Evnissyen

It's on the PREFERENCES screen. Hit ESC and then click on PREFERENCES.

The first time I went through A4 I went with four characters: A fighter, an archer, a mage and a priest. I soon found out that archers become increasingly less useful as time goes on. (I don't know why: I mean, in real life, the arrow is quite a deadly weapon.) Same with thrown weapons: they cause lots of damage in the beginning but not so much later on. So I reduced it to two. Fighter (mostly useful as a magnet to keep your enemies away from your spellcasters and clumped together for those area-spells I love so much) and combined mage/priest. I found out that A4 became extremely hard with just two characters. So I made it 3: fighter, mage, priest. That's what I'm playing with in A5. Also, ever since I started playing the Spiderweb games (Geneforge 3), I found that "NORMAL" was just way too easy so I started playing "HARD" to make it challenging enough. I've liked it that way... until now. With 3 characters and level HARD, well, the game is neither too challenging nor too easy -- it's pretty much just about right... but a strange thing has happened, which is that it's started to tire me out. At the point where I was almost at the end of the Anama lands and had just one more quest to complete, I was thinking, "What the hell... I've gotta go through ANOTHER quest now?" All the pleasure was gone... that magic that I'd found in Geneforge 3. So I hate to admit it, but I had to reduce it to NORMAL level. Now it's back to being a pretty easy game (though harder than it'd be with 4 characters). I'm not sure if Jeff Vogel would be comforted to hear that a full roster + NORMAL = piece of cake... (except for the occasional crazy-tough foe) Probably most of this isn't very interesting, but I was wondering if anyone else thought they wanted to share their favorite ways of playing the game.

You ARE a bloody murderer, Jonathan W. Where's your conscience? I'm not very fond of Solberg... I guess I'm not supposed to be... but unlike Gladwell he HAS meant well. One of my more favorite characters so far, maybe, is Shanker. I think I have a crush on her. Is that supposed to happen? Now if you killed her, Jonathan W, I'd be very, very mad.

This is really a minor thing, but I was wondering how possible it is to allow users in future games to crank up the game volume? Right now there's LOW and there's NORMAL, but there's no loud. The reason I'm asking is that Avernum's sound is at a lower level than my computer system's sound, which I have to crank up in order to be able to hear the Avernum sound over my cd player, and I have to sort of get the right balance w/ my cd player so it's low enough to be able to hear the Avernum sounds over it . . . and then, because I have my system set up so it yells at me whenever I do something it doesn't like, such as hit the wrong key (outside of the game) it goes HEY! really loud, obnoxiously loud. It makes me jump. I don't like jumping; it's sort of like exercise. I'm not even one of those people who cranks the volume up really high when they're playing games, as if they're in the cinema or something. Avernum's not really the game for that, anyway. Besides that... although some of the imports from Geneforge I've been thinking are a little too much, I like the creativity w/ the voices and the dying sounds in Geneforge, and it's a little bit missing in Avernum, though there's more of that in the A5 than A4. Alright, I'm through complaining... .

Have you ever, in your life, geased? If not then have you ever contemplated geasing? And if so then did you enjoy it and how many times did you enjoy it? Seriously, though... the question in my last post was for Cake. But your post before this last one was helpful; it clears up a little confusion. Thanks.

So then, *I... why don't they seem to mind that I've killed off their loyal friend, Lysstak? So much for honor and loyalty, I guess. It's always about greed and ego. In the real world, I would expect to be screwed in the end if I helped them... if not killed just to get a possibly dangerous person out of the way. Of course, maybe I haven't gotten far enough in the game to get a full enough grasp of their thinking or what they're all about. Also, Nationalism is very dangerous. It brings out some of the worst in people. It's not nearly the same as patriotism. I am a little bothered, too, by everyone's hatred of me... it would be nice if I could just scratch out the insignia that seems to duplicate itself onto any armor I decide to put on, and say, "Hey! I like Avernum! wanna be an Avernite too! Please like me!" And yeah, I guess if this were the real world I'd be part of some anti-empire underground revolutionary group or else a loyal devotee to Emperor Prazac, she seems like a sane person among a lot of crazy Nationalists who want to kick everyone else around for their own gain (and even kill them whenever they decide that's helpful). I'm proud to be a liberal.

But that power-gamer's dream requires that you sort of half-cheat. By the way, how'd you get into the Anama while being greased... I mean geased?

