Juan Carlo

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.

There's a website with detailed maps of all the levels in Avernum. It's based off the older game, but most of the layouts haven't changed for the remake (just items and stuff). He's the map of the Spiral Pit which might help: http://homepages.uni-regensburg.de/~mim09509/Avernum/Avernum1/Towns/SpiralPit.html This site saved me alot of trouble more than once.

So if you plan on keeping the same creatures for most of the game (which hasn't been that hard thus far, even on torment), is there any reason at all to increase Magic Shaping?

I've never played as a shaper before in these games and am currently playing G3 as one. I don't fully understand how player skills affect the power of creations. If you, for example, increase either you "magic shaping" skill or increase your "create Vlish" spell a level, does this mean that all of your current Vlish will be affected by this? Or do you have to absorb and recreate your current creations to see the benefits of the stat increases?

Anyone know if the "Wand of Inferno" is a unique item? I got the quest to give the guy the wand, but I think I accidentally sold it after I found it. Will there be other "Wands of Inferno" in the game I can give him?

OK, I checked. I did already train my two levels of Parry and Melee. So I guess there really isn't much for a Guardian to buy in this game. Kind of a relief, actually, as it means I can quit lugging loot around.

Thanks Nim! Hmm, I haven't tried Brodus Blade. I talked to him but he wouldn't teach me. Do you have to be awakened to have him teach you? I will try again (although I'm not awakened yet, but probably plan on joining them). But right now I have like 20,000 dollars. I guess I should buy a couple levels of Blessing Magic and Spellcraft so I can maybe cast speed. I'll see if I can find some trainers.

Another question: are there a limited number of inventory slots available? I find that I can't pick stuff up, even though I am nowhere near the encumbrance limit. Kind of annoying when you have high strength but still can't carry anything.

Oh, also, is there anyway to speed up movement speed in these games? I just finished playing Avernum (with it's lightning fast movement when you disable animations), so coming back to Geneforge 2 it's a bit startling how slow the characters walk. It's not game breaking for me or anything, but it'd be cool if the early Genenforge games had some sort of way to disable walk animations and speed things up like the new Avernum does.

I'm level 17 in a torment G2 playthrough as a Guardian and thought I should start an ongoing thread for any questions I might have. The stuff I'm wondering at the moment: 1. Is there anything for a Guardian to actually buy in this game? Most low level spells are really cheap and apart from living tools I have yet to see anything worth buying. I currently have 5000+ gold and no where to spend it (at least that I've seen so far). I ask because if there really isn't anything to buy I'd like to just stop lugging everything to stores and back (which can get tedious). 2. What are the recommended spells for a melee Gaurdian to have? I'm not really using creations, so currently I'm just using "heal" and occasionally "Augmentation" (although this one eats up all my mana, so I only use it before super tough fights). I did buy speed just because I think it would be useful, but I can't use it (my blessing magic is at 0 and my total mana is only 31, where as I think speed requires 100 mana to cast). So what level does blessing magic have to be at to cast speed? Also, is it worth wasting points in magic and intelligence to even get speed? Or should I just concentrate on quick action? Thanks!

I wish I had known this. I upgraded hardiness to 12 on both my magic users so they easily could have taken the damage up close. It would have been awesome to have a true melee/magic hybrid in this game.

