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So far as I can tell, the only differences in the game engine between Avernum 1 and Avernum 2 are that dual-wielding now limits the weight of the weapon in your off-hand slot, and that humans now get bonus traits. But that nerf is pretty minor, and dual-wielding is still hilariously overpowered. I'm tromping through the game on Normal with two dual-wielding human warriors, a priestkitty, and a spellslith, and not having too much difficulty aside from the "random superboss out of nowhere" issue that pops up from time to time. I honestly wish though that he'd fixed my #1 pet peeve with Avernum 1: your fighters are absolutely incapable of getting effective defenses against mental attacks, and combat balance is such that a charmed fighter is absolutely lethal to your other characters. The only skills that bolster mental defenses are buried in the caster trees, and the build system is set up so that hybrid mage/warriors are basically half as effective at either casting or fighting as pure characters are. A few general notes on builds: * Give everyone 1 rank in priest spells and they can cast Minor Heal and Cure a crapton of times (even the warriors), which really stretches your resources in dungeons and can save your rear end when, say, your priest is going to die on his turn from DOT. Investing in First Aid does something similar (by giving energy and HP back after fights) but costs more in skillpoints. * Riposte is garbage -- it deals crap damage and doesn't reduce the damage you take. Parry, on the other hand, is basically "evasion that actually works", so you'll want to invest heavily in it for your tank(s) * You don't really need to invest in Endurance; as far as I'm aware all it does is give you +5 HP and somewhat better resistances to acid and poison. If you need more HP, drink a healing potion; there's plenty to go round. * Agility is worthless for melee fighters. Bows in general are not amazing. * On the other hand, you want every character in your party to have at least 15 points in the basic combat skills (swords, polearms, bows, throwing) to unlock the Adrenaline Rush ability. It gives you 20 AP, enough for three attacks or spells. End every overworld encounter on the first turn via triple Lightning Spray/Divine Fire! Meiteron posted:Oh god I just started Chapter 4 and am getting instantly slaughtered every time I step out of the Tower of Magi. Like, "get into a random battle 15 steps away and lose both front line fighters to the enemy pack before I can do anything" slaughtered. I'd go back to the chapter 3 areas but I've cleared most of what was doable there out already. Don't forget your battle disciplines and consumable items. But yeah, this is an issue. You can take the portal back to chapter 3 and go tool around in the west and northeast areas for random encounters that might be more survivable. Or might not. If you can make it up to the Eastern Gallery (where Silvar, Cotra, etc. are), there's some kitty quests you can do which should be easier to handle.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:47
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Doctor Goat posted:I hear that Avernum 2: The New One has area of effect attacks and this makes me very happy because Avernum 1: The Original One didn't have a Fireball and an old-style CRPG without a fireball spell is a war crime. The reremakes have AOE spells. The mere remakes (from like a decade ago) just had multitarget attack spells and were lame. On the other hand, the AOE spells in the reremakes are comically huge, so there's not a whole lot of tactical thought to how they're used.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:28
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Roobanguy posted:What do you mean by this? I remember Avernum 1 made it so you couldn't use broadswords in your offhand, and had to use rapiers/shortswords. Oh, really? Guess my memory's just fuzzy, then. Oh, and my other biggest pet peeve that wasn't fixed: treating towns as open spaces when pathing on the overworld, so that whenever you exit town and click to move somewhere, the pathing goes "  guess I'd better cut through the corner of town to get there! " That plus the total lack of pathing when you're in a boat. Would it really have been that hard to have multiple A* pathing maps, guys?
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Jan 22, 2015 15:45
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year199X posted:Oh my god thank you. Aw, and here I've been throwing away the ones I got where I was far from a town. Silly me.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:02
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Granted I beat that boss on the first visit, but aside from having to re-do the lever that summoned three monsters when pulled (and which summoned three goblins on the revisit  ), everything was already open for me. Weird.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:17
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Argh, there's got to be something back here (in the Giant Fort) but I can't figure out how to access it! As far as I can tell there's no way to get there. The apparently open path by sidestepping that fence isn't actually valid (the tile is blocked, presumably because it's actually part of that small pond). The switch on the wall just exposes that force barrier. There's no way, as far as I can tell, to get into the kennels -- the fences are impassable and nothing opens them. The Avernum 2 hintbook (i.e. for the previous game) has a completely different layout for this section. I've gotten everything I need quest-wise from this place, but it's super-frustrating to have an obvious hidden treasure room be inaccessible, especially when there's a switch that is accessible that reveals it! Smacks of a mapping error. 
