Alex

Tested with v1.0.1 for Windows (ordered directly from Spiderweb back when it was new).
 

begintalknode;
	state = 33;
	nextstate = -1;
	question = "_Go ahead._";
	text1 = "The statue recites, with great care and precision, a long string of magical syllables. You struggle to memorize them. They're very complicated. When the statue is done, it closes its eyes. It has nothing more to say.";
	action = END_TALK;
	code = run_hardcode(68);
	sf(29,0,1);
	break;

Spray Acid L3 is not attainable in the latest Windows version (1.0.1):
 

begintalknode;
	state = 33;
	nextstate = -1;
	question = "_Go ahead._";
	text1 = "The statue recites, with great care and precision, a long string of magical syllables. You struggle to memorize them. They're very complicated. When the statue is done, it closes its eyes. It has nothing more to say.";
	action = END_TALK;
	code = run_hardcode(68);
	sf(29,0,1);
	break;

The run_hardcode(68) part was commented out. After restoring it, it says you need Arcane Lore 14, but the game freezes whether you have it or not.

You can right-click on a creature and see its level, health and resistances. That way, I saw that the Iron Clawbugs in The Dry Wastes were much higher level than my fresh character.

The remakes add more content and quality of life improvements. The graphics, UI and game mechanics just feel more polished.
 

When it comes to immersion, I feel that the need to buy food in Exile I makes you feel more like you're actually destitute exiles thrown into the pit. The respawning dungeons in Exile somehow feel less immersive and more generic to me, though.

I think the character progression is strongest in Exile and weakest in the newest remakes. If you invest a lot in magic skills early, you become very poweful after a while. In the latest iteration, the enemies soon become HP sponges with high resistances and chance to dodge your attacks (even most spells). I suppose it's more balanced, but it's less fun in a single player RPG, I think.

Back in February, I got an e-mail from Humble Bundle with a link to a DRM-free installer, and also a Steam key.

I prefer DRM-free versions when they are available, so I wonder whether the v1.0.2 patch is available for dowload somewhere else than from Steam?

I'd say one similarity is that Tolkien's fantasy universe was partly a fantasy version of England and Europe, whereas Vogel's fantasy worlds seem slightly North American to an European observer, or at least they do to me (yeah, I should speak for myself).

Both Exile/Avernum and Valorim have something of a Wild West spirit, and even the Shaper empire reminds me of the USA, with the Chinese Drakon as its main rival.  

23 minutes ago, Derell Licht said:

Wow... that's pretty sad; one of the things I enjoyed about the original A3, was being able to tool around in a boat and explore out-of-the-way places... Maybe I'll just go back to that version, though I think I'll be stuck at 800x600 if I do...

 

In the original A3, you could buy a boat in Upper Avernum, but not on the surface.

Apparently, Avernum 4-6 are not going to be remastered soon:

"Geneforge needs remastering BADLY.

We may remaster Avernum 4-6, but it won't be for a long time."

Avernum 1 runs at 2560x1440 on my desktop monitor (Geneforge 5 works, too).

However, Avernum 2 and Avernum 3 don't go above 1920*1080 in full-screen mode. The blurry text is somewhat annoying.

1920*1200 works - either in windowed mode or upscaled with thin black bars left and right.

Selecting 1920*1440 or 2560*1440 gives a 1920*1200 game area with thin black bars top and bottom and thick black bars left and right. At least text is sharp then.

The demo doesn't include the surface at all.

Now it says "Coming January 31, 2018" instead of just "Early 2018":

http://www.avernum.com/avernum3/index.html

Dear Privileged People

Politics divorced from materialism doesn't work.

Real privilege is material privilege. If you're rich, you're privileged. If you're poor, you're not privileged. All those other invisible supernatural privileges are just a plutocrat scam, an academic circle-jerk.

You self-styled progressives don't give a damn about the material living conditions of the working class.

Newsflash: The working class doesn't give a damn about your silly hipster fads.

