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A6 Difficulty


Grimm

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I finally finished A6 as a way to tide me over until the new game comes out. Did anyone else find it weirdly easy compared to the rest of the SWS games? I always play the games on normal, but despite that I've never actually finished an Avernum game before now: the end game always turns into a grind where my laissez-fair approach to character building comes back to bite me.

 

But with A6 I almost didn't have to put any effort into character building. They were all custom characters to start: I ran a pole focused sith with elite warrior, a bow focused nephilim with dead eye and nimble fingers, a human priest with pure spirit and a human mage with natural mage. I ran up a skill point surplus in early game and just kept putting off allocating them until I took the time to figure out exactly how I wanted to build my characters until I accidentally finished the game around level 40 with ~100 unused skillpoints in each character. I would throw in some skill points when I needed to access new spells or find new nature caches or unlock new locks every now and then, I pumped strength on my slith just so he could open all the heavy gates, but besides that I pretty much ignored about 25 of my levels. 

 

I haven't finished everything: Malanchion still has some quests for me (I'm sure killing him will be a major pain), and my journal atm is still pretty steep. But I stumbled into the final fight by accident, not really sure if it was the final fight 'cause I was still waiting for the game to get hard like the others did.

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Your character building strategy honestly sounds reasonably solid.  You might not be fussy about the details but your setup is pretty classic.  I wonder if your laissez-faire approach happened to go in less classic directions, in other games?  That seems like the most obvious explanation.

 

I'm also not sure which other SW games you mean -- there are a lot, and they vary in what makes them challenging -- but I guess one thing that does potentially make A6 (and A4 and A5) easier is that the character traits are extremely powerful if set up properly.  There's no equivalent to those in Geneforge, Avadon, or the Remakes of A1-A3.

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3 hours ago, Fate's Bulwark Against Fate said:

Your character building strategy honestly sounds reasonably solid.  You might not be fussy about the details but your setup is pretty classic.  I wonder if your laissez-faire approach happened to go in less classic directions, in other games?  That seems like the most obvious explanation.

 

I'm also not sure which other SW games you mean -- there are a lot, and they vary in what makes them challenging -- but I guess one thing that does potentially make A6 (and A4 and A5) easier is that the character traits are extremely powerful if set up properly.  There's no equivalent to those in Geneforge, Avadon, or the Remakes of A1-A3.

 

I don't think my approaches were unclassic in the past, just poorly optimized. I usually do melee, ranged, priest, mage, and focus on that throughout the game, but I never really put any effort into planning out a build properly so I always hit endgame with very few of the specialty skills unlocked. This mostly effects my warrior characters since they end up with low parry, riposte, lethal strike, etc, so they end up squishy and struggle to keep up with the enemy NPCs. 

 

By other SW games I mostly mean Geneforge and Avernum. I always found those games to have fairly challenging end games in the past, and often challenging midgames as well. The character traits and race traits do seem to be what was doing it for me: getting free skills in pole weapons, blademaster, sharpshooter, tool use, first aid, etc meant that my characters essentially leveled themselves up: it was pretty much impossible to build a bad character unless I decided to use my slith as a bow wielding mage all of a sudden. But I didn't find A6 nearly as challenging as A5, for example. I definitely could not have gotten as far into A5 as I did by ignoring 20 levels.

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  • 1 month later...
On 4/24/2019 at 3:18 PM, Preferential Depletement said:

Your character building strategy honestly sounds reasonably solid.  You might not be fussy about the details but your setup is pretty classic.  I wonder if your laissez-faire approach happened to go in less classic directions, in other games?  That seems like the most obvious explanation.

 

I'm also not sure which other SW games you mean -- there are a lot, and they vary in what makes them challenging -- but I guess one thing that does potentially make A6 (and A4 and A5) easier is that the character traits are extremely powerful if set up properly.  There's no equivalent to those in Geneforge, Avadon, or the Remakes of A1-A3.

 

I feel A6 was the easiest of the 2nd trilogy. Although it is hard to exactly point out why.

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