I think I stuck 1 point of endurance into my front warrior/tank to give him more durability (at a point when I noticed he was dying too much), but otherwise I ignored endurance for everyone else and was fine. However, especially with your warriors, you definitely should use traits like "increase endurance" and the "robust health" type traits (of which there are three) to increase their health somewhat. You get a new trait every even level and there are enough that you can easily spend those on making your tanks more durable. Plus there are also plenty of wearable items in the game which increase endurance. As to skills, for you warriors I'd say get Melee, Hardiness, and Parry to 10 right away for your front warrior--followed by blademaster. Same with your second in line warrior, but with him you can focus on leveling blademaster up sooner if you want for DPS .After that you can decide to focus on dual welding, lethal blow, or some combo of both (it's usually good to have a few points in lethal blow, though, just because crit damage is so effective when it happens). You might want to get melee to 20 just because it unlocks "Battle Frenzy" which is really, really, handy. However, there are lots of items in game which raise the melee skill, so you don't necessarily have to put 20 skill points into melee (and I even think an argument could be made that it'd be better to only level melee to 12 or so and put the spare points in dual blade or lethal blow instead, as they will give you more damage output than melee and you could always use haste spells and speed potions to get battle frenzy. Although they are less dependable so that's your call). Also, while it doesn't help you in combat at all, I'd actually recommend upgrading first aid to 12 on both your magic users. They can spare the skill points and this will mainly allow you to not have to revist a town every other minute to restore mana/health. This gets really, really, annoying late game so if you have first aide it will literally shave hours off your playthrough and make things alot easier on you.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Jeff's remake of the Final Gauntlet is even worse than the last version which also involved groping around in the dark while continually being attacked by monsters out of sight until you got attacked. Yeah, I didn't mind the part where the lights go out in the Spiral Pitt just because that section was pretty brief and didn't really involve groping about in the dark for switches. It was more or less just a kind of fun thing to switch things up a bit, even if the controls while moving in the dark weren't done very well. But the Gauntlet really wasn't fun in any way. Mostly just because every time you turned a wheel you had to RE-WALK THROUGH THE ENTIRE ROOM IN THE DARK searching for which tiny thing had changed (and it's not just walking through the room, but you basically have to trace every single wall and object with your party lest you miss something). Which is annoying enough in itself, but when you have to fight two Cryo-Drakes, a couple giants, and an eye beast on top of this it becomes almost cruel. ANyhow, I actually think he could easily lessen the pain of the darkness sections if he would just increase the radius of visibility around characters by a couple squares. This would maintain the nostalgia aspect of keeping these parts from the original games, but it would also make navigation alot easier. Either that, or he could just use the "greyed out fog of war" effect to represent the darkness, rather than the absolute "black" used to represent areas you've never been before. That way you still couldn't see enemies (making combat a challenge), but you could at least see the map and click on areas in the dark to move there (unlike the absolute black which you can't click with your mouse, making movement a pain).

I almost think he should have added an optional ritual as that quest was cruel. It was the very last thing I did in the game. I had been playing a while and was tired, but wanted to finally finish the game before going to bed. So I fought the eyes on the bridge thinking they were the game's final boss (huzzah!),but then.......you find out it's a trap and have to fight a bunch of golems....which I also assumed had to be the end....but then "the Gauntlet"....which was bad enough itself......but once the lights went out just as I was down to my last energy potion I was totally ready to strangle someone. And even that section was a bit harrowing (after I groped in the dark, found a wheel, turned it, and fought off the monsters I kept thinking, "that totally had to be the last wheel, right?". But no. There were 4 total.) Of course, I did enjoy every minute of it.

I wouldn't recommend playing at high resolutions at all. It's nice to have the option, I guess, but at 1900x1200 (and even 1680 x 1050) these games are virtually unplayable as it's too hard to see anything. Unless you specifically make high rez sprites, 2D graphics don't scale well. So the higher the resolution the smaller it just makes everything look--which is why most 2D games have a resolution cap (although the new spiderweb games don't, which is kind of odd). Anyhow, I think I also played it somewhere in the 1280x768 range, which seems like a reasonable rez to play it at. I could see everything fine.

Originally Posted By: Valdain the King What a stupid question but well, is each ending a separate storyline for the game meaning that 40 hours for killing the emperor, 40 for surviving, etc. I want to just complete the revenge story but will i have to spend another long time to complete the rest. No. As others have said, it's confusing to think of it as three endings. They are basically just three seperate quests that you have to complete in order to finish the game (although they could be considered endings, I guess, since two of the three give you the option of ending the game after you complete them. So technically, you could just do one of them and be done with the game if you don't want to play any more. Otherwise you can also do all three). But they really aren't huge involved storylines that you have to plan for. The entire game is basically leading up to them so you don't really have to wory about which one you want to pursue, or locking any one option out, or anything. Just play the game normally and you'll eventually come to them.

