Lilith

The short answer is nothing: the hope is that there are enough possible flags and people will select randomly enough to avoid an accidental collision. It's not an ideal system.

It does seem like a build that replicates the functionality of original BoE and runs on modern computers would be a good first milestone for the project to reach before going too wild with potential feature creep.

One issue is that AppData isn't really meant for user-editable stuff: it's a hidden folder, so people have to go out of their way a little bit to put things in there. I feel like the best place for something that needs to be editable by both users and the program would be a folder in Documents. I think you get that error message if you try to start one of the pre-included scenarios (Valley of Dying Things, etc.) and the game can't find it, or if you try to start a custom scenario when the scenario folder is empty.

If you really want to find out what people think, it's possible to create a poll, you know.

Spirit Claw is the shaman's basic attack: you don't select it from the ability menu, you just click on your target in combat mode and the attack should happen automatically as long as you have a rod or staff equipped. Are you sure you're not actually trying to use Spirit Charge? If you want to use that, you need to upgrade Spirit Claw to rank 6.

No, there's no in-game calendar; the replenishing herb patches are on a hidden timer that's probably based on turn count.

Honestly, it's probably best to just use them as you get them. It's easy to get to level 30 by the end of the game and you've already seen that you don't really gain much from going higher than that, so you might as well just get a little boost from them as early as possible. Since you get a full heal when you level up, some people like to save up a few for a mid-dungeon heal.

Exile 1 also describes Hawthorne as a brilliant strategist rather than the aging puppet we see him as in EftP, although he doesn't exactly get any dialogue in the original so we have to take the game's word for it.

Even the editor can't increase stats above normal maximums. Since reading the book with the trap still on it requires over 10 Arcane Lore, it can't be done with a singleton.

After checking the book for the first time, did you talk to Pyrn to get him to remove the trap on it? If you don't do that you need something like 13 Arcane Lore, and Sage Lore and Vahnatai Lore don't count; the requirement is reduced after you talk to him. If he already died, you're out of luck.

Also, a lot of older RPGs let melee-based characters make a large number of attack rolls per round at high levels, which smoothed out the randomness a bit. Modern RPGs (western ones, at least) have largely decided that the image of your fighter making five or ten attacks per round is too silly for them, so everything gets staked on one or maybe two rolls, with the results that we see. (The fear of being seen as silly is, I think, one of the more unfortunate trends in current game design in general, especially since it tends to produce results that are just as silly but in less interesting ways, but don't get me started on that.)

Your best bet is probably to send an email with this information to support@spiderwebsoftware.com where Jeff Vogel is most likely to see it. Hopefully the fact that it's a consistently repeatable error means that the source of the problem can be tracked down.

clearly what jeff should have done is camelcased the title: GeneForge

Well, the inspiration from it came from Lake Avernus in Italy, which is said in mythology to be an entrance to the underworld, and that's pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/206020/

Also, if you were planning on bows for your casters because you were thinking it'd give them a backup attack for when you don't want to spend spell points, keep in mind that beyond the early game your hit rate and attack power with bows are going to be junk unless you waste points in Dexterity, so it's not really worth it.

Yeah, I never bothered with First Aid beyond the two points you can buy with money. Spellcraft is a must-have, though; it's beneficial in itself and you'll need it to work up the skill tree to Resistance anyway.

