Marak

From what I've seen and read, the Exp penalties you get from positive Traits are canceled out by the fact that you're always getting good Exp from what you're doing. Because you're Leveling more slowly than you "should be", the game rewards you extra Exp for killing a monster/doing a quest because they're almost always "higher level" than you. What will happen is that the Exp penalty will "cost" you about 3 or 4 (if I recall correctly) Levels by the end of the game, but this is offset by all the free Skills/Abilities you're getting from your Traits. Traits like Natural Mage, Pure Spirit, Elite Warrior, and Divinely Touched scale with Level - so you're basically getting a hefty amount of free Skill Points out of them. However, I find that taking both Divinely Touched and *whatever else* and dipping your Exp Penalty into the 40-45% (or more!) range takes things to an extreme. I don't personally like it, but honestly, unless you're playing on Torment or something you should be just fine.

I'd rather Jeff go the safe route, buy up artwork within his budget, and imagine the glory of the Great Cave in my head than have him hire a team of artists capable of producing Baldur's Gate quality graphics and end up going bankrupt because of it. I enjoy pretty graphics as much as the next guy but given the choice between looks and more story and more quests and more gameplay, I'll take more story/quests/gameplay. The reviewer on the other hand, will never "get" Jeff's games and will end up blowing $60 on yet another fluff-over-substance Final Fantasy title.

Heh, I think you missed the [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tag in SoT's last post.

I think Avatar has a point, sometimes it's disappointing that, after some significant or meaningful dialoge, the person goes Hostile and you know that there's only going to be 1 outcome: someone dies. It would be nice to have a "knock him out" ability (a spell, a battle discipline, something that might miss and can only be used on low-health Humanoids) so he/she can, in fact, be subdued and dragged back to the proper authorities and dealt with.

Naw, he started bellyaching that he had to *gasp* READ the game's set-up (you know, those 6 grueling paragraphs that explain why your Party starts the game where they do) and things just went downhill from there.

1,2,4, and 8 are all solid titles. Hard to go wrong with any of them. Well, 1 not so much, but it's still a classic. 8 was also a blast, I bought a used PS2 just to be able to play thru it after renting it and loving it. Re: Doom Warrior, that ties into my point/rant above (sort of). I mean, why do something archaic like read when the Developers are supposed to spend millions of dollars making a 132 second CG Cut-scene that takes up more disc space than the world map? Right? Right?

4 is still my favorite though.

Alright, fine, a few (very, very few) examples of "friendly" undead exist but I'd still like to have to fight Solberg after he finally snaps because of, oh, take your pick: the stress of "helping Avernum" becomes too much, or he's bitter over the failure(s) of Tranquility, or he's finally given up on everything and the seeds of insanity planted when he was confined to his remote tower finally blossoms, or the death of Cheeseball VII, Esquire, or well, take your pick, really. Plenty of valid reasons for Solberg to finally lose it and finally do/plot something that is detrimental to Avernum. Speculation is fun

Ahh, nice timeline, very informative So it does make Avernum over a century old - and puts Solberg's age into a clear light; without his "skills" he'd be long, long dead by now. By decades. I hope we get to fight a Corrupted/Enraged/Crazed, Fully Undead Solberg in A6. Hero of Avernum or not, when was the last time you saw an intelligent, friendly undead? That's right, never. They might pretend to be friendly or helpful at first (that Vampire that wants you to kill some Ogres for him in A3 comes to mind), but they always betray you or attack you in the end. I don't foresee Solberg being the only good egg in the history of Lichdom, and there are serveral text comments in A5 that come right out and say that using Mage skills to extend one's life never turns out the way the recipient thinks it will.

Having to wait until sometime early next year for A6 is making me progressively sadder.

Hrm, only 50 (ish) years from A1 to A5? That doesn't seem long enough given that the originally banished people could still be alive in their 80's and A5 makes it pretty clear that we're supposed to be many generations into Avernum's history, with there being grandkids or even great-grandkids to the original "settlers". Plus I remember there being a mention of how your Empire troopers in A5 wouldn't have been treated so poorly by the Avernites "just a century ago" again implying that Avernum is at least 100 years old by now, possibly more. Of course, if that were the case, A5 would have to take place 45+ years after A4 and anyone who remembers the Time of the Shades would have to be at least 55 years old, and this isn't the case (see the Nephil in Blackchasm Fort who talks about the events of A4 with you). Sigh, I guess there's not enough evidence one way of the other, but it's still sorta fun to speculate. P.S. It's probably way too late by now in the game's development by now, but I always wanted to suggest to Jeff that he add to the information given about a foe when you right-click on it in combat. I'd love to be able to click on the monster I'm beating on and see "Hostile So-and-So, Health 318/495, Slowed, Weakened, Cursed." You know, instead of guessing when my debuffs were wearing off. The little floaty Xs in A5 were a good start but when you nail a monster with Daze, Slow, Leg Sweep, and Shield Breaker over the course of 2-3 rounds, you have no idea which one is wearing off when: the Xs remain so long as ANY of the four debuffs remain, and the game never tells you what combination the Xs represent at any given time.

Last year, my wife took classes at a psuedo-technical school to get herself into the IT Job Market and got herself a handful of Microsoft Certifications. In one of the first books she was given, Microsoft admitted IN WRITING that Windows XP breaks down over time, its performance degrades over time, and that periodic re-installs of the operating system are both expected and encouraged. It's not just your imagination that Windows isn't running as smoothly now as it did when you last installed it.

I guess I'm biased in the opposite direction. I grew up playing FFI and Dragon Warrior I and II on the NES. This was a time when "bad" graphics were the norm, and you enjoyed the game based on more important things like the quality of the game's transration, the combat system, character growth, and dungeon design (such as it was in those days). Avernum and Geneforge represent my absolute favorite type of game to play, period. And then I see people putting all of Jeff's games down because of their graphics, the hands-down LEAST IMPORTANT element of an RPG, and it makes me sad. I mean, look at the graphics of the most influential RPG of all time: Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, wait. I rest my case

Oh, I did. I blasted thru A4 as quickly as I could on Hard, got my chars up to Level 34 or so, managed to get the "good" ending Click to reveal.. wherein you toast Rentar-Ihrno v2.0 for good and immediately registered & fired up A5. But honestly, after playing thru A2 and A3 with 3-4 parties each, I'm still more familiar with the 8 points/Level system than I am the 5 points/Level system.

Obviously A5 happens somewhere between 20 and 50 years after A3, as there are numerous references to Empress Prazac being "no longer young" and having all the original settlers of Avernum dead of old age (Solberg excepted). I've been wondering how many years/decades this actually is since the in-game Calender disappeared on us and all time frames given are vague in the extreme, usually along of the lines of "oh, it's been a few decades since then," or the ever-popular, "oh, that was such a long time ago in Avernum's history." Also, I'm still hoping Jeff brings the party-wide Reputation stat back in some form or another, but I'm not holding my breath too much.

Mmmmmmm, can't wait for more tasty Avernum goodness. I'm having having an absolute blast with 5 so far and if A6 is ANYTHING like A5 or GeneForge 5 I know I'm going to play the crap out of it. Too bad I have to wait for the PC version

At least you can get rid of Forcecage with a quick Mass Curing, esp. if everyone is Hasted. And yes, spamming Slow on EVERYTHING in a fight like that can actually be more beneficial (in some ways) than spamming mass AoE damage.

Quote: This has caused confusion before; people seem to assume the X is for Exile. <----- P.S. This thread has been brought to you by the Letter "X" and the number 3.

I love A3 for that reason alone: the melee system was a blast because your fighters (esp. with a good Polearm) could keep up with the Mages on damage. Yes, it was broken. Yes, doing 200 damage Lethal Blows at Level 20 in the Filth Factory is just ridiculous. But it's still a lot of fun I'm seriously thinking of just scrapping my current Hard-mode Party and trying something completely different, like Staight-up Tank, Tank/Priest Hybrid, Straight-up Mage, Mage/Priest Hybrid. As has been said, Archers are a joke and I can use my Tank to blow points in Tool Use (as was suggested earlier in the thread), and I'll still have 2 Healers and 2 Mages (albeit of differing levels of skill), which seems to be mandatory when things get hairy.

I feel lucky now, I've been using XP pretty much since it came out and this is only my 3rd re-boot of it (and the 3rd one wasn't truly necessary, but I figured "copy-pasting" Windows from one Hard Drive to another wasn't going to work so well so I just bit the bullet and reinstalled XP while I was at it).

I just dump everything in the Portal Fort (A4/5) or Fort Emergance (A3) or, well, dumping things in A2 is bear no matter how you look at it =p The problem with this method is two-fold: less money in your coffers (no big deal in A3) and digging thru 5 dozen icons in the "On the Ground" area of the lewt screen. Fun times

Yeah, I need to read the site more closely, I didn't realize that the discount was a standard thing... Thanks for the heads-up though folks, I appreciate it Ugh, now the problem is remembering the proper address and such, I've moved since '04 when I bought A2/3... although Jeff WAS able to dredge up new Registration codes for me out of the blue since my copies of A2/3 didn't survive the Great Hard-drive Crash of '06, Operating System Re-install of '07, and Complete Computer Re-build of '09 as Registered copies. Imagine that!

Yeah, it's a case like that where you end up selling every one of a "vendor trash" item, only to find out later that you need to give one/some to an NPC, only to find out that you picked up every one in the game and sold them, that the Character Editor becomes your friend. I won't touch the thing normally unless I make a "dead-end" save in which my Party is 100% unable to survive/return to a town under their own power, but I think a situation like the one I just described is a fine use for it - after all, you're penalized for carrying too much trash around, and then game penalizes you for not carrying all your trash around. Fight back with the Editor! =p

Ahh yes, the Tower of the Magi with its northern entrance, leading back into Avernum proper, taunting you with its inaccessibility

And unless she's lying through her teeth (and very convincingly), remember that she soundly denounces the Plagues as a Way of Revenge when you broach the subject with her in her tower early on in A3.