Serene Tempest

I also felt a little frustrated that playing as a loyal and pragmatic hand who kept Avadon's best interests at heart meant alienating all of my companions. But perhaps that's part of the choice the game forces on you: how much are you willing to sacrifice, and how much personal sacrifice are you willing to demand from others, for the greater good of the Pact?

A regime change in Avadon would certiantly make this a more viable option - especially as I'm sure that Dreless would need certian assurances to agree to this, and assurances coming from a (future) Keeper of Avadon would carry much more weight than assurances coming from some random Hand.

 

Also, if you could play it off right, you could make it apparant to Hanvar's Council that this was a way out of a disasterous war. That might make them reconsider.

 

I'm sure you'd have to do some pretty good political maneuvering to pull it off.

During my first meeting with Dreless, as he's about to jump out the window and asks me if it would be possible for Tawon to be free of the Pact's tyranny without returning to it's former imperialistic ways, I thought about it for awhile and a solution occured to me. What if the Pact were to offer the Tawon Empire membership? Of the farlands, they alone seem like they could be viable candidates, and while there is certainly distrust and bad blood between them and both Holklanda and Kellmendriel, is there really more than there is between the current pact members? It would achieve what Dreless wants (for Tawon to be secure and free from the Pact's tyranny), at least if you take his word for what he's real goals are. It would also strengthen the Pact and give them one less enemy to divide their resources among.

 

Thoughts?

Presumably, yes. That's what happens if you fight the shock troopers on the southern end of the map instead of running from them.

I did this with two Shadowalkers and just jumped right over the Golems without attacking them, and had Alacander plant a turret right next to them to distract them. The trick was getting the Golems to focus on the Turrent rather than run back to attack the shadowalkers. Once I got that to work, two shadowalkers can make pretty quick work of a couple hostile turrets and the controllers, and I found that once you start to gain momentum in this battle, it gets a lot easier.

 

That said, I definitely didn't get this one on my first try.

That's too bad. I think that Jeff's games have grown considerably since then, and I'd be really interesting to see a retelling of the story at the level of his more recent games.

Some decisions you make (mostly during the endgame sequence) will affect the ending text, though I don't think anything you say to any of the wives does. To the best of my knowledge, the only decisions that make a difference within the game are the ones associated with your companion's personal quests. And even then, only for a certain endgame path.

Even in the rebel ending you're still keeping up appearances of being loyal to Avadon. I'd think you could make an expansion that would make sense either way around that.

 

Also, the real-life ninjas did use polearms sometimes. One of the more famous ones (I forget his name) even developed a unique style of spear-fighting.

I mostly find summoning useful as a distraction, especially if you're only summoning wolves. They don't do that much damage, but they can take damage instead of your PCs and set up Shadowalkers for backstab. When you get Hellhounds and Salamanders, they can get in two uses of their fire-breath, which makes them do half-decent damage. If you are fighting enemy spellcasters, using an assault crystal on your party plus multiple summons can reflect a lot of damage back too.

 

I'm not sure if there is one ideal party for every major quest. Depending on the quest, I'll use Shadowalker/Shadowalker/Sorceress, Shadowalker/Blademaster/Sorceress, or Shadlwaker/Blademaster/Shaman. I did find Shadowalker/Shaman/Sorceress to be more difficult, and Shadowalker/Shadowalker/Shaman to suffer from having no decent crowd control options (though I haven't tried the Stunning flash powder).

I would have liked it to be possible (if very difficult) to uncover more of the conspiracy before the big reveal. Not enough to stop it, but perhaps enough to put together the pieces just before it happens (and just after you are no longer in any position to warn anyone).

 

 

It would also be cool if having certain characters with you made certain conversations and encounters play out differently (for example, Jennell's tracking/pathfinding skills coming into play more than just during her special mission, Shima's stealth and scouting abilities allowing you to sabotage things and giving you more of a heads up about what's next, Nathanilie being able to see through illusions and dispel magical effects, and Sevlin... well... annoying your enemies?)

I don't remember the sequence to get on the other side of the gate you can see in the first level. I got there twice out of sheer stubbornness.

What specifically do you want to do with the editor? There is a trainer in the first Breza Woods zone who will allow you to to retrain your characters if you'd like to experiment with different builds. Or you could use the cheat code:

 

Shift-D to bring up a text box, and then type "retrain".

 

Of course, if you want more skill points or to tinker with the skill trees, these won't help.

