Aoslare

Right, Trianus gives you the reward either way. That's why he is listed (and his reward is listed) under both options, while Crowley is only listed under one.

 

I guess that is somewhat confusing. I put the whole thing together with an eye to the reputation scores, so I always separated rewards and actions out based on them first.

It indeed starts at 100.

 

Red Mage refers to the "powergaming" munchkin strategy that maximizes earned bonuses -- whether you can get rewards from both sides where applicable.

http://minmax.ermarian.net/g4/g4q.html

You know, I thought about doing this. However, I did out the math, and even with maxxed skills, armor, and magical buffs, you will never block more than about 90% of damage (physical or magical). And for most of the game, you will be a lot closer to 50-60% than 90%. The thing is that you can get almost as good reduction with no skills, and just armor and buffs - about 80-85%. If you train up Resistance, I'm not actually sure you'd have enough skill points left to get both Mage Spells (for Dispel) and Priest Spells, anyway.

Furthermore, even if you went that path, training Resistance is a huge waste of skill points. Given that you have to invest in 6 points of Endurance, which is almost a complete waste, you have to buy a huge amount of Resistance before it becomes more cost effective than just training Hardiness more than is sensible.

Finally, remember that A4 uses the stun rules from G1-3. If your only way to avoid being hit in melee combat is Parry, stunning is going to be a problem. High stun resistance armor might fix that, but I dunno.

Thuryl's right. Lethal Blow would actually useful when you are at very high levels, if you could get enough of it (10+) to make it somewhat consistent. Blademaster would be parallel to Sharpshooter, if not for its craptastic unlock cost.

 

I probably *would* buy Magical Efficiency if it cost 1 and had no unlock cost. However, that's about as high as I'd go. And since you can buy 2 points for gold, that means I wouldn't really buy any with skill points.

 

Resistance would be quite decent without an unlock cost, though perhaps still slightly too expensive (it starts at what, 6?). Reducing nearly all magic damage by 4% isn't bad. If nothing else it would open up new builds for singletons.

The selling cursor is a very good suggestion. Alternately, just making the place you have to click bigger would do wonders. This is an example of an easily fixable interface problem.

Some of those blurbs have been practically unchanged since Exile 1 even though the game engine has changed a lot. Geneforge has a few that were copied from Avernum, I think, even though the stats are different. But Str and Dex have been incorrectly described in multiple dialogue boxes for numerous games now.

It does have some inaccuracies when it talks about what the statistics do and other technical aspects of the game engine, but it has far fewer than anything else out there, including the little blurbs that display in Geneforge 3 itself. But the FAQ is generally excellent.

Actually, you can change skill point costs, more or less. It would be fairly simple to create a dialogue script that exchanges skill points for skills, at the appropriate, dynamic rate, after checking to make sure you have enough. That would bring us back to Exile-style, talk-to-the-trainer training, but I don't see a big issue with it -- particularly if it's only used for special skills, for which it isn't unrealistic to require a special trainer.

No, no, no, no, no!

 

The problem isn't the skill points, the problem is the skill costs (and powers). I don't care if you get 200 bonus skill points when you start out, you're STILL not gonna want to train in Blademaster, Anatomy, Lethal Blow, Magical Efficiency, Riposte, or Resistance. Some of the skills are great to train in, because they have reasonable unlock costs AND provide useful abilities. Parry and Quick Strike certainly, and sometimes Gymnastics, Sharpshooter, and Magery.

 

Magical Efficiency is entirely useless AND insanely expensive. Insanely. Anatomy doesn't really do much, at least at the low levels you can get to. Lethal Blow is good if you get a lot, but it's so absurdly expensive (absurdly) that even with 400 bonus skill points, it would be stupid not to invest them elsewhere. Resistance isn't bad, but it's stupidly expensive, stupidly, prohibitively. Riposte is honestly not great -- it doesn't seem to add to your chance of not being hit, it only works on melee attacks, and it does miniscule damage when it does work. Plus, it's ludicrously expensive. Ludicrously! As for Blademaster, you need to invest a vertiginous amount just to break even with the same investment in Strength and one of Melee or Pole Weapons, and given the profuse non-skill-point based boosts to Str/Pole/Blademaster available, you'd never do that. Vertiginous...

