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Alberich

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Everything posted by Alberich

  1. I did all that -- but he didn't show. I've installed 1.02 now but I didn't see him in Kelleran -- if Randomizer is telling me true, then I shouldn't expect more, at least not now. Thanks to all!
  2. I decided early to let the Bhanlon twerp retake his mansion in Kelleran...I cleared out the villains, told the mayor I had cleared Bhanlon to return, and went back to the northern port and told Bhanlon he could come back. Yet, each time I come back to that town, the theater (which I patronized) is still a mess, and Bhanlon isn't to be found in the mansion. Do I just have to wait for further events, or is there something I neglected to do?
  3. In two of the towns in The Vol....the Blasted Pit and the little one near where you first enter...some of the terrain is black blocks, as if the art had never been drawn there, and it doesn't light up when I get close enough to see. What can I do about that?
  4. Short answer is, "Yes," because a familiar casual game gives me something to do with my hands if I want to listen to music, an audiobook, or a video lecture, and I played enough Freecell, Spider, and Canfield/Klondike in the past that I'm hardly thinking at all when I play them. (My favorite casual game, Machiavellian Suns, requires a bit more concentration, so I wouldn't try to listen to a lecture while playing it.) Somewhere I've still got a book of 101 solitaire games, from back when I played them with actual cards...I liked "Congress Solitaire" pretty well while listening to LPs (easier to win than "Parliament Solitaire"...you laid out the aces in advance, which I assume represented having a two-party system in place while you played)...wasted youth, maybe, but I liked it.
  5. Yes, conversations do matter, particularly in the Avadon and Geneforge series.
  6. But, yeah, main question is does it work if I only focus on fire shaping with my shaper in all Geneforge games? That's how I played G2 through G5, and yes, it does work, even on torment. I was slightly handicapped because I refused to use canisters and always aligned with non-Rebel factions, so that in G3 and G4 I never got to use drayks (my favorite fire creation) (kshyakks work just fine in combat, but I liked my drayks best). But in G5 I found a trainer for drayks, and I got through all the games just fine anyway. Also, I never really worried about keeping them alive to build XP - at least not for most of the games - I liked to change my mix of critters / use of essence around, and build my shaping skills to make the new ones tougher. May not be the most efficient way to play, but it was fun for me. More dedicated replayers than I ever will be talk up the value of magic shaping and vlish, but to tell you the truth I just don't like looking at vlish. G2 was my second favorite in the series, after G5, so I hope you have a great time with it!
  7. The other folk in this thread have done a lot more replays than I ever did, but I always played as a Shaper and always went with the "frequent reabsorption/recreation" route. Part of it was that I didn't want to reload every time a creation got killed...that happened too often. Partly it was because I liked to vary my creation mix according to the enemies I was facing (without spoiling...it's intuitively obvious that some opponents will damage some creations more than others; and I noticed that some will attack certain creations in preference to others, at least in some of the games they will--so you can vary the creation mix to draw fire as well as dish it out). And then there are the essence pools to exploit.
  8. In my long-ago experience with tabletop roleplaying (and also some more recent play-by-post), I can tell you lots of RPG players liked them (as I did). Most, in fact, of the ones I knew. You didn't need the DM/GM to create something of enormous literary quality either, as the players' imaginations filled in the gaps quite nicely. I haven't played as many CRPGs as a lot of people here, so I can't really speak to what their audiences like.
  9. Larry was great...and so was Leather Goddesses of Phobos...that said: I'm one of the only people I've seen in the forum who liked the Silke romance, because I thought it did fit in with a theme of the Avadon games. Your companions often had side goals that put their own wishes -- revenge, wealth, local interests, or whatever -- ahead of the mission and loyalty to Avadon or the Pact. The Silke romance gave you a rather extreme chance to put aside the mission for a personal wish, rather than a grander goal. (I didn't pursue it, beyond letting her escape once, because I wasn't playing as someone that selfish; and because I wasn't doing any "betraying" until Av-3 when I felt justified in killing Redbeard.) I did wish he'd given me a chance to spare her after routing out the rebels, and set her up in that little house I paid so much for...I like a chance to do a little deed of kindness aside form the main plot. Since I don't know anything about the new game, I don't know whether a romantic subplot would fit it, but I do like that kind of thing. And if it's not a huge part of the game, well, the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in the crazy world of a Spiderweb game...
