Thaluikhain

I once had to create a map due to a weird graphics error in a outside combat in BoE (which naturally didn't let me save and restart the program until I won) where what was on the screen didn't change, but I could still right click to see what was in each square.

Using the windows version, though.  Not a huge issue, just keep right-clicking without thinking because I grew up doing that for E3.

I like disabling the marker in Skyrim and finding things myself, though that's at least part because I worry my sense of direction is atrophying.

Playing E1 (I'm able to play E1 for the first time, woo!) makes me miss E3's talking system.  Also, right clicking to look and the newer sound effects.

(Gah, these constant wandering monsters are a pain)

On 7/26/2020 at 9:09 PM, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

Wound deals "unblockable damage". It's a separate damage type. It ignores all resistances and defenses, including physical, except for the Absorbs Magic ability, like Rakshasi have. It can even damage characters with the Invulnerable ability.

I didn't know that.  Being able to damage Invulnerable things seems particularly odd.  Is anything else unblockable?

10 hours ago, Ess-Eschas said:

Wound is an excellent spell, and your approach seems like a sound one to me. Amongst other things, I believe Wound partially ignores some creature resistances and immunities, so it can be a very effective way of damaging foes. Notably, it later games, it can actually be used to harm 'invulnerable' creatures, without enough patience!

At least in later Exile games, Wound seemed to count as a physical attack, and worked fine on monsters immune to magic, fire, cold and poison.

Always thought Icebolt should work that way too, you are throwing an icicle at them enemy like it's a javelin, according to the description.

19 hours ago, Goldengirl said:

Valorim is also described as being recently settled, and Avernum obviously is a very new society.

Valorim is the newest continent settled by the Empire but, IIRC, it's not exactly newly settled, there are big cities all over and Shayder's sewer system is getting old.  There's no frontier as such, just the odd places inside the Empire's realm which are not well settled.  Until the plagues, it was mostly very firmly under Empire control.

OTOH, Upper Exile is still very much newly settled by humans and their slith or vahnatai allies.

1 hour ago, Edgwyn said:

And of course Nethergate does fit into Alex and Goldengirl's colonialism theory.  It has been a while since I played Nethergate, I cannot remember if it is early in the Roman occupation or later.

IIRC, Boadiccea is mentioned, so that's not quite a generation after Roman had conquered Britain (or at parts of it).

Also going to say no.  Apart from writing big fantasy worlds with lots of stuff in them, not seeing much connection, they are very different creators.

Didn't someone convert E3 maps to BoE?  Don't think they got them all, though.

Ok, used the editor to leave the scenario, copied Nephil's Gambit into the scenario folder to try that, but only Burned is coming up on the list of custom scenarios..

It just suddenly dies after the fight with the Blight Spirit at the end of Burned.  Killing it triggers a string of specials, there's a display text and a destroy all monsters one, followed by the change terrain one.  Actually, I don't know for sure it's the change terrain one doing it, but it's the last one to get a message come up before crashing.

I think the same scenario also has another change terrain and that worked fine.  You go through a door and it locks behind you, I'd presume that'd be a change terrain special, but don't remember if a message came up for it.

Oh, is the one hit kill thing part of the Debug mode?  Turning it off seemed to fix that, though BoE was struggling during some turns (during the monster part of the turn, it soon said the program was not responding, though it was able to run the rest of their turn, just without me being able to see what was going on, sounds and damages still worked), managed to barely win the fight but it still exited the game during the Change Terrain step.

EDIT:  Oh, Shift-1 stops those messages about specials coming up, though it still kills the game at what I presume is the Change Terrain step.

23 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

Huh, haven't seen that one before… just to clarify, by maps, you mean the areas you've explored on the automap, right?

Yeah, that's it.  Just loaded it again and it's just the outside map.  Though had saved inside a town, will have to try when saving outdoors.

23 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

This almost sounds like it could be related to the debug mode bug, as there's a step-through mode that shows the current node in the transcript and pauses after each node… but it also sounds like it could be something totally different?

Yeah, getting messages like "Step: Stuff Done Equal? - 20" and "Step: Destroy All Monsters - 26".  Both before and after I turn debug off with Shift-D.

EDIT:  And another one, this one bigger and weirder.

When fighting the Blight Spirit (which is the end fight for Burned), I got killed after a bit, so reloaded and tried again and got taken to the main screen with my party, despite having saved in a scenario.  Loaded from there and went back to the proper spot, and was able to kill the monster with one hit (doing normal damage for that PC, which is not nearly enough to one shot it), start get the ending dialog but the game exited when it reaches the "change terrain" step.  Reloaded it a couple of times (no problem with loading), and the same thing happened, until one time it didn't, the fight was running normally for a few turns and then just froze.  Had to close BoE and start again, at which time I oneshotted the monster and the game exited again.

Ok, reloaded my save game, and Shift-D got rid of that problem, thanks.

But all my maps had been erased, both the outdoors where I was, and the two towns I'd visited.

Also, went to the blacksmith and bought some stuff, and it's not identified when I got it.

There's also a weird thing when I trigger a special, and nothing happens until I click again, which sometimes happens when it's a one time show text thingy.  Annoying but not game killing.  Monsters don't seem to make death noises, and animations are very slow, again, not big problems.

"Save as" is working again, though clicking on "Cancel" still saves, rather than cancels.

EDIT:  Saved and exited, and upon reloading, the map of the town I'm in is still there, but the outdoor map is not.  Next town I go to also has the map still.

ALSO EDIT:  The "Go back" function in the dialogue doesn't do anything.

