Kestral

House of S has this one right. Each character will have one primary attacking stat: either Str(melee), Int(casters), or Dex(ranged), which should always get a majority of stat increases over their lifetime if they are to have any hope of good to-hit percentages. Then there's the choice of how much to dilute your offense to get some Endurance. My fighter was going only about 2/3 strength and 1/3 endurance and I found that his hit rate was suffering unless he wore lighter armor. I switched to 100% strength (already having 5 or so points in endurance) and got a couple +strength traits and have been much happier since; the strength is actually also helping him tank because he can now wear armor with bigger to-hit penalties without having to worry that this will drop his hit-rate to unacceptable levels against more powerful foes. So I think over-all a damage dealer should go 100% strength and a tank should put maybe up to 25% of those points in endurance, but no more than that if he still wants to be able to do damage in addition to tanking. Note/Question: Doesn't endurance also increase resistance vs poison/acid/etc? It seems like my fighter with his extra few points of endurance usually only gets 1 or at most 2 turns of acid when he's hit with it, while my other characters tend to get 3 turns. Might be something in his equipment is doing this though, by adding acid resistance.

Update: (using PC version from steam) * Auto save is every 100 steps. * Holding down space bar give me about 6.3 auto-saves/minute. * Taking energetic herbs then immediately putting a cup on the space-bar for 4 minutes did not cause regeneration. * Putting the cup back on the space bar for 2 more minutes did cause regeneration. CONCLUSION: Herb regeneration takes place after between 2500 and 3750 steps on the travel map. No info yet on whether steps inside locations are counted equally. Also sill unknown what mechanic is used for the respawning of monster groups on the travel map. Need to confirm: 1.) whether they will respawn just by holding down space-bar on the travel map (like herb patch regeneration). 2.) whether they will respawn if you repeatedly enter/exit a location (like the respawning monsters in a dungeon if you enter the dungeon repeatedly).

Re-spawns in dungeons are based on how often you've entered the dungeon from the overland map. (confirmed this with tests on 4 or 5 mid-level dungeons - didn't do any serious test on respawns in dungeon floors other than the first floor of each) Intending to do some tests on herb growth involving: 1.) Determining how many times i have to press space bar between auto saves on the overland map. 2.) Holding down space-bar on the over-land map and counting the number of auto saves that go by before the patch I'm standing next to regenerates. 3.) If it's not working, trying to enter some locations and then return to the overland map repeatedly to see if that influences herb regrowth. Haven't had time to actually try this all weekend though. Maybe tonight or tomorrow morning before work I can get an hour to myself. =P If anyone else tries something similar please post your results, I'd be very interested in them. Update: Auto save is every 100 steps. The herb regeneration is somewhere between 2000 and 5000 steps based on one test so far.

Good for them! More coverage ---> more money coming in ---> More cool games, amiright? Do they usually talk about future projects? (I'm kinda new around here) Just gotta pray they don't start "calling in rich" to work if they get *too* successful. =P

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires my last herbs gathering was 15th day (main save and did visit to Final Gauntlet too) and after that no herbs and I have checked herb patch near Bargha (actually Giants Castle) past 3 days and no herbs there and saturday checked patch near ToM and autosave saved game but I didn't save game cause ToM patch was empty too. Can you tell us exactly what you mean by "15th day" and "past 3 days"? Are you talking about real-life days?

Woah! Something just occurred to me. The game clearly keeps track of time somehow, but there's no indication of when significant time periods/milestones have passed. But there *IS* the periodic auto-save. Perhaps the auto saves happen on the same time boundaries that other things happen on. "Has it been 10 auto-saves since the last time I visited that herb patch?" Worth testing this as well. Update: Haven't had time to test this yet. I want to try and see if I can quantify how often herb patches regenerate, either in terms of "how many times have I left and re-entered the overland map" or "how many quick-saves have I waited for on the overland map".

