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Originally Posted By: Slarty
Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel
Originally Posted By: Nioca
...Except you don't know what the range of that spell is to begin with, and it's always centered on your caster anyway so you have to get them right in the fray of things just to have the spell take effect.
Um, what? Doesn't the manual tell you these things?

No, it doesn't.
... *dumbfounded*

Originally Posted By: Slarty
Okay, so let me get this straight. Somebody plays A6, posts a long list of critiques, and you tell him to read the manual. Yet you haven't read the manual or even played the game? Sounds like a bit of a double standard there...
...I was trying to be helpful...
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Originally Posted By: Nioca
Better example: Look at the Avernum original trilogy, and look at the second trilogy. Which one is more popular?

It's generally a very bad idea to weigh how popular a game is based on the forums. It's participants are too small in number to be an accurate representation of the Spiderweb "audience."

Quote:
ya'll need better computers.
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Is the pathfinding the reason why my characters can't seem to find the best way to the enemy?

 

For example, I'm in a narrow tunnel fighting a bad guy...I click on the enemy to attack and my character immediately turns around and starts going around the other way to get to the enemy, despite being able to switch with other characters (btw, that was so annoying in A4, not being able to switch when in narrow tunnels) so my character loses the chance to attack which could end up costing me the fight. frown

 

Also, I agree that it would be very helpful to have popover texts describing what all the various effects are. I wish we had a way to combat my characters being frozen or the seared lightning (I think that what it was) that was in A5....I don't know whether it's in A6 yet.

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The pathfinding algorithm never does seem to switch with other party members. Up to a point this might make sense; maybe the player, and not the algorithm, should really decide whether a second figure ought to move or not. But it can be super annoying, all right, when the algorithm does something utterly idiotic instead of the obvious simple thing.

 

These are actually the only bad experiences I've had with pathfinding, though. It's always been that the algorithm did something stupid because the non-stupid thing would have involved switching places with another character.

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Originally Posted By: VCH
I always move the characters like I would a chess piece. It's turn-based so there's no reason to just click on an enemy and let the game decide your path.

Yeah but when you play modern rpgs (like Diablo, Dungeon Siege, basically every single RPG ever made, lol) you click on the enemy to attack all the time, so when I'm playing a Spiderweb game sometimes I click first and forget to check the path. tongue
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Originally Posted By: Locmaar

Having your mage attacked by fiends he just attempted to kill is something that I find quite understandable. Protect your mage better. That is a tactical element that makes both sense and the game more entertaining.


To an extent, yes, but it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to run past a bunch of fighters to get to the guy hiding in the back. Plus this contradicts the idea that you have to be near everyone to use group heal / cure. So you can't really protect your spellcasters effectively when area of effect spells make everyone try to flock toward him.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

...total transparency of the game world is hardly an essential requirement for every possible game. I mean, how on earth is a young and inexperienced soldier supposed to know just exactly how strong the slow spells cast by a weird cave demon thing are?


True to an extent, but, hey, your characters are introspective enough to assign an exact number to their health, they should at least be able to rate their tiredness on a scale of 1-10 wink.

But, really, the issue is not not knowing how things work, but being killed by the lack of possibility to know. Even when I have played enough to have a general idea of how much, any specific encounter does not need to match the general one, and doesn't do me any good in terms of figuring out if it's going to be useful to cast haste until I'm unslowed or deal with the skipping of turns that I don't know how often will happen.

Originally Posted By: monolith94
Sounds like you don't like having your party die, gauss. *shrug* I've gotten used to it.


I have no problem with dying--like I mentioned earlier, when I've played, e.g, Portal or HL2 I found most of my deaths hilarious or amusingly surprising; and because I was killed by the enemies instead of by the gameplay mechanics. The problem with Avernum 6 is the gameplay mechanics are what kills me.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel
Whoa, wow... Okay, most of your complaints are simply a case of not having read the manual. Seriously, there's not excuse for not reading it.


Like mentioned, thee things either aren't in the manual, or are poorly, confusingly, or incorrectly explained.

Geeze, you could at least give the guy who does string theory enough credit to assume he's at least looked at the instructions tongue.

Originally Posted By: Other

Also, for enemies debuffs, I have found that their spells usually seem to be less powerful than yours. If I haste and go into a battle, the enemy will usually have to cast slow two or three times just to take away my haste, and not actually to slow me.