Well, naturally, some things are so mundane as to become redundant, such as eating, sleeping, bodily functions, personal hygiene, health care issues, myopia (does my hero or heroine choose glasses or contact lenses?), and let's not forget whatever matters might arise from human attraction... these will go unnamed out of respect for the sensitive. Endurance points don't matter much, either, if your opponent's careless blow happens to sever your neck. Obviously this isn't the sort of stuff I have in mind when I'm talking about realism, I'm only talking about those matters which give the player a sense of place, a sense of BEING THERE. That's all.

But the Darkside Loyalists only want the power for themselves. They want to rule the Empire themselves. What do I care about their egos? And what's in it for me to further their aim, except maybe some end-game scenario in which I get a share of their spoils? Besides, I'm a man of virtue.

Say... I wonder what would happen if I killed the king's emissary? Maybe I should try that, next time I see him. I suspect nothing much would happen except maybe the town getting angry at me (though in places like Exodus the townspeople have a strange habit of helping me kill whomever I decide to attack... unless it happens to be the mayor, of course. But I wonder... would the King send somebody out to kill me? If I killed his emissary I would surely be put in bad standing with Avernum, right? Probably this is the sort of thing the Darkside Loyalists would end up asking me to do, in the end, should I happen to want to join them (and why anybody would want to join them I'm not sure)... . Hmm... .

I'm wondering whether or not I should kill off those lame people in Harkin's Landing. That wouldn't hurt my standing with the Avernites in general, would it? (It would be nice if it would... consequences are nice to have in a game.) While I'm at it I might as well kill off the mayor in Exodus as well, he also sucks. And the green-cape guy, too. Except that there're also innocent people in those towns that I wouldn't want to kill. Besides, I probably wouldn't get more than a few XP's out of each town, so it probably wouldn't be worth it. No, actually the only people in Harking's Landing who deserve to die are the mayor, for imprisoning the drake, and his secret lover. Pefko.

Yeah, I don't see any reason, either, why you would need a cheat to get the bracelet. If I remember correctly: If you do what the mayor at Harkin's Landing wants, which is to kill Lysstak, then he gives you an ugly bracelet which allows you into Tranquility. You don't need a cheat for that: Just tell him you killed Lysstak and he'll give you a bracelet. Maybe this is the problem, though: In order to get the gates to open you have to open them yourself. Go to the wheel and click on it. The soldiers will check your bracelet and give you the okay. Open the gates and on you go. But I don't remember whether or not first you have to talk to the green guy in Exodus who's assigne there to hand out bracelets and let him know you have one. All I remember is that I did talk to him first; my guess would be it doesn't matter. Just tell the Harkin's mayor you knocked off Lysstak, get the bracelet from him (you might have to actually ask him for it; I don't remember) and then head for the wheel in Exodus.

Funny, Cake... funny. First, in regard to weight: I might be in the minority in actually missing the days when backpack weight mattered. I like realism, man. And it's not realistic to be carrying 25 sets of full plate armor unless you're Atlas and somehow have an absurdly enormous backpack which somehow does not restrict your movements. Anyhow... Keturn has a couple of excellent points. First, being able to summon light should be the simplest of priest spells available. (Isn't it actually available in Nethergate? I think I seem to remember something like that.) Having to carry lanterns and candles is, I think, a little bit silly. If I can summon all kinds of meteorological disasters out of nowhere then I should be able to summon a little bit of light. And yes: I agree with Keturn that in the darkness of Avernum, before the glowing fungus, this should be the very first thing magical trick a wizard would develop and master. Also, an even better point: YES! Lack of light SHOULD have detrimental effects on certain things such as your fighting ability, or positive effects such as improving stealth capability (perhaps a good trait to import from Geneforge 4?). And another thing: How is it that a character can hold a candle steady (which requires two hands actually -- one to hold the candle and one to protect the flame) and still be free to fight?

This has been on my mind for a while... back in the Drake Pillars cave I spent 1000 clams on the share from the merchant at Harkin's Landing... but then when Gladwell's geas kicked in and made me kill that poor drake, and thus turned the whole loony town against me, I lost my contact. (By the way: What kind of an ******* (Gladwell) makes somebody kill the last drake in the frontier, a poor, tortured soul, notwithstanding my respect for drakes (it always made me sad to kill even a single drake in the Geneforge games), just so he can make himself a cloak out of her skin? What a sicko. I can't wait to kill that creep. It's not just the geas, and the hidden treasures... it's also my moral code. Nobody messes with my moral code, man.) Anyway, so I'm wondering, though obviously I'll find out anyway in time: will I eventually find somebody else, later in the game, who will cash in the share for me if it happens to become valuable? Or did I just loose 1000 coins? I admit it... I read Matt Pasek's walkthrough which suggested I buy the share; though I'm glad it ended before Tranquility. It was good for the beginning of the game, now I'm happy to be on my own, as I should be.

