% needed penalty, a -25% gained to a +33%, etc.

Yup.

Can you even get 6 points in Create Battle Alpha? I don't think so.

Disposable creations work less well in G2+ because levels from shaping skill only give half a point in each stat per level, just like regular levels. In G1 those bonus levels gave a full point per level. Combine that with the prohibitively high cost of raising your base shaping skill bonus too high above +10, and you will end up with creations that are SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful, by ten or thirty (!) levels depending on the creation, if you keep them around and let them gain experience. Meanwhile, because all characters gain xp relative to your PC's level only, no matter how much xp drain you have from companions, you will never be more than a small handful of levels behind a permasolo PC, about 1-4 levels. (The xp penalties for advantages in Avernum work the same way. They are hugely less significant than the bonuses of the advantage/creation.)

Yeah, G1 was very unbalanced with regard to creation strength and how your stats impacted that. The levels creations gained from experience gave them, essentially, half as much power as the levels they gained from your shaping skill when you created them. The nice thing about that is that it made this kind of "disposable creations" model worthwhile to play.

You can actually continue to change your mind up until practically the end of the third (and biggest) island, so don't worry about it yet. In G1, it is generally agreed the Awakened were presented as the most rational and humane (though there are plenty of reasons to choose the other sects). G3 on the other hand is clearly intended to force a choice between two bad options. More people seem to side with the Shapers, probably because some of them, like Khyryk, seem a little more reasonable and less crazed.

Presumably, E3. I'm pretty sure there aren't any town character-based ferries in E1 or E2, just outdoor encounter-based ones.

The longer you keep a creation with you, the stronger it will end up being. In G2 and G3, the intensity of this effect outweighs having a very high shaping skill. The result is that it's usually beneficial to create the creations you want as soon as you have the essence and skill. You can pump their INT later, when you have extra essence, but spending a few levels on perm AI is a small price to pay for having your creations be at a permanently higher level, by those several levels. As for make inactive: I use it whenever I have creations in tow and enter one of the damaging atmosphere zones (at least, the ones where the entrance is a safe area).

How dare you compare a dysfunctional villain like Rentar-Ihrno with Slartibartfast. Rentar and bistromathematics... pshaw! The Nine-Headed Cave Cow is not pleased, and He or She has indigestion today, so you'd better watch out for bovine retribution.

muchos gracias.

Does anyone have a complete list of alchemy recipes and ingredients needed for each, in Avernum 3 and BoA? It's the last piece I need for some research I'm doing for EE, and I can't find one online. Thanks in advance.

Google has cached versions of his Cookbook as HTML and .DOC files. They leave out the pictures (were those tables?) though.

Thuryl is right, and that applies to both theories. Somebody do a nice controlled trial, huh?

I would be somewhat skeptical that Luck works differently for different kinds of items. It just doesn't fit with the way the engine is put together, with everything possible scripted and as little hardcoding as possible. I would love to see the results of a controlled test such as the following: - Pick a creature with multiple drops (look in the scripts - basic nephils and goblins might qualify) - Kill five of them (exact same creature, no variations whatsoever) 10 times each (the same five of them, save and reload) for three scenarios: All PCs with zero luck, three with zero and one (the killer) with 10, and all PCs with 10 luck. I had no idea that Luck affected drops in Exile. That's interesting, actually, given the randomness of the Exile drops.

It's hard to interpret those results since you have mixed in a totally indeterminate number of creatures of various types. Also, a significant number of encounters are activated along your path -- perhaps Luck affects the number of Nephils that appear at some point? It just doesn't sound like a very controlled environment. Anyway, it is a pretty well established fact that Luck *does* affect drop rates. How much is a good question, but if your data shows no change, I question the data's integrity.

I'm going to attempt to put together a file on game mechanics and other useful information, which I expect will take a couple weeks at the most for a first draft. Every time I play one of these big RPGs, I make lots of notes, the equivalent of 3/4 of a FAQ minus the walkthrough section, but I never do much to share them. I've decided I really ought to change that.

You mean, besides the profuse number of things that have been there since G1?

I'm not sure anyone has tested that. However, since some of luck's effects are only individual, and it's cheap, you may as well spread some around. My guess would be that it's an individual check, but I'm not sure, as in Geneforge series (same engine) increasing PC luck seems to affect creation-kill drops. You could test it yourself. Give one PC maxxed out luck, have the other one kill things, and see how often they drop compared to PCs with no luck at all.

Each creature has a list of things it can drop (though many have an empty list or just one item). For each item on the list, there is a default percentage chance the creature will drop that item when it dies. There is a seperate roll made for each item, so one enemy could always (in theory) drop everything. As far as I can tell, luck affects each of these rolls. I haven't tested it, but an increase of 1% per point of luck (possibly with the 10- and 20-caps we know and love) would make sense, given how drastically luck changes the possibility of a drop, and that this effect is more noticeable with drops that rarely happen without luck.

I think it's been pretty well established by now that pylons are a neat enemy and a good addition to a game when used sparingly. When they dot the landscape, things get boring and annoying.