For random enemies, this is largely true, but for tough enemies, magic enemies, mini-bosses, or bosses it may or may not be true.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

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Almost every single enemy attacking with acid or poison. Just seems like terrible lazy game design there.

Honestly, it's far better in A6 than in A5 or G5.


Maybe, didn't play A5 or G5 past the demo areas. Though I do remember similar problems in the other GF games, but not as bad.


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If you aren't watching the text area, you should be. It tells you what's going on. Some of it is still too weird (such as the wild beast/spines thing that Student of Trinity brought up) and it still takes trial and error to figure everything out, but it makes learning what everything does much faster.


Yeah, I do, but it's easy to miss things there when you're distracted, and in fights things can be scrolled up by other notices before I have a chance to read them. I know I can scroll up, but if I don't know I have to, I will miss stuff.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
The pathfinding algorithm never does seem to switch with other party members. Up to a point this might make sense; maybe the player, and not the algorithm, should really decide whether a second figure ought to move or not. But it can be super annoying, all right, when the algorithm does something utterly idiotic instead of the obvious simple thing.

These are actually the only bad experiences I've had with pathfinding, though. It's always been that the algorithm did something stupid because the non-stupid thing would have involved switching places with another character.


That's part of what goes on, yeah, but I've had other weird problems, where there was actually a shorter path, but my character took a longer path, or there were two equal paths, and it took the one that went past an enemy. This is especially noticeable in bottlenecks, where there can be gaps, but your characters will to backwards to try to go around because the algorithm can't find the gap.

Mostly, I move one square at a time now, but they'll still do crazy things moving two or three squares away sometimes smirk. Especially when the area they're in is somewhat crowded.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
What? Man, that would sure have been nice to know. Not even Divine Restoration does that.


If only you'd have read the instructions! tongue





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Originally Posted By: Toby-Linn
Do we get to learn it in A6?

Nope.

Dikiyoba doesn't like the fact that searing lightning is uncurable. Dikiyoba doesn't mind uncurable freezing so much since the series builds up basilisks enough that it justifies the game mechanics. However, Dikiyoba doesn't like running across random enemies who have a freezing ability with no explanation.
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Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Dikiyoba doesn't like the fact that searing lightning is uncurable. Dikiyoba doesn't mind uncurable freezing so much since the series builds up basilisks enough that it justifies the game mechanics. However, Dikiyoba doesn't like running across random enemies who have a freezing ability with no explanation.


Yeah, I've found that annoying, too. Although I prefer Exile's basilisks. They were much scarier. If you don't kill them quick, you know that only instant death awaits! They seem to've been toned down, and had their numbers increased a lot, which I don't like, it makes them much less special.
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Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Plus, you can't Simulacrum them to kill anything for, what was it, something ridiculous like 4 SP? tongue


10 SP, but that's still not bad for what's effectively an instant-death spell that can hit several targets over the course of a few rounds.
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It would seem Gauss that you and me get different things from playing this game.

I quite like having to be switched on enough to know when I can safely click on an opponent to attack and when I need to make a deliberate square-by-square move. Also with the Searing Lightning having to be tactical when I use Curing Elixir as they are pretty rare and using one only to be hit again is a bit crap.

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Originally Posted By: Lilith
Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Plus, you can't Simulacrum them to kill anything for, what was it, something ridiculous like 4 SP? tongue


10 SP, but that's still not bad for what's effectively an instant-death spell that can hit several targets over the course of a few rounds.

In Exile II, it was definitely lower. I think Ur-Basilisks were 9 or 10, but regular Basilisks were very low.
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Originally Posted By: waterplant
It would seem Gauss that you and me get different things from playing this game.
I quite like having to be switched on enough to know when I can safely click on an opponent to attack and when I need to make a deliberate square-by-square move.


But...the point is... that you don't know.... You can be two squares away with nothing in between you and the guy you want to attack, and your character decides to try to walk around him or something insane. It's not about paying attention, or knowing what's going to happen, the problem is the fundamental impossibility of knowing when the algorithm will do something nuts.

The only solution is to exclusively move one tile at a time, which is what I mostly do, but that's kind of a crappy solution when, e.g., increasing the number of steps / decreasing the size of the steps in the algorithm (assuming the algorithm isn't totally nuts) should fix this.

