RandomOG

My rant was really against games which use 'aggro' or equivalent much more extensively than Spiderweb games and lamenting that some of that seemed to be infiltrating Avernum. It used to be that one had to arrange to block the mobs advance on one's mages using terrain or fighters in actual contact with them. Sometimes while circling wide with a hasted character to get their mages who were about hanging back and about to blast your party. Fun! (But that was probably a party of 6). It's certainly necessary to balance the game so the mobs aren't simply unstoppable, but not necessarily by using an 'Aggro' mechanism. However, the games have undoubtedly been dumbed down over the years. You no longer need to visit a trainer to spend skill points. You don't need to eat or sleep. The party size has been reduced from 6 to 4. The number and variety of both Priest and Mage spells has been reduced. You can no longer play as Sliths or nephilim. (I'm contrasting with Exile here). Guess it's what people want.

Essentially it's been dumbed down to make tactics easier for new people. Tanking has become such universal, if dumb*, RPG trope that it may have been felt it was necessary to include it also. (* Put it this way, do you know any experienced human player who concentrates all his effort on the heavily armoured fighter at the front while ignoring the squishies in the back row who are getting ready to blast the party? No? I thought not. So why should the AI do it?)

Well the title pretty much says it all. Can anyone who has tried using the new version of the game on the original Nexus 7 please comment. There seems to be no free trial version on android to try out. I downloaded the free version of Avadon when it first came out but abandoned it instantly as text was way too small to read and didn't zoom, and the controls were too small to hit accurately. Is Avernum similarly poorly ported? I see comments online about small text, buttons too close together, especially on character upgrade screens, inability to accurately select squares to move to/attack etc. How do all of you find it? Does switching on and using the accessibility features of Android help? (Shouldn't be necessary of course) I have been a player of Spiderweb games, off and on, for about 18 years, so was very disappointed to find Jeff had let such an unplayable port of Avadon go out under the company name. (If it was only intended for 10 inch tablets there should have been large warnings to that effect.)

Where exactly is the 'Nephilim fortress' that has the Spell books? I've been playing through the demo area and can't seem to find anything called that. I vaguely recall some dungeon with nephelim but having cleared it I can't find it again. Doh! Thanks

Thanks Everyone. I reckoned it might be something like that. I have the Libram quest filed for similar reasons. Would have replied earlier but Real Life intervened. 'Work is the curse of the gaming classes.' Randomiser

I'm LVL9 and the 'Widows' are handing me my head every time, on Hard. Party SO (Main - hey I like mages and hadn't read the Slartanalysis),SW and SH. Mainlining on Dex, Int and Str as appropriate. Chose the middle tree Spec. Have been mainly going up the L and M trees rather than building the lower level skills very much. Can't seem to do anything about poison. Various healing abilities 'also cure one effect' above 3 - does that include poison? Ah me, Cure was low level and spammable in Avernum. What would be a reasonable build for this kind of level? Randomiser

Thanks Randomizer. I finally bought the game! Didn't read this far down the analysis because the thread starts out being about parry rates, which I wasn't bothered about. No disrespect intended to your handle, it's just that I've been using Randomiser as mine in various games and forums since 97, on and off, so I'd like to stick with it. I doubt any confusion is likely once people start to read the posts. Randomiser (UK)

I'm not quite sure which abilities affect Sorceress and Shaman attacks, like Firebolt, Lightning Wind, Ice storm and Spirit Claw, Poison Mist, Call the Wind, especially the first in each Group. I stared off assuming they were magic attacks so were based purely on Intelligence, then discovered that they sometimes missed so now I wonder if there is a Dexterity dependence as well? Can anyone clarify how this works? Thanks Randomiser (UK!)

Hadn't come across the money back offer before. It's genuinely generous. But the last para! Do you have the saying about someone 'throwing their toys out of the pram' in the US?

Hey the OP wasn't long enough for you? I should have avoided shorthand altogether? I never expected the sorceress to be Erika from the beginning nor complained she wasn't. On the basis of the demo I was just concerned this was going to be the kind of game which excessively hobbles 'magic users' all the way through.

Will I buy Avadon or not? On the basis of the demo I think probably not. I just didn't find it very engaging. I started on Exile 2 or 3 back in 1996 and have bought several Exile and Avernum games since. It would be fair to say that the trend has been uniformly to simplify the game mechanics. Fewer spells, simpler training, fewer stats and skills, no rest, no food, unconsciousness instead of death etc. A balance is needed, but I think Avadon carries this dumbing down too far. One of the attractions of RPGs for me is the ability to customise my character and this is progressively being lost. Jeff, at the end of the instructions, is even talking about 'fixing' overuse of Dexterity by not allowing any selection of statistics in Avadon 2. (Whereas if anything needs fixed it seems to be that Dexterity is too powerful and he needs a lower cap or a law of diminishing returns.) I enjoy playing 'mages' and the new magic system looks like it will be way too restrictive for my taste with long cooldowns and a Vitality meter to watch, so that sorceresses will be very circumscribed in their use of abilities. Jeff's comments on vitality don't make sense to me. I'm supposed to be aware of it but not worry about it , because I will almost always have enough, but he wishes he hadn't placed so many Potions of Vitality? He can't have his cake and eat it. If I will always have enough, the meter shouldn't be there because in practice it makes me think I have to hold back on abilities for really tough situations. I consider my screen medium res - 1280x1024 - but I end up with tiny Character icons scurrying across the screen at a speed where my mouse hardly catch up with wandering NPCs to click on them. (My CPU and Graphics card were very humdrum 4 years ago). Having read Jeff's May 4 Blog I realise he is a bit sensitive about criticism right now. - But I am disappointed if this is his new direction and I think that pursuit of casual gamers is a very uncertain financial strategy. How many of them will be repeat buyers over a 15 year period? I wish him well but I may have to be looking elsewhere in future.

Is it just me, or is the demo for Avadon considerably shorter than those for recent Avernum games? Does that mean the game itself is shorter than, say, Avernum 5 or 6. Given the structure of the demo I didn't even get to try out all the NPCs. Who knew you would only get one trip outside of the castle and so should take both newest NPCs if you wanted to see how they played?

Subject says it all really. Do wands do the same damage whoever uses them or do the user's stats contribute? If so how? (Some of the wands say BASE damage ... ) Thanks

Yep. Kudos to those who did all the boring testing or managed to delve into the code somehow. This is stuff people always want to know - How else can you work out which weapons to give which characters? - so Jeff could save fans a lot of work by just publishing the formula in the first place.

Thanks Slarties How does Magery fit into the picture? Otherwise I think I understand but the thread is a bit confusing when you say Average Damage for Weapons = Base Damage + (Weapon Multiplier * Attack Bonus * 0.75) and Dantius then goes on to define base damage in an odd way. I guess you mean the base damage is the average damage done by the weapon without taking into consideration the bonus from the character's stats. Really it seems to be a fairly simple Hit Dice based system where you get a specified number of dice of a specific size from the weapon and 0.75 dice of the same size from each point in the relevant stats. It seems lots of the difficulty in defining the numbers arises from trying to discuss the subject without mentioning hit dice. E.G A steel spear is 11-33 which is to say 11D3. Average throw on a D3 is 2 So base damage is 11*2=22 You get an extra 0.75D3 for each point in Dex, Thrown Weapons and Sharpshooter. Say total is 18, then bonus comes to 18*0.75*2=27. Total damage=22+27 = 49. Fairly easy as I say, but only if you actually think about hit dice, otherwise you wonder where all these magic numbers come from.