My fighter used to have both the minus-magical-damage ring and the minus-mind-control ring, because I wasn't sure which was more valuable. I kept the mind-control ring on him and figured I'd switch rings when I got to an energy-intense situation, though in retrospect I guess it should've been the other way around. After I finally did a direct comparison and discovered that, though their face-value reduction numbers are the same, the mind-control ring reduces mind control effects more than the other does the other. Then I decided it wasn't worth hanging onto the energy-damage ring so I just sold it. Really, mind-control is far more annoying than energy damage, except with lightning shock (a nice new feature in Avernum 5, though I hope there's a spell, sometime in the future, that rids characters of it)... I mean, it really is annoying as hell when one of my characters runs away in terror (and out of range of my priestess so she can't cure him or her... unless it IS the priestess) or, worse, charms one of my characters. On the other hand, those tricks only take a simple mind-clear spell to fix, whereas the lightning-shock is unfixable, damn it. Still, I prefer mind-control protection to energy-damage protection.

By the way, speaking of AutoSave: How exactly does this work? I mean: At what point does the game decide to auto-save? What motivates the game to auto-save? By casual observation i've come to guess that it's probably time-based, which is only relevant if you're playing for an extended session... and this, really, makes the auto-save utterly useless and just a waste of save slots which, to be honest, there are too few of. (Perhaps this would be something to improve in Avernum 6? It seems to me a pretty simple thing to reprogram, unless there's a good reason for having only that specific number of save slots.) Really... the auto-save should go.

This is one thing that bugs me a little about Avernum (though it's not a bad bugging of me, more just an attribute that I accept) -- that the map indicates a secret room that I can't access. I search and search for a button that opens it, I wait for the possibility of finding somebody to open the way for me, and no go. It turns out to be just a teaser. You see... the blocked passages and blocked herbs and such I ignore and don't fret over. I KNOW they're inaccessible unless I happen to find a back-passage to it that becomes accessible later on. It should be the same way with the "secret rooms", but it just bugs me, and I always go back and double check, triple check, quadruple check for a button I might've missed, someplace in the vicinity or slightly further from the vicinity. Sometimes they're not even anywhere near, such as in the Workshop. So I can't help thinking I've missed something important! Oh, well. It's just something I have to live with. It's part of the personality of Avernum, I don't want this to sound like a complaint, though it probably does sound that way, because it's not really something I feel upset about. It's just something that makes me a little neurotic, is all.

Azuma: What do you mean, "the Anama won't notice your mage"? In what capacity/scenaria/means of the word "notice" do you mean? It actually sounds like joining the Anama is really not worth it at all, except to give yourself a challenge. Is that basically all it is? Do the Anama actually possess more powerful spells? Can they make a priest more powerful? (And they don't seem to be concerned with mages -- maybe this is what Azuma was talking about, except that the previous posts suggested that my Mage would be bound, also. ...So, I'm confused in that regard. Azuma's confused me! Not that I don't welcome confusion; I do, I do! Just so long as it reaches its proper end in appropriate time. Also, and this is important: Do the Anama actually possess any skills or magic that I cannot obtain elsewhere? Also: Can they train me in skills that would be beneficial to me, especially skills that would not be trainable, or as effectively trainable, anywhere else?

Perhaps if you don't go all the way back to town then he stays. After I talked to him I went back to Solberg's tower to rest before I took on the remaining few enemies, but when I returned, not only was Sorengard gone (I didn't intend to kill him anyhow . . . besides which, Solberg seemed glad that I didn't kill him and rewarded me properly, so I figured killing him would be not just, as Student of Trinity puts it so well, completely uncool . . . it would probably make Solberg angry... whatever that's worth, which is probably nothing apart from my just feeling guilty for pretend-killing a non-existent character. (I really wish Jeff Vogel would put more realism into his characters and into consequences, but then... I can't really complain... especially since this seems to be his best game so far, at least as far as I've gotten (Anama), from Nethergate forward at least (even including Geneforge 3 & 4 which I loved). It's just that the interface and everything is so perfectly simple that it opens up, I think, so many possibilities for creating a game of real strategy and complication... but I'm a critic. I don't want to be too critical, especially considering that Jeff's games are independently made. I have to hand it to him: he's a hell of a developer. He makes ME want to go back into programming, even though it just about drove me crazy before I finally quit.) If Jeff doesn't mind, actually, I'd be happy to write up some of my thoughts of what I think would make the ideal Spiderweb game. But I don't want to be intrusive? (Jeff?) It's just that this stuff bugs me, you know? I'm a writer, I can't help it. I'm a perfectionist. Anyhow, back to the Workshop... Usually in cases like this I would go back and make sure I killed off everything just for the XP, but this time I figured screw it, I'd had it with that damn workshop and all it's portals. If there's one thing I hate in games, it's mazes.