Of course, the problem may be the algorithm is totally nuts, or that it has something like O(n!) run time or something stupid, but basic pathfinding is like a first year CS student problem and there's really no reason for there to be this much of a problem with it.

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Also with the Searing Lightning having to be tactical when I use Curing Elixir as they are pretty rare and using one only to be hit again is a bit crap.


As you can see in this thread, it's not exactly common knowledge that this is even possible. You can't be "tactical" if you don't know it's possible. And yeah, then there's the making it useless by being attacked with it 10 times in a fight... By the time the fight's over, you can just heal until it goes away. *sigh*
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I just saw some pathfinding problems...Although this time it was with my enemy. I was battling a slith, who was using a pole. He wanted to run over and stab me with it. There was an empty space next to my character, and that was only a few spaces away from that slith. Instead of running up and attacking, he ran out of the room I was in.

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Originally Posted By: cfgauss
Of course, the problem may be the algorithm is totally nuts, or that it has something like O(n!) run time or something stupid, but basic pathfinding is like a first year CS student problem and there's really no reason for there to be this much of a problem with it.


Without being a complete dick about it, basic pathfinding is by no means a simple issue, even if they do attempt to teach solutions early in the curriculum.
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Depends on what you mean by "simple." It's simple in the sense that you can look it up in a textbook, or use google to find a hundred permutations of various implementations, and can even find papers and talks given by experts on how it's done in fancy sophisticated modern games that need to do it the most efficient way possible.

 

It's also especially simple in this case, because Avernum's tile-based system is literally identical to the setup given in every single introductory A* article. I mean, the very first google result is about this. It even talks about altering terrain costs to do this right when you have, e.g., enemies who could slow you down, and performance problems...

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And this year's X Prize for Medicine goes to Waterplant and Other, for their discovery that ordinary Curing elixirs and potions also cure the dreaded Lightning Effect. The prize will be conferred by King Starrus in person, in an elaborate formal ceremony in The Castle. It also consists of 30,000 coins and a major artifact of your choice.

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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
And this year's X Prize for Medicine goes to Waterplant and Other, for their discovery that ordinary Curing elixirs and potions also cure the dreaded Lightning Effect. The prize will be conferred by King Starrus in person, in an elaborate formal ceremony in The Castle. It also consists of 30,000 coins and a major artifact of your choice.



I am so glad to be the joint recipient of this prestigious award - I've never earned anything in my life. Other may have the coins as I have a large jar at home I am trying to gradually empty whenever I go to the shops.
If I may be so presumptuous as to nominate my prize it would be the Blessed Plunger to unblock my (blessed) kitchen sink.
Many thanks.
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I suspect that's related to not knowing how strong the effect against you is / your potions are.

 

Edit:

Okay, I've noticed a few times in playing that I will be right next to an enemy, click on them to attack, and my character walks *around* them to attack from a different side. How do you even do this?! I simply can't comprehend how someone could even write an algorithm that makes that possible. And, yes, I didn't misclick, I know since my character attacked after his ridiculous voyage to the other side of the bad guy.

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I'm running the windows version. It's possible that there'd be differences between the mac and windows versions, but it would be odd if there were.

 

I know some windows programming, but I don't know how macs are different, so there's a possibility there's some strange difference that could cause, e.g., the list generated in searching through nodes to have a one-off error, or a minus sign problem, or something. But that would seem less likely to me than a poorly designed algorithm.

 

Although it is my job to notice details (and to be overly harsh about mistakes!) so it may be that I am just more observant laugh. Plus, you know, once something irritates you, you tend to notice it more and more often!

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No, he's clearly willing to learn them. That's what making all his observations and trying to analyze what's going on is. He's just unwilling to apply the is-ought fallacy to them.

 

I use the mac version, and I've experienced the same thing about clicking on an enemy and running around it. Actually, I'm not sure if I've noticed it in A6 or in other games with the same engine, but I've definitely seen it on rare occasions. I'm fairly sure that it's only happened when there were an unusual number of impassable terrain squares nearby.

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Originally Posted By: Locmaar
Originally Posted By: cfgauss

Although it is my job to notice details (and to be overly harsh about mistakes!) ...

 

What's your job? IT supervisor in a nuclear power plant? Just wondering whistle

He could be an engineer, my superior is a lot like that too. Then again, that's what I'm like, too.

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