Kelandon

I'm pretty sure that's the idea. I ran into this, too. I got going on this quest a little before I was ready to do it, backed out, and came back later. I got the same message that you're getting. I feel as though it's a little hard to judge how the fight is going to go on the basis of what leads up to it, so it's sort of annoying that the game doesn't let you back out.

And wow, that Solberg/Ess-Kalyn sequence was one of the coolest in any Spiderweb game ever.

Bahhh, I finally admitted defeat when I encountered Khrez-Yss on the way to Formello. I probably could've kept going, but it was such a ridiculous slog that I just lost interest. I cranked Parry and Blademaster on my fighters (and the prereqs as necessary) and Mage Spells/Priest Spells/Spellcraft on my casters. I immediately started doing about 2x the damage I was doing before, maybe more. I also got access to a bunch of spells that I couldn't cast before, notably Cloak of Blades and Ward of Elements. With that, I went back and cleared out the Honeycomb and anything else that seemed too hard at the time. (I left the stuff beyond the Dragon Gate for later. It seems insane right now.) I'm now finishing off odd quests in the Eastern Gallery, and then I'll take another swing at Formello. Things have been going so smoothly now that I haven't wanted to stop playing all day. One other thing that occurred to me is that I ended up using tunnels and doorways to much greater effect than I ever had before. A6's creature AI is remarkably good at targeting exactly who I don't want it to, but I seemed to be able to fool it if I kept the casters back from a doorway and stuffed the warriors up right up against the doorway. Even if there was one extra space to step through to pursue my casters, the monsters tended to do that only when the casters were in close, not far back. I often found myself retreating into tunnels to take advantage of the same phenomenon. I bet someone who was a lot more careful about equipment and quest sequence probably could've gotten a bunch farther than I did without using skill points (except, as noted, on the occasional utility/non-combat skill, such as Tool Use). It was time-consuming and ultimately kind of tedious, but it wasn't actually impossible. Other random thought: Strength is a utility skill, too, although I've tended to boost it for its combat uses. But one of the unexpectedly frustrating things about this particular challenge was that I could wear so little equipment. After I started using skill points, I ended up boosting Strength on every character, even the casters.

On my last play-through of Avadon, I just pumped Dexterity for everyone (except Nathalie, who got Int). Nothing else. Just Dexterity. Among skills, my priorities were (in this order): 1. Bows/ranged weapon skills 2. Critical hit skills 3. The middle column 4. Interesting abilities (usually the left column) Everyone (except Nathalie) got some kind of bow or ranged physical attack. (Nathalie used her default magic attack.) The game was remarkably doable with this strategy (even on Torment), and what I like about it is that it is so simple and clean. You might not be able to beat some of the worst optional final fights this way, but you can do pretty much anything else.

Hmm. That sounds like the right direction to go in, although now that you've done all of that, I'm surprised that you're still having problems. I wonder if maybe you're close to maxing out your disk space, or some other thing that might make an iPad run slow for a really memory-heavy application.

In reading this, I'm reminded of something that I may have brought up before: in recent Spiderweb games, the general problem with an inappropriately designed party is not that it can't make progress but that it does so incredibly slowly and tediously. I think on my first play-through of Avadon I may have spent as much as 50 hours, and enemies felt as though they had unlimited HP. The problem was that I had a horribly designed party, though; with a better party, I got through in the more typical 20-30 hours, and fights never took anywhere near as long as they had in my first play-through. The game becomes tedious and not fun if you design your party wrong, but you may not ever know that that's what the problem is, because you can still keep going.

After a delay, I picked up on this game again and got through the Cotra-Asterios sequence. Still barely making it, but I'm able to hang on by the skin of my teeth. The Eye wasn't as much of a problem after I'd gained a few levels (no retreats necessary), but the next combat was. I was pretty disappointed when I managed to wipe out all but the main caster by Asterios, retreat to safety, and come back fully recharged only to find that the henchmen also revive and recharge if you do that. They're now sending me to Formello. My characters range from level 21 to level 24, and I'm going to see if I can manage this assassination that they want me to do. My goal is to get into Fort Duvno and buy the skills there at the trainer, and then I'll probably give in and use some skill points. All of the characters (except the Tool Use guy) have over 100 skill points now.

This is odd to me, because I played Avadon most of the way through on a first-generation iPad and had no such problems. The animations played a little slow, but I never had long pauses between events. Oh, um, I closed everything else that was open in order to play Avadon. That might have helped. Double-tap the Home button, press and hold on an icon in the bar that appears at the bottom of the screen, and start closing things when the icons begin to vibrate. It's like you're deleting them, but if you do it from the bar at the bottom after double-tapping the Home button, it just closes them. That frees up memory and makes things run faster. You can also jigger the Preferences a bit.

*waves hand* Hi! That's me! Good work so far! It looks nice, and I'm hopeful that it will perform nicely when it's done. If it's ever done. I am a skeptic, after all. Anyway, keep it up, and I look forward to the someday maybe release.