Cool. I will probably do some tests entering/leaving a few different dungeons a bunch of times to see what happens, whether there are diminishing returns, etc. I've definitely seen respawns when going between different levels in the same dungeon as well. Update: First basic test using Slith Temple. 1.)Cleared out first floor/lower level. 2.)Left the temple and immediately re-entered it from the world map 10 times in succession: Found 1 Slith Warrior, 1 Frozen Worm, 3 Sliths as respawns. 3.)Repeated (2) four more times: All four times I found the Warrior and Worm respawned, and either 2 or 3 Sliths seemingly at random but always in the same locations. 4.)Tried going back and forth between the upper level and lower level of the temple 7 times. This resulted in zero respawns on the lower level. --> Working hypothesis: Each dungeon has many "only once" monsters and a few "respawning" monsters. If a monster is marked as respawning, it has a chance(probably close to 15% based on my small sample size) of respawning each time the party enters the dungeon. Once it has respawned, it will remain until killed again.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S ... or, potentially, balanced but irritating ("Train a less useful skill now in exchange for a very minor bonus that will accrue by later in the game"). I hadn't considered that a choice like that might be irritating...that's a good point, actually. Agree we don't want another "lore skill" and definitely want to avoid encouraging/rewarding "savescumming" as much as possible... However, isn't money already technically unlimited in AEftP because of the herb patches and re-spawning monsters that drop random valuables? (am I wrong about this?) *If* luck encounters existed and were balanced, it could actually make "getting rich" slightly less tedious for those who already feel the need to grind out cash to buy every skill/spell training for every character. I think this kind of thing would really have to be done with completely new encounters in order to work right though. Unless there's the capacity to create new encounters out of whole cloth relatively easily and tie them to specific map locations, etc, it probably won't work well. Hmm...it looks like there are both design and implementation hurdles here. Perhaps it would be better to leave this idea on the back-burner for a while.

Woah! Blade Sweep is based on Dex?!? Awesome! I have a 100% dex full-archer in my party...totally adding blade sweep to her hot-bar and trying it out.

I guess my question is "What defines a day or a week in Avernum?" How does the time mechanic work? Is there somewhere where I can check the date in the game? Is it keeping track of how many "days" my party has been adventuring? Does time only pass when walking on the overland map, or does part of a day go by every time I take a turn, even in combat? Thanks so much! (Yeah, I should probably be able to beat the slith island fort boss and the evil spider hive-queen thing and the ghosts at the bottom of the spiral...but as I said my party is not optimal. Mage has 10 points in tool use, priest has 10 points in arcane lore, one character is a dedicated archer, and my warrior was pumping repost skill and using a shield for a while and only at lvl 12 or so realized that he needed to switch gears and become a dual wielder. >_< And I'm far too stubborn to turn the difficulty down to normal after getting this far on hard. =P)

Ok, noobie question perhaps: How do I tell how much time is passing or has passed, and how does that allow me to know when monsters in a certain area will respawn (or be likely to respawn)? (I've played to lvl-15 so far on hard, and haven't noticed any indication of time or days passing. My party is not, super optimized, and currently I'm able to clear up to the bosses in most of the dungeons I can get to, but many of the boss fights are too hard. I often go back to various places looking for respawns so I can get a few more xp and hopefully lvl up and be able to finish some quests that require beating bosses.)

Hehe. Getting missed by the arrow is only half of his luck in that situation though! I get that luck also increases armor a bit. That's cool. I guess the picture isn't 100% false advertising, since an arrow will do less damage to you with more armor. I just always thought of luck as something a bit more nuanced and unpredictable than just armor. A few rare/random "lucky" encounters might be a way to give it that feel.

Ahh, I didn't realize that skills were set in stone. Special encounters are creatable/editable though, right? (Is luck used in any special encounters at all in the base game? I haven't seen anything that suggested it was in my first play-though so far.) Is it possible to use the value of a skill (or the highest or total amount of a skill in the party) to influence probability in a special encounter, or the chance than an encounter happens at all? I know cave lore is used as a "you must have at least x to activate this encounter" trigger, but if luck were an encounter trigger I'd ideally not work that way. It'd be cool if there were a few special encounters in heavily traveled areas that only had a small chance of happening each time you pass them, but that chance was based on luck. For instance, when crossing a bridge, you might have a 1% per lvl of luck chance of spying a silver necklace that had fallen in the water and recovering it. Or, when going down a well traveled tunnel, you might come upon a traveler who has just recently been killed by undead, and there's a scroll or wand on his body. Or when going though some more remote tunnel, you might stub his toe and dislodge a beautiful crystal. Even with points in luck, you might pass over the area several times before you see the event happen, but without luck you might never see it at all. Some of these could be repeatable events, so that every so often as a lucky person travels back and forth over certain areas he might finds random bits of loot or stumbles on a crystal or something. (not enough so that you can farm tons of gold, but enough to feel like you're actually getting a little something from your skill point investment over time) It's just that the picture representing the luck skill is a guy bending down to pick up a coin...it'd be cool if that wasn't totally false advertising. Not as urgent as issues of combat balance (since that's most of the game) but still something I felt was missing in the original. Just my suggestion - don't mean to demand more from someone who's already working hard for free so others can enjoy his work. Just though this was a cool idea; I don't even know if its possible or not.