Melee fighters aren't completely useless, they're just a lot less versatile than spellcasters; they do a bit more single-target damage under favourable conditions, but that's about all they do. If you're going to use a melee fighter at all, I'd recommend you just bring one and make them a sword user, since dual-wielding swords is generally the best option for physical damage and there is one point in the game where you need to have somebody use a sword. Archery is probably even worse off than melee, unfortunately, and I wouldn't recommend using an archer. My recommended party for a new player would probably consist of one dual-wielding sword user, one priest and two mages. Feel free to give everyone a few levels of priest spells so they can heal in an emergency (getting enough points to use Mass Healing and Unshackle Mind is a good idea if you can afford it). When you use your casters, don't neglect buffs and debuffs: Daze is great for shutting down groups of enemies early in the game, and most support spells are pretty effective in general. Make sure to focus your stat investment on a single stat for each character: melee fighters should mostly invest in Strength, archers (if you use them) should focus on Dexterity and spellcasters should focus on Intelligence. Endurance isn't super important, but you probably want a bit of it; a 3:1 ratio of your main stat to Endurance is probably a good balance. Skills are a bit trickier to figure out. Melee characters should initially invest mostly in Melee Weapons, Blademaster, Dual Wielding, Hardiness and Parry, since those are the most useful skills for them. Riposte skill is pretty bad, and Quick Action and Lethal Blow are just okay at best. Spellcasters want their basic spellcasting skill (up to 17 points so they can use all spells), and they should also work toward putting points in Resistance for improved survivability. One thing to keep in mind is that battle disciplines are actually very good and so is the Hardiness skill, even if melee combat itself has its limitations. In the long run, you want to invest a bit in physical combat skills even on your casters so they can get access to battle disciplines (up to Adrenaline Rush if possible), Hardiness and maybe Parry. You eventually want a total of 17 Arcane Lore and 15 Tool Use in your party if possible, so plan around that. You can get up to 4 points of Vahnatai Lore which can substitute. I'd personally recommend against buying the Sage Lore trait, as either through error or by design it . As far as Tool Use goes, 15 is ideal if you want to be able to unlock and disarm absolutely everything, but try for 10-12 early on and then put the rest in if and when you can. Cave Lore isn't too important: spend money to buy a couple of points for everyone from Tor's farm after doing the quest there and then forget about it.

The short answer is that it depends on both what your stats are and what attack you're using: the higher your current intelligence and skills, the less an extra level of damage will do for you, while a percentage bonus will always increase your damage by the same percentage (although if you have more than one percentage bonus, they stack additively, not multiplicatively). So +2 Intelligence will probably be better for you early in the game, while +8% magical damage will be better for you later in the game. Basically, to calculate the damage you do, the game rolls a bunch of imaginary dice and adds them to a base value. The size of the dice depends on what kind of attack you're using, while the number of dice rolled depends on your stats, skills, and equipment. This is what's meant by "levels of damage": it's the number of dice rolled. In general, for a magical attack, every point of Intelligence adds an extra die of damage, and every point in the relevant spell skill also adds an extra die. I believe there's further information about damage calculations in the game's manual.

Nah. As long as you did what they wanted on their quest, it doesn't matter what you do after.

Measles has a case fatality rate of a few tenths of a percent, comparable to influenza. It's certainly not something you want to have, especially as an adult, but the vast majority of infectees survive.

There are limits. One of the reasons Ebola hasn't overrun the world is that it kills people too quickly and too dramatically to spread beyond local outbreaks. At the very least, your host needs to survive long enough to transmit the virus. (On the other hand, rabies kills within weeks of infection and in a very visible fashion, and it remains endemic even in areas where the mongoose, its original host and one of the few mammals that can be infected with the virus without dying, is not present. So it's true that high lethality isn't an absolute barrier to persistence in the population. In the case of rabies, being less contagious might actually help it: over 80% of bites fail to transmit the disease even without treatment, so it doesn't tend to wipe out entire populations.)

Another factor in relative lethality is that precisely because viruses rely completely on their hosts to reproduce, they don't tend to benefit from killing them quickly; most viruses that are deadly to humans are primarily diseases of nonhuman animals that are imperfectly adapted to us. You might say they kill us by accident, and over a long enough period of time you'd expect us to coevolve with the virus in a way that reduces lethality. On the other hand, many of the most deadly bacterial infections are caused by anaerobic bacteria such as the clostridia, which can live quite happily in soil and don't particularly thrive in the human body -- if we drop dead, so much the better for them.

I think they meant to imply that the unfortunate part was that bacteria weren't so easy to eradicate with vaccination. (Even when vaccines exist, pathogenic bacteria are less likely than viruses to be reliant on humans for survival and reproduction, so you probably won't get rid of them entirely.)

No. Golden Crystals are always good for anybody and should be saved for equipment you expect to keep around for a long time. Dexterity and evasion bonuses are good for Dexterity-based characters in Avadon 1, but they're not as good in the sequels. Most other enhancements are filler.