Kelandon

Near the end of island 4, I found a canister of Create Rotghroth, and my troubles were over. Those are melee creations strong enough to satisfy me, so I replaced my three ur-glaahks with three rotghroths. I ran into a problem on Island 5, though. Ice End is now hostile to me. It might be because a drakon in Spire Forest (I think) approached me, and due to my canister use, I had to kill it. I can't think of anything else that I did between the last time that I was in town and this time, and the town wasn't hostile then. Now I have to de-hostile Ice End somehow before I continue playing. I can figure it out myself from the scripts (presumably an SDF somewhere), but if anyone knows what's up, I'd appreciate you saving me the effort.

Nothing that's strong enough to give me trouble can be affected by Daze. I finally broke down and made some ur-glaahks. I don't see much of an increase in strength, unfortunately, but I gather I'll be able to replace them with drayks soon enough, now that I'm on island 4. Or something. Not sure what exactly I'm going to do on this island. And the trip was a pain in the butt. Took me four loads to get all of my stuff over, but now I realize that I should probably be selling some of that garbage. UPDATE: Ach. Turns out that a newly-created drayk would be lower in level than the fyora that I've been dragging along since the beginning, so I'm keeping the fyora until I can get cryodrayks or drakons. And just as soon as I add some melee power to my repertoire with the ur-glaahks, I run up against pylons. I'm tempted to replace the ur-glaahks with drayks despite the level difference (drayks = 25, ur-glaahks = 33), just for the sake of dealing with the pylons in the mines, but instead I'll deactivate them and then take them down one-by-one for XP. Man, the moment I can shape drakons or gazers, I'm going to blast the heck out of everything I meet. I've cranked Intelligence to get the most Essence I can, and I'm just itching to make some high-powered range creations.

The vlish deliver a different kind of damage in melee, so if I'm reduced to fighting in melee, the vlish can already do the job; glaahks wouldn't help me much. I just want a creature that attacks at range and delivers good fire/cold damage (but is also pretty high-level by default). Hence, drayks would be the perfect solution, but I can't get them yet. It's not a huge problem. Like I said, I'm wiping out the western part of the island unaided, but it does cause a reload every now and then when I get swarmed. A huge part of my strategy is avoiding getting swarmed (and has been for a while). I should probably be blessing my troops a little more often. I rarely do, except when I have to reload after a hard fight.

I'm working my way through Donal now. I'm finding that my pack of vlish (half terror, half regular) is very strong against most things, but it struggles a bit against certain patterns of immunities. Submission turrets refuse to be defeated except by my vlish in melee, which is sketchy at best. I've kept one fyora since the beginning, and in cases in which my vlish can't do much damage, I have them throw poison and acid while Greta and my fyora do the real damage. I'm really looking forward to getting drayks and such, because I have ridiculous amounts of extra essence at this point, and I need to blow it on something. I definitely am working my way through the island on my own, with very little or no help from Greiner's troops. I freed the guy from his possession (had to look up how to do it, because the dialogue options are less than obvious), but his troops seem so weak and hesitant that I haven't bothered to ask them for much. I'm still playing a crazed, canister-guzzling rebel looney, so I don't know why I care so much about not wasting Greiner's troops, but I guess it's just that I want the XP to myself. I've sold all missile weapons and wands that I've found, and I've just been saving crafting items, because I haven't really looked into how they can be combined just yet. I guess I should do that soon. I'm hoping to make some serious headway in the next couple of days, because I've spent too long on island 3.

Originally Posted By: Ghaldring That's the worst build I can think of Well, yeah, I know that now. I didn't then. Like I said, I took that one piece of advice in a change-area screen too seriously. Quote: Yes, Parry is overpowered, but if you focus purely on Parry you're going to bite the dust. Especially considering that there are many attacks which bypass parry (The Eyebeast at the Taker road was torture). Guardian's should have creation support. I had no creation support as a Guardian, and I was still fine, even against eyebeasts. I did have to boost Endurance a bit by that point, so that I could get hit once and not die, but generally I could kill an eyebeast with a couple of swings. They also missed sometimes. I think those were the fights in which random chance played the biggest role, though. Quote: Easss is a wimp. I find Learned Pinner to be the hardest sect leader. I didn't have any trouble with any of the sect leaders. But then, I was level 42 or something by that point.

