Prince of Kitties

I didn't know about Krug's 4 AP, he seemed to do a lot of damage for that.

My feeling on NPCs is that bad AI makes the spellcasters and archers kind of useless; the spellcasters will bombard Rokka and boost their HP to godlike levels, saturate the battlefield with summoned monsters, etc. and the archers will eventually wander into melee and get killed.

Alas, Major Haste only works on NPCs when cast by another NPC...

(On the other hand, the NPCs become useful if guilt-inducing decoys during the final fight. If the Seraphim and Death Orbs are attacking NPCs, then they're not attacking your party...)

Regild doesn't seem to appear much in the latest version of FS, but you can trigger the ambush anyway but going to Fort Contemplation and walking around.

(Well, actually there's a bug where you have to enter, leave, and then enter again before walking around. You get the idea.)

Also there's another Seraph fight nearby, which can get you an NPC if you're lucky; though said NPC is kind of useless due to shoddy AI.

Sylae: I think that's fixed in the latest OBoE, you can't be taken down to less than one AP by webs.

Mystic: Making monsters prefer damaging instead of summoning spells would probably get rid of a lot of problems, yeah. I think I might have suggested it at one point. Personally I'm in favor of just removing Weak, Medium, and Strong Summoning (and also Summon Spirit, Sticks to Snakes, Summon Host, and any other kind of weak summoning) from the monster repertoire.

Sluggish = takes a large amount of real time. In large battles, each turn can take over a minute because of sounds and view shifts. Even with sound disabled it's a problem.

Re randomness encouraging savescumming, I guess that's a good point. Hadn't thought of that.

In the interests of making combat a bit nicer and less boring, especially at high levels, I think it would be nice to make some significant changes from the old BoE model. Here is what I propose...

- First of all: DON'T SWITCH THE VIEW TO VISIBLE MONSTERS WHENEVER THEY MOVE! This is the current default and it slows the game down hugely!

(Perhaps a better default would be e.g. to only do this for monsters within 12 spaces, so you can keep track of them more easily. But all visible monsters on the screen is too much.)

- Currently having any Luck at all seems to make you about 25% death-resistant. I can see good and bad sides to this; for balance reasons though I'm not sure the probability of cheating death should ever go above 50%.

- Outdoor combat encounters are rather boring right now. I propose a means of changing that, just a bit.

1. Decide who gets the first move randomly. Monsters 50%, PCs 50%.

2. If and only if there is a spellcaster in the encounter, then sometimes invoke an initial malus or detrimental condition. For instance:

"Curses and restraining spells bombard you!" -> The party is slowed and cursed. If possible, NPCs should be too.

"Clouds of anesthetic gas rise around you." -> Sleep clouds appear amongst the party.

"Foul vapors condense around you." -> Party starts in a stinking cloud.

Monsters would always get the first move when this happens.

... And that's all for now. If you guys have any better ideas, please mention them...

Favorite RPGs: dunno, never really got to play any.

Favorite BoE scenarios:

Redemption (this one IMO is worthy of a pretty good fantasy/horror novel)

Falling Stars (wore thin eventually, but there's just so much to do in it!)

At the Gallows (never beaten, alas; but I loved the SF aspects)

In retrospect, I think giving up was the right decision. I can code, but I'm still very much a novice when it comes to design and whatnot, and design is half the work (and would be a major issue when porting a procedural program to Java).

Maybe I'll attack it some time down the road, when I know more about the design aspects of programming, because it would be cool to have BoE in a web applet... But probably not.

I forget how to deal with the cube... But if you give up all your gold to charity in the BotH fortress, and then drop all your food, the temple will judge you worthy.

Ugh. Looking at the layout of the savefiles, I doubt there's any way I'm going to get any of the file IO part done.

I think it is time to call it quits.

Well, so far I've got the PC and Item classes mostly done for the PC Editor, as well as a "Retriever" class to fetch stats and other variables by name. The big hurdle seems to me to be file IO, since I haven't done much of that before and BoE savefiles are...weird.

I may never get the actual game port (let alone the scenario editor) done. However, even failing that, a really powerful CLI interface for editing PCs and items (which is what I intend for the PC Editor replacement) would be cool, so for now that's what I've set my sights on.

Newbie that I am, I am attempting to port as much of Classic BoE as a I can to Java, starting with the character editor.

(Or rather, attempting to rewrite it in Java, because the code looks like an untranslatable procedural mess to me.)

I don't necessarily expect it to reach any level of functionality even this year, especially if I get another job sooner rather than later (and I'm fervently hoping I do). But I figure I'll at least learn something, even if I fail miserably.

