Sterno

I'm starting to see that Jeff's blog posts about "When I do <x>, some people hate me and my games and will never buy one my games again" aren't even remotely exaggeration. Cerin, I'd say hang in there, dude. I thought the story got a lot more interesting right around the point that I hit the level cap, and I did it right about the time you did. The fights started getting a bit more challenging, too.

I'm curious what difficulty you're playing on if you thought it took a dramatic jump upward in the end game. I'm only up to the 2nd trip to Dhora Woods right now and entering the wizard's tower, but so far on Hard the game has been really easy compared to Avernum 1 & 2 on Hard. I think I've only used maybe 3 healing potions all game so far and no other consumables. I was just thinking last night when looking at my inventory full of consumables that it's probably a bad sign for game difficulty if you don't need them even on hard. Probably should have gone Torment, but I don't want to risk breaking some achievements by switching difficulty mid-game. If it ramps way up later in the game though, I guess I'll be glad to have them all. Though if that's the case, I'd argue the difficulty should be spread out better, which might be what your OP is about. I'm already level 22 and it'd be weird to see a big difficulty jump this late in the game. My main complaint about Avadon is the linearity. Looking forward to the more open-ended Avernum: Escape from the Pit to see how it fares under the new game engine.

For people who are playing Avadon and wishing there were some music, I recommend checking out music by "Two Steps From Hell". You might recognize "Freedom Fighters" from one of the Star Trek trailers or Heart of Courage from the Mass Effect 2 trailer. They've also got an mp3 collection on Amazon for like $8 if you get addicted to it like I did but get annoyed when it keeps disappearing from Youtube. Started listening to this while playing Avadon and it makes things way more epic.

After reading that it doesn't stack to have to different characters in the party with the lockpick skill, I thought I'd download this editor so I could retrain one of the guys. I tried using the no-frills one that's upstairs in Avadon by talking to the guard. However, when I ask about retraining, it gives me some information about what that means and asks me if I want to proceed. However, my only options from there are to add lockpicking, boost all skills, and cancel. There's no "Yes, I really do want to retrain" option. I've got the Steam version, if it matters.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer It's interesting since the first dungeon takes about an hour to play through and you can't alter your character until near the end. It's really not uncommon for people to buy a game on Steam when it's cheaply priced (such as the current $9 for Avadon) and then not getting around to playing it for a few weeks, since they're currently playing something else. And maybe they'll never get around to playing it at all. Don't underestimate the power of low-price impulse purchases.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=1&Category_Code=collection_cds I believe you can get registration codes for the mac/PC versions when you order, instead of waiting for the CD. However, note that while there is a discount of around 40% on the bundles compared to the individual games, don't expect Steam prices. If I remember right, Jeff ran a 50% off everything sale last October (about a week after I bought every game... doh!) So if anyone is thinking of buying a whole lot of games, might behoove you to wait a few months and see if there's a sale. 50% off a bundle is a pretty big savings. Then again, if you've got the money and want to support an indie dev, there's nothing wrong with full price either.

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires ah you are on that Ahamed's book-quest, its doable on level 11/12 onward. I didn't really know what I was getting into and managed to do this at level 6 on Hard. I had the sorceress NPC in the party, too, and she was pretty useless the entire time since all I had for her so far were fire spells. My main guy is a blademaster and I had the shadowwalker as well. If you're cautious and willing to burn a few potions (I think I used 3) and/or a few charges from wands/scrolls of lightning (I think I used 3 here too), you can definitely complete the book quest that early. I don't know if you could clear that whole area out... I tried but found I had burn way too many consumables to get deeper in there, so I took the straightest path out.

Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves Can anyone confirm that the Steam version can be modded? Yes, it worked for me.

I know psychologically it can be hard to downgrade your difficulty mid-game once you've picked one. I think you'll be pretty safe at least on Hard, though. I was a newbie as well about a year ago and played Avernum 1 & 2 on Hard without too much trouble, and by all accounts those were tougher than Avadon.

Just wanted to bump this topic, since I think it's beneficial to people who may just now be buying it on Steam.

So you're saying the next game might really be Avernum: Escape from the Naked Dwarf Pit?

Sweet. Hopefully this means Avernum: Escape from the Pit will be on there.