Slith makes a good point, one that I put me off of GF3 when I tried to play it back in 2005. In GF1 and GF2, I made sure not to have an opinion until very late in the game, so I could see all the sides with essentially the same save file. (Replay value is bad when I really, really don't want to replay the game.) In GF3, that was completely impossible. For that matter, it looks pretty hard to take a reasonable path. You have to choose a side that has a lot of things wrong with it. The Awakened were pretty moderate in GF1, and unaligned options were pretty moderate in GF1 and GF2, but there's nothing like that in GF3. I dropped any pretense of choosing I side that I like very much, and I'm just playing an extremist canister-chugging rebel. I don't mind linearity (see my BoA scenarios), but the island transitions are a little annoying. Okay, I get it now. There were legitimate complaints about GF3, though they were quite different from the legitimate complaints about A4. I'm still quite enjoying the game (because I've simply accepted the limitations), and I'm looking forward to a couple of days from now, when I'll be able to play a bit more. Island three, here I come.

Reactionary? For GF3? It's not really an engine change in the way that A4 is, so that doesn't really make sense. It's just a tweak in the way that A3 was a tweak on the engine from A1 and A2.

I'm doing pretty well on the second island with a horde of vlish. I swerved Rebel immediately but think I swerved too hard, because it looks as though I could've tried to broker a peace between the fighting sides on the second island but I just gave the rebels a canister instead. The factions are much clearer in the previous GFs. I'm finding that I'm having trouble figuring out what my options are in GF3, and it's screwing with my attempt at role-playing. For the most part, I don't care, because I'm really liking the game. At some point I heard that GF3 was something of a nadir of the GF series, in sort of the same way that A4 was for the Avernum series, but I'm not finding that at all. The plot is actually pretty engrossing, and I'm enjoying the engine enhancements and new graphics. My preliminary feeling is that I like it better than GF2. We'll see if I still feel that way after I'm off the second island.

After the beginning, I got annoyed with the "loyalist" answers that I was supposed to give and went rebel the whole way. In GF1 and GF2, I waited until the very end to choose a side. In GF3, I'm joining the rebels as soon as I can. We'll see what difference that makes. Also, yes, I put the difficulty level up to Torment, just to see if that makes any difference at all (which it hasn't, yet). Making a pack of fyoras seems to be my strategy early on, just as in GF1. Small early boosts to Leadership and Mechanics, as well as a significant boost to Fire Shaping, and now I'm going to crank Intelligence until I can get three or four fyoras. I grabbed Greta... don't know if that makes any difference yet.

I tried doing that with Easss in GF2 yesterday, and it was just a little more effort than I wanted to put in. The GF should be stronger: if you let the enemy use it, fighting that enemy should be like fighting Rentar in A3 (possible, but obscenely hard).

It's probably possible to play as a Shaper who puts most of his effort into making strong creations, but making lots and lots of creations isn't quite the uber-tactic that it was in GF1, at least not at first. I didn't play far enough to find out if it ended up being helpful eventually. I'll try a little harder in GF3, though. I'm thinking Shaper loyalist (whatever they call it in that game) with hordes of creations, not unlike what I did in GF1. Recommendations about how to make that work? I'm too lazy to search, so if anyone wants to link to places where this has been discussed before, feel free.

