Lattan

Quote: Originally written by *i: It's upstairs in the northern part of town. In a quite dark barracks in a box or something that might be easy to miss. I suggest turning the brightness of your monitor up. QFT It may also be partially obscured, though I'm not sure.

You don't actually need to beat the adventurers to get everywhere in the Honeycomb as it's enough of a maze you can come at them from both sides.

And on a related note...do you ever get to discuss the tests with somebody? They're supposed to have been set up by the Crown for adventurers to prove their worth, but King Starrus hasn't mentioned them as far as I've gotten. Especially irritating since I originally thought I'd have to complete them before being entrusted with some task or something.

Quote: Originally written by Januarist Revolutionary: In fact, strangely enough minor characters often get more fleshed out as people because they have less exposition to give and less plot to drive along. I have to emphasize this point. In A1/2 the bit characters (shopkeepers and the like) were truly interesting. That was the part of A3 that most irritated me...suddenly the characters stopped being interesting people and become 3-line jobs (buy, sell, goodbye). And it happened again in A4.

You can enter the ruins of the old Tower in two places. One of those places allows you to reach a demon, which you must kill. It's a quest from one of the wizards, who will then allow you to read his spellbook.

Quote: Originally written by Mimi: Hum... sorry, but where is The Tower of Magi ? Or, from Almaria, go east until you can't go farther and then turn south. It's in the very southeast corner of the map.

I'm most of the way through the game and still have no idea what it does to you/your opponents. Can anybody explain?

Any chance of an A4 update if that happens?

Quote: Originally written by Glafna: Contra-ooooookkkkkkkaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy. Not exactly how I would put it. And you ARE aware that Jeff has a job outside Spiderweb, right? Quote: the About Jeff page: Practically all my programming is done from noon to 6 PM and from midnight to 4 AM. The afternoon programming is done with the soothing sounds of Comedy Central and the Simpsons in the background. The late night stuff is done with Comedy Central playing on the telly. I say all of this only to make it absolutely clear I don't have a real job. We work in our basement here, with the TV always on, and we like it that way.

Unlike the other Avernums, I'm also finding a lot of high-quality gear that could go either way. I haven't finished yet (I'm in Rentahr's Keep), but there aren't any must-haves so far. Except possibly the Gazerskin Sandals and the Emerald Chestguard.

There's more than one of each of the Girdle's...you'll get another chance.

Jeff works alone. If I understand the nature of his life anywhere near as well as I think I do, he will always work alone. Otherwise he wouldn't work alone. If he didn't like working alone in this environment, he wouldn't. He'd be a designer for some corporate entity, like he was for MechWarrior 4. And one person can only work so fast, so he won't provide us new games any more quickly.

Quote: Originally written by Slartucker: I added a line in the door script on my testing copy of A4 to tell me what my Unlock strength is. The result goes up 1 for every point of Tool Use, and goes up 2 for every 3 points of spellcraft/etc! Synergy was correct. Wait, I'm confused. That's not how I'm reading what Synergy said. Quote: Originally written by Synergy: Tool Use Jump from 0-1 counts as 2 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 1-2 counts as 1 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 2-3 counts as 2 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 3-4 counts as 1 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 4-5 counts as 2 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 5-6 counts as 1 towards total (extrapolation) ... Tool Use = 1.5 x Tool Use points, and the total adjusted points for opening a Difficulty 35 door = 48 points. Oh, and what's a "UD level bonus?" I clearly don't know my way around as well as I thought.

Quote: Originally written by Slartucker: I added a line in the door script on my testing copy of A4 to tell me what my Unlock strength is. The result goes up 1 for every point of Tool Use, and goes up 2 for every 3 points of spellcraft/etc! Synergy was correct. Wait, I'm confused. That's not how I'm reading what Synergy said. Quote: Originally written by Synergy: Tool Use Jump from 0-1 counts as 2 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 1-2 counts as 1 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 2-3 counts as 2 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 3-4 counts as 1 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 4-5 counts as 2 towards total (extrapolation) Tool Use Jump from 5-6 counts as 1 towards total (extrapolation) ... Tool Use = 1.5 x Tool Use points, and the total adjusted points for opening a Difficulty 35 door = 48 points. Oh, and what's a "UD level bonus?" I clearly don't know my way around as well as I thought.

Quote: The A4 manualEffect: Improves the caster’s Tool Use skill by about .75 plus .75 per point of spell strength. So if I'm reading it properly the equation should be = Tool Use + ( (Mage Spells + Spellcraft + Magery + Unlock Doors level +1) * 0.75) Okay, so the +1 is probably not a big deal. But I originally thought the formula was a little different and went to the bother of opening the manual and all, so I figured we could get it right.

Quote: The A4 manualEffect: Improves the caster’s Tool Use skill by about .75 plus .75 per point of spell strength. So if I'm reading it properly the equation should be = Tool Use + ( (Mage Spells + Spellcraft + Magery + Unlock Doors level +1) * 0.75) Okay, so the +1 is probably not a big deal. But I originally thought the formula was a little different and went to the bother of opening the manual and all, so I figured we could get it right.

The second quest can be solved through the chitrach tunnels. I believe the proper map is directly south of the chitrach queen-thing, but I'm not sure. I have no idea about your first one.

I actually found the cauldron contents far more difficult than the blue thing in this quest, possibly because I didn't want to do the full bless/haste/blah for those. But as always, the key to battling a powerful single enemy is slow, acid, and haste.

You need to actually buy those skills 6 times each (or whatever the requirement is), so any race/trait bonuses don't count either.

I keep seeing all the ways to edit the game, and I'm beginning to wonder: Is there any technical reason one couldn't create an entirely new scenario using the A4 engine? Obviously we have BoA that's meant for it, but this is a different engine, and more importantly (it's my understanding that Geneforge uses the same scripting language) you could do it with Geneforge. So, er, yeah.

Quote: Originally written by Istara: The exception might be the guy who charges you 1000 to make you a client, who then makes Warrior's Cloaks and Runed Helms and stuff (which you won't find by that stage, nor ever in multiple quantities). Ugh, no. While I admittedly found him kind of late, I also found Runed Helms within 1.5 hours of buying them. They're available within the Great Cave, and so is the not-so-stellar Warrior's Cloak.

The various armorsmiths and potionmakers in the game serve the same purpose as the anvil in G3, at least from what I know (I didn't buy G3). It's simply a text-based interface instead of a visual one.

Quote: Originally written by Contra: ..And some people might find that offensive? Afterall, I don't think Horus has actually said that he thinks Avernum 4 sucks. Shockingly, some people don't seem to like TM very much. And getting vaguely back onto something that resembles the topic: It's really irritating that the pathfinding algorithm lets the PCs just cease movement if they run into somebody.

I believe the newsletter said March.

I also say Avernum 2. It has some fairly important interface advancements over Avernum -- I really like seeing health bars on my opponents and having a quest list -- and has a better story than Avernum 3. Plus actually ending Avernum 3 was irritating. And probably not least, Avernum 2 was the first SW game I played.