I haven't tried this mod yet, but after looking at the thread I'm very much looking forward to 1.2 and will definitely try it then. Suggestion: If you haven't already, you should change/improve the luck skill! Currently it's only 1% armor and 1% of some spell resist per level I think, which is kinda meh, other defensive skills are better. Maybe give some other small effects so that someone might actually consider putting points in luck, or have some special encounters where something different happens to very lucky people. (the most awesome thing would be if lucky people had monsters sometimes drop more/better stuff on death, but that's probably not possible?) You're the coolest for doing this project! Thanks so much!

This is totally lame!! 1.) Luck should effect the chance/amount of loot dropped by creatures on death, something like 5% per point. So with 4 members maxing it at 10 points, you'd get 300% random drops and get rich quicker in mid-game selling slith spears. THE PICTURE IS OF A GUY PICKING UP A COIN! FALSE ADVERTISING! 2.) It should have some small offensive boost as well. Not enough to make it nearly as good per point as the attack-related skills, maybe only +1% critical chance per 2-3 points. But it says "everything goes a little better," so that should mean not just "you take a bit less damage" but a *VARIETY* of small miscellaneous boosts.

Everything is better now! Thanks so much, Jeff, you're the best!

Originally Posted By: Erik It's definitely related to the steam update. I have two machines with steam, I ran the update on my primary (Win7/64-bit) machine and Avernum 4 stopped working. I then copied the steam install from my secondary machine (everything except the steamapps folder which contains the games themselves) and Avernum 4 works again. Avernum 4 works with steam client: Built: April 18 2012, at 10:17:32 Steam API: v012 Steam package versions: 1868 / 1868 Avernum 4 does not work with steam client: Built: May 15 2012, at 10:21:05 Steam API: v012 Steam package versions: 1869 / 1869 There were no changes at all made to the Avernum 4 install during this test, so that presumably rules out an issue due to a change on Spiderweb's side (though they may still be stuck holding the bag to work around the crash). Nice! Is there any way for normal people to revert to an earlier steam client without having a 2nd machine though?

I am on Windows Vista 32bit, and I also had Avernum 4 stop working after the latest steam client update. It seems strange that this crash is associated with a steam client update. Swapping "Avernum 4.exe" to the demo version doesn't help steam start the game but allows it to be launched manually (from C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\avernum 4\). Trying to launch the steam version of the exe manually results in the "(SteamAPI_Init() failed)" error. Key points: * Steam cannot successfully launch either exe. * 32 bit system - so this is not a Win7/64bit thing. * I can run the demo, so it's not a driver issue. No drivers have changed since it used to work and no driver needs to be changed to make the demo work. * Definitely related to the most recent steam client update. Devs: Find out what *exactly* changed in that update and look there. * Based on file modified times, I don't think *anything* in the C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\avernum 4\ directory changed as part of the steam client update. Perhaps something should have changed that didn't? That's all I've got. Good luck devs! I hope you can sort us all out soon. Edit: One more thing: The last dev post confirmed "not reproducible on Win7/64bit", but that may mean his version doesn't show an error on that system. We've confirmed it's not a problem with a specific OS/platform. What hasn't been established is whether it's universal/reproducible for people using the latest steam client. Any confirmation of many more instances of the crash or of *any* instances where the steam client updated but the problem did *not* occur will be helpful. Little chance of someone whose game is working coming into this thread though, so maybe ask any friends who also have the game on steam? The important thing is whether the devs (or just Jeff?) can reproduce the issue in order to get to the bottom of it. Jeff, thanks so much for responding to this thread a few times already. If you have a good repro let us know and we'll just chill and let you figure it out.