Triumph

This. Leaving aside the gameplay annoyances caused by the boat / island system, one of G3's failings was making both sides unpalatable and then forcing you to choose one. In the earlier games, there was something appealing at every faction available, and there was also the option of refusing to join any faction. G4 did a much better job of what G3 tried to do, I think: tell a war story where you ultimately need to choose a side, both sides have sympathetic characters and points, and you still have the option of choosing a third possibility that attempts to subvert both sides. Instead, in G3, you get Shapers who are civilized jerks and rebels who are barbarous jerks. It's always irked me that you don't get to visit Icy End until after your alignment is locked in, because I feel that town does more than anything in the game to show the rebellion in a sympathetic light.

I miss the good ol' days (which was I even around for?) of you arguing with Delicious Vlish about builds and stat minutiae. 😂

Avernum 6: Is Melanchion alive or dead? If alive, did you take out a majority of his rivals like he asked? Is Gladwell alive or dead? If alive, did you help him gain power? Not sure, but how you handle things with Spire / Bargha may have a slight effect, also. See this for more detail and colossal spoilers. No idea what factors into the A5 ending beyond killing / joining the Darkside Loyalists. Maybe joining the Anama has some effect? Ditto for how you deal with Gladwell? But I never played A5 past the demo.

Yes, either alignment is fine.

The only truly important thing to find in the mines is an entry baton, but you can also get one of those in the West Workshop, and if for some reason you destroyed that one, there's still other paths to the Geneforge (besides the one that requires the entry baton).

Am I correct in understanding Slarty's objection to be, not the existence of a significant character / location from which many quests are obtained, but rather the often unnatural, verisimilitude-breaking implementation of quest acquisition?

Hmm...so, definitely some non-optimal choices when it comes to stats so far, but I don't think you're hopelessly doomed. Shapers don't really need Strength, for example, and generally you want to focus on just one type of shaping (E.g., Fire or Magic, not both). The biggest thing to do is revisit previous zones and make sure you've fully explored them - any zone with black space on the map is a place that may have more loot / quests / walking XP (aka enemies) and/or another exit to a new zone. Check whether you have any open quests you might be able to complete in the zones you can reach, and talk to the NPCs to see if there are any quests you may have missed. It's worth considering your creations. Which type(s) are you using? And how many? Given your stat investment, Magic creations seem like the way to go. There's a canister of Create Vlish in the Upper Research Hall, which it sounds like you should be able to get to, so that would be a good place to start if you don't already have at least Vlish. Make sure you don't waste essence boosting their stats - they need 2 Int at creation so you can control them, but otherwise don't spend essence on them. What are your combat tactics? As a shaper, you want your army of creations to do the heavy lifting while you focus on healing / buffing them (plus maybe the occasional bit of offensive magic). In terms of where to go...have you made it to the southwest quadrant of the map, but are stymied getting into the northwest quadrant? Or have you not even go through the Barzite lands yet? In Pit of the Misfits, I think you can talk your way through with high enough Leadership. Alternatively, you may be able to go north from Western Pass and bribe your way through Taker Toll Road. (I believe the highest Leadership you can need in G2 is 12, so you're most of the way to that goal.) This post has some good general advice for playing the Geneforge series; you may already know all this, but it might also give you new ideas for tactics. This walkthrough, though not infallible, has a good bit of useful information as well. I don't know if any of this will be specific enough, but I hope it helps!

1. We here on the Spiderweb forums frown upon necromancy, so in the future please try to make new thread with a link to an old thread, rather than commenting upon the old thread. It can be confusing for readers who don't notice the timeskip in the middle of the "conversation." If you hope the author of the old thread specifically will respond to you, you could also try messaging them. 2. In G1, the biggest factor in creation strength is your own shaping stats, followed by leveling; creation mechanics vary throughout the series, but the most important factors in creation strength are always either shaping skill level at time creation, or leveling up. Creations don't actually get SP like you - every point you upgrade consumes your essence. Plus, creations automatically gain stats as they level up, without you "allocating points" at all. In no Geneforge game is it really worthwhile to add points to a creation by spending essence, beyond giving it the minimum two points of intelligence so you can control the creation in combat. If it's too dumb, it'll function like a friendly NPC, fighting on your side but under computer control.

It helps to use blessing and healing magic on the friendly NPCs as well. I haven't tried it in G4, but in G3, every time I thought "Surely the friendly NPCs aren't strong enough to take down *this* enemy," they always proved me wrong (though sometimes not without buffing / healing from me). Akhari Blaze? Yep, sabotage his machines and send the Shapers after him and even the final boss of G3 goes down without a hit from me. (I couldn't finish the game as a rebel solely because the drakon in the cells in Dhonal's Keep who clearly was meant to help me bugged out and literally just disappeared.)

