Mea Tulpa

Added those - anyone else have opinions about Vermeers?

Bloodmoon, is there anybody else there with a name from the same source? Jeff has tended to pull 2 or more names at once from books, TV shows, etc.

You won't be happy when you see the fight involving the 500 Doomguards, then.

Dok, this thread is headed in a very bad direction right now, so you might want to elaborate on your question if you want it to have a happy life.

Well, up until said all-out war, Avernum's solution was to exile them to the Abyss.

Random -- Spellcraft costs A LOT more than Battle Magic for Agents in G1. I forget the exact amount, but it's something like twice or three times as much. Edit: Angelic -- it's cosmetic.

I beleive you need to have asked someone else about the toadstools first, possibly the cook in Egli.

More to the point, exploitable imbalances and bugs are two VERY different things.

It is a bit confusing. Some stats use the 10-cap, and some don't. If a stat doesn't use the 10-cap, it gives the same effect for each new point, whether it's an extra die of damage, chance to parry, improved resistance, whatever. If a stat does use the 10-cap, its effect increases at the following points: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 29 Basically, you need 2 points for a bonus after 10, and 3 points for a bonus after 20. Hence the "10-cap" because often, combining with naturally increasing skill pt costs in G2 and up, it becomes much less useful to buy more of that skill after you get to 10. But, skills are treated differently in different games. In G1, ALL skills use the 10-cap. Their skill point costs don't go up, though, so it's actually quite a cool system. In G5, I believe that NO skills use the 10-cap. I am not 100% sure about this, but most at least do not. In the games in between, it varies, with G2 and G3 applying more 10-caps and G4 fewer. I know Fire Shaping and the other shaping skills apply the 10-cap in every game except G5. I believe the same thing is true of Parry and Quick Action. Hope this helps. Edit: Thuryl, there are DEFINITELY other 10-capped stats in G2-4.

Mehken comes and talks to you regardless of what you did with her earlier.

Hey, I never said the game was easy! The beginning is particularly difficult; your health is so low that with the permadeath, it really requires picking up a good understanding of how to survive in combat. It is definitely a game that _requires_ save-and-reload, at least in a few places.

Golgolath, I think you stepped in a little deep here. You're addressing matters of preference as if your own opinion is going to be shared by everyone. To give one example, I absolutely can't stand the Avernum dialogue system. I could elaborate, but that's not the point; the point is that's my opinion, and this is a question of opinion. Both dialogue systems do what they need to do. Dismissing somebody else's preference as "nostalgia" while suggesting that the game you like better is actually "better" or "better made" is self-centered, to say the least. Why is it so hard to believe that somebody else might genuinely enjoy different things, or care about different things? A few other points. In a CRPG, ideally, fighting should be fun in and of itself. If fighting isn't fun, and the only reason you do it is to grind towards some kind of power-up, it begs the question of why you are playing a game whose main modality of play bores you. Finally, you say that in Avernum "the game world is massively larger and fully fleshed out." I don't know what you're talking about, but it's wrong. The fact is that the game text in Exile and Avernum is almost exactly the same, and game maps also correspond almost exactly. A few optional dungeons were changed (and in very rare cases, added) between Exile and Avernum, but the "game world" is not "massively larger" by any stretch of the imagination. It's almost exactly the same, just with different graphics.

Besides which, the existence of the Vahnatai implies the existence of spaceships. I mean, they look just like the stereotypical thin glowing aliens that were all over pop culture in the mid 90's.

This sounds like another good time to plug Jewel of Arabia, which had a realistic and balanced implementation of a PC elephant.

Yeah, but he's a stereotypically violent black guy being chased after by law enforcement, so it's okay.

You have to actually ACCEPT the "quest" to check out the assassin's room, after Astoria suggests you do so. In other words, you have to choose the dialogue option that says "Yeah, I'll go look" or whatever. The option appears immediately but for some reason a lot of people seem to skip past it.

Originally Posted By: Chr1suf And the part with human as base form for the battle alpha and beta (as they are advanced alpha) was put there too. (not sure about the thahd was listed too as it really a long time ago but it was somewhere in the game.) Heustess definitely says that many creations came to be by experimental shaping on existing animals and men. I'm not sure it says that is categorically true of all creations, though. Clois does say she thinks serviles are shaped humans, but she's not sure. However, I don't think there's anything about battle alphas or betas being shaped from humans. It's certainly a reasonable conclusion to draw given their physical form, but I ran several searches of the G1 dump, including for "battle alpha" and "human" and found nothing linking the two.

What he actually said, BlueRivets, is that he *can't* do anything about it. Given how quickly he has been working to get out patches on other PC graphics problems the past week, I think it's pretty clear that if there was anything he could do to help you, he'd be doing it.

Pyro would like hear more feedback from other users about his trainer. The thread is back in business; please keep it civil, at least out of respect for his work!

The easiest solution is to change your screen resolution to a more traditional one before playing. (My default is 1280x800, but I can switch to 1024x768 unstretched.)

It doesn't quite apply to charming because charming isn't handled like damage. Charming is basically a standard RPG to-hit roll, except instead of using accuracy and dodge scores, you get CHANCE = (Base chance) + (5 * (spellcraft + mental magic + spell skill)) - (mental resistance) So, extra points in mental magic are useless against creatures with low mental resistance, and make a big difference against those with high mental resistance. Since mental resistance is mostly just based on level for NPCs, extra mental magic skill is always helpful.

There is no "cap" -- the "cap" that DV talks about does not exist. There are diminishing returns with battle magic in G5, as with every other skill in every other Geneforge (or Avernum) game. That is to say, every new point in the skill contributes the same amount of extra damage. So does every point in Spellcraft and every point in skill at casting an individual spell. So yes, the 14th point of Battle Magic or whatever will make less of a difference, but that's only because the damage has already been ramped up; it increases damage by exactly the same amount as the 2nd or 3rd point of Battle Magic.

Yes, it can safely be considered a bug. And no, magic hasn't been toned down. *Haste* has been toned down significantly, but some other neat buffs have been added or strengthened. Mental magic remains extremely strong despite a few minor tweaks, and battle and healing spells are unchanged I believe.

Jeff refers to the factions by the name of their leader throughout the game, the manual, and the hint book. Yes, the Rebels and Trakovites are still in play as names, but Alwan's sect is emphatically NOT referred to as "the Shapers." Four of the sects (all but Ghaldring's) follow the Shaper path, more or less, and three of them are led by Shaper Council members; and in only one out of six endings is Alwan's extremist path adhered to. I don't think I saw "Astorian" anywhere, either.

Originally Posted By: Nenayar All this reminds me of a christian legend about Eden. While Adam and Eva were mindless decorative creatures, everything was good. Then they got intelligence and free will and were banished from Eden. Why? Because they became dangerous for current government, they got the potential to start rebellion in future and of course were punished to ensure the safety of god. From god's point of view they became dangerously malfuctioning toys. This is certainly one viable interpretation of that story, but it isn't the only one. (It's also one that doesn't make very much sense in the context of any monotheistic religion -- how the heck could a human being pose a threat to God's safety?) My favourite interpretation came from a professor of mine in college who worked from oldest extant sources and examined discrepancies between source languages and later translations. She suggested that the banishment from Eden, though clearly a consequence of Eve and Adam's actions, was not a punishment per se. Rather it was a sort of coming-of-age, or developmentally, the beginning of rapprochement. The issue was not so much that God had been disobeyed, as that Adam and Eve had outgrown the garden.