 

For those skills, it is pretty much always better to spend the skill points elsewhere. If you want the skills to be buyable and useful, make them buyable and useful, don't throw off the rest of the game balance.

The fact is that NONE of the classes have problems; they are all almost identical, really, if you look at things on a strategic and numerical level; the Warrior and Shock Trooper simply don't have ANYTHING to recommend them above the other three, whereas the other three each have their own strengths.

 

I think there can be little debate that the Lifecrafter is the most powerful, while the Infiltrator and Servile are the most flexible. There is honestly almost zero difference between those last two classes, it's just a little extra HP vs a little extra essence.

Dylan X, you really need to stop telling other people they're bad posters. Your judgment is way off, and you've already been warned about it.

 

I know my patience with you is exhausted, and around these parts, I'm one of the patient ones. You need to stop.

In E1, there were very few interesting characters, and Solberg had some good stuff to say about the history of Exile, so he gets a pass.

 

In E2, Solberg was actually a pretty cool character. He actually had a legitimate reason to isolate, withdraw, and be bitter, but for once he didn't whine and complain about other people; he actually tried to be helpful. And he provided an interesting perspective on the final plot point of the game.

 

In E3, he whined and moaned about Linda but didn't actually do anything about her return. I always found that a little bit ridiculous. Solberg was the senior triad member, and I can't imagine either X or Mahdavi really pushing to get Linda back, let alone Micah. So I've always held Solberg partly responsible for the Tower of Magi disaster. Plus, he got demoted to teaching frigging level 4 spells to noobventurers. Lame.

 

A4 saw more whining and moaning and general uselessness.

Just to clarify, you certainly never need more than 16 Tool Use. And you don't *really* need that either -- there are very few traps you can't just survive your way through.

This all sounds great, but I'm particularly excited to hear:

 

This is exactly what the character engine needed after A4. A4 was reasonably well balanced, but character progression was not terribly interesting. I'm not sure what exactly "battle disciplines" means -- whether it refers to the special abilities themselves, or -- be still my beating heart -- an open-ended, divergent specialization system like the one used in SAngband.

 

Hopefully this also means the character skills will be more differentiated. We don't need multiple sets of skills that do almost exactly the same thing (Spellcraft/Magery, and so on) and we don't need skills that are almost impossible to train in *and* are less useful than other skills (Anatomy, Lethal Blow, Riposte, and don't even talk to me about Magical Efficiency and Blademaster).

 

I do note that nothing has been written about more variety among the spells. That makes me sad, but you can't have everything.

 

Edit: Oh yeah. Solberg having a bigger role is interesting. He's already the only major character to appear in every game. Hopefully, he will also have something interesting to say -- he hasn't really done that since 1996.

I still can't get over how much "Barzahl" sounds like "Garzahd".

The Barzites didn't stop making them. One of them says "we haven't made many YET."

Where are you getting that from, Nalyd?

No worries - if you leave an area and then come back and revisit the sheds where you found rats, there is a chance they will reappear. Most people don't get enough rat kills from a single trip through the sheds anyway.

Yes, but there are multiple sources who state that the Barzites simply didn't know how to make them. Clearly, that has changed by the time the PC is running around. But we still only meet Taker-made Gazers. At best you can suggest that the Takers and Barzites made them more or less at the same time, but it seems like a stretch to argue that the Barzites made them first.

Compare to La Marseillaise .

 

Edit: Well, best compare SoT's version. I was wondering about "minette", though.

What in the world would suggest that, Invisible Retlaw?

See, this is why I hold SoT in such high esteem. Bravo.

Oooh. Good point about that instructor ET!

 

It still seems likely to me that the Takers were the first ones to successfully make Gazers -- given that nobody claims the converse, and we meet plenty of Taker-made eyes but none crafted by Barzahl. But clearly, that knowledge spread or was duplicated.

This point is unclear. However, everyone in the valley beyond Freegate -- the Takers, Barzites and Awakened -- originally worked together. It was only when Barzahl became megalomanaical that the Takers and Awakened left. We know that the designs for Drakons/Gazers/Rots all came from that collaborative period, with Barzahl's mind behind them. The simplest explanation for Tuldaric's augmentation would seem to be the parallel one.