Juan Carlo

Question: Is there a way to train magery and blademaster all on your own? Or can you only use trainers?

I have 6 polearms, 6 melee, and 7 strength, yet my blademaster skill hasn't unlocked as trainable in my fighter's stat screen.

Same with magery. For my priest I have 10 int and 9 priest spells, and my mage has 9 int and 9 in mages spells---yet magery is still untrainable for both.

I suspect this fix for Avernum 4 mouse hitching problems (from forum user "sea") might also work for Geneforge 1-3:

Original post:

http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubb...ng_Probl#UNREAD

I had the same problem with lag in menu/inventory screens in Avernum 4 and this fixed it for me. It's worth a try with Geneforge 1-3 as I think they use the same/similar engines.

What are the chances? Or will only Avernum/Geneforge get remakes?

Just releasing "Nethergate: Resurrection" on steam would be welcome too (maybe Valve would reject it as too primitive, though, who knows, but the demo works fine for me on Win 7 64 bit).

Play Avadon if you haven't. It's much more linear than Avernum (so some people don't like it), but it's still a good game with a similar feeling. I probably prefer Avernum to Avadon on the whole, but Avadon beats Avernum when it comes to plot/characters (which are much more interesting and developed) and battles (which are much better designed on the whole, I think).

I just cleared everything in the Eastern Gallery (including that spirit dude who guards the emerald chest plate--I just dazed him repeatedly and he died without even getting a hit in on me), and I still say this is the easiest spiderweb game I've ever played on torment.

Again, maybe it will get harder, but I have a 10+ skill point reserve on all my characters that I haven't even spent yet just because I'm unsure where to put them yet and they don't really seem to need them. Magic users seem insanely strong in this game in terms of damage. Same with bow users. My tank doesn't do much damage, but he doesn't really have to as all he has to do is be a meat shield while the rest of my party snipes everything.

Of course I will gladly eat my words and come begging on this forum for help when/if things get harder or I come across a super difficult boss.

I don't see the need for an editor. I love spiderweb games, but I don't exactly play them for their awesome engine or anything (the engine is serviceable, but there are more user friendly ones out there). If you want to mess around with making your own RPG worlds I'd recommend "Neverwinter Nights." It's a decade old now but it still has one of the most user friendly level editors of any RPG on the market.

Skyrim/Oblivion are pretty easy to mod as well but those are really more FPS's.

So what's the easiest way to navigate in these older games? I find that screen scroll navigating is a pain. Just using the keyboard seems like the easiest and most intuitive method, but for some reason the landscape is littered with scores of pointless rocks making keyboard navigation an equal pain.

Is there anyway to click on the mini map and send your party to where you clicked? That would be awesome.

My only question at the moment is how you should build defense for Nephile archers. Is it best to focus on parry for defence? Or should you just try to keep him from getting hit at all via positioning and by pumping skills like Gynamistics/defense/dexterity?

Does parry even work with bows? Or do you need a sword equipped?

I'll start:

I'm playing on torment. My party is level 9. I have a custom warrior (elite warrior/divinly blessed), custom archer (Nephil, sharpshooter, divinely blessed), custom Priest (Divinely blessed, Preist trait), and a mage (Divinely blessed, mage trait).

Thoughts right now:

-Most surprisingly I've only had a party wipe like twice so far. I am just about to leave the demo area, so maybe things will get harder, but still I expected things to be harder much faster like they were in "Escape From the Pitt."

-Have been seriously underwhelemed by the story so far. This is probably the least captivating start to a Spiderweb game I've ever played. They usually have some sort of hook to grab you in the first half hour or so, but this one is just mostly "You are adventurers! Go and adventure!" for like the first 5 to 10 hours of the game. Although it finally seems like things are picking up as I leave the demo area, so we'll see.

-I'm new to the older Avernum games. I very much prefer the newer JRPG type "tiny tranversable map" interface from "EFTP." I guess I just never feel fully like I can get a bird's eye view of anything. It's not a deal breaker for me or anything, though, just more of an annoyance over all the wasted space.

Over all, though, I'm having fun with it. My party is currently level 9 and are about to go see what awaits them in the eastern Gallery!

I'll post any random questions I encounter here in the hopes that some kind soul might answer.

Since someone is doing an A5 playthrough thread, I thought I'd start an catchall A4 playthrough thread. Since these just went up on steam I imagine that I'm not the only guy playing through at the moment. So if there is anyone else out there playing the game please feel free to use this thread to post your thoughts and questions.

If you want to look for the hardest fights in this game you shouldn't look at bosses (which you can buff and prepare for and exploit in various ways), but rather some of the open world fights that just dump you into the fray with 4 eye beasts, 3 crydrakes, and seven giant shaman (or some of unholy combination).

These are hardest just because you have to waste your first moves buffing up and casting haste, and often times your entire party is cut in half by the second move.

I for example remember having a hard time with that wandering undead quest in the Great Cave. I might have just attempted it too soon, but that fight was really hard just because your entire party has to withstand an attack from the outset, before you can counter (at which point you have to choose between damage or buffing, which can be a hard choice sometimes).

