Mea Tulpa

I agree with SoT that justification for the sudden surge in power (as in G1) is great, but there is another solution. PC power doesn't have to rise dramatically over the course of the game. It's well established that having power rise in some way, finding little bonuses -- the "ooh, a treasure chest" or "ooh, a canister!" effect -- is very pleasing to players. But those increases can be spaced out and they don't have to be large. The reason most games employ large power increases is a lame one. If PC power doesn't increase much, enemy power can't increase much either. So if you are not willing to have a versatile battle system with room for interesting and different varieties of enemies at a given power level, a long game without large power rises quickly becomes boring. Personally, I'd rather play a game with enemies that don't get significantly more powerful, but rather employ an increasing variety of attacks and strengths. Make me do something a little different, rather than do the same thing again and again and pretend it's different just because the numbers are bigger.

Specifically, in one valley within one mountain range, and it's on the immediate left edge of the G5 map -- it's not particularly western at all.

Thuryl -- now that the BoE source is out, has anybody located the source of these misbehavings? I know the source is rather sprawling, but the bits involving combat mechanics seemed pretty straightforward to me, even if the code wasn't particularly tight.

Thuryl: that's the same conclusion that TM and I came to several years ago. That said, I do think it's ridiculous that all people carry money on them (let alone wild animals and monsters), but I'm a big fan of realistic and consistent item drops -- which, dear god, is something that Realmz got right that almost no other game has. Although the best answer may be the way the Exile series did it: specifying that "gold" actually refers to all sorts of barterable items and valuables. I'd prefer to see that implemented by changing the name of "Gold" to, say, "Loot".

What balances drayks out is their lack of mental resistance, compared to wingbolts, drakons, or whatnot. Using drayks in the endgame was possible, but required extra effort either in taking care of them (very annoying) or in acquiring and equipping creation mental resistance items. They are also drastically different on different platforms. On PC their ranged attack is fire elemental; on mac, it is physical. Jeff discussed the battle creation dilemma on here a while ago and it sounded like he was going to do something about it, finally.

From a game design perspective, the nice thing about experience is that it can make a player feel like they are making progress when they kill something. The bad thing about it, is that this can be potentially illusory or meaningless, or lead to stupid munchkin sagas that are not worth it for anybody. Having static XP drops and increasing requirements to level, maximizes the good part, but also leaves opportunity for the bad part. Having static requirements to level, but decreasing XP drops depending on your level, minimizes the bad part, but also reduces the opportunity for the good part to happen. Killing something and getting less than you used to is not usually a positive experience, unless the enemies scale up pretty quickly. Personally, I deplore experience, in part because of its potential negative impacts and in part because it is one of the most unrealistic elements in RPGs, perhaps behind only hit points in absurdity.

I'm pretty sure Jeff did say that you would be able to choose any of the 8 classes previously offered (that counts the three pairs of quantitatively identical classes) in addition to the one missing class.

Very weird. Redownload-and-reinstall sounds like the best solution. At least it happened early so you aren't losing much progress.

Huzzah! The new buffs system sounds like a great idea. And weaker haste is excellent.

This problem happened to me in Avernum 4, and Jeff was able to trace the bug to a nasty side effect of the seemingly innocuous "backtostart" cheat. Have you used any cheats?

The loose mention of "cities" in that context doesn't guarantee everybody gets a Dillame or a Dhonal's Keep, just everybody gets some kind of occupied zone.

Weird! I did similar tests in Avernum 4 and Parry definitely had significant damage reduction. (I believe it did throughout Geneforge as well, though I don't remember clearly.) Apparently the reduction from 5% to 3% parrying per point wasn't the only nerfing Parry received in this game. Unless Parry still defends against non-physical attacks (and, ugh, who wants to test that) this devalues it quite a bit. It's still useful, but it may not be worth buying manually on Torment, given the wasted points in Dex and Defense. (The other possibility is that going to 40 in Parry causes some kind of overflow problem, since the skills were originally coded to go up to 30. But this seems pretty unlikely)

No, it wouldn't. If you test further, you will discover that not all damage reduction was created equal. The "x blocked" message reports damage blocked due to armor/resistance (the stats displayed on the character sheet). It does not report damage blocked due to the Protection or Prismatic Shield spells or due to Parry. Try repeating your test but write down every damage result you get. You will get a lower range and lower average damage for the character with Parry.

PARRY is NOT capped at 50%. The chance to parry an attack is capped at 50%. The parry SKILL also provides universal damage reduction with every point purchased, and this is not capped. It is not displayed on the character sheet and is not subject to the 90% resistance caps for those stats, either. The level 24 slith priest exercise sounds a bit contrived as you would never distribute skill points that way for a real character, particularly ones with those advantages. Magical efficiency is irrelevant; it's very nice, but it's just a convenience skill as the game's built-in SP restoration and large stock of energy potions makes it unnecessary. Really, the advantages of EW are plentiful.

True. It would be nice if they had situationally powerful attacks that encouraged their intended use as, you know, situational creations. I'm not sure what those would be, though.

Over the top charged creations would make the game very not-fun. Because they'd essentially always be the best tactical option, and would largely make the game too easy; but using them extensively is also a chore compared to regular creations.

Good point about the other STR# resources. I never think about those descriptions because they have so many factual errors from a game mechanical standpoint, but they are clearly worth being included here. You may have a point about the wiki, but I am standing by mine: post somewhere else. Really, the unpreparedness of the wiki IN NO WAY prevents you from creating content. So however unnecessary you may find my desire for clear policies, it isn't inhibiting anything at the moment. Post on the forums. When there is enough content there that organization becomes difficult, then complain. But enough with the armchair complaining.

I was going to do text dumps? I just use batch search, so for Geneforge (as with A4-5) dumps aren't necessary, as all the game text is stored in easily readable text files. TextWrangler is a freeware mac program that will easily do batch searches of multiple files and folders using stored settings. Well, the opening text and ending text aren't in text files, but you can get them using a resource editor. I guess that would be useful to have. If I have time I'll try to compile those into a dump.

Thuryl put it best. Warriors aren't bad, there just isn't anything at all to recommend them over the others; absolutely nothing.

Is it 38% on every cast? My A4 tests showed a small amount of random variation in the initial level it was set at after being cast (consistent with the random factor given in the spell data). That was A4, though.

whine, whine. The wiki was intended to be primarily a game world information wiki, detailing the history of different people and places as depicted in the game, information about magic and shaping and so on, but focusing on the Geneforge world itself rather than game mechanics. The administrators got busy. The site is still locked because we would prefer to keep it organized from the beginning, rather than spend an absurd amount of time organizing it later, as happened with EE. If you want to contribute, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from writing the contents of an article you want to write, in mediawiki markup, and posting it, for example, here. If a few people did that it might even spur us into action (or Diki anyway, as I am going to go incommunicado for the summer in a week). But I am a little sick of hearing complaints from people who have contributed less than we have.

Her name is Shanti, and what happened to her is part of the plot. If you explore the southwestern area thoroughly, you will eventually find clues as to what happened with her.

The plated artila is one of the worse values in the game.

Originally Posted By: Ale193 I thought that this discussion was not about gay bashing, but rather straight people not wanting to seem like they're gay. Those two topics are rather closely connected.

Don't blame the internet Nikki. Blame the high number of protopubescent boys present The issue isn't people who dislike homosexuality, the issue is using "gay" as a derogatory term for things that are totally unrelated. Such as "man-jewelry," which is a rather more hillarious term anyway.