For what it's worth, the three endings do take a sizable amount of time if you want to do them all. I did all the quests in the game, leveled to 30, then only had the 3 ending quests left to do. I thought I'd breeze through them but they alone ended up taking me somewhere around 10-12 hours. Of course I played on torment so your mileage may be different depending on the difficulty level (The Emperor's Assassain quest alone is kind of crazy on torment. It took me a while just to figure out how to get through it, but once you get the trick it becomes easier). Plus this game is huge. If it's your very first playthrough, you want to do all the quests, level at least to 30, and you aren't using faqs, I can't imagine anyone could finish it in less than 50-60 hours (if not longer). Maybe I'm wrong. Like I said I played on torment so I can't exactly judge how long it would take on casual or normal.

I'm not sure if you really need to reach level 40, unless you just want to do it for its own sake. I just did a torment game and I was hording wisdom crystals all game, thinking I might need them to level late game, but then I used one and realized they kind of suck as it takes like 6 to level one character and there's not a whole lot of reason to level past 30, even on torment. I reached level 30 just before starting the last three endgame quests and I didn't feel underpowered at all. So I ended up just selling all of my wisdom crystals in order to buy training and energy potions. The biggest problem for me endgame was that I was nearly out of energy elixirs. I did the gauntlet last and it was a bit of a pain as I kept holding my mages back just because I wasn't sure how much game was left and I didn't want to run out of mana. It kind of made me regret not investing in First Aid (which, in retrospect, I think is probably totally worth it).

This dungeon was kind of a pain, mainly just because it's so energy draining. There are a bunch of huge fights which require lots of energy to survive. So for me the worst part about Bahssikava wasn't so much the monsters as much as it was the tediousness of having to run back through three levels (including a boat ride and tons of switches with monsters that periodically respawn) to a town after every fight. It really made me wish I had invested in First Aide, but by then it was too late.

This fight is one that seems better in theory than the way it plays (or like it should have been play tested and refined a few more times, as it doesn't really seem to work like it's supposed to). I realized fairly quickly what you were supposed to do, but I could never really get it to work in a fool proof way. It seems like the positioning is really finnicky as sometimes I'd get the buff/removal and other times I wouldn't--even though I was in the circle at the time the crystals discharged. So I ended up just, more or less, ignoring them and positioning my magic users outside the room to pelt Hakaai with damage, while my two tanks just tried to do the best they could to distract him and do damge inside the room. My tanks died repeatedly, but as long as you have a priest with the resurrect spell (and a few energy elixirs) you'll be fine as Hakaai will ignore your casters as long as you keep one tank alive. Honestly, the fight was alot easier once I stopped worrying about the crystals.

I just finished a torment playthrough and got all the achievements except for the "40 caches" one. I have 36 caches I just found on my own from playing the game, but I don't know if I'm going to bother hunting down the other 4 (even with the list of all the caches on this forum, I think it'd be too tedious since I don't know which ones I don't have--unless there's some way to tell which one's you have and havenot found). Plus, I could be wrong, but I almost think that with potions the game just keeps track of how many you make total. So you could save before entering an alchemist's, make 25 potions, reload, then make another 25 from the same ingedients and it will unlock the achievement. I could be wrong, but the acheievment unlocked for me even though I'm pretty sure I didn't make anywhere close to 50 potions. In fact, when I finished the game the stats said I had made 100 potions total and I'm pretty sure I didn't have any where near the ingredients to make that many (I was desperate for energy elixirs by the end of my playthrough).

So I want to see all three endings and get the various achievememnts for the endings, but I also don't want to play the game three times to do it. At what point do you start making decisions which will lock you into one path? In otherwords, at what point do I need to save? Are the endings just determined by who I decide to give Pyrog's papers to? Or is more involved?