snikrep

So, having started in on Avernum 4, I now recognise the issue... #5's engine allows monsters to break melee combat with my tank, run all the way to my wizard, and swallow him whole with the AP they get for a single round - since they can attack for a mere 1AP. In #4, where the wizard gets a round of warning if a monster is coming for him - since the beast needs 5AP to take a swing at him - the "one guy dies in most combats versus ordinary mooks" problem never happens. I've found even on Hard mode that I'm never doing the back-to-town-early thing. I guess #5 just wasn't designed for the squishy glass cannon ranged attacker character type

On a related note: Is there anything plot-wise related to smashing that crystal with the woman's spirit inside? I went back to the front entrance of Gladwell's keep to check if anyone was behaving differently, and all his folks attacked me and fought to the death! They all seemed still in thrall - and mighty ticked off that Gladwell had been slain...

Ah, that explains that bit. I had thought I was walking on the wrong tiles or something when the last wall refused to open. By that point I had already slaughtered all the Ahonarians for their scrolls so going back to town for more chitrach advice was a bit moot, I guess. It's true what they say, pillage THEN burn!

Student of Trinity: While I might count my total party kill situations on the fingers of one hand, single member kills were very common. I had some squishy folks, I guess... my strategy lay in sending one bruiser tank character running into the thick of things while his three compatriots escaped to maximum range and lobbed area of effect weapons centered on the tank. When rushed, the squishies would form a wall-o-summons™ for defense, but often the summoned creature AI would defeat this tactic! I hear what you're all saying about quick fixes for death making the game easier. Then again, it seems the game already has a quick fix for death - if you see an unstoppable monster of doom approaching, send a few party members to their deaths while others back off with a full move and go out of combat.. the monster AI is usually too clueless to pursue, and once you are back at the town, poof! your heroes are alive. It's the walking back to town thing that got me annoyed all the time... death didn't seem catastrophic, just annoying. There was never a point where I felt I had to mourn my losses! Part of the trouble, perhaps, lay in that returning to town back down the route one had come was too "safe"... there was hardly ever the risk that the reduced party might be caught by a monster behind them and fully destroyed, for instance. The only bad outcome from unconsciousness, then, lay in time spent walking about when one could be exploring or fighting. Perhaps the addition of occasional randomly spawning wandering monsters might solve this? Like the returning rockhounds' behavior, but for all the creatures, perhaps. Of course that would leave a window open for powergamers to beat up wanderers over and over to gain extra levels... hm. I guess for me, the fun of the game came in the thrill of exploring new caverns and discovering the encounters therein. Yet often I found myself considering whether loading from a save and redoing a section (stripped of the majority of its explorative fun thereby) was less time-intensive than trekking safely back to town and returning. To put it another way, I had several intense fights in which the party won, but I restored from save anyways, because some member had died and re-fighting the battle was preferable time-wise to the hike to town and back to continue the dungeon (the rat-elevator sequence in Drake Pillars comes to mind). When victories feel like losses in this manner it was a letdown, at least for me. I just hate restoring from saves, I guess. And the mechanics of the game presented a compelling argument why one should do this even when the entire party had not been wiped. I'd even love to see some feature one can activate, say, that removes the ability to restore from save while the party has living members, for instance. Or perhaps something similar to what xerex proposed above -- that party members abandoned to their fate might end up permanently dead, while party members who fell in a battle that the party ended up *winning* might be restored onsite by the quick application of first aid / cpr / potions / etc. EDIT: In a corollary to this , the portions of the game I found most fun were those in which return to town became impossible and one had to press onward to find the next safe haven. Riding the rapids above Harkin's Landing; the sequence in the Howling Depths; and the Vahnatai area all were great for instilling the necessary fear of losing party members, for there was no easy, safe, boring trek back to town to restore them. Write more point-of-no-return sections such as these into Avernum 6 !

So I'm a newcomer to the Avernum games with #5 and must say I enjoyed playing through it immensely. I finished the game on Normal with a fairly un-optimized, organically levelled group (my archer ended up with twice as much Tool Use as Bows, for instance) and still found the difficulty curve spot on for enjoyment: Quest directions which seemed to be clearly leading down the "main storyline" road could be defeated with good tactics even if I got caught flatfooted by ambushes, and tended to kill off my party when I used bad tactics. And the existence of areas off the beaten path, preceded by glaring messages saying "do not pass, fools, for herein lies certain doom," did in fact require heroic efforts to avoid said certain doom. Killing the chief of Khora-Vhyss, for instance, required expending every consumable combat item I had on hand to that point, and left a single party member alive to tell the tale (the mage, who finished the damn slith lord off with his last charge of his last wand)... then, when the interaction dialogue for the glowing Slith-god in the next room came up, I knew it was time to run! Congrats on a well balanced game! That said, there is one thing that I continually found myself wishing for as I played through the game: the ability to restore "unconscious" players back to at least marginally useful status while the party was still out in the bush someplace. I'm the sort of dungeon crawler type who enjoys seeing how far the party can get before being absolutely forced to return to town at the last possible moment, yet was often frustrated in this attempt by having one party member go unconscious in minor fights. It seemed that due to poor tactics or random chance one member of the party would have a high chance of being gang-rushed and slain in even relatively minor fights, leaving me with one of the following options: Return to town just for one guy when three were still at (mostly) full faculties; reload from frequent saves, which would get tedious and felt a bit like cheating as all of the ambushes and whatnot would no longer be surprising a second time through; or press onward with diminished numbers. Usually I chose the third option, so that by the end of the game, my priest character (who had cleverly snatched the Bonding Knife early on and was significantly more durable than his comrades) had accumulated 2 extra levels over the next-most-advanced party member, just from remaining alive through more of the game. The aforementioned clueless archer spent about a quarter of the game unconscious and only got revived when some cunning trap was puzzling the others. And my token Slith spearman had only a slightly more distinguished record at remaining conscious, at least until he learned how to Parry efficiently (somewhere around the Howling Depths). In the entire run of the game my party managed to acquire only two scrolls enabling recovery from unconsciousness (and accordingly guarded them like the Dead Sea Scrolls), and, not being an Anama, my priest only learned to cast that spell after the Vahnatai section. This meant that until the very endgame the above dilemma was constantly the case. The addition of an item or ability (excessive levels of First Aid, or a potion one might craft by burning all that mandrake root, for instance) that allowed a single character loss to not feel like a total party loss / restart situation would have, in my humble opinion, made the game far more enjoyable. Even if it healed the character to 1 health, say, necessitating burning multiple potions or spells to bring the guy to full working order... or healed the character to a state with lessened combat abilities or action points ("still debilitated from your recent coma" or something). Or else, if such an item would be deemed game-breaking or exploitative, at least make it possible to access an unconscious character's inventory while they are unconscious. Pressing onward with three folks often brought me into situations where I really wished I had access to that member's pack. In the early game I had to burn mutltiple inventory slots splitting up all my piercing crystals evenly among my party members, for instance, to avoid the all-too-frequent forced return to town because I had discovered too late that Mr. Unconscious had had the bag of crystals in his pocket before he went down. This sort of feature to keep the ball rolling in exploration mode and lessen the number of "grind-y" returns to town would make an eventual Avernum 6 a better game, in my humble opinion. my 0.02 coins, and thanks again for an enjoyable game!