If you're looking at an optimized build, probably not as your defensive abilities are going to be paramount. That said, I have yet to actually train anyone up to level six for a top-tier skill. You have to sacrifice too much for it in terms of your other skills.

I found both stunning bash (and Hamstring for that matter) to be useful as, effectively, an extra use of Savage Blow. If I happened to get a stun in the bargain, that was just a bonus.

I found Daze to be a little more useful than that. Sure, it wouldn't reliably knock out any specific target, but when fighting groups it would often take two or three of them out of the fight, which while not spectacularly useful was enough so I kept using it. But I found charm foe was too unreliable.

My favorite characters in a game (or book, or movie) aren't necessarily the people I would like or trust the most in real life. They're the most interesting and unique characters.

After doing one playthrough, I can't think of any skill set for any of the characters that I'd call nonviable. But there were some skills that I trained and never really used purely to unlock higher skills. Most notable Arcane Curse and War Cry. Shadowalker Focus and Triumphant Roar were worth it for the Haste, but I found the War Blessing to be underwhelming as well. And, as Randomizer pointed out in his class analysis topic, these abilities can be largely replaced by potions/scrolls/crystals. I think if these abilities provided somewhat stronger blessings and curses than items it would make them much more attractive.

 

For context, I like the game to push back at me enough so I have to think about what I'm doing, but I'm more interested in the story than repeating battles a dozen times to finally win them. I usually peruse the forms to see what the consensus on character builds is and loosely follow it. I started out the game on Hard, and ended up lowering the difficulty to Normal about 3/4 of the way through and to Casual at the very end.

What do you have for critters? And what are your magic and basic (Strength, etc) stats?

Plus, if you're mostly in it for the story, I consider Geneforge 1 to possibly be the best game Spiderweb's ever written.

 

G3 seems to be one that people either love or hate.

At least the unstable firebats were possible to knock out in 1-2 turns if you played your cards right, allowing you to take out the pack before they closed on you. The unstable rats near Patrick's tower are another story. Summons wouldn't last long enough against them either. I had to resort to letting one of my party members take the hits and then dragging him back to the nearest city gates.

The world of Avernum doesn't end, but it undergoes some very dramatic and irreversible changes.

I, for one, liked the ending a lot. One of the biggest detractors for A4, I found, was the changes to the world of Avernum, the world in general being much tamer and overrun with crystal miners seeking fortune. It was plenty realistic given the narrative of the world, but I felt that as a fantasy setting that made it lose something. The Avernum post-A6 was presented as regaining it's wildness. I was a little disappointed that the Horde kept northern Avernum, as the Formelleo area had always been one of my favorite parts, but I suppose you can't have everything. Which may be a decent way of summing up the message of the ending.

 

I did find the final battle to be the easiest and most straight-forward of any of the Avernum games (I never played A1 though). Now what would have been a very interesting battle would be if you had to face the three Horde leaders at the same time. But I think Jeff's blog posts on the difficulty of computer games probably offers some hints as to his decisions about climatic battle difficulty.

I wouldn't put an archer in an optimized party; archery is definitely inferior to both melee and magic in A6. In the early game, throw missiles can wreck havoc, but it quickly falls behind other sources of damage as the game progresses. I'd say for optimization magic is going to be your main source of damage, with melee fighters mostly serving to shield your mages. I find Slith can do a great job of being warrior/priests, allowing them to fill both roles. Giving a slith Divinely Touched and Elite Warrior gives you automatic pole weapons, blademaster, parry, and a 10% hp bonus, allowing them to be competent fighters while focusing mainly on magic. Granted, they won't be spectacular fighters, but magic is going to be your main source of damage anyway, and they should be plenty adequate for the occasional foe that only falls to physical damage. So I guess I'd throw out two Slith warrior/priests and two Nephil Divinely Touched Natural Mage wizards. I'd pick one of the Nephils to have tool use and just give him most of the wisdom crystals/knowledge brews you come across until he catches up. What you're real killing power is going to come from is when you get adrenaline rush for everyone. Once your priests have divine fire and everyone has adrenaline rush, you can hit groups of enemies with 12 area of effect spells in the first round.

Messing up the purity agent would lock you out of Taygen, and possibly killing his alchemist for Rawal (could someone confirm/deny this?).

Maybe some of these areas are leftover from G4; parts of the western tunnels seemed oddly familiar to me, making me wonder if he'd just used the A4 map as a template to modify rather than starting again from scratch.