Just finished GF2 for the first time in nearly five years (since November 2003). Apparently I played it twice back in '03. The first time, I played as an extraordinarily weak Shaper with really high Leadership and Mechanics, together with an uber-powerful Fyora (level 37, maxed stats) and a similarly enhanced Drayk (level 40, nearly maxed stats). I couldn't really fight anything, but these creations kept me alive while my Shaper disarmed traps and reasoned with the opposition. This ended up not being very fun, because I couldn't fight anything at all. The second time, I played as a Guardian, also with high Leadership and Mechanics, but with reasonable combat skills. This worked better. This time, I did the Guardian thing again, emphasizing QA and Parry quite a lot, and it was pretty absurd by the end. I had so little health that just about everything that I fought could kill me with one unadulterated hit, if that hit could just be landed. Foes rarely did land that hit, though; I'd at least deflect damage almost every single time. I did think that relying heavily on QA and Parry caused random chance to determine the outcome of fights much more than usual in a Spidweb game, though. I'd save before a combat, and if Parry failed me once and I died, I'd just reload and try again (with exactly the same tactics), and eventually I'd win. Eventually Parry would hold up all the way through. I probably should've played on Torment, not Normal, because Easss was pretty disappointing by the time I got to him. For that matter, so were the other two, who weren't much stronger (as far as I could tell) than regular drayks or drakons. Then again, I don't know what a climactic battle could've been: really huge blasts bouncing off of me over and over again? I specialized in melee, leading to some really ridiculous situations. My strategy for taking down pylons was amazingly stupid but effective: I ran up to them and hit them in melee. I'd kill one, run away, heal, run up and kill another, run away, and repeat until they were all dead. I don't think I'll be bound to melee ever again. I didn't feel any plot disappointment in GF2, the way I did in GF1. I think the reason is that GF2 never builds up a mystery the way that GF1 does, so I didn't really expect anything. I was just exploring and hacking most of the time, and Jeff always builds interesting worlds to explore. The business about Shanti's death was sort of a mystery, but it didn't grip me the same way that the total strangeness of Sucia Island did, so I didn't mind as much when the resolution was simply that I met Barzahl, met his deputy, and killed the guy in single combat. I do think that my ending was a pretty cool one, though. I spent most of the game avoiding those questions about which side I agreed with, remaining cautiously neutral (and never used a canister), and trying not to kill anything when diplomacy could be used to avoid death. Then, when I reached the drakons in Benerii-Uss, I let loose and slaughtered all of them, killed Syros and most of the Taker city, killed Melancon Eye, killed Barzahl and all of his city, killed Phariton, sabotaged the Radiant College, sabotaged the Magus Complex, killed Learned Pinner and most of Medab, killed Zakary and most of Drypeak, and generally rained the righteous fury of the Shapers down on all of the godforsaken place. This gets the unaligned ending, but there are special notes for all of the deaths of the leaders and for the lack of canister use. For GF3, I'm thinking I'll go back to being a Shaper, unless it turns out to suck. I haven't played GF3 yet, so this will be brand new to me. We'll see how it goes.

I can't say that I ever use scrolls or wands. I use energy potions/elixirs occasionally, and as many knowledge brews as I can get my hands on, but that's about it.

I thought it was a later GF that introduced the glow for using lots of canisters. Certainly GF2 has glowing NPCs. (But I guess Trajkov in GF1 glowed, too.)

Designer FAQ, Q11.

It's possible that the VoDT FAQ may help, especially questions 1 and 3.

A nice ideal, sort of, but when there've been literally thousands of pages of preceding text, it's pretty hard to write a satisfying stand-alone that also continues the story. I've been having a hell of a time recently with non-stand-alone stories, because I've been trying to read the X-Men comics from start to mid-1990's. Only problems are the cross-overs and extra X-Titles and limited runs. I really just want to read Legionquest with full context, but to do that requires tracking the entire history of Legion, and (much worse) the entire history of Professor X and Magneto.

Well, when you can't go outside, you spend time reading or on the computer. That's what so many Seattlites (and Finns) are on the Internet.

Yeah, the difference was that my Shaper didn't use any magic. This was probably inefficient (should've at least hasted my creations). I dumped some extra skill points into the shaping skills, especially Fire Shaping, especially early on, but for the most part, I counted on my creations living for a while in order to gain levels. Yeah, come to think of it, if I had been playing on Torment, I probably would've needed some magic to spell up the creations. Even as a Guardian in GF2, I'm getting that much.

