Mea Tulpa

Are they a significant factor in G5? In G4, for example, there were enough shades and pylons that you couldn't rely much on cryoas or cryodrayks.

When are there ever bottlenecks in Geneforge? The problem with Cryodrayks is that their damage scales up more slowly than any other high essence creation. Drayks and Drakons will both do less damage to Drakons, it's true, but they will also take significantly less damage. Against a wingbolt, with no relevant resistances either way, the wingbolt will simply do more damage. Also, shades and pylons are problems. The real question for the all-magic shaping or all-fire shaping path is: are there any enemies that resist magic, but don't attack with it? And likewise for fire. War Tralls resist fire and magic, and don't attack with either. But Drayks, Drakons, and Wingbolts all have physical resistance, so the only real loser in the matchup is the Gazer (which is excellent otherwise). Eyebeasts resist magic heavily and attack with fire. This is a potential problem for wingbolts, and an easy win for fire shaping. On the other hand gazers resist magic, fire, and ice and attack with magic -- a problem for fire shaping. Pylons resist fire, ice, and physical attacks heavily, and attack with magic. This is a shining moment for wingbolts and gazers, a problem for war tralls, and a sure loss for drayks and cryodrayks alike.

What about shades, pylons, golems, and other non-creatable enemies with tough attacks and stilted resistances?

What types of enemies are most numerous / annoying in G5? I am trying to look at the viability of different creation attack types.

I just checked, and indeed the Guardian's base essence increased between G3 and G4. Since the Guardian is not a playable class in G4, I have to assume this was done for the benefit of NPC Guardians.

Emulators, irrespective of system, typically have a hard time playing recently released games. Software that was designed for the hardware of 5 years ago is a better bet.

I honestly suspect that the shaper/rebel character differences are unintentional. Especially the Guardian bonus. If you invest in Intelligence at all, the Warrior will eventually overtake the Guardian in Essence anyway. Guardians in G4 could shape in combat, remember? This probably used essence, so suddenly there was a reason to tweak their essence, and since the Guardian was no longer a PC, no reason *not* to. The confusing part is that at level 1, Guardians start out with more than twice as much essence as Shapers! That makes no sense, and is completely contradictory to the first three games. Edit: And DV, the point is that Endurance (and the class modifier) both have relatively little impact unless you pump Endurance pretty high. With a Servile and a starting Endurance of 3, you need to add about 10 points to Endurance to double your HP. The difference of the class modifier is that with a Sorceress, who also starts with 3 Endurance, you need to add about 13 points to double your HP. Or to give another concrete example, at level 19, a Servile with 10 Endurance will have about 322 HP. Whereas a Sorceress at level 19 with 10 Endurance will have about 250 HP.

I've done some digging, and I've more or less gotten the answers. I'm pretty sure I have the exact formulas for Energy and Essence. HP, I don't have the exact formula, but I have a pretty close approximation. The HP data is extremely tricky. Basically, each class has a base amount of HP, Energy, and Essence. The base amounts are all fairly low (with one exception which is probably a bug). Each class also has one of three possible multipliers for each stat. The multiplier changes the amount the stat increases as your level and your Intelligence/Endurance go up. The multiplier makes more of a difference for Spell Energy, a small difference for Essence, and a pretty tiny difference for HP. That last part is different from previous games! THE FORMULAS: Essence = Base + (Int * Lv+1 * Modifier) 8/8 = Large Modifier 7/8 = Medium Modifier 6/8 = Small Modifier Base = 10 for every class except Guardian, where it is 40. I think the Guardian essence was changed in G4, because Guardians were no longer PCs, and nobody realized it needed to be reset for G5. I count this as a bug. Spell Energy = Base + (Int * Lv+1 * Modifier) 14/8 = Large Modifier 12/8 = Medium Modifier 8/8 = Small Modifier Base = 20 for most classes and is between 16 and 28 for all classes. Hit Points = (Base - 6) + ((Modifier * End) + 5.8) * Lv+1) 0.90 = Large Modifier 0.75 = Medium Modifier 0.60 = Small Modifier Base = 20 to 30 for all classes. Note that a substantial portion of HP is independent of both Endurance *and* the class modifier. This is the 5.8 in the above equation. For example, at level 9 with 5 endurance, the difference between the medium and large modifiers is 6 out of over 100 hit points! Not much at all. Class Base Values and Modifiers Code: CLASS ESSENCE SPELL ENERGY HIT POINTS------------ -------- --------- ---------Guardian 40 + 6/8 20 + 8/8 24 + 0.90Warrior 10 + 7/8 20 + 8/8 28 + 0.90Servile 10 + 6/8 16 + 8/8 30 + 0.90Agent 10 + 7/8 20 + 14/8 20 + 0.75Infiltrator 10 + 7/8 28 + 14/8 20 + 0.75Sorceress 10 + 7/8 20 + 14/8 28 + 0.60Shaper 10 + 8/8 20 + 12/8 20 + 0.60Lifecrafter 10 + 8/8 28 + 12/8 20 + 0.60Shock Trooper 10 + 8/8 20 + 14/8 28 + 0.75 Conclusions Endurance is much less useful than it was in G4. Class also has much less impact on HP than it did in G4. Combined with Parry being nerfed (for the third time!) this strips the Servile, Guardian, and Warrior of almost all their defensive advantages. The Sorceress is starting to look significantly less hot. You can still use her as a traditional Agent who ditches Parry in favor of the occasional creation. But she is a poor choice for the role we all envisioned for her, as a shaper with better magic and better skill point allocation. The Essence you lose, compared to a Shaper, would take up more skill points to recover than she saves you on magic skills. Shock Troopers no longer have more spell energy than all the other classes. They do have more energy than the other strong-shaping classes, though. AND, they no longer have an essence handicap! Essentially, they are now Shapers with more spell energy, but less ability to invest in magic skills. If you plan on just pumping Int and using items for magic skill, this makes them an excellent fit. Finally, the Agent and Shaper classes are 100% inferior to the Lifecrafter and Infiltrator, albeit in pretty insignificant ways. The Guardian is also worse than the Warrior, except for the fact that he will have way more essence early on.