One concession I'm giving myself: I won't maintain savefile compatibility unless I absolutely have to. I will maintain scenario compatibility for obvious reasons, assuming I actually get that far. Which is looking less likely by the minute. But in the worst case I learn more about Java, so I figured, why not?

Anyway I just thought I ought to mention this (probably ill-fated) venture to the people here, on the off chance I might get some useful advice out of it, or something.

There are Linux and Windows binary versions of WxWidgets OBoE available on the Google Code page, but no sources as far as I can tell, and none in SVN for the WxWidgets version either. I'd like to experiment with the OBoE code and maybe eventually contribute, but it seems the sources aren't there... Help?

The secret of how to break out of the computer screen and into real life, and from thence conquer the world!

N/M I got it working. It seems that, with PulseAudio, I have to use the ESD sound mode instead of ALSA.

Okay, I really need some help here... Does anyone have Exile 1, 2, or 3 working under Wine? If so, what Wine version and what winecfg configuration or other setup?

Last weekend I bought the Exile Trilogy on CD. This week I have been trying to run it. Suffice to say, it is not willing.

I tried Wine on Linux in Windows 95 mode, and the games freeze at random during combat.

I tried Windows XP with Win95 compat mode enabled for the game binaries. The games worked the first time I ran them; the second time, the cursor would invariably disappear when over the game window, and I wouldn't be able to click on anything.

I tried DosEmu on Linux. The games didn't even start.

How can I get this old-but-nonetheless-awesome software working? I'd prefer a Linux solution, but a fix for the Windows XP cursor issue would be quite acceptable.

Although it was pretty useful for monsters - the "good archer" trait in BoE for instance allows 40+ damager per shot.

(Realistically this makes some sense, but Exile is not supposed to be realistic. I mean, it has magic.)

Ah ha! So that's why Avatar's blessing appears to be so weak! Yeah, that's broken alright.

(Also explains a lot of Barcoorah's L1 party wins. )

A rather odd question: is there anything special about the "pants" item slot? I recall that, in (IIRC) Exile 2, it was said that walking around without pants could have bad consequences. I've personally never seen it in any BoE scenario, but I was wondering if there's code anywhere that checks (or could check) whether a party member is wearing pants?

OpenBoE should work fine on 7. Failing that, it works fine in Linux under Wine.

Regarding AI, I have a much simpler suggestion... Currently enemy mages like to spam summons, which prolongs battles but makes them rather boring. I say they should instead favor attack and slow/curse spells, trying to kill the party as quickly as possible.

If assigning a statistical weight to various types of spells isn't feasible, a good way to do this might be to simply remove most of the summoning spells from those available to monsters. IMO "Demon" and "Guardian" should stay, as they summon fairly nasty opponents; but the others just clog the battlefield.

Clicking on the link to it now returns a 404 error. Lost in the migration perhaps?

(I'm assuming it's legal now that BoE is open source?)

It's Magic-type damage that zaps affects you each turn, stacking with each acid attack up to 32767 damage per turn IIRC. Acid-protective items can block it and acid-curing items can remove it, but are rare. The "Cleanse" and "Major Cleansing" spells do *NOT* remove it.

Just a little suggestion... Acid needs a damage cap! As it is right now, even very weak acid-spitting monsters are incredibly lethal; a few spits quickly stacks up to 100+ damage per turn. Sure, you can survive by leaving the dungeon, but I think the lack of any cap is still game-breaking.

(FWIW I'd suggest a cap of 40 or so per turn, stacking faster than poison. We still want the stuff to be nasty, just not unbalanced-nasty.)

IMHO it's pretty hard to do effective horror with BoE; the game can be immersive, but it isn't *that* immersive, not to the same extent as something first-person for instance, or as a well-written book.

That said, some scenarios have done it pretty well.

Off the top of my head, the two I'd recommend most are "Redemption" by Alcritas and "Revenge" by The Creator. "Redemption" is pretty creepy and atmospheric, despite some slightly cheesy and outlandish bits; "Revenge" is not as creepy, it tends more towards a grim sort of humor, but it has some elements of horror.

Also, there's "The Adventurers' Club", which is clearly influenced by the horror genre. Once you get passed the tedium of certain parts, it's rather interesting. However, it is also a *hard* scenario, even harder than "Redemption" (mostly due to lack of powerful items).

("The Adventurers' Club" can't be gotten from the Truesite, the archive for it there is incomplete. Get it from the Spiderweb scenario archives instead.)