Hondero
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lets play Playing Exile for the first time...
Hondero replied to ladyonthemoon's topic in The Exile Trilogy
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.
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lets play Playing Exile for the first time...
Hondero replied to ladyonthemoon's topic in The Exile Trilogy
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. -
lets play Playing Exile for the first time...
Hondero replied to ladyonthemoon's topic in The Exile Trilogy
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 😉
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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whats your favorite sommuning out of the three
Hondero replied to Trenton.'s topic in The Exile Trilogy
I can picture some of the lower summoning spells (like Summon Beast or Summon Spirit) being interesting and useful if the game progressed a lot slower. But by the time you get those spells and have the SP to use them freely, it's easier and quicker to just run up with melee or use Wound/Fireball. Speaking of it, it could be interesting to have such a scenario, where characters and items were relatively weak (stone items!) and gained experience very slowly, so that the lower spells were useful and low-level monsters were more of a threat. -
I recently stumbled upon a good Exile: Escape from the Pit website at http://www.exile1.cjb.net/ This site has the most complete list of all the unique items for E1 that I have seen, so other players might find it interesting too! About the only item not on there that I remember is the "ice staff." The rest of the site is solid, too (except for the work-in-progress walkthrough, although I don't think it will be updated soon -- the site was last updated in 2000).
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Originally Posted By: The Mystic You might be able to change the display settings in the virtual Win98. Otherwise, try VirtualBox with WinXP or WinME; the Exile games should look a lot nicer. Thanks for the tips, I actually tried out your advice on the "Windows 7 Compatibility" thread on using DosBox with Win3.1 and it works out perfectly! I really miss Win3.1 too, so it has a nostalgic feeling that goes right with Exile.
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Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel The Exile trilogy are 16-bit programs, I believe. Just so you know. Thanks, I gave VirtualBox with Win98SE a try and it works out! Only 16 colors, but the choppiness in Windows doesn't effect Exile in-game fortunately.
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Hello! I wanted to continue playing Exile 1 after a long break. During this break, I moved to a Vista laptop from my WinME desktop. I have the old Exile trilogy CD, but running any of the Exile files doesn't work, giving the message: "The version of this file is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher. I tried copying the installer and then running it in compatibility mode for Win95/98, but still got the same message. Fortunately, I have the registered version of Exile 1 still on my old WinME, along with the savegames (the machine isn't plugged in now, but I was planning on turning it on and moving the save files to the new computer anyways), so would it be possible to simply put the whole Exile 1 folder on the WinME into a zip file and then copy that to the laptop, hopefully avoiding installation altogether? Thanks in advance! Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated too. EDIT: I just read Micawber's post on the Win7 compatibility thread, so I'm going to try VirtualBox.