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Jan 23, 2015 04:35
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Daler Mehndi posted:I remember that in Exile 2 / Avernum 2 it was a really big deal to obtain the spell to dispel barriers. And I ended up visiting older places once I did. Is this what's going on here? It's always a big deal to get that spell in any Exile/Avernum game. But no, I can't even walk to where the barrier is; that entire tunnel is physically inaccessible from everything I can tell. I've scoured the entire dungeon looking for more switches or other ways to manipulate the terrain there so I can open up the path. The actual barrier is, ahem, not an obstacle.
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Jan 23, 2015 04:57
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GreenNight posted:I used to keep a notepad.txt file full of areas I needed to return for this. I take screenshots for the same reason. Re: bosses, granted that I'm basically doing all of the non-plot quests first, so far I've only run into one or two Spine Shield assholes. There are plenty of normal monsters that will stick acid on you when you hit them, but that's not such a huge deal. What's worse though is the ones who have access to the Charm spell, especially since they always seem to go immediately after my priest. Also, there's a few more uses of "I have a gigantic mob of helpers plus I lead off the fight with massed Battle Frenzy" than I'd like.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:04
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JustJeff88 posted:This got me thinking (and it is a good idea, what Roadie said)... how hard would it be to put all 4 Exile games (don't forget Blades of) into some kind of "wrapper" so that they would run on modern systems, especially the 64 bit ones? All of the Exile games are 16-bit so they won't run on a 64-bit OS. They work splendidly if you run an XP Virtual Box, but the casual user isn't going to want to bother with that and only certain versions of Windows support it. I thought that if they could get them running easily, they could put them on GOG as free games and get themselves more exposure. They are already free on Spiderweb's site and are no more archaic than the early Ultima games, so why not? This has already been done...for Mac users, via Wine. Presumably some similar approach would also work in Windows.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:01
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KICK BAMA KICK posted:I have always wondered why he didn't hire out the process of porting the old games to the new engine. I'd bet it's doable for someone else given the source materials and a finished example. Maybe he looked into it and the math doesn't work out (or just doesn't have the capital for any up-front payment) but seems like faster releases of the remakes plus more time for Vogel to write new games could add up to a profit even after the grunt's cut. Spiderweb Software is not a high-margin company, so I expect up-front capital is at a premium. Plus, making games is his job, so why is he gonna hire someone else to make games for him? Maybe if he had tons of ideas of other things he wanted to do, but he's still able to put out Avadon games on a reasonable schedule while keeping up the rereleases, so that doesn't seem to be an obstacle.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:55
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sitchelin posted:I just started Chapter 3 and I demand to know why my Hyrdas have been replaced with boring Hellhounds! I'm guessing he didn't want to try to animate seven individual heads. Plus it'd probably look like poo poo with the new graphics style. But I'm with you, Hellhounds are boring.
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Jan 24, 2015 16:41
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Happy Hedonist posted:How does Avernum play on the iPad? Is it rough with the touch controls and the smaller screen? I just bought my first iPad yesterday and was thinking about picking it up. I already have it on PC but I'm not happy with my party. I was thinking about buying it again, this time on iPad, and rerolling my party (again). I haven't tried it myself, but my sister and her husband have both played the game through on iPad, so it's at least playable. I'd expect that those situations in which you want to carefully control exactly where you step would be more irritating, though. quote:Funny story. I'm about 15 hours into Dragon Age Inquisition after buying it last week, yet all I want to do is play Avernum. WTF is wrong with me? There's a lot to be said for games that let you just play the drat thing instead of demanding that you sit there and watch things happen. Not that modern RPGs are nothing but cinematics, but they do move a lot more slowly than the Avernum series does.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:49
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I got level-3 haste way after getting all of my characters to 15 combat skills. It's kind of hard to get excited about a 50% chance at Battle Frenzy when every fight leads off with my party getting three turns in a row. In related news, Adrenaline Rush is still bonkers powerful. Also, I see this game is continuing the fine tradition Avernum 1 set of having level-3 barriers all over the lategame dungeons with no loving clue where the level-3 Dispel Barrier spell is. I've already Lost Forever some loot because a dungeon imploded and there was a barrier in it I couldn't dispel (in the Ziggurat).
