Men are from Slars

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.

G1, more than the others, is certainly not flat - the landscape and especially the world map definitely gave me the impression of differing elevations when I played.

The point is that the beta testers play more expediently and, in the main, more skillfully than many new players do. Torment may be easy for you but for many players it would be impossible. I'm sure you've seen the posts here from people who found the game very challenging on Normal.

Genes are mentioned by name in Geneforge 1. So the series name cannot be written off as circumstantial evidence. Dannette and company called the things they learned to modify genes. Given that Geneforge calls what we think of as swords, swords; and what we think of as islands, islands; and what we think of as magic, magic; I am inclined to believe that what the Shapers called genes, are what we call genes.

Frankly, this was always a silly reason to choose Natural Mage over Elite Warrior. But I'm glad now that things can be this much clearer

Interesting. What was the most armor you equipped? I am curious if it actually caps armor at 0%, or if there is just a penalty of some variety (a flat -20%, say) which you weren't able to surpass with the initially avialable equipment.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Opinions about Bush are sharply divided. Hardly anyone counts him as barely satisfactory; he's either great, or appalling. Sharp division means that there's not much gradation between, not that the division is even. It also implies that a significant number of people hold each opinion. Frankly, I can't think of anybody who's actually stated that they prefer 3 to 2, except possibly you, and I'm not even sure about that. 3 is a good game, but opinion is not sharply divided; it is grossly, though not universally, against 3.

Six really was too many... in Exile it was a holdover from the Gold Box games, in which the party regularly faced huge swarms. Without that aspect I think it just slows down a lot of different aspects of play.

I don't think opinion is sharply divided at all. G3 is a good game and probably does not deserve all of the criticism it gets: but it deserves most of it, as the game contains elements that are extremely annoying (the boats) and its new features, such as those SoT lists, are picayune. G2 had a much less recycled plot and a vibrant expansion of game mechanics (new creations, expanded differences between creations, loads of new spells, and completely redone mechanics for creation stats, as well as some tweaks to the PC's skillset). G2 isn't universally loved, but it is very widely preferred to G3.

I think the "only first 10 levels" thing was a bug in the original version which Jeff fixed in an early update. And ur-drakons don't stun! They slow.