Drayk Armitage

Interesting. I always compared Exile with Ultima 3, but it never occured to me to compare Avernum with the later isometric Ultimas. Huh.

What I like is the return of the old "Fly: Ceiling too low." message. Also being able to shoot melee-based monsters from the air for free. Although having an atlatl with unlimited ammunition is a little strange. I'm also confused about how getting 20 Gymnastics allows you to Fly, but getting 20 Sharpshooter just gives me this lousy "Kag Shot" battle discipline that always misses.

Parry is broken.

Nephil's Gambit, Nephil's Gambit, and Nephil's Gambit.

Camp Samuels moving is one of the more egregious differences. Most other movements can be explained by the different ways the map is represented in the games. It's unlikely that the cave walls are moving around, however slightly, either, so when Blosk moves a little west, it's not hugely noticeable. Given that the stalagmite field by the ToM in E/A 1 was supposedly built to keep the tower hidden, this seems an intentional change. However, Camp Samuels moving a long distance across a river is a bit of a stretch.

The Nine-Headed Cave Cow frowns upon thee.

#3 didn't actually have new creations. #2 did. The only new things in #3 (as far as game mechanics go) were the anvils, and Alwan and Greta (unique to #3).

A lot of quests in A4 do not affect dialog at all, particularly Job Board quests. A little message will show up when you click on the person INSTEAD of the dialogue box, saying something like "You show Jeff the Nephil's severed head. Jeff hands you a pouch of 300 coins and a silver bracelet." Are the quests still listed in your quest log? For the bat bits quest, note that you need multiple bat bits and you are not guaranteed to get one per killed bat. You may need to visit the area repeatedly to get enough.

To clarify, crystal wands are a missile weapon found late in the game; I'm not talking about wands that can be used as a potion or scroll.

Well somebody's a Ziggy fan.

Rational Mind characters can still use Crystal Wands, though, can't they? No lamps but crystal wands is hard to reconcile.

Well, Roman singletons can, it just requires an obscene number of potions and scrolls, and is much harder even with them.

Not on Torment they aren't!

Charm Beast works wonders because it also means the uncharmed monsters might attack the charmed one instead of you. The crystal equipment did not seem to offer very much protection against stoning when I tried it out (I tried it a lot) despite the claim of 80% on its info box. Anyone know what if anything it does?

Constructive criticism is one thing, and stubborn negativity is another. Personal attacks, however, are against the code of conduct. Consider yourself warned.

Exactly. I was not saying your predictions are nonsense; I was asking what evidence they were based on.

Quote: Originally written by heal plz: The solution then is to modify corescendata2.txt file, setting some weapon's it_damage_per_level to 1, which means it will do constant damage each hit, which means the total damage will be affected only by other stats of interest, so the number of tries necessary to come up with some conclusion would be defined purely by the complexity of game system and brainpower, unlike the methods of preset number of tries calculating the averages. A clever idea. However, if Strength and Sword skills interact with the damage per level number differently, as I originally suggested, this method might not reveal it, for obvious reasons.

How is your info for the Windows version if it's based on my data, which was taken from the Mac version? This is the question that I was originally asking: what is your data? As to the rest, my answer remains: Random fluctuation does not explain 0% difference versus 50% difference. I'm not interested in arguing it further unless there is more data to discuss.

It would be helpful to state how you came to that conclusion. Bonuses to levels of damage are hard to accurately evaluate given the range of damage presented. Also +3 levels of damage but only +10% to hit is an unusual combination; most of Jeff's games uniformly bundle +1 with +5% if both bonuses are given.

If you look at the columns in my chart showing change in average damage (the "+ Obs" and "+ Icy" colums) you will notice that for Melee Weapons skill, Berserker skill, Mighty Warrior trait and Bless spell, the gains are nearly identical for both weapons. For Strength skill however, the gains are about 50% greater for the Spear. The discrepancy between nearly identical and 50% greater is too wide for me to chalk up to random chance when using 20 data points for each average. You claim that "any increase will be more noticeable on the spear", but in fact this was not the case; Strength was the only increase that was significantly more noticeable on the spear. Additionally, if each point of Berserker added 1 level, we would expect the +10 Berserker results to be similar to the +10 Strength results, but they aren't.

Interesting numbers. Some of these make a lot of sense (i.e., the Mighty Warrior formula) but they fail to account for a few things, such as the fact that weapon damage die affects Strength more than Melee Weapons. I'm interested to hear how you arrived at these numbers.

Where does the 3 levels and 10% data come from?

I notice Jeff refers to Cheeseball as "it" and not "he" as he is referred to in the games. Perhaps Solberg had Cheeseball neutered. That would explain their animosity...

Uh, that's how time is recorded. Midnight is 12 AM, followed by 1 AM, 2 AM, ... 11 AM, then noon is 12 PM, 1 PM, and so on. He edited it about 10.5 hours later.

I can actually think of two console RPGs that took this idea even further. Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom has a number of different possible player character sets and endings depending on which marriages take place in the game. Dragon Quest V similarly gives you a choice of whom to marry, and allows you to play as your own children, although in that case the choice of wife only seems to affect your kids' hair color.