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If you enjoyed their dialogue so far, then I guess so? Personally I find both of them to be extremely predictable cardboard cutouts with no personality, in G3. YMMV.

Well, it's not just about switching tiers. Some creations are just a lot better than others. In G3, for example, Vlish are generally a lot better than Glaahks -- all attacks can cause stunning in G1-3, so the Glaahk's special bonus isn't very special, and the Vlish's ranged attack does more damage anyway. Gazers and Eyebeasts are certainly good, but because they are so expensive, a Shaper who's kept his Vlish alive will probably still have 3-6 spots filled by a mix of Vlish and Terror Vlish when the game ends.

This is where you went wrong. Disposable creations only truly works in G1, because in G1 creations get fewer stats from levelling up than they do from levels they have when they are created. In the other games, creations will be much, MUCH stronger if you keep them with you and level them up. This is particularly true of Vlish in G3, since they are cheap and can be made early, but have some of the best ability scaling of any creation in G3. Disposable creations can be an OK strategy in G5 only because it takes a while to access the best creation types, and there are a few big jumps along the way. EDIT: However, that said, G3 is not the hardest game in the set anyway. What difficult level are you playing on? You might be running into other tactical snafus...

Well, the pixel graphics that have become popular in games recently are awesome, but that's because a lot more care is put into them than "take anything that looks OK at 1x and make it 2x." Big-pixel graphics work when you have a consistent style, a palette that allows gradual color changes, and often things like black outlines to help with contrast.

My suggestion would be to do something vaguely based on the console style used in some later games: [left pane] [central pane] [right pane] left pane = party stats, inventory below it central pane = main view right pane = automap, transcript text below it The transcript text does not need to be as large as everything else, so it is OK if the right pane is narrower (to maintain the automap size you are using). The whole left pane can be enlarged, with locked proportions, to say 1.5x the original size of its components. This means it will be wider than the right pane, but based on GUI01 there should still be room for a full inventory + the party stats pane in that column.

Yikes. There really needs to be some border space between those panes.

The automap looks good. The clickable elements in text, like in the inventory and party stats panes, are now literally 1/20th the size of those enormous buttons. This is to be contrasted with the fact that those clickable elements perform actions that you can't do any other way, whereas the giant buttons all (I think?) have keyboard equivalents. Similarly, the terrain icons now look really pixelated. (Note that the forums, by default, shrink and smooth this image; if you click on it you can see the original and what I mean here.) I know they always were, but these are big chunky pixels compared with tiny fonts where font smoothing is active. I would suggest making the text elements bigger (and perhaps the main viewing window slightly smaller). Yes, you might need to extend horizontally, and the main viewing window will take up less of the full window that way -- I don't think that's a problem.

Am I truly that obscure? ...never mind, I think I know the answer I'm getting if I ask that question

Aha... you meant that being Nephil gives a bonus to Move Mountains, not that it gets a bonus from Move Mountains This is indirectly true, because Nephils get a +10% damage bonus to all physical ranged attacks. That's what you were seeing in the "Missile damage" row. (Note, this will only actually be 10% if you are starting at 100%; if you have other bonuses, it will be proportionally lower.) None of those are really great incentives to use Nephils, unfortunately; it's not that they're bad, it's just that humans with their huge number of bonus traits are better. If you do have a Nephil and you are going Dex + bows (which is also suboptimal in this game, unfortunately), Move Mountains is absolutely a good spell to use... but a regular spellcaster will still dish out a lot more damage with other spells (and run out of SP a lot less).

Huh? I just double checked and the damage calculation sheet does nothing like that. This also doesn't make sense. What are you talking about?

I agree about cultural expectations of gender roles -- and if you look at game content you can see just how deeply these were embedded. Nearly every game featured a male protagonist, and once more games were released targeting children in the mid-80's, damsel-in-distress setups became ubiquitous. For example, here's a list of some seminal NES games that all involved rescuing a captive woman (often a literal damsel, and usually the male protagonist's love interest): Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Ghosts n' Goblins, Wizards & Warriors, Bubble Bobble, Ninja Gaiden, Kid Icarus, Kung Fu, Hydlide, Dragon's Lair, Double Dragon, Adventure Island, Adventures of Lolo, Mickey Mousecapade, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tiny Tune Adventures, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers, The Battle of Olympus, River City Ransom, Battletoads As you can see, this runs through many of the most prominent games. Metroid subverted this with a female protagonist -- but then turned her into a sex object by creating an ending where she takes off her clothes. So I think there is some intentionality here: the intentionality of adults wanting to pass on their concept of gender roles to the next generation. (We can be glad, I guess, that it didn't work as well as it might have.)

Is that in reference to the quoted text or the PDN?

We meet again, Scorpiradan.

It's now been five years since the Grand Poll, so I think it's truly a good time to do another one, hehe. I've gotten enough done on a new poll to believe this will not turn into an abandoned project, so now I'd like to bring this topic back up. Ideas for interesting things to ask about in the poll. GO!

It's not that most people weren't friendly, but there were nonetheless more unfriendly pointy bits on the map.

It's interesting that there were and are differences both between genres, and within genres. CCGs have always felt to me like one of the most gender-unbalanced geek genres -- and pretty sexist and you-name-it-phobic even in the oughts -- but that was less true of L5R or Pokemon, say, than it was of Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh.

That's an interesting point. I note that all the people I can think of came to SW long before they came out (and I would guess long before most identified as trans, though I don't want to make any assumptions there).

With these additions that were new to me (btw -- serious congrats to all of you as well!) I think I can count at least 11 current and former members who identify as trans. I think that's too high to be observation bias (or "expression bias" kind of like what Randomizer described). And these members span the whole history of the forums -- including the earlier years when more unfriendly behavior was tolerated. Probably there are many factors involved. One more that occurs to me: the indirect impact of the story of Spiderweb's flagship franchise, Exile/Avernum. The first trilogy revolves around the premise that people who let others see that they are different, are not just mistreated but in fact wholly excluded from society. And the games cast the player as someone fighting against that: fighting for justice against those who have excluded them. It's not hard to see how this could resonate. I think that attracted a certain kind of people, a certain kind of openness, that agglutinated over time. Also, the first trilogy included several queer characters, including a lesbian couple. This is not the same thing as including characters that are not cis, and I don't mean to blend them together. However, in the 90's there was not a lot of media regularly consumed by kids, and approved by parents, that even acknowledged the existence of anything other than male-female couples. Even in the oughts you rarely found that in video games, and while Spiderweb dropped this element entirely in its later games, it remained in both sets of first trilogy remakes. All of this just sets the stage. But I think it makes sense that with a backdrop like that, you attract people looking beyond the surface of societal expectations.

The good news is that you are in the state whose insurance market has some extra insulation against anything congress does, due to the state laws that predated the ACA, and the longer time the economic & medical dynamic has had to entrench itself there. So while everything is still sort of a churning vortex of awfulness, at least there's that.

Serious congrats! Glad things are going so well for you, and hope they continue to do so.

I understand the impetus here, and choosing a place outside of the application folder does make sense. But %APPDATA% is frankly not a good choice for a folder whose contents the end user is expected to be updating manually. Which is how installing BoA scenarios has worked.* This is a bad choice not only because it's hard to access the folder, but also because it's hard to access that folder for a reason. You don't want to set a confused user up to accidentally mess with other data in that folder. *And should work. Replacing something that you can do en masse with a drag-and-drop with something that requires an in-application feature use is ridiculous. If somebody wants to drop 10 scenarios in that folder, now they're going to have to click a button and navigate a through a file selection dialog box ten times? Ridiculous.

Yes. The A4 chitrachs definitely go on the list, though, especially in the original release where they used clawbug graphics. *shiver*

I think the split maps would have caused less heartache if they weren't compounded, in the game they were introduced, by the G3 boats. Honestly, the G3 boats are probably the single most hated element there has ever been in any Spiderweb game.

He was also, if I have the story straight, in the middle of writing G3 when it became clear just how (initially) commercially disappointing BoA was. G3 and A4 (the next game) were definitely a step in the opposite direction from that. I would not say, though, that G4 was a sharper version of "what G3 was trying to do." G3 was structural hand-holding + a story built around deliberately painful forced choices + zero mechanics/balance changes. G4, OTOH, asked you to play a double agent rather than pushing you to pick one path, built a story around grit more than anything else, and featured some of the bigger mechanics/balance changes of the series. It's worth noting that despite originating in G3, Khyryk is basically the polar opposite of it -- he avoids paths that are laid out for him, refuses problematic forced choices, has a personality, and ultimately shakes up the balance of the world. That's why he's so beloved. G5 I think was a little bit aimless: it was the big finale with everything packed in. It has some of G4's grit, like with Mehken and Rawul; but also a lot of G2's open-ended rollick. I think this meant that everyone found something to appreciate about it but few loved it start to finish.

In the past, when people have compared personal feelings about and rankings of Geneforge games here, there has been a general gravitation towards the following two orders: 1 > 2 > 4 > 5 > 3 or 1 > 4 > 2 > 5 > 3 However, every time it gets discussed, there always seems to be a pretty broad consensus that G1 is the strongest of the bunch, overall, and G3 the weakest.