  10. Well, as a matter of fact, I did discuss that a little in this thread. The big thing for me was Even with good tactics, I thought he was by far the hardest fight in the game...nothing before or after even came close. And given that he's a god (and an optional fight) I suppose that's how it should be. Yeah, I remember lots of people had ways for beating Golath...but sometimes pure cheapness is its own reward.
  11. Glad to be of service! (I had a crazier, and funnier, one for High Lord Golath, but Jeff read the forum and fixed it .)
  12. If you do it right, you can use the floor damage against him, while keeping yourself safe. I wrote a little about it here.
  13. Thanks! It was an old memory and I had utterly forgotten this.
  14. If you've ever read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent and the boys meet a cow-like creature bred (or genetically engineered) for exactly this purpose...it wants to be eaten, and it walks up to your table and tells you so. (That, I guess, is TheKian's reference.): (And I suppose the "Help me" might be a reference to the original Vincent Price The Fly.) Another possibility is that they weren't making the smarter Ornk for food, but for some kind of work that it would do better if it had some brains. (If anyone read Robert Don Hughes' "Pelmen the Powershaper" trilogy back in the day...the giant beasts of burden were called Tugoliths, and they'd been gifted with speech and human-child-level intelligence...which made them both useful and extremely dangerous.) Doubly so if the smart ornk you meet isn't itself a shaped creature, but a descendant of one...or didn't come out exactly as intended.
  15. Can't help you on the Nephilim, but I did play torment-- On a mage-priest, I recommend having one who specializes in mage spells. Until/unless you get a lot of swordmage trait, you are sacrificing defense for those mage spells, so you may as well get the best ones. I wouldn't give mage spells to anyone who isn't going to specialize in them; the combination I used was one mage-priest and one priest-archer. I always went for "custom" character types rather than the preset ones...this thread has plenty of advice on what's important.
  16. You don't lose the game then....at least not as long as you have completed a certain achievement, to wit:
  17. I didn't, but I approach A3 as a quasi-casual game...something to do with my fingers while I listen to something interesting, so I wasn't in a rush to get past those scenes. (If I were just concentrating on the game, I might well feel differently.) I also appreciate the puzzle aspects as they offer a change-up from the endless fights. The hidden tunnel is not the last of those mirror-puzzle things so you might not want to continue if you find them very annoying.
  18. I did the same. I just reloaded my last save and went out without winning...and yes, you can go to at least Day 181 without ending the game automatically.
  19. "The more options, the better," is always my view--which is one reason I liked GF2 so much (you could choose from principled factions, chasing power for the sake of it, or staying above the fray and by default remaining loyal to the people who sent you). I ended the last game as a Trakovite shaper/lifecrafter and didn't mind the hypocrisy at all...but it might be fun as well as logical to play it with the kinds of limitations you are describing. Also, if the "Trakovite game" is substantively different from the "shaper game" or the "rebel game," that would give your mod more replay value.
  20. I realize the whole Free Roads/toll thing is only part of the Wyldrylm rebels' issue, but it seems like a problem small enough that it shouldn't lead to rebellion. Problems with the Free Roads leading to settlers moving in and slowly disrupting the shamans' nature magic is an issue, as is the perceived "intrusion" that comes with it, but somehow it doesn't seem to have enough impact on the culture to have incited rebellion (beyond maybe some pride or unwillingness to find some sort of compromise or different methodology for the rebellion). I see it very differently...I suspect one of the inspirations for this was the conflict between English settlers and American Indians in the colonial and post-colonial period...there were a lot of efforts to solve the issue (Henry Knox, a Revolutionary War artillery commander, was especially prominent in them), but the fundamental problem was this: agriculture gave the white settlers a lot more population density; the government wasn't strong enough to stop them encroaching on Indian lands, no matter what treaties said; and that meant, in the end, they were going to be driven off all of it. The Wyldrylm is kept to a low population density, not because they aren't up to agriculture, but because they need the low population density for their magic. Once you start letting more "built-up" outsiders in...it's inevitable that the Wyldrylmers themselves are going to lose their land and way of life. They're farsighted enough to see that, especially if their main defense is magic that will go away if too many people move into their lands. That's why they're trying to nip it in the bud, and why they're so melancholy when they lose. Can't remember who, but somebody said "any country willing to give up a little freedom for a little security will lose both and deserve neither", and the Wyldrylm seems to have taken that WAY too seriously. It was Ben Franklin...quote was "Those who would give up some of their Liberty, to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither." (Blxz and I chatted about it in his Let's Play Geneforge 5 thread.) Interestingly, Franklin was using