Men are from Slars

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.)

Oo, interesting. Yeah, Easss doesn't actually mention "vial" or "goo," but he clearly says he stole the Geneforge sample from Yu-La, good call. A correction though -- the G1 PC does not retrieve the sample for Yu-La, the PC is simply a courier who brings it from Yu-La to Thrackerzod. And since in canon G2, Yu-La takes it off the island and the Takers steal it from her, it seems that the G1 PC did not perform that task and actually has nothing to do with that vial making it to the Takers. If the PC had had more concern for the Sholai and/or the inutile, they might have prevented it, though. (Also, it's red, not orange.) (It's also not clear that Yu-La knows it's a sample of the Geneforge -- if she had, then as a greedy trader, presumably she would have bargained for a lot more in exchange for it.)

Really glad you enjoyed it Lorn! Thanks for the suggested additions. FWIW, your points 1, 2, and 3 have absolutely nothing to do with this mod. Point 5, and your drayk confusion, would be addressed by reading the codex. It's a little weird to complain about things, where you have refused (repeatedly!) to read the mod's own explanation of how it works. I don't really know what to tell you. Point 4 -- Thornstalker's quests are absolutely completable. I've actually gotten a lot of positive feedback about them. They definitely do require exploring all over the place to find enough thorns. There are 4 separate thorn quests (all listed in the text log, as I have now pointed you to three times ) plus a final reward for completing all of them.

I don't think canisters ever factored into skill point cost in any version of Geneforge, did they?

That's deliberately left for the player to figure out. Minor spoiler: Sometimes in games you have to put 2 + 2 together, rather than having somebody give you a quest marker.

AFAIK there's exactly one reference to the vial of goo in G2, and it's extremely vague and gives zero context to anything. Am I missing something too?

"I am not a Taker!" "I will probably script my character" because I don't like the options the game gives me... *looks at Easss*

"this is supposed to be a Guardian's most fundamental ability besides whacking something" Where does it say that?

He also said he never wanted to design the Tower of Magi again. Famous last words...

No, I think that would also feel weird. Since your initial complaint is basically just thematic, not great to solve it by making the thematic elements in other parts of the game unintuitive.

Yeah, evasion can be pretty different on different difficulties. First because of the chance, but also because of what happens when a hit does make it through -- if that's a light hit, and you evade most of them, you can just ignore it, you're unstoppable. But if it's a 1HKO, 80% evasion probably counts as "not good enough." Taking a step back, though, it's a non-interactive game mechanic, with the problem that it becomes dramatically more valuable the more you have of it. If you go from 90% dodge to 95% dodge, you cut your incoming damage (and statuses) in half. But going from 50% to 55% is much less impressive. The build strategy thus becomes "all or nothing." And it's almost impossible to make it interesting, because you don't want it to break the game if somebody goes all in on it. This is essentially what happened with the original incarnation of Parry, in OG2. This was a common balance issue in mid-era SW games. In Avadon 1 IIRC, putting all your stat points into Dex and wearing evasion items resulting in almost never being hit, even on Torment. So evasion was nerfed in Avadon 2, and you could no longer get it up to a consistent level at all. This is a little silly. The energy costs of weapon shaping skills are 10, 20, 15, 15, 20, 20, 25, and 15. Those are quite low -- your per-round energy regain will pass most of them pretty early on. Also, Intellect does not improve your rate of recharge, only your max energy.

https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/indie-postmortem-1-geneforge-2-infestation "Eighteen months ago, we released Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor. This was an all-new title, the second game in what I had planned as the Queen's Wish trilogy. This game sold very poorly. This was a shame. I'm really proud of the game. It's the sort of game I want to play, and I really liked playing it. However, in my advanced age, I may have fallen out of touch with what people want. When I was younger, I always said, "I write the sort of games I want to play. If people don't want what I like to play, I'll quit this business and sell shoes." Luckily, since this didn't happen until I'm old, I'll do remasters instead. (I WILL finish the Queen's Wish story somehow. I'm still figuring out a way to make it viable.)"

Just to be clear, the conclusion of my quoted post was not "1.5 years"...

What difficulty?

Wait, did he actually talk about a Nethergate update? That's amazing. I hope so!

In practice, Intellect doesn't boost weapon shaping in a meaningful way. In practice, skills that improve physical attacks do make weapon shaping better -- it's an indirect effect, but it's meaningful. I understand the complaint about the % bonuses, but this is basically about flavor, not balance. If anything, I think my vote would be "replace Evasion with a dedicated Weapon Shaping skill." Then it could work exactly the way e.g. Battle Magic works. The "sum of Melee/Missile weapons" thing feels like a weird holdover from Avernum's Battle Disciplines (which, in their original incarnation, were incredibly similar to weapon shaping in other ways, too). Evasion itself is an odd skill -- it's the only skill whose effects are a complete subset of another skill's (Dexterity), and while it scales differently from Dex, it's not ultimately a very effective skill. Plus, it pretty clearly ended up there just as a less-vulnerable-to-imbalance version of Parry. (re Essence Mastery, the Guardian/Agent analysis leaves out Shapers, who like Essence Mastery as much as or more than anyone else, so I think that would feel pretty weird)

This isn't something we have to guess at. Wikipedia helpfully gives us this: From 2010 through 2024, there have been 10 games released in roughly 15 years of work. So that's an average of 1.5 years per game -- however, half of those games were brand new (Avadon 1-3 and QW 1-2), and four were new engines (Avadon, AEFTP, QW, Mutagen), which is all extra work. 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 most extreme example is Nethergate: Resurrection, which Jeff said took about 3 months of work. However, that was also a remake in the same engine as the original one, just a much more mature version of it.) If the new games are 2 years, and the remakes are 1 year, that adds up to 15 years. Or you could interpret it as 20 months for new games and 16 months for remakes and get the same total. (Note that this doesn't account for the new-engine time, while the list of 6 remakes we're looking at only includes 1 of those.) Anyway, my money's on 6-9 years depending.

