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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I wonder how big the rest of the continent is... I have a feeling that the whole outside area of E3 (is it Valorim, or is that just one part?) is only a very small part. E3, and all of the Exiles for that matter, did a very good job of giving the world an epic sense.

I tried to steal Sulfras's loot and escape, but my party wasn't powerful enough to survive while running... so the only way to get his hoard was (unfortunately) to kill him. I felt kind of guilty, but this is a role-playing game and we are Exile scum, after all. At least he wasn't a friendly dragon like Motrax. I was surprised that the tunnel to the East and the Final Gauntlet was still accessible - I assumed that killing Sulfras would lock off that path of the game.

Originally Posted By: Omlette And yeah, you really don't want to annoy Sulfras - although if you've managed to reach her, you're getting pretty powerful. Originally Posted By: The Almighty Doer of Stuff She'll try to kill you as soon as you take it from its case, which is right behind her. If you want that mace, you'll have to either kill her or run really fast. Thanks again - I'll try stealing and running first and see how that goes. The inventory trick worked out too... works well with Major Blessing. Copied from the Gamefaqs guide by Mangoman: "Sulfras isn't a very nice dragon, but at least he wont try to eat you, like Pyrog. He will say that he wishes you to retrieve the Onyx Scepter, and the Silver Circlet. Your reward will be passage through his tower to the east. I think this is another way to 'win' the game. Note that if you kill Sulfras before being given passage to the east, you will never be able to go there,(i think)" -- There don't seem to be many walkthroughs out there for E1, but as long as this isn't the only way to win the game, getting rid of Sulfras shouldn't ruin the game (that's if I even can!).

Ooooh, you're right! This is a lot of fun. Procyon (my sword user) has Heartfinder and Blessing Blade right now and they're a lot better together than even a Steel Greatsword. I haven't noticed the penalty because the character seems to have enough points in edged weapons... but I'll have to test and see whether dual-wielding penalizes the to-hit chance or the to-hit chance and damage bonus. Looking through the Exile 1 item list, the Holy Mace seems the best bashing weapon (1-7 + 8 damage, undead slayer, one-handed), but is held by Sulfras. I'll have to procure it without getting her mad -- reading some walkthroughs, it seems like she is needed later in the game.

Thanks for the quick response. I haven't tried dual-wielding yet but I will probably stick to one class of weapons (so I can pump skill points into a single skill to offset the penalty, hopefully, rather than spreading them around).