I ended up scraping your site for Avernum 2 and Avernum 3 maps just so if bad things happen and yours disappears, we'll still have copies. Your site was down a few times when I was playing through Avernum 2 so I wanted some offline copies for my own use anyway. I ended up way too reliant on the maps during my playthrough, and playing while the site was down was like going into battle with both arms missing or something. One minor thing I noticed were that there were some missing maps for Avernum 3. Monoroe Province, North Valorim, and Northwestern Valorim were missing or had broken links. I think one of those was even broken on Rache's site. Between your site and Rache's, I was able to find and repair them, though, so I imagine you'll have no trouble fixing them on your end.

Considering that when you go to purchase Avadon, you have the option of adding the electronic-only version of the hint book for $7, I doubt it's supposed to be free on that FTP site.

Where is this press release that you speak of? Nevermind, found it on Blues News. Just surprised there isn't an announcement here yet.

I found slow pretty useless with my high level party in Avernum 1, but I'm finding it useful during the low-levels of Avernum 2, particularly since I upped the difficulty and some of the scarier things can 2-shot me. Cutting down their attacks really helps with survivability, and my mage doesn't have any decent nuke spells yet.

Just in case any other newbies are curious, I finally finished Avernum 1 on Normal mode. The first level or two was difficult, and then things got easier as I learned which spells are useful (haste, and attack buff/defense buff priest spells early on). Melee would kill everything while my priest kept them healed and my mage kept them buffed. Thing started getting hard again once I finished the initial nephilim quests. Mainly because it became less clear exactly where I should go next, and I started getting in over my head on a few fights. Demons and gremlins in particular were tough, as they'd do nonstop summons, slow spells, and take control of my party members. Then I started poking around Silver's maps/walkthrough and found where I could learn Haste level 3 and Unshackle Mind. And after that the game pretty much became a cakewalk on normal mode. Had I known exactly where to look for those spells earlier, I think the whole game would have been pretty easy on Normal. Haste level 3 alone is a huge game-changer in terms of your party's power. Just started Avernum 2 on Tough. Started out a little rough but once I got my footing, I've been doing okay (I'm only level 3 atm, though). Until my melee guys get leveled up a bit more, defensive buff spells and "Slow" are hugely helpful. And I have a better idea of how to build characters now, so I'm thinking this will definitely be doable. If so, I'll try Torment for Avernum 3. Anyway, my recommendation to newbies would be to keep the setting on Normal if you're going to explore the game on your own. But if you're going to use FAQs, Silver's maps, etc so that you can run to all the most useful spells/weapons/armor as early as possible, then I recommend setting it to Tough. Otherwise I think you'll have too easy a time.

Any chance you can post a .rar of your new and improved scrape?

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha If you had the spare time you could do your own set of maps, it is not that hard. I'm also curious why you think this would be easy. There's a lot of work there, not to mention a lot of knowledge needed. I don't actually plan on creating my own for Avernum, but I could see taking a crack at it for Avadon. I'm kind of curious if anyone knows how the images in Silver's maps were generated though. I'm assuming it was something more elegant than moving around the map and cut & pasting a ton of screenshots together. Or maybe you can just use image files from the game install? I haven't actually poked around.

I've got another mirror up here, just in case the others go down. It looks like maybe silver's site is going to be back eventually. If so, I'll remove the maps. I did just notice the front page says "You may link to this site, but may not redistribute any of the text or images in part without express written permission." I don't have express written permission, so, uh...

Thanks for recovering these maps. I'll get them up on my own site as well just so there's one more place out there that's got them.

Steam would definitely be better exposure, but as a customer I prefer Impulse for indie games, if I have a choice between the two. Steam tends to be a lot slower getting patches out for non-AAA titles, and usually you can't install the patch manually for the Steam version. Take a look at Steam forums for Eschalon and how long they had to wait for some of the patches. Not only does Impulse update faster, they also don't add in any DRM, so you can just patch manually on your own. But I'm way off topic now.

Originally Posted By: tehpineapple It's hip, it's modern, and it's on Steam, baby. Is Avadon actually on Steam? I don't see it there. I wouldn't ignore Impulse as a possible delivery platform, either. Much smaller than Steam, but they've got a decent user-base and tend to get indie games available faster and more often than Steam does.

Btw, I don't know if Silver is ever going to see this, but if it's just a matter of not wanting to host the site anymore, I'd be happy to throw the maps up on a site and give proper credit back to Silver. I'm already paying for hosting on a site that barely sees any use, so I wouldn't mind finding some more uses for it.

Here's an example (from one that got archived): http://web.archive.org/web/2008051010572...imFortress.html