No way. In the last decade or so, Spiderweb has spent closer to 2 years on brand new games, and closer to 1 year on remakes, especially when not the first game in a series. A4, G3, A5, G4, A6, G5 could well be 6 years, and I wouldn't expect it to be more than 8 or 9.

1) You are wrong. I didn't nerf fire. Fire creations resist fire. That's it. Did you read the codex? 2) You just wrote above "you made it so that it's worth shaping everything" so I will refer you to that statement. 3) Did you read the codex? 4) No. Also, it *is* annulet. That's a word. 5) You're probably not ready to do anything with them yet. Did you read the relevant quest?

Yes - see under Quality of Life in this post.

What is "stuff"? These vague descriptions make it really hard to help you. You've never seen it trigger at all, not when fighting anything?

I'm not saying "5 percent isn't much." Sometimes, 5 percent is a lot. I'm saying that adding duration to these statuses, whether +5% or +20%, doesn't matter. Getting 6 turns of War Blessing instead of 5 has zero impact on whether or not any character ever wants to use a weapon shaping skill. Especially not when you compare it with the big cost for a magic-oriented character, discussed above: needing to use a physical attack rather than a spell. Extra duration on statuses really only matters when all of the following are true: - The initial duration isn't long enough for what you need - Reapplying the status is a non-trivial task - The status is strong This describes something like Dominate. This doesn't describe much if anything that weapon shaping does. Just because a bonus exists, does not mean it matters. Just because a bonus has a large number, does not mean it's strong. Context matters.

If it's a creation augment issue, it is not mod-related. Augments are not moddable. Can you be specific about what you are seeing? What does "doesn't hit anyone" mean, what situations did you try it out in? Remember the exploding boils thing? 🙂 I think I'm just going to split all your questions to a new thread. This topic really can't be your personal tutorial topic, especially when half of the questions aren't really about Overrun.

You keep saying "its modifiers" as if anybody cares about either (1) Intellect, or (2) the duration modifiers for these skills. +5% to duration isn't relevant to all that much. Also, in order to use any weapon shaping ability you're using a physical attack. Which uses physical attack modifiers. To do actual damage. Which you probably care about a lot more than an extra +5% duration to war blessing or vulnerability or whatever. Agents don't care that much about Intellect. Agents do care about being able to use their actions to cast spells. That makes weapon shaping not the first thing they're going to turn to. Weapon shaping is excellent when it's a mostly-free bonus you tack onto your regular strong attack. If you're only making the attack in order to use the weapon shaping ability, it's not as good -- most of the time, in that scenario, you'd rather just cast a spell.

How offensive ability strength is determined: Damage The base damage range (shown in the tooltip) is basically a good old die roll: for example, 4d6 + 5. Die quantity = 1 + Character Level + Ability Skill (e.g. in Firebolt or Guarded Lunge) + Weapon Level (if a weapon-based attack) Die size = fixed, depends on ability used. Base damage = fixed, depends on ability used. * If attacking unarmed with the Feisty Slap Gloves, Strength also adds to die quantity. After rolling base damage, apply the bonus damage % (also shown in the tooltip). Bonus damage % is mostly additive. This is where you get +5% from Strength, +8% from Melee Weapons, etc. Most sources are conditional, and the tooltips are not always precise as to when they apply: Physical melee only: Strength Physical ranged only: Dexterity Any magical/elemental damage: Intellect Melee Weapon attacks only: Melee Weapons Ranged Weapon attacks only: Ranged Weapons Melee/ranged attacks only: Guarded Lunge and Essence Lash modifiers Spells only: Spellcraft Spells of a particular school only: Battle Magic, Mental Magic, Blessing Magic, Healing Craft Specific abilities only: the % bonuses certain abilities gain from extra skill, e.g. +25% per point in Firebolt beyond 1. Everything: Statuses (War Blessing, Curse, Enraged, Overload, Rooted, etc.) Everything (summed and then multiplied with the above total): flat % damage bonuses from equipment/charms (e.g. "+5% to melee damage") * In the rare case that an ability does two types of damage (such as that one sword), the first damage type appears to determine which % bonuses are used for both damage components. Duration This is calculated basically the same way as damage. Most status effects omit the dice component, and just have a fixed base duration. Bonus duration % is much like bonus damage % with two exceptions: 1. Status duration always uses Intellect bonuses, never Strength or Dexterity bonuses. 2. Status duration uses "% to blessings/curses" equipment/charm bonuses rather than "% to damage" ones. Bonus duration % is effectively applied with a little bit of variance, which is why you don't always get identical durations when casting the same spell, unless you have no such bonuses.