the saying to praise Pennsylvania frontiersmen who refused to do this. (He was trying to persuade the legislature to provide them with more arms and ammunition against Indian attacks instead of calling on troops to be stationed there, if I remember.) But for my reasons above I think they legitimately see it as an issue with their long-term survival. It's like reading about something like the Seven Years' War or the War of the Spanish Succession: the issues at stake are so remote from my experience in the present, the alliances are so arbitrary, the causes so nakedly realpolitikal and self-interested that, while maybe interesting intellectually, I can't really bring myself to identify with either side, or to root for either, or even just to think one side is more "right" than the other. Now for me, the War of the Spanish Succession is a fine example of what makes this sort of thing interesting. (In fact, I found the Avadon alliances less "alien" and more like the world I know than the ones in Geneforge.) The point was pretty simple: if one king rules both France and Spain, France becomes hugely powerful by itself, and can start dictating terms to other European powers in trade or colonial squabbles, or even in effort to obtain more land. The solution is to nip it in the bud. Something similar happened a few times in the history of the Roman Republic...the empire of Alexander had split into separate kingdoms. On one occasion, the king of Syria (Antiochus) managed to defeat the king of Egypt (Ptolemy) and so start building an empire that could've grown strong enough to conquer Rome....so Rome sent messengers to Antiochus with a simple ultimatum: disgorge Egypt or we march. He disgorged. On another occasion, the Syrians took some territory in Greece and Rome did march...not because the Syrians were massing troops on the Roman border right then, but because they didn't want them to get strong enough to do it. I call this sort of thing "a war about the nexl war" -- i.e., you are fighting now because you can win now, not because of your casus belli. (And I think World War I was an especially awful example, but also very understandable.) Machiavellian? Sure...but it's how you stay alive in a dangerous world. The point is, if you want your empire or even your wealthy republic to survive in a world like that, you can't just think about your immediate causes or grievances...you have to look at future trends, and who can hurt you later, and what you have to do to stop it now. Redbeard is good at that sort of thing...both domestically and in foreign affairs...as successful dictators often are. When you've got enemies on all sides, it's distasteful, but he's just the kind of man you need to deal with it. Unlike the real world, the world of Avadon gets a "happy ending"...almost all the threats are on an island, you can reduce them to non-threats for a long time, that doesn't leave a new set of enemies ready to join against you to stop your new power....and that safety means you can start to be choosier about your leaders. (Though the ending text suggests that new dangers come along anyway, in the future, just as they always seem to really do.) Plus, the Tawonites are revanchist imperialists of the worst kind, and I can only suppose that a successful Dhelessian conquest would be far worse and more humiliating for the Pact nations. In the Pact itself, Avadon rules but it's small. If Tawon takes over, we're all paying tribute to them, and they can eat a lot more tribute than the Black Fortress. And as the Tawonites would have an interest in keeping the Pact nations weak and divided to stop rebellions, giving them more incentive for tyranny than Redbeard has. So for me, not only are Redbeard's ways understandable for all their harshness (through the first two games) but the enemy is very much worth fighting even if his rulership is the price.
  21. A couple of other hints for sneaking out -- #1, if you're a tinkermage with some lockpicks, many of the side doors should be pickable. That means you can get into side rooms and hide while guards go by. #2, when I'm sneaking, I like to go into combat mode...makes it easier to control things. #3, once you get into the eastern caves, you are going to have to fight somebody for sure...but you can make it to the eastern caves without fighting anyone if you hide in side rooms to let the guards go by.
  22. No matter how much sanity or ability he lost, I never wanted to see Solberg go... but I finally *want* to kill Redbeard, and I'd say that's a job decently well-written. For me, it was also a matter of the war being resolved....in games 1 and 2, it seemed to me we needed Redbeard or someone very like him...at the end of game 3, you've crushed the major threats to the Pact or at least trimmed them back to manageable levels, and can start to be a lot choosier about who leads you and what he can get away with. But I greatly enjoyed the whole experience -- for me, I didn't really need a whole new tangent or setting so much as a good resolution of the tensions from the first two games (as I'd gotten in Geneforge 5), And that, I got with this,
  23. If you believe that using superior or hidden powers to defeat your enemies is "cheating"...then you don't stay in power as long as Redbeard did. I think that's part of the point of the way the game is set up -- you have to adopt at least a little of his ruthlessness yourself if you are going to get into power over his dead body.
  24. I mean, after beating the toughest challenge what the hell would I need that equipment for? To make up for the consumables you used up beating him...
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