ALSO ALSO EDIT:  When casting spells at a target sitting on top of a special, it kept triggering that special.  Which could be useful if you could do that on purpose, now that I think of it.

Hmmm, ok, so there's a Vahnatiai option now (have to rethink my usual 2 of each party) with one Vahnatai graphic, an Anama Member option (which everyone who isn't a caster should always take, I guess).

Have noticed that the "save as" function inside a scenario is the same as "save", doesn't give you an option to choose where you are saving to.  And there's a really annoying flickering thing down the very bottom, the only way I can play the game is to play on small screen and stick the bottom below the edge of my screen.

The normal screen is a little small and the 2x is too big to fit on my screen.

I should stress, I'm not meaning to sound too critical, these are just things I've noticed that seemed worth mentioning, it's still very nice to be able to play the thing at all, and I appreciate the work done on the mod.  On to replay "Burned".

EDIT:  Ah, found some things.  The controls are a bit sluggish, and I can walk through anything (walls, trees, caves).  Also, ran into an outdoor encounter of goblins and they didn't seem to be able to move or attack, just stood there until I killed them.  Put a PC next to one and "stand ready" -ed and they didn't attack in their turn.

Mcafee also seems to think they are a big improvement, in that it lets me run them without randomly quarantining them (so far).

Was wondering, was BoE supposed to be full screen only, and the character and scenario editors part screen only, or was that just me?  In any case, thanks.

I've managed to read LotR (it's not easy), but couldn't read the Silmarillion.

CON might be linked directly to HP (maybe even armour to a bit).  WIS is linked to Cleric magic (or whatever you call it in your edition) in D&D, so maybe priest spells?  Possibly bravery but that's not really it.

CHA...awkward, but then that's a bit of a mess in D&D anyway.

56 minutes ago, chrlpolk said:

I also now understand why future games only use 4 characters.  With the experience system, you easily end up with a few characters several levels ahead of the others.  At the beginning, my two melee characters were consistently 3-4 level above everyone else, mostly due to taking advantage of bottlenecks at doorways.  This "Magic User" character rapidly caught up once he learned mass-damage spells, and the "Cleric" character to lesser extent.  But I had to grind (have other characters pass their turn) to let the "Thief" and "Bard" catch up.  That slowed down the adventuring quite a bit.

In E3, ran into that a lot, the dedicated Mage using fireballs goes up rank really fast (could be casting haste spells, which are more cost efficient, but just simpler to batter people with fireballs).  Usually have 3 melee fighters, and have to keep swapping out who is first because they get more kills.  Walking through a dungeon, walk up to a low level monster, enter combat mode, first fighter hits, end combat mode and the party is a few space away from the monster who can't hit back right away and do it again if needed.

11 hours ago, Ess-Eschas said:

 

Yes, this point is something of a borderline case. With something like this, the dividing line between an actual Easter Egg and general game humour is probably a little thin, or at least open to some interpretation!

 

My reasoning behind classing this particular response as an Easter Egg is that it requires you to manually type an unrecognised response to a cow. Given the way Exile III runs its dialogue, the player very rarely ever needs to actually type in a response, since most of the dialogue flows naturally by clicking on relevant words. Typing in a response is reserved for special situations (such as asking about the special artifacts), and there’s certainly no reason to expect to do this for perfectly normal cows. So, in that sense, I would be tempted to class this as an Easter Egg.

 

Incidentally, the little side comment I made there was specifically referring to making animal sounds back at animals (so, for instance, saying ‘moo’ to cows, or ‘baa’ to sheep). By contrast, I don’t think this constitutes an Easter Egg, but there are some fun little comments hidden away in there. I rather enjoy the little scene with dogs, where you can subvert the narrator by keeping on playing with them even after the game suggests that you have better things to do.

 

Do you have to type in a response for those?  Been ages since I played the game, so I might be totally wrong, but I thought you could get there by asking about "buy" or "sell".

On 10/12/2019 at 9:29 AM, Ess-Eschas said:

 

– There are some nice responses if you talk back to animals. Of particular note, perhaps, is that if you give a garbled comment to a normal cow, it will reply:

 

 

‘Mooo. Never heard of it. Mooo.’

 

– This is definitely a feature, so I’m not sure if it counts, but the ‘About Exile III’ dialogue contains a ‘Thought for the day’ box at the bottom. This thought is randomised, and is taken from a selection of tongue-in-cheek comments. Examples include:

 

Not sure if the first counts, talking to animals is something you are probably going to try (and some animals are worth talking to).  Wizard's familiar off the Isle of Bigail, and a monster in the Slime Caverns in the lab.

IIRC, Thought for the Day has serious thoughts in there as well as the random stuff.

Well, if you want if to be very much like E3, just with less talking and post-apocalyptic...

I don't suppose anyone knows of a big post-apocalyptic and low dialogue BoE scenario?

1 hour ago, chrlpolk said:

It's going very smoothly!  Almost like there's a reason these archetypes came into being....

Was going to say that D&D was one of the big influences for Exile, but the systems are very different.  And yet I'd imagine the way most people run their PCs looks a lot like D&D classes.  Probably this is partly cultural, but in large part because it works.

18 hours ago, chrlpolk said:

Avernum just doesn't feel the same.  Too many alterations.  I know it has a lot of quality of life improvements, but it loses something, too.  The six-character party has more of that Gold Box feel that drew me to it to begin with, and the design is... better?  I know "better" isn't the right word, but I prefer it.

Yeah, second that.  Could never really get into any Spiderweb games after BoE, though I've got a few of the first Avernums and Nethergate and played some Geneforge demos.

Huh, cools, have to give that a look, though it's a zillion parts long.  Not able to easily play the games myself on my system.