This should be entirely feasible. I'm not certain about the first two games, but at least in G3 it was possible to complete the game without inflicting a single point of damage via player-controlled characters (and no mental magic either), and based on my experiences with G4, I'd be pretty confident it's possible there, too. Taking brute force out of the equation forces you to look at each zone as a puzzle to be solved. What combination of leadership, mechanics, sneaking, friendly NPCs, and other environmental elements will let me accomplish me goal? This approach also changes how you look at equipment - combat effectiveness is no longer how you determine "best" armor and weapons to equip. You cannot clear every zone or quest as a pacifist - some absolutely require combat - but you should be able to complete the game.

Oh my. The spin-off game practically makes itself. 😱😂

Welcome back! And thanks for reposting this!

One battle, no matter how many times you cast Haste, is not a statistically meaningful sample. You probably just got unlucky.

Spiderweb needs to recreate geneforge with abacus support and make it look like a Rorschach test where instead of skills you can click random blobs in the quick bar...thoughts? Sorry, couldn't help myself. 😎😂

Fixed that for you.

This sort of reminds me of movies or books that I've enjoyed in part because I never knew what would happen next, but that one of my brothers found a lot more meh because the plot twists I found suspenseful were instead totally obvious and predictable to him. We all have some ability to connect the dots and figure out what's going in a story, but for any particular story (regardless of its medium), some of us are going to do better at filling in the blanks than others will. I've been annoyed by stories that I felt never explained such-and-such important matter, but I've also been taken aback when the aforementioned brother said a story that I thought made complete sense failed to explain things and left him in the dark. So I wonder if the implication / explication distinction is less about enjoying one versus the other in an absolute sense, and more about how successfully / easily one makes inferences for a specific story. Humans generally enjoy solving puzzles (otherwise we wouldn't keep making them for thousands of years), and I think that includes the act of inferring. It's quite satisfying to realize you've worked through the hints to figure out a story. Maybe our final interpretation isn't exactly what the author intended, but we have still used logic and imagination to build a coherent understanding out what the author gave us, and this makes us feel smart. Contrariwise, if we are unsuccessful at inferring some kind of meaning in a work of fiction, we wind up confused and frustrated and dissatisfied. Thus how much one enjoys implication in a work of fiction, versus desiring more explicit details and connections, comes down to how successful one is at drawing inferences from said implications. Tangent: oh wow weird flashback to discussing Eliot's "The Waste Land" in English Lit as a freshman and boggling over how many literary allusions he loaded into that thing.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "sort of undefinable" "Sublime" (but, then, you aren't sure either, so we're even 😂), but I certainly find that some video games are capable of drawing my mind to ponder truth, beauty, and goodness (the so-called "transcendentals"). FWIW, playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild earlier this year is what convinced me that video games can be art. Never before have I thought after finishing game that it was such a genuinely beautiful experience to play. (Note: the game is not perfect, but what human art is ever perfect? Also, not saying there are no other video-games-which-are-art in existence, just that I haven't had a chance to play them.) In the past, I've played games that I thought came close to being art but that I wasn't quite sure about, or games that had certain elements I thought qualified as art but not the game as a whole. If we don't have many video games that qualify as art, I suspect it's more because of time than because the genre is inherently incapable of being art. Geniuses like Michelangelo or Bach don't come along every day, and the greatness of brilliant works of art can take time to achieve widespread appreciation. People have been painting, making music, and writing books for millennia, which means that even though most of those works are bad, the sheer amount time means a great many brilliant paintings, pieces of music, and books have appeared. It's harder to point to video games as art perhaps in part because it is such a young art form. I imagine that if mankind is still playing video games in 500 years, we'll have more examples that are widely recognized as great art.

Eloquence? Rhetorical Proficiency? Dizzying Intellect?

Is it possible there are controls for the doors somewhere nearby? Throughout the Geneforge series, a lot of doors are operated by a lever somewhere nearby.

Vinlie plz Amen! Preach it! I'll make the adjustment.

FYI, added a link to this in the G3 strategy central post. Thanks for all your work on this! I love seeing new fan-made content like this for older games!

Well, since you asked... I've no more interest in seducing the local innkeeper in a video game than in real life. Moreover, it seems completely unnecessary - it's never been why I play Spiderweb Software's games. Now, if Jeff wants to include that sort of thing, that's his business. But after seeing how the romance in Avadon 2 turned out, I'm can't say I'm champing at the bit for him to write more PC-NPC romances.

It was three years since the last time people posted the links didn't work. If no one responded and the links still don't work, realize this is just dead.

Or time travel. 🤔

Wow. 😮 *applauds* Nicely done!