The real commies at least had one good idea: Everyone had a right and duty to work. We have the right to freeze to death in the street while classist hipsters pass by.

Having won the propaganda war, the corporate oligarchs sponsor only two kinds of politicians:

1. Classists and imperialists with a thin coating of political correctness.

2. Classists and imperialists with a thin coating of populism.

Enjoy your Drumpf.

"it's not a Spiderweb game if you can't switch sides and help the bad guys"

Hm, can you join the bad guys in Exile/Avernum?

I don't think it's actually insane - you are aware that she is imaginary, after all.

Also, I don't think you're missing out on much by skipping some crushes. When something real arrives, I believe you'll let go of Katie, and crushes, by themselves, are basically a waste of time - you obsess over some good-looking stranger, and then you find out they're married, an idiot, or both.

19 isn't really that much. I hadn't kissed a girl by then either.

It's worth noting that you can have several active quests for the same monster. Killing just one monster yields enough monster parts for all these quests.

Given that the nationalism of your compatriots bothers you, do you think living among nationalist foreigners would be more pleasant?

In order to get a residence permit in most countries, you need to have a job there, be a university student, or be granted refugee status. As pointed out, you could also marry a citizen of the country you wanted to move to.

I haven't actually tried it at later level-ups (I was thinking of re-starting and tried different starting builds without exiting the character creation screen; it's fairly easy to stumble upon it that way). If it works the same way there, it might cost up to 2 skill points in order to unlock the "Impoved Intelligence" and "Improved Strength" traits, in the case of pumping only Dexterity. A rather low price for old-school freedom, perhaps.

When creating a custom character, all base attributes start at 2 and you get 3 points to distribute freely. First you assign attributes, then skills, then traits. However, you can go back and forth between these tabs.

Now, to see the exploit, increase e.g. Intelligence to 5, then get at least 2 levels of Priest or Mage spells to unlock the Improved Intelligence trait, then select said trait, after which you can decrease Intelligence all the way to 1, not 2. After that, you can change skills and traits as you wish. Doing similar tricks for all attributes reduces base attributes to 1 and you get 7 points to distribute freely.

You need to spread the word, because I haven't seen anyone else use the phrase the way you do.

Isn't anyone prepared to condemn Miley Cyrus for her twerking? Oh well, let's see what we have managed to scrape together in this thread, after three pages: The Washington Redskins and quinoa. The first is basically a guilt-by-association fallacy:

"Redskin" is a racial slur.

Racial slurs are bad.

The name and mascot of the Washington Redskins are, like, cultural appropration!

Therefore, cultural appropriation is bad.

Compare:

Hitler was a vegetarian.

Hitler was evil.

Therefore, vegetarianism is evil.

And quinoa...OMG...increased export income for the producer countries wouldn't be a problem if the local elite would share enough of it with the peasantry. They could import a variety of food, medicine and other things needed by the poor. But, of course, the local grandees aren't pale-skinned enough to be evil. The Great Satan (US of A) exports a lot of food - subsistence farming isn't all it's cracked up to be.

1. Cultural achievements are owned by the race that creates them. E.g., "twerking" is property of the Negroid race.

2. Of course, the above does not hold for evil (privileged) races, only for good (oppressed) races.

THIS IS WHAT SELF-PROCLAIMED PROGRESSIVES ACTUALLY BELIEVE.

On a more serious note: Without the first assumption, the whole giant on clay feet called "cultural appropriation" just falls flat on its face.

This thread is cultural appropriation due to the alphabet used. Only racially pure Phoenicians - mongrels need not apply - have the sacred birthright to use their alphabet!

Without nitpicking that summary, I see how the topic is useful context for complaints about the Crusades. I'm not sure what it has to do with complaints about colonialism, especially in the last century. There was no aggressive empire to defend against, whereas said criticism tends to be about either (1) exploitative motives and actions, or (2) plainly negative outcomes.