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Jan 25, 2015 17:16
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JustJeff88 posted:If it only takes him two or three months to remake a game, why are the Avernum 1-3 remakes spaced out so much?...or did he do other projects in the meantime that I've forgotten? You forgot about Avadon, which also got a sequel fairly recently. Also, he wants to space things out a bit so he doesn't saturate the market. If you play Avernum 1, and then six weeks after you finish it Avernum 2 comes out, you'll be more likely to think "Nah, I've played enough RPGs for awhile, I'll wait for a sale." Bold Robot posted:Wouldn't getting all of your characters 15 combat skills kinda gimp your mages? That's a huge points investment. Not really. Mages don't have a whole lot to spend points on. Mage/Priest skills, Spellcraft, a little arcane lore (but see also the Sage Lore trait), maybe some Resistance and/or Magical Efficiency. Also, you don't have to do 15 "hard" skillpoints (though I did). You can get part of the way there with bonuses from items. In fact, there's a sword that gives +2 Melee Weapons and +3 Pole Weapons, specifically to give casters a stat stick that helps them get combat disciplines. It took me a bit to figure out how the hell putting +Pole Weapons on a sword, which can't be dual-wielded with a polearm, could possibly be useful.
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Jan 25, 2015 22:46
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BKPR posted:Just hit chapter 3, trying to see the council. Is there anyway to get back to regular rear end human avernum? Feeling kind of underlevelled. You get back there eventually, but not yet. You shouldn't need levels to make progress at this point though; chapter 3 is mostly plot.
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Jan 26, 2015 00:28
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JustJeff88 posted:I wasn't either, but I happened to glance at the Spiderweb page for Crystal Souls and saw that it came with a Steam key, just like if you buy it from the Humble Store, so I redeemed it. Steam gets up my nose, so I only buy from Valve if there's no GOG version or unaffiliated DRM-free version of whatever I'm keen on. Now I wish that I had saved the Steam key and given it to some friendly goon, but perhaps the intention was for the purchaser to redeem it and not exploit the situation to give a potential customer a free game. Then again, I could copy the DRM-free copy I got and pass it out to an unlimited number of other people, so what the gently caress do I know? He's almost certainly doing things that way to allow people who use Steam as their primary games library to incorporate the game into said library, not so that you have a spare copy to give to a friend. Re: Avadon, sorry, didn't read your post that carefully 
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Jan 26, 2015 01:30
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Dr. Video Games 0112 posted:It's in the same place as the original, I believe, the quest to get it is still a pain. As far as the Ziggurat, you can actually go right back in and everything is still there including the enemies, just can no longer get back to the balcony. I dont recall any main dungeon being inaccessible after some story event, with the exception of maybe the chapter 2 river dungeons. Ah, good to know. I did eventually find the L3 Dispel Barrier, but I can't be arsed to go back and find what I need. It's not like my party needs even more power, and frankly I've run out of trainers to shovel money at, too. Unrelated, but the weapon Demonslayer is a huge disappointment compared to the Flaming/Frozen Blades. In fact, I'm not even certain it functions properly.
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Jan 26, 2015 03:32
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Right, I've finished the game (on Normal). Did every sidequest I could find, except for one that required me to find a Steel Waveblade when I'd already sold all of them (probably there's a vendor out there who sells one, but I can't be arsed). My megalegendary party can now retire. I hit level 35-ish by the end, for reference, and for the last 10+ levels I felt like I was massively overpowered. Divine Retribution + Adrenaline Rush is the most brokenly overpowered combination in a game full of broken overpowered combinations. Why yes, I would like to kill 20 units in a single round.
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Jan 26, 2015 18:45
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Sankis posted:So I'm doing the quest in A2:Crystal Souls to find the three giant statues. I found the one in the giant cave, the one in the village north of that, and I THOUGHT I found one in the fort but I'm only showing 2 statues in quest items. Did I miss one somewhere or am I bugged? The one in the giant fort is in the southwest where the demon was, so double-check that. And if it's not there, then double-check the other two locations as well; maybe you only got it in an alternate universe that you load-save'd out of.
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Jan 27, 2015 05:35
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Bold Robot posted:How the hell do I get into the Brigand's Madhouse? Enter through the east side, look for secret switches, and keep an eye on the map; stepping on certain tiles will silently close walls, forcing you to leave and re-enter.
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Jan 28, 2015 05:50
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Bold Robot posted:Okay, I figured out how to get into most of the Brigand's Madhouse and killed the eyebeast, but does anyone know how to get into this part in the center here? There's a switch somewhere. It may not be in one of the adjacent rooms. Sometimes switches are really sneