Hondero

I completely agree, what a great game! You make me want to play through E2 again. It's just the perfect blend between the engine, nuances, and spells of E3 and the cool original Exile locale of E1, in my opinion. I grew up the most with E3 but going back to it years later, it's tougher to get into the non-Exile setting. It's amazing too -- so many games now have throwaway text/dialogue/cutscenes, but even the smallest character text in Exile/Avernum is special! I love hearing about how some random town's mushroom wine is amazing. OK now to keep playing Avernum 6 ...

I was honestly curious how it was going, sorry to hear you deleted the gallery! It was fun to read. Glad you can spend the time on Avernum though. Do you have a favorite of A1-A3? I forget if you mentioned before. I started E3 a couple weeks ago, then realized that I never truly finished E1 and that I liked the classic cave setting anyway ... so restarted E1 and have been running through all the quests.

Hey Motardo, I'm a year and a half slow, but I finally tried your new status icons (Exile 1 fresh install with your self-contained install program, with DOSBox and Win 3.1), and it works great! Thank you for doing this. Really cool to see how these affect things even in just the 30 minutes I've played so far. In my first battle, it was curious to even see that the mage's Strength spell blessed to a higher level than my priest's Bless (though they are all noob characters now, and sure Bless will improve with caster level). Without your new icons and patch, there would have been no way to even know this. Right before this screencap below, I ran through a few swamps just to see how the red poison addition worked. Since I grew up with the later version of E1, I had to get back my nostalgic graphics (right image as compared to left). But I just layered my MIXED.BMP from a normal Exile 1 install and overlaid it into the correct position of your revised MIXED.BMP file, and it works just fine. You can see the Wound spell in the image above ;) Link here if anyone wants to use it: https://imgur.com/a/iU9mqwB

I was just doing this yesterday in that exact area on a new E3 run-through. This plus a having the main 2-3 fighters "camp" the corner with Stand Ready makes these dungeons a lot more manageable (and even the lack of a "Stand Ready" command is why I keep returning to Exile and can't get too far in Avernum). That's some cool stuff to know also, Joleneth. I'm about to try E1 again, so will have to see if any of the encumbrance rules are similar there. The "non-armor" items in the game that raise your Defend score are a favorite of mine exactly for this whole encumbrance reason - Ivory Charm, Shielding Band, Shield Mace, Scrioth, Krysknife, Rings of Protection, etc. Edit: Thanks for the clarification, Scropius. Will have to retrain my brain to remember to give those to all my spellcasters. I'm going to keep my eye out for that cursed studded armor just for fun.

Wow - awesome detail. I appreciate the help here. Very interesting to know that with DEF >10, a single item at 3 encumbrance is OK, compared to how a gear setup with 2enc + 1enc would sometimes hurt your AP (if I am understanding correctly). I'll have to dive into your links to better understand.

I'm late to the topic, but love to keep the Exile forums going (and just jumping to E3 myself again after getting distracted by other games -- it's magical how the Exile series keeps calling back). I agree with Edgwyn about some things are only enjoyable with cheats. In my new start of E3, I'm letting myself have unlimited food and identification via the Editor. It's obviously cheating, but I never enjoyed running back to town to buy food or find a random sage, and constantly having that worry in my mind. Will it make the game that much easier to beat? I don't think so. To your original point about exploiting the armor / AP bug, go for it if it helps you enjoy it! I almost always avoid plate armor in all of my Exile run-throughs because I can't stand having my characters at <4 AP, so we could argue that the AP penalty is a little bit harsh anyway. I don't remember it exactly, but even with 20 Defense, your character will sometimes get penalized for 3 Encumbrance, right? Oh, let me also add, all of us are probably 'cheating' by constantly using Wound on magic-resistant creatures anyway

I remember making a topic on the monster numbers for Exile II maybe 10 years ago — I had to check that thread and I still think the same! In dungeons in Exile 1, I recall the enemies respawning at a ridiculous rate. It was most noticeable in some of the linear dungeons (“I know I cleared this area out”) and did feel like a tedious slog. Sort of a false difficulty — you’ve already potentially cleared a dungeon, beaten the boss and horde, and yet you still have to deal with leagues of respawning critters. If you give Exile 2 a shot, the dungeon respawning is not nearly as bad, and it only seems to be a characteristic for some dungeons. Many of them don’t seem to have respawning. I remember playing some E1 dungeons and seeing enemies respawn right before my eyes as I walked around! For the wandering monsters just leveling up your party will help a lot. Like you noticed, even level 5-8 may make wandering goblins and such run away. It is annoying to be exploring and get 2-3 groups of monsters attack you sequentially, especially after you just cleared a dungeon. Like Thaluikhain said, Exile 3 had a preference setting for less wander monsters, and it was nice to turn on when you get tired of them. Fortunately, leveling up helps a LOT, and by the time most of your characters are 15-25+, you can walk around most areas of Exile without most wandering monsters attacking. Feels good When I started playing Exile 2 again a couple weeks ago, I was annoyed at the wandering and respawning monsters sometimes getting in the way of the game. Since there is no game setting to change it and because I think it is sometimes a cheap move on the game’s part (like the false difficulty I mentioned), so I started just buying a lot of energy potions and giving myself the gold back via the game editor. You still have to slog through the duplicate enemies at times, but at least you don’t have to get stingy with the spell points and hold off of buffing your characters.

This is wild! I would not have guessed the game would have supported something like this, but I can imagine the work you needed to do to accomplish this. I usually like sticking to “stock” graphics but I will hopefully give this a shot later on. Thanks for sharing.

Whoa — years of playing and I didn’t realize Wait as being different than Stand Ready (clicking on your active PC in combat — which I also like, as it hits an enemy if they walk into an adjacent square during their turn). So Wait will allow you to have your fighters effectively swap their place in the party action schedule but not give up their turn? Very cool. Have to try it out in person to see if it works how I am imagining.

I'm just seeing the thread now but glad you are still giving it a shot! Don't give up! I've only ever played the Exile series with 6 characters, so I would say the extra two make a very very big difference. The prefab party is really not bad, but I like to have 3 fighters in the front line, 1 utility "rogue" (lightweight fighting, lock-picking, trap disarming, secondary priest spells), 1 mage, and 1 priest. My party is heavy on the fighters though ... that rogue could usually take the 3rd slot and allow for another stronger spellcaster. Some people make some exotic parties, but I really recommend having a "main" mage and priest as separate characters with a 6-person party. Regarding the attacks missing, having the points in Dexterity will be a big help. 6 points should be minimum (maybe even 7/7 along with strength), and the 6 points in either Edged / Pole / Bashing should be good enough at the start too. It might be boring, but at the very start of the game, the most helpful things IMO are just a "blank slate" fighter with Dexterity, Strength, and weapons skill (and HP, but some of that can come from Strength). Unless it is for roleplaying purposes, it is usually better to stick to one type of weapon per character, not split it between Edged and Bashing. I always have a character dedicated to Bashing weapons just because I like maces and some diversity and for some RP reasons myself, even though anyone agrees that maces and flails are never as plentiful or powerful as swords in Exile. I like Defense as a skill, but you can usually buff that up as you level up early on in the game. I was just writing how useless Thrown Missiles are when Almighty beat me to it : ) Definitely echo what Almighty said about Bless, Curse, and Haste in this game. IMO, the most effective way to do well in most combat in Exile is to buff the main fighters with Bless and Haste. You will see them hitting a lot more, doing more damage, and taking a lot less in return.

Hey Ivan, thanks for sharing this method. I realized I started Exile 2 a bunch of separate times but never got more than halfway through the game, so I had a hankering to start playing it again today. Unfortunately, while the game ran very smoothly, any sound effects were oddly choppy -- they would seem to get cut off in the first half a second or so. A lot of people would probably say that the sound effects in Exile are not its strong point, but I got really nostalgic for them and I couldn't play the game without them! Speaking of, the outdoor "entering combat" tune in E2 has to be my favorite of all of the combat tunes, Exile or Avernum. However, I did see a post here about how Old-Games packed the Exile 2 program into a self-contained downloadable version of DosBox running Windows 3.1. I used DosBox and Win 3.1 to run Exile years ago, but didn't want to go through the hassle again, but since this was self-contained, there were no headaches regarding finding a old copy of Windows, mounting a drive, and even installing Exile. This method worked for me, and did not have any sound issues. Edit: I apologize for posting the Old-Games link. If anyone is curious, it is easy to search that site and find Exile 2 and see the files I am talking about. I ran the "Download - Easy Setup (11.8 MB)" file which just unzips a couple folders and .BAT files into a folder of your choosing -- not sure if there is a difference between the two setup files they include. The download is annoyingly slow, but I was happy that it worked. Like I said, there wasn't any messing around with DOSBox, just running the "START THE GAME.BAT" file they included. I do have some mouse cursor flickering issues but no sluggishness that other people mentioned in this thread. Now, somehow I swore I played E2 a lot more recently than my copied save files show (2010) and that I was significantly farther in the game ... but it will be fun to play it again 😉

I third Major Blessing. Buffing your fighters and having them be unstoppable seems so much more SP-efficient than direct damage spells. In a long dungeon like the Tower of Shifting Floors, you might want to bring a lot of energy potions (and the Ring of Magery to regain SP if you have enough charges) so that you can keep your party healed and keep major blessing powered for when you have a decent amount of fighting. Although the Tower is a pain, the many walls mean that your blessed fighters can take down the golems with your weaker spellcasters hiding around a nearby corner, away from all the missiles -- just make sure a bunch of golems doesn't appear around the corner.

Originally Posted By: trener Tnx....by the way they dont attack me anymore. Strange, but the problem is gone. Funny, but that is good! Maybe it is similar to towns, where they forget about your crimes after a certain amount of time has passed?

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES I can only ever remember enemies with the Sleep Cloud special ability, not spell, using it. Oh man! I remember the Gorgon in E3 using it on me in the far Eastern coast (Gremlin land). When I first started playing the Exile games, I always cheated by giving my single character full stats/spells and amazing items . . . but when an army of Gorgon appeared, my one character fell asleep and would not wake up for the entire battle.

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Originally Posted By: S M Adventurer Wound also deserves a mention. It is very useful for taking out monsters that are immune to everything This is actually one of my favorites from the Exile series. Apart from Shockwave (another favorite), it's one of the best ways to take out anything with a resistance/immunity to magic. I agree, Wound is great. I am re-playing E2 and am in the early stages on Chapter IV, so there aren't any real magic-immune monsters yet, but it is still great to give experience to the priest. Another spell I always like was Ice Bolt . . . not sure why though. It's a little expensive for what it is and I can never really see the improvement in damage over Flame (does Ice Bolt do about the same as an individual square of Fireball?), but it has a special place in my heart.