Minor nitpick: There was the Ottoman Empire, and it also claimed to be a Caliphate. A century ago, this Caliphate had declared jihad against the Entente infidels and was busy with the Armenian Genocide. Thanks to French colonialism, the Barbary slave trade was stopped. Thanks to pressure from the colonial powers, the rest of the Ottoman slave trade was also slowly eradicated. Well, at least the Ottoman Caliphate had already stopped taking its "blood tax", which was abducting Christian children to be forcibly converted to Islam and used as soldiers, among other things.

As for one side starting it, I think that's an accident of chronology. Christianity got there first, and it did so at least in part by sword. Islam came into a world already full of faiths, and it had to make room for itself somehow.

First I'll say I appreciate your balanced view of history, but do you apply the same standards to, say, the conquest of the "New World"? By an accident of chronology, some natives happened to be there, and the Conquistadors had to make room for themselves somehow. Why do people still whine about that?

Again, I'm dubious. It resonates, to be sure, and it has more resonance with a portion of the population than anything Christianity can muster now; Judaism hasn't had a state to call its own before Israel for a very, very long time. But the Crusades certainly found purchase in Christian imagination. So did the Spanish Reconquista, followed immediately by the conquest of the New World. The Thirty Years War, one of the darkest periods of European history, at least began over intra-Christian conflict and probably provides something of a model for current sectarianism in the Middle East.

 

What's unusual is the violent faith persisting so far into the modern era, but it's easy to attribute that to post-colonialism and grinding poverty rather than any inherent property of the religion itself.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think any of this would be a concern if so many states holding large Muslim populations weren't such disasters that they effectively cannot act as states and monopolize the use of force. He could see much the same outcome from fundamentalism in the USA if the USA were not a highly successful state with a strong security apparatus and popular support.

Nobody has commented on the 16% approval rating of IS in France. How do we keep beliefs similar to theirs from becoming mainstream Islam in the Western world?

You appear to be saying that Muslims have been perpetrators of violence, and Christians innocent victims of that violence, throughout history. Is that really the point that you're trying to make?

No. One side started it, and had the upper hand for a very long time, that's a fact. I'm very glad that they lost in the end. Anyway, I just wanted to give some historical context to the usual complaints about Western colonialism in the Middle East.

You're pointing to a true historical fact: Muhammad had, by 632 at the end of his life, established an Islamic kingdom of sorts in Arabia, and within a few decades of his life (say, by 661 at the end of the first caliphate, or 678 at the end of the life of his youngest wife), Muslims had conquered the entire Middle East (save the Byzantine Empire) and much of North Africa. Islam began with an empire. In contrast, Christianity didn't have an empire until the 4th century, some 300-plus years after its founding.*

 

But I think you're drawing a wrong inference on the basis of that fact. The nonsense fundamentalism that ISIS spouts has much more to do with recent developments in Islam than with Islam's history, as you can read in the NYT and elsewhere.

 

Living as a minority under Muslim rule has not, historically, always been great, but it has been a hell of a lot better than living — well, being executed — under ISIS the past few months. Consider, for example, Muhammad's famous letter of tolerance to local Christians.

Well, the theological foundations of IS may well be very different from mainstream Sunni Islam. However, I read a statement where they claimed to have offered Christians a choice between conversion, jizya and death. It didn't seem completely un-Islamic to me, just medieval.

I see people jump to the defense of Islam here. I should clarify that I think IS is more medieval/barbaric than Islamic. As other people have stated in the thread, brutal warfare is obviously not unique to jihadists, nor do most Muslims act like jihadists - this is common knowledge.

When it comes to historical states, you can cherry-pick examples to make them appear more or less villainous. It's largely futile. However, there's still a difference between victims and perpetrators. The Muslims attacked the Christians, not the other way around; the first Arab siege of Constantinople started in 674, the First Crusade in 1096 and the second Battle of Vienna in 1683.

http://en.wikipedia....n_Islamic_state

Not even IS has claimed that Modern English "Islamic State" (or its Arabic equivalent) is ancient. What an odd strawman argument!