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I mean, alhoon is also the guy who wanted endless public discussion of G2-G5 with no spoilers for G1, a game released 15+ years earlier, and which for years he refused to play. I guess what I'm trying to say is he is very good at mental gymnastics when he has decided how he wants to approach something 🙂

Extremely awesome. Thanks stilltim!

What difficulty level are you playing on? In past games, difficulty level raised base stats (Str, Dex, etc) directly, by a set multiplier. That may be the case here as well.

Also Exile 3, and also one of the Avadons.

Considering that you can play as a Servile in G4 and G5, that would raise some storyline issues.

That is a truly great portrait, SMoE. Welcome back!

You can't try to play an agent like a shaper. I mean, you can, but if you do that on a high difficulty, you're going to have a lot of trouble.

So, basically, "mash attack button." I mean, I do that sometimes too, it's fun but maybe not very good for assessing which areas are truly too hard to deal with.

Oof, fair enough on the Daze misses! If Daze is truly missing numerous enemies 3 or 4 times in a row, because your hit chance is low enough that that's a normal outcome -- sounds like you're punching above your weight. Geneforge gives you a lot of flexibility in what order you go through areas in, but the enemies aren't equally tough in all areas. On Normal you might not have to worry so much about the enemies getting harder. On Torment, extremely low hit chance may be a sign that you should come back later, when you're stronger. Either higher levels, for hit chance, or better spells/creations/equipment, for better options period.

Yeah. The other way out is to not get surrounded by enemies in the first place. It's almost always possible to avoid this. The game does present Agents as needing to be more tactical, and less charge-in-guns-drawn, than Shapers can afford to be. These kinds of tactics are crucial on Torment. Whether it means changing your geographic approach, approaching slowly, sending weak sacrificial creations ahead as cannon fodder, or simply beginning your crowd control before the crowd coalesces... there are options. The leaping definitely makes those options less tactically straightforward than they were in previous games, but it's still possible to make them work.

Does this happen when loading any save, or just a particular save?

It's been a long time, but in OG1 that was used for Discipline Wand damage. No idea if that's still the case.

And again, be aware that editing those defs will affect numerous enemies and NPCs, not just your character.

Vampires nothing. Give me back my Null Bugs and Basilisks!

Joining the Anima also gave you access to an extremely cheap source of magic lockpicks. You can also play Avadon with a party where no one has a lockpicking skill. Spoiler alert: this is even worse than playing Geneforge and not raising your Mechanics at all, heh heh heh.

In addition to what ADOS said, the Unlock spell by itself did everything lockpicks did -- you didn't need lockpicks on top of it, and in fact couldn't combine them. So even if money was finite (it wasn't), you could handle doors entirely with SP (which regenerated on its own).

SW games have definitely been receiving finer-tuned balance recently, which I think is awesome. The result is that Torment feels different. It used to be that it was punishing and terrible for casual players, but if you could exploit the right aspects of game balance -- Vlish, Divinely Touched, Adrenaline Rush, etc. -- it became pretty easy. The fact that Torment is now tormenting, period, is great. IMHO. Do appreciate how thoughtfully everyone's been talking about this -- it's nice to hear different perspectives on this, and it's some real food for thought. I can really see how "Geneforged Shaper getting 2-shot" could feel either thematically appropriate, or not, depending on how you look at it. (I'm not sure, though, that Augmented Sholai can fairly be called "run-of-the-mill" anything.) But at the end of the day, there are multiple difficulty settings for a reason. If someone finds the highest setting too easy -- or, worse, they find the lowest setting too hard -- then I can understand the complaint. But if the highest setting is too hard (or simply too frustrating, as it's sometimes felt to me), there's an easy option. I've made that choice, sometimes, with a few past SW games, and turned down the sleep number. Not that Torment was unbeatable, but just that I found I had more fun on a lower setting. And i remember that feeling of, ugh, I've always done Torment, do I really have to swallow my pride? For me, at least, that was easier to swallow than a finite-quantity consumable item 😉 My min-maxing runs deep, but it turns out my achievement-seeking doesn't.

I didn't hate them, but I didn't find them very immersive, I think because the character movement was always on a separate screen from the dialogue (except for the little floaty five-word bits). It just ended up feeling stilted to me. That said, it may just be that I found the subject matter of the text-based cutscenes (e.g., the Olgai Council scene in E/A2) more compelling than the ones that happened to get a real visual (Litalia, Litalia, Litalia, Litalia, and Litalia).

Given that, it looks like the easy answer for you would be to simply remap the Razer keys using Razer software (or any generic key remapping software). I know some of them by default map to "keys" that are not normally desired for gaming use, like "browser back" and "browser forward" buttons, so they might not have made it into SW's key logic. (I'm surprised numbers don't work, though. These are regular top row numbers, not keypad numbers?)

No. The resources that unlock doors in Exile -- lockpicks and SP -- are infinitely renewable. SP, in particular, are very easy to renew, and are so much better at unlocking doors that many (most?) people didn't bother with lockpicks at all. (This was especially true since lockpicking required its own investment of skill points, whereas Unlock was investment-free functionality for every magic-user.) What makes the Geneforge/Avadon system actual resource management (however mild) is the fact that living tools are finite. If you don't manage them at all, it will permanently limit your ability to open doors -- which is why the OP was forced to "guess" when to open doors and when to conserve his resources. There is nothing like that in Exile, Nethergate, or Avernum.

The 'seamless' overworld map of the Second Avernum Trilogy only exists in those 3 Spiderweb games, and... while I know plenty of people liked it, overall, it definitely generated the most negative feedback of any SW map system.

Not really since the beginning. It's just Geneforge and Avadon that have had this system. I can't really think of any equivalent manage-this-non-renewable-resource-in-order-to-access-stuff mechanic in Exile, Nethergate, or Avernum.

Yeah, this has been the case since at least Nethergate: Resurrection. I don't think it's one check per percentage point of blocking, though. I think it's one check per potential point of damage. I don't know that we know for 100% sure that is how the mechanic works but somebody did some testing once (Lilith maybe?) and IIRC that was the best fit.

The forum ranks have been updated to feature Mutagen's creations. Enjoy! Or, cower in terror as appropriate. No Living Tools were harmed in the production of these new names. Thanks to Edgwyn for pointing out that the postcount requirements were a bit outdated -- these have been updated as well. This should be a particular treat for newer users.

I thought the time-based autosave has been in previous games too. Did I make that up?