Eldiran

@Other: That matches my experience exactly. Using everyone's suggestions I managed to tough it out, but there's definitely a level range in AEFTP where you have to face off against way powerful casters that can devastate you based on chance. Thankfully I've gotten past that and now my party can weather their attacks. @blackwight: Agreed, I don't think the extra randomness adds anything. I always prefer reliable abilities to random ones.

Thanks Randomizer, I'll check that out. Great advice Kestral! And thanks for the help, everyone. I tried respeccing (via the editor) my fighters with much more endurance, hardiness, and parry, and I've stopped retrying every time a single party member dies (instead I flee with my healer). Now the game is fun and manageable again. I still object to the random AI, but at least now bad luck doesn't mean game over.

Good point Mike. Unfortunately many problem encounters have been in tight spaces where contributing to the encounter means being within AoE range. I should try to be more clever about defensive placement and cover though. I'll see if I can get Return Life too; it would be incredibly nice to have but I'm not sure how/where to get it yet.

That's a good suggestion. I think I'll try some more defensive builds and give it another go. Still bothers me conceptually, but doesn't seem like there's anything else to be done about it.

@BMA: true, and I don't take issue with that. I accept a certain degree of randomness. However, when the RNG can either hand me a flawless victory or a total defeat against the same foes depending on how merciful the AI is, it's a bit too much to take. @House of S: thanks, hi! You're right, the Remix does randomize weapons quite a bit. Even though I complained about them above (to emphasize the degree to which the combat system is random), I don't usually have much trouble with physical attacks. My main gripe is with enemy casters or monsters with abilities. If any two enemies use their attack spell against me it's often an instant total party kill. Even just one caster using his attack spell two turns in a row is devastating (particularly because most of these spells also inflict a damage over time status effect of some sort). I've experienced this with enemy shamans, mages, chieftains (poison rain is quite painful), and lately, I've been getting flattened by slimes. If I could fix this through some sort of modding, it would probably be by reducing the potency of area attacks. It's quite crazy how often the enemies have party-wide spells that are two to three times more powerful than their single target attacks.

Hey guys. I hate to appear out of nowhere to complain, but there's something about Escape from the Pit I have to gripe about. I'm about 30 hours in and greatly enjoying the game. However, the more I play, the more one big problem stands out to me. Whether I win or lose any given (level-appropriate or higher) battle is extremely random. To start, with any attack there is a random chance to do a random amount of damage. Status effects are randomly inflicted by my spells and attacks, and then they may or may not affect the enemy (i.e. slow, ensnared, etc). I randomly gain entire extra attacks from Haste. Also, random critical hits. The enemy AI chooses random targets, and if they focus fire, I die. The worst part comes when the enemy possesses godlike abilities and spells (such as with any given caster or slime). For example, Draining Slimes can either attack 1 character for ~20 damage + acid or deal ~70 damage + acid to my entire party. Enemy casters either twiddle their thumbs summoning rats or wipe my party with lightning storms and poison rain. Whether I win or lose is almost entirely random. Is anyone else noticing this? Is anyone else extremely bothered by it? I just had to get it off my chest and complain. I still love the game, but I may not continue playing because of this. Also, does anyone have any hope that it is something that can be fixed? I am using Avernum Remix, which is great, but I don't know if there's any way to fix this short of editing every enemy and item in the game. Thanks for reading.

Sorry for the slow reply, but nope, I didn't. EDIT: Hm. Somehow the problem was fixed after I created a new party and went into the Tutorial. Never mind.

...does not appear to be working for me. Whether I allow the program to switch resolution or not, when I enter into a scenario (either by a new game or by a saved file) the viewscreen is blank. I can't see anything where I should see the terrain, etc, but it seems I can still do things. Command + R, control + R, option + R, and shift + R do nothing. (I know one of them is supposed to refresh the screen...) The game seems to be running fairly slow as well. I'm using Mac OS X v10.3.3.

I'd have to say Nethergate was the best demo of JV's I'd ever played. One, cause it's a great game, two, cause it's like getting two demos in one (Romans and Celtics) and three, I was really bored at the time. Unfortunately I've yet to buy the real thing, though.

I'm sorry to hear of your misfortunes. I wish you luck. Don't worry about people who complain about how slow you might be; you are providing a voluntary service, after all.

I bet you could take away the simulacrum spell during a boss battle (or is there no call for taking away skill with a spell?)

That reminds me. I wanted to ask about the Spray Acid spell... does it have any USE? Because whenever I've casted it on a foe, I find that I could easily have done more damage by hitting the enemy with a rock.

If you have any more trouble, just feel free to post the code and someone'll root through it.

For the first thing: if you know how to set up a dialog (using the more complex setup than just with "message_dialog()") then you can do this. If not, then the instructions should tell you somewhere. Anyway. Set up the dialog with the text and the options. Make sure to define a variable by putting "short (name of variable);" between the customary "variables;" and "body" except without all the parenthesis and quotes and with "name of variable" replaced with the name of your variable. It'll look like this: (if it's in a town) begintownscript; variables; short choice; body; beginstate INIT_STATE; break; And so on with all the other states. Now you've defined the variable "choice". After you set up the dialog, you'll put "choice = run_dialog(x);" where x is 0 or 1 depending on what you want (see appendices for run_dialog) Now choice will the number of what option the player chose. Strangely enough, option 0 will make choice be 1, option 1 is 2, and 2 is 3. Then you check for what they chose: if (choice == 1) { do first option } if (choice == 2) { do second option } else { do third option } I apologize if this is confusing. My explanation is far worse than that which the docs have, but I hope it still helps. For the second one: you need to use the script "specobj.txt" which you can find in VoDT's folder. It explains what to do in the script. The third: just place a special on whichever spot you want the dialog to pop up on. Use message_dialog() in the state to do it.

Sounds like quite a good article, and it will be useful now that all these scenarios are starting to come out.