I say GRah Hoth is easiest of the final three quests. He might be hard if you play it like it was intended, but I just opened up the treasure room, stuck my party in there, Grah followed me in, I killed him in 5 minutes, then spent like an hour mopping up the 45+ minions he spawns as they filtered through the tunnel one at a time. It's really more a battle of attrition that takes ages, but it's not hard.

The Gauntlit is more annoying than hard. This area, more than anything, depends on your loadout. So it might be best to do it first. When I did it I had very few energy potions left, which probably made things much harder than they needed to be. I don't remember having to reload much in the dark area, but it was definitely annoying, and stressful, and not much fun having to wander artound looking for switches in the dark (while being attacked at the same time and having my mages running out of magic).

I did LOVE the emperor's quest, though. It was the best thing about the game. It's also the hardest of the three--but in a fun way. It was initially kicking my ass so I had to get creative and give my mage with blink a couple revive scrolls and a invulnerability pot and let her just blink the entire hallway then revive my party at the end. That final boss fight was epic too, only I have no idea how anyone could survive it on torment without invulnerability potions (lucky I had enough for my party to get through).

I screwed myself on this fight just because I was doing the "no resurrection scroll" achievement, and even though it unlocks before you get to Redbeard (so you technically could use scrolls during the redbeard fight without ruining the acheievement), I basically just sold every resurrection scroll I could find the whole game. So I had none left for the fight and had to return to a previous save and buy a bunch.

This is really a fight you have to plan for well in advance as there are no shops or anything once the end game starts (which itself takes a few hours of play to get through, so if you make it to redbeard and aren't prepared you have to back track a really long ways). Kind of a pain.

Yeah, they work again if anyone was wondering. Steam did another update that fixed it.

It's hard to compare as part of EFTP's difficulty comes from the fact that it's an open world game and thus you can stumble into areas which are way beyond your level from the start--which I think makes it seem harder than it actually is. But most areas in that game are relatively easy provided you just approach them at the right level.

However, in terms of individual encounters I actually think Avadon is way harder than EFTP. It has better and more challenging boss fights on the whole, I think, and unlike EFTP it seems like there are fewer exploits in Avadon (i.e. if you are clever you can always sort of "game the system" a bit with EFTP, and there's usually a "cheap" way around most of its big boss fights, whereas Avadon doesn't really have this. You pretty much have to play along with most of its fights the way they were intended, rather than taking short cuts). Plus, you max out your level really early in Avadon so after a certain point (and unlike EFTP) there really is no longer the option to grind for more levels. You just kind of have to deal with what you have.

Apparently Avernum 4-6 are coming to steam tomorrow. I just noticed them in the "coming soon" section.

I played through on torment. You don't really have to grind at all, but you do very much have to do things in a particular order. You will always have some quest that is within your reach, but sometimes finding out where exactly you are supposed to go early game can be frustrating. I often found that I'd start quests before having to abandon them because I wasn't strong enough yet.

Word of advice: Do all the early quests in your immediate area, culminating in retrieving the mayor's necklace. Then get to the great cave and do all the available delivery quests to get some experience. Most great cave combat will still be out of your league, though, so at that point go back and do all the Slith quests (which should be manageable by now).

After that the game kind of opens up and you should be fine to take on most anything.

Low level fights are an annoyance late in the game as they can still take ages, yet give you little experience. I know hardcore min/max people will disagree but, personally, I think once you reach level 30 there's not much reason to fight anything that you don't have to anymore. You're strong enough at 30 to take on all the end bosses, even on torment, so the near constant trash mobs in some of the dungeons become a big annoyance late game (The demon dude's castle especially. It's full of lower level demons every 5 steps, none of which are a big threat to you, but all of which have enough hit points to really eat up your time and slow you down. I really hated that level).

I really loved this game (I put 100+ hours into it on steam, which should tell you something), but if I have one criticism of it it's that there are far too many trash mobs. I don't mind early and mid game when you are still leveling, but once you hit late game they are a pain. Which is why cave lore is actually a really good idea (as theoretically it allows you to avoid combat if you want), but it doesn't always work that way (even with max cave lore you still can't avoid fights in the high level areas). I really think he should have left most of the combat to above ground encounters and made them optional with high cave lore so you can choose to not fight them any more once you no longer need the experience. Fighting low level monsters every 10 steps in dungeons can really harm the fun of the game's sense of exploration at times. Especially once you've already killed every type of monster in the game 100 times over.

I've been playing Geneforge 3 and I was surprised by how good it looks in comparison to the new Avernum. Maybe I'm just seeing things, but it seems to have some sort of lighting engine or something in place which the newer spiderweb games lack. So when you are in dark areas with a light source the light seems to fade into the dark in a more natural way and the shadowed areas look much more realistic. Plus, there is a starker contrast between light and dark so you often have to use a light source in dungeons.

Whereas in Avadon/EFTP it seems like when the lights are on everything is one color, whereas when the lights are off everything is just one shade of grey. You don't even really need to use light sources in Avadon/EFTP as everything is perfectly, uniformly, visible--even in the dark.