Speaking of mixing Gladwell's curse & the Anama... I'm wondering if the "Dark Magic" Alcander mentions is only Gladwell's Curse and not the attack spells that I suppose they don't seem to like? In other words, I'm wondering if, if I play the game again and want to join the Anama, I can train in all the spells I want until I reach the Anama, and be able to join them as long as I don't get Gladwell's Curse? (Which I would not do again, but... you know... I had to see what it would make me do and what the benefits were... .)

Should I bring the whip? Anyhow, this is straight from Matt Pasek's walkthrough (all numbers are trained numbers): SPECIAL SKILLS Quick Strike (QS): 6 Dexterity (starts to cost 8) + 6 Melee or Pole (starts to cost 7). Parry (Par): 6 Dexterity (starts to cost 8) + 6 Defense (starts to cost 5). Blademaster (Blm): 6 Melee (starts to cost 7) + 6 pole (starts to cost 7) + 6 Strength (starts to cost 8). Anatomy (Anat): 4 Intelligence (starts to cost 7) + 8 Melee or Pole (starts to cost 8). Gymnastics (Gym): 8 Dexterity (starts to cost 9) + 6 Strength (starts to cost 8). Pathfinder: untrainable. Lethal Blow (LB): 8 Anatomy (starts to cost 8) + 8 Blademaster (starts to cost 9). Riposte (Rip): 8 Parry (starts to cost 7) + 6 Blademaster (starts to cost 8). Sharpshooter (SS): 6 Dexterity (starts to cost 8) + 8 Bows or Thrown (starts to cost 6). Magery (Mgr): 8 Intelligence (starts to cost 9) + 6 Mage Spells (starts to cost 8) or Priest Spells (starts to cost 7). Magical Efficiency (MEf): 8 Magery (starts to cost 8) + 8 Endurance (starts to cost 8). Resistance (Res): 8 Dexterity (starts to cost 9) + 8 Endurance (starts to cost 8) + 8 Hardiness (starts to cost 5).

Well, in at least most cases doesn't it not even matter whether or not you've already wiped out a certain area once you get around to getting a quest for it? (Unless, of course, you kill somebody who was supposed to receive a letter, or something along those lines.) I mean, there've been instances where I've gotten a quest that I already took care of, and then gotten the reward by simply mentioning that I took care of it already. I reached Exodus, for example, after killing that mischievous goblin, what's-his-name, Gobi or something? So, after the mayor gave me the quest to kill him I simply told him I already killed the bastard, and got the XP. I remember there was another part where somebody wanted the head of some creature, and I realized I'd already killed her, so I simply went back, found the head, and returned with it.

Go up close and type g? Also, I think the tutorial should tell you how to do stuff? (Wasn't there a tutorial in the opening of this game? There is in every one, isn't there?)

Avernum 6? Damn, I thought #5 was going to be the last? And why back to Exile? I was, well, kind of looking forward to a new sort of game with a new premise and a new story. Not that I don't like Avernum. I do, very much. I guess it would be nice if #6 were a little more complicated, strategically (Avernum 5 actually is nicely more complicated, anyway, than #4), and more realistic in respect to how the characters behave. For instance when I'm told, in a dialogue box, that somebody I'm talking to runs away, and then I close the box and the person's still there, just standing around. Or, when a character is offended by something I say and yet this effects nothing, I go back to talking to them and it's as if I never offended them. Or I can steal things in front of a person's face and they don't seem to care. Or I can steal something significant from a merchant's back shed, say a weapon, and then sell it back to them and they don't even recognize that it's their own weapon. Just... a little more in the way of human (and non-human) memory would be nice, it would make the game so much more challenging, and interesting... strategy is a nice thing to have in an adventure game. Much of the beauty of Jeff Vogel's games is the simplicity... the interface doesn't get in the way of the game, and the graphics aren't overwhelmingly elaborate like too many games. This, I think, allows a lot more room for the kind of stuff that really makes a game interesting... the storyline(s), the characters, strategy, discovery, and so forth... . Of course, I don't want to suggest that Jeff Vogel should be making his life more difficult. I guess I just thought I'd sort of inject my own thoughts.

Actually, how exactly does Fatigue affect a person, besides preventing them from using another battle discipline? I haven't noticed anything so far.