Mea Tulpa

> "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 :-)

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.)