Drakefyre

That was one of my scenarios.

Micah says Linda and Solberg were part of the group that led the assault on Akhronath.

I don't think you die - I think you go back to where the other person is.

It has some very difficult areas, especially on torment.

Avernum 3 is on the surface, so it's like a whole new game world!

Yes, creatures can evolve - sometimes forcibly, like with the creation of drakons. Think of Jurassic Park, when the all-female dinosaurs started to have babies.

I don't know about Vlish, but Clawbugs certainly can (see Clawbug Queen), and Battle Alphas are shaped to not be able to breed, but naturally can.

This is one of the reasons they were Barred. They could mate, were highly intelligent, and very deadly.

Assassination skill increases the chances that you can assassinate a monster, not how much damage you do. So once you're assassinating almost every hit, there's no point in putting more points into it.

 

Also, I love hardiness. It blocks damage and increases all of your resistances. Luck is worth some points too.

Right - for each level of hardiness there's a chance that it will block a point of damage. So if there are 10 levels of hardiness, so on each hit it can block anywhere from 0 to 10 points of damage.

In fact, the Gazers from Geneforge and Avernum 4 are most similar to the Gazer graphic from Exile I v. 1.0.

GF4 has much improved sneaking.

You can't use items as markers to track things between scenarios. You can't do anything to check about what a party did in the previous scenario.

So people can voice their opinions but people are not pressured to vote according to the more vocal judges. It helps people consider aspects of the scenarios they hadn't before.

There is a human Geneforge from GF1 and the drakon ones from GF2 and GF3. There's no reason to think that 200 or so years of technological improvements wouldn't provide a way for the human geneforge to be "perfected".

I'm not too keen on having three votes to throw around - maybe you could make each judge pick a 1st and 2nd choice worth 2 and 1 points respectively? Or even 3 and 1?

When it says you have three votes to allocate, can I place all three on the same scenario?

Right - before CSR existed numerical scores were fine, but now they're just a mirror of CSR. Discussion judging for the finals would be good for me.

GF1 has a lot of crypts that teach shaping.

Salmon's method reminds me a little of staff picks at a book or movie store.

I guess another part of my disillusionment with the ranking system is that the contest results are basically predetermined based on CSR ratings. This would be a vote for a discussion-based system here, actually. Or at the very least having all scores emailed to the contest runner, so nobody sees other judges' scores until after the deadline to maintain independence.

 

EDIT: Yes I know these are completely different ideas, but they're somehow similar in my mind.

Well, IRV results aren't different at all. The advantage I see is that it's a straight majority vote for best scenario - in a points system everyone can rate a scenario an 8.5 and none of them have it 1st choice, and it will still win. Nobody (except the author) is happy then. After second/third votes are counted for getting a majority for best scenario, it ensures that the best scenario is actually chosen.

I've just done my tests on the 7th contest - it looks like we don't have enough judges for Concordet or Borda - one vote can change things a lot. The results were the same except for Roots and NTH switching (by one point) and Corporeus and Areni switching (also by one point). IRV gives the same results as numerical, but I can see where it has advantages over the numerical system.

 

EDIT: I should add that this was for Best Scenario judging - which happened to be every scenario entered.

 

And I'm not sure I like the discussion judging for something like this - independent judges tend to give more real, unpressured results.

I'm not so keen on the point judging system. I wonder what a relative ranking system would give ... someone (maybe me, later) could go through the last contests on the Lyceum and see how the contests would turn out if they were judged in the following ways:

 

MLB MVP voting

Instant-runoff system

Condorcet method

 

EDIT: A reason for this is to prevent a few people who hate or love a scenario from dragging a scenario to victory or defeat.

It was the same price and overpowered in the beta/unpatched Mac version.

I'm the GP at work and Drakey at home.