Are the secondary creations (Cryoa, etc) all the same as in G5, or have any changed? Anybody got a list? Edit: And if anybody could post a list of essence cost for all creations (I'm assuming there have been a few tweaks, as usual) it would be greatly appreciated as well.

Anybody got a list?

I notice an annoying amount of overlap among the best artifact possibilities. In particular, the +2 AP boots (which seem better than all the other boots for almost any build) overlap ingredients with the best Shaping Stat girdle *and* with the best Creation Stat Up gauntlets. And the best Magic Stat gauntlets overlap with the Spellcraft greaves. Can anybody give a rough approximation of which ingredients are available at what point in the game?

Parry at 2% per point is much weaker than it's ever been. So I fail to see how combat ability makes you more survivable in any way. Certainly it doesn't make your creations more survivable, which is more useful -- isn't it? -- for somebody who's shaping. We need to remember that all the classes are ALMOST EXACTLY IDENTICAL. There are only 2 differences: 1) Skill point costs. Unless you are buying 20 levels of a given skill category, the difference between a "strong" and "average" class for a given category is not significant. Mainly this makes the "weak" categories prohibitive to invest in since even getting to 10 purchased points will cost 30 skill points extra. 2) HP, SP, and Essence. The differences here appear to max out at about 1/3 difference. This is probably most potentially relevant with Essence. Melee weapons, battle magic, and creations all seem to be pretty acceptable methods of attack, so no class should be lacking in offense. Since Parry is so bad, this makes combat skills... not much of a consideration. I'm assuming QA is also at craptasmal A5 levels and not the acceptable G4 level. On the converse, items can now replace shaping and magic skill in the late game. Looking at it this way, here is a concave representation of the classes: Shock Trooper - high HP, high SP, poor magic until late Guardian - high HP, low essence, low SP, poor magic until late Servile - high HP, low essence, low SP, poor shaping until late Agent - poor shaping until late Shaper - high essence, low HP Sorceress - high essence (Note: I am not sure about the Guardian's essence. He starts with 43 while the Warrior starts with 13. I am assuming this is a bug/typo in the flat bonus essence, in which case it is not relevant late game.)

*blinks* Magic heavy Shock Trooper? Best way to dominate the game? Seriously Vlish? I fail to see how that's any better than a standard Sorceress, and that's ignoring the large chunk of the game where you have a huge handicap in magic.

I took down the statistics of all the classes, and I have basic guesses at HP, Essence, and SP math. I think it is well established the magic and shaping complement each other; and magic and combat complement each other; but it combat and shaping skills do not have the same synergy. This would leave us with essentially the same Servile/Infiltrator/Lifecrafter continuum we had in G4, but instead we now have the Sorceress. Compared to an Agent/Infiltrator, the Sorceress gets more HP, more SP, and more essence, and slightly more Int. The only loss is in combat skills. So unless you are going for a combat Agent, the Sorceress is just better. Compared to a Shaper/Lifecrafter, the Sorceress gets more HP, more SP, and slightly less essence. There are minor differences in magic and shaping skills. Since most Shaper builds involve buying more skill points in the Magic category than the Shaping category anyway, and the essence loss can be remedied with a small investment in Int, the Sorceress will get more out of her skill points and therefore is just better. The Servile vs combat oriented Infiltrator question is exactly the same as it was before. The Servile gets more HP while the Infiltrator gets more essence. Differences in skill points used are negligible. So basically, I see three major categories of optimized builds: 1) Combat Oriented Singleton (Servile or Agent/Inf) 2) Magic Oriented Singleton (Sorceress) 3) Shaping Oriented (Sorceress)

Heh. I forgot I still had that in my sig. I'm not sure how much of it makes sense without TM around, but I'm glad you liked it.

This is probably a Normal vs Torment issue. Charm scales up when difficulty scales up, whereas it is the reverse for high-powered attack spells, which are more useful when they kill things in 1-2 turns than in 5-6. I have sworn off Torment! I am playing this game on Normal, even if it doesn't kill me.

*nod* G4 already brought us back to the disposable creations paradigm.

I believe somebody got it open once using an insane investment in defensive stats and buffs, and there was nothing in it.

?

Battle magic ahead of mental magic for agent types, really?

Slar thinks that Nebulan's gimmicks are past their due. That is all.

So what about creations? What is the shaper/sorceress route like? Presumably it is different given all the talk about battle creations.

Interesting! Lots of nerfing, and it's stuff that probably needed to be nerfed. Haste in particular. Lack of super-Haste seems like it makes playing without creations very, very dicey on higher difficulty. You can't heal and attack in the same turn -- usually -- without using up items. You also can't hit-and-run effectively. Combined, this makes having super-strong defenses a necessity. Meanwhile, weaker Parry is bad news for Serviles. I think the days of the Insidious Infiltrator may be gloomier as well. Unless regeneration aura is enough on the HP recovery front, but I am skeptical. Sorceress FTW... right? Beta testers, what am I missing?

Goodbye, spambot.

Learning by practice is even more of a grind though, isn't it?