Slawbug

I mean, it would be weird to remake the first five games and not the sixth.

It's real, but it's not a huge secret. If you google "rough diamond" avernum you'll find a bunch of mentions of it.

Yes. And to their credit, they both have, um... names.

Good people in general would be a welcome addition. The rebels maybe get it worse in this regard (Lankan, Hoge, Agatha... ugh), although OTOH Greta is notably less dopey than Alwan in G3. Also, the rebel quests forcing you to do dumb things like kill Khyryk, there's gotta be a way to mitigate that. It doesn't help that both of the faction big-deal figureheads, Akhari Blaze and Lord Rahul, have absolutely zero characterization and are basically just cardboard boxes that say "i'm in charge" on them.

Jeff has acknowledged a lot in the last ~8 years that G3 wasn't well received, "suffered from complacency" on his part, and that the repetitive story was part of that. I don't expect radical changes, but he has brought it up basically every time the G3 remake comes up. I dunno. Maybe it will just focus more on Greta and Alwan, and less on all the NPCs, who besides Khyryk pretty much universally seemed like terrible jerks.

@alhoon Aodare. And yup, G2.

Yu-La doesn't make any effort to hide the fact that she met other Shapers, nor their location. That fact that neither the other Sholai, nor the nearby serviles (the nearby very inquisitive and highly cautious serviles) would ever get a clue about this, even if she didn't go out of her way to say so, seems weird. Thrackerzod is also so close geographically to Masha's group, and in uncontested territory the Takers can easily surveil. It's not impossible for them to be completely undiscovered there... it just seems unlikely and isn't really explained. Whereas every other group is organically placed and feels integrated into the whole scenario.

Shanti remains the best character in all of Geneforge.

I was really irritated by that retcon -- it's a big shift even if on a minor point, and Thrackerzod in general seems very incongruent with the game world. (It's also just weird that the serviles freak out so much about both the PC and Goettsch, but have zero interest in Thrackerzod's crew of multiple shapers at all.) Either it was a kickstarter backer insertion that was poorly vetted, or it was a moment of Avernum 4 syndrome.

Yeah, I don't think that's what the OP thought. They posted a bunch about Geneforge: Mutagen back in 2021, so clearly they played it, and from those posts they clearly never played the original Geneforge games. I think they simply heard "original GF2" in this thread, without context, and thought "original" meant it was another name for Mutagen. The confusion is representative.

You can open or close the text combat log - in the settings menu - or by pressing 't'

I mean, it's two games from the same series, so gameplay and mechanics are very similar. Items, similar. Races and creatures, similar. (The tutorial is also similar, because the mechanics are similar.) This is all... pretty standard for games within a series, isn't it? But I don't really understand how "only a small difference" can even apply to the storyline, the locations and maps, or the NPCs and dialogue... those are completely different. (Also, just an observation, but you've made an awful lot of posts here complaining about Geneforge. This is a lot of effort to put in to talk about a series you don't seem to like very much...)

Sliths have... I guess analogues in standard fantasy, but they are kind of the polar opposites of traditional dumb, mundane lizardmen. So I'd give some credit there too. The others less so. Slimes are pretty much a direct lift from ad&d. Most of the monster list in Exile is straight from ad&d, which isn't surprising given that (a) this was true of the vast majority of 20th century RPGs, and (b) the whole premise of Exile originated in Jeff's tabletop campaigns.

It's definitely a step further away from mainstream expectations for RPGs. A step backwards, absolutely not. It's also hard to argue whether or not it's a step backwards without any specifics to talk about. What about the gameplay, combat, and inventory is worse to you? I'm with Mechalibur on the combat balance points mentioned above. It certainly has more depth than the very fun but wildly imbalanced mechanics of the original Geneforge games. (And Mutagen came out after QW1.) The graphics are... well, I don't think anyone completely loves them, but I do appreciate going back to a top-down perspective. So that complaint I understand at least. As for the stories... it's worth pointing out that the central Avernum stories (1-3) were written from 1994-1996, and Geneforge was written all in the early to mid oughts. 15-30 years of real life (!!) passed between those stories and Queen's Wish. The world has changed, and so has the person writing them.

I suggest emailing the email address you quoted and asking.

Hi! What part are you asking about? This is basically just an announcement that the old policy is kaput (as of 2015) because it isn't viable to give previous-owner discounts in the modern app-store-centric world. If you're wondering about the free hint books, I'd suggest emailing the support address listed in the announcement to ask.

They don't have the same odds. They use the same lookup table in their functions (charm_odds), but there are steps taken both before (in this case, dividing the monster's level by 2) and after looking up that value (in this case, using a 0-to-70 RNG), and those steps are different for charming and for capturing, which results in different resulting odds.

also, worth noting, although this is the same odds table that Charm and a few other effects use, they don't necessarily use the same formula with it. I know Charm takes the caster's level into consideration, for example. So it's not actually that charming is twice as hard or anything, it just scales very differently.

Except it's not actually a percent due to the 7/10 multiplication. r1 needs to be <= 4 to succeed vs a level 24-25 monster, which will happen 7% of the time -- as even 49/10 rounds down to 4. And then level 26-27 should be 2%, since a roll of 2 also rounds down to 1. After that, as you note later, it's 1%.

pascal int Random() Random returns an integer between -32768 and 32767. The integer is from a uniform pseudo-random distribution. The seed for this function is the global variable randSeed. RandSeed is initialized to 1 by InitGraf.

You have it backwards. if r1 is greater, it fails. That set of conditionals is what causes it to fail.

Actually... wait a minute. r1 is a short. c++ rounds down by default. and that's a > not a >= in the charm_odds compare. so this means that anything above level 27 and not immune should have an exactly 1% chance to get captured, right?

And voila, here's charm_odds as CM kindly provided in a previous thread: const short cCreature::charm_odds[21] = {90,90,85,80,78, 75,73,60,40,30, 20,10,4,1,0, 0,0,0,0,0, 0}; For Capture Soul, looks like it's auto-success through monster level 13, then it starts dropping, and becomes quite harsh above level 23. Looks like level 27 is the absolute limit.

Yeah, the mechanics in all the Geneforges generally make creations supported by spells a stronger option than anything else. The only things that really ever compete are Parry in G2, or a truly focused investment in Mental Magic in the later games.

Crazy! Good catch Ess. I guess this just never came up because people rarely bothered with archery in Exile in the first place.