Kelandon tomwatts [the number five] [[at]] gmail [[[dot]]] com various previous beta experience no familiarity with OGaE in BoE probably will have time to test both halves

It's on the potion-making screen when you actually use the ability. So you hit u, then a, then mouse over whatever potion you want, and it tells you the ingredients. For the record, they are: Healing Potion: Healing Curing Potion: Healing Hasting Potion: Energetic Energy Potion: Energetic and Spiritual Strength Potion: Spiritual Graymold Salve: Graymold Balm of Life: Healing, Spiritual, Energetic Healing Elixir: Toadstools, Healing Hasting Elixir: Spiritual, Energetic, Toadstools Energy Elixir: Spiritual, Graymold Rogue's Elixir: Energetic, Toadstools Strength Elixir: Spiritual, Toadstools Bliss Elixir: Mandrake, Healing, Spiritual Restoration Brew: Mandrake, Graymold, Healing Protection Brew: Spiritual, Energetic, Mandrake Heroic Brew: Graymold, Spiritual, Mandrake, Toadstools Invulnerability Potion: Mandrake, Toadstools, Graymold, Energetic

That's interesting. I can't remember having heard of this before. The HLPM has shops from 0 to 18. It looks like Where the Rivers Meet goes up to 25. I can't immediately find anything that goes to a higher number than that, though, so it's possible that there's a bug past 25 somewhere.

"Abortion is the lesser of two evils" is, I think, a pretty common view. This is part of why the youngest voting generation right now, the Millennials, is so ambivalent about it, despite otherwise trending so liberal on other social issues (such as gay marriage). It's also possible to believe that life begins at conception, but even so, abortion should be legal until the fetus can survive as a baby outside the mother. The logic is that to do otherwise is tantamount to maternal slavery. Doing otherwise compels a woman into the service of her fetus against her will until birth.

This is a really cool thing to hear about. I've been meaning to go back to GF1, and I'm looking for ideas. I'll probably go melee-based, but this sounds awfully tempting.

You'd have to try it to know for sure, but I don't think so.

I think the point is that the character number is stored in that SDF. These were the two calls I was referring to in my post, so I won't bother finding another example. This is often an issue with party member names, because you don't know how many characters are in the name, and the string is disjointed so you have to add up the components. Word of warning to anyone using string manipulation, I guess.

You need a couple more calls, notably get_buffer_text(). Look at any string manipulation in any released scenario and notice the last two steps (getting the text and adding it to the dialog). I'll edit in an example when I'm back at my computer.

Real problems in the Eastern Gallery. I'm not strong enough to take on Corma-Eye while fetching Asterios, and I'm nowhere near strong enough to deal with the attack on the caravan, so I'm doing miscellaneous exploration and quests to gain some levels. I'm hoping that I'll be able to take down the Eye soon with my usual multiple-retreat strategy. We'll see.

I gave my first fighter one more point of Strength, but I've otherwise left things alone, and I've managed to gain a few more levels and make it a little deeper into the Eastern Gallery. I also went back and cleaned up some old quests that I couldn't do before. I've still avoided the Honeycomb, because I don't know what that will be like, but all the quests say "THIS IS HARD!!!" Right now I'm in the middle of trying to find Asterios, and everything's pretty much okay. I have to say, it's kind of a relief not trying to min-max. I would be worrying about where to put all these skills points if I were actually using them. But I'm not. So I don't. I just run away a lot.

ITT: Andraste ignores me.

Ishad Nha, are you posting in the right thread? Several of your responses seem really off-topic. Hmm, that workaround for place_monster is not one that I've ever tried. Seems like it would work. Hidden groups are still easier to do more complicated things with (manipulate attitudes, give non-default scripts, etc.), but it doesn't sound as though you need to do any of that here.

At one point, I decided to watch all of Star Trek, so I watched all the episodes of The Original Series, Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager (plus the movies) in chronological order. I didn't watch Enterprise partly because I heard it was bad and partly because I just was done at the end of Voyager. They were surprisingly good when strung together like that. Well, to be fair, I expected most of TNG and DS9 to be pretty bad, and they weren't, so "surprisingly good" may have had more to do with my expectations than anything else. Anyway, I saw the reboots and, while I liked them both, I was pretty surprised by what the second one did. It was good, but I was expecting... well, not that, anyway.

I almost never used spawn_creature, but I worked a lot with "place_monster" and dealt with its big downside, which is that you don't know for sure what the creature's number is going to be. If there are no summons, then place_monster starts with creature number 86 and counts up. If you have summons in the town, though, it starts with whatever the next number is after the highest-numbered summon, unless you've filled up all available summon slots, in which case I'm not completely sure what it does (grab an empty space from a dead summon, I think?). The issue here is that set_creature_memory_cell may not work if you don't get the right creature number. As an alternative, I suggest using a hidden group.

I don't know why spawn_creature() would give you problems. I think I used it at some point during Bahs/Exodus and didn't encounter any obvious weirdness, so I'd have to see the script. On the SFX boom: are you trying to kill a creature and then call a boom after that creature's death at the same spot where the creature died? And are you trying to do it with put_boom_on_char()? If so, I'd recommend putting something into the DEAD_STATE of the character that saves the character's location into two SDFs and then use those SDFs with put_boom_on_space() instead. Putting a boom on a creature who's now dead sounds like a recipe for an Unhandled Exception or some other kind of game-killing error.

I'm still working my way through the Eastern Gallery. I did the Silvar quest and took out the Darkside Loyalists in Fort Avernum. I'm doing quite a lot of two things: isolate enemies in narrow corridors so as to pick them off one-by-one as much as possible, and run away to heal in the middle of a fight. I think I ran back to Silvar about 10 times during the Fort Avernum fight, including 3 times after killing everyone except the leader there. I do have Mass Heal and (now) Lightning Spray, because Pure Spirit and Natural Mage are letting my PS and MS rise just enough to get those spells. I think I also boosted Strength on one of my fighters to get him to be able to hold more equipment. But now everybody's gained another couple of levels, and I have enough cash now to buy nearly all of the skills that I could buy from Fort Remote. Not sure how much longer this will hold up, but it's still okay so far.