Yeah, I just didn't bother to check the difficulty level, so I left it on whatever the default was. I probably should've changed it. I tried GF2 with essentially the same strategy (Shaper who is extremely weak and has many weak creations that get replaced) and it didn't work very well. I'm going with a Guardian emphasizing QA/Parry, no matter how cliche it is. It's interesting that the skill requirements became much more diverse when I chose that route. The Shaper in GF1 basically just pumped Intelligence with every single level. This Guardian in GF2 is boosting QA and Parry, but I also need Strength, Endurance, Melee Weapons, Healing Craft, and a little bit of Blessing Magic, too. (Not to mention Leadership and Mechanics.)

I didn't bother with the Power Core. And the creations had no issues there, the one time when I did wander in — it was me, the Shaper, who did. I put nothing into Endurance the whole game, so I was still pretty weak at the end. As far as initiative, I forget whether the more important factor was that I relied mostly on missile creatures (fyoras, artilas, drayks) or whether I pumped Fire Shaping from the very beginning and therefore had pretty high-level fyoras even at start. Either way, I pretty much always could get a good round of attacks from most of my creatures before enemies got to attack. I could never have enough Intelligence. I kept dumping skill points into it to get more Essence for stronger creations. It wasn't until the very end, when I had my gang of drayks, that I finally felt as though I had enough Essence. (And after using the Geneforge, of course.) Oh, I should mention that I never bothered changing the difficulty, so I think I was playing on Normal. Torment might've been a different matter.

You can just read the documentation. All of that is free.

It's somewhat easier to learn Avernumscript from BoA and then apply it to GF than to learn it from GF directly, though both are possible.

Just re-played Geneforge 1 for apparently the first time since I first played it five years ago. The few bits of strategy that I've picked up from glancing at topics here on the boards apparently made a huge difference. On the first play-through, I saw the in-game tip that said that creations would become very strong if you kept them all the way through the game, and apparently I took that to heart: as a Shaper, I kept my original two fyoras that I created within the first couple of areas. I kept them to the end of the game. They were about level 17 or 18... pretty low for the end of the game. I pumped their stats by evolving them as much as I could, so they were pretty ridiculously strong for fyoras, but they were still fyoras. I apparently added a drayk near the end of the game, but that was it. I beat the game originally with a couple of fyoras and a drayk. That was hard to do. This time, I didn't evolve the creations at all. I gave them 2 intelligence points and that was it. I made as many as I could, and I absorbed them and made new ones when I got the ability to make stronger creations. I had 7 creations almost from the very beginning of the game, and I ended with a pack of drayks. This was a lot easier and rather more fun, too. I could go into the Shaper Crypt and just blast the heck out of the creatures there, which I could never do before. Doing a full-on assault at the Front Gate was pretty fun, too. I had a lot of success not ever getting hit. I'd get just in the range to attack one creature, hit it enough to kill it, and end combat mode right there. Then the next creature would come into range, I'd enter combat, kill it, and end combat again. This got me into trouble with Corata, actually — killed him before he had a chance to say anything to me, so I never got the control rod. Seemed like less than ideal programming, but maybe it was also less than ideal playing. Originally, I felt that GF1 was something of a disappointment. It felt very mysterious and exciting, but the secret of what the Geneforge was got revealed long before the end of the game, and there was nothing interesting to learn about Sucia Island in the last third of the game. It was just a matter of killing stuff and working through areas to get to Trajkov and help/kill him. There needed to be more to discover, especially in the last part of the game. I felt the same way this time, but not to the same extent. Maybe because I had a vague idea of what I was doing this time, my movement through the map was more directed and efficient. I was paying a bit less attention to the plot and a bit more to the strategy, so it was okay when the plot faded out at the end. It was decision time by then, anyway. Eh, there's my meaningless ramble about GF1. Expect another in a few weeks, when I go through GF2.

"Burst your bubble"? That's certainly a weird way of expressing that thought. (Though if you had actually read everything on my site, you'd have had an answer to #1 already. And to the last question you added on.) In other news, I've come to the conclusion that special spells are virtually mandatory for a halfway decent scenario that's larger than a couple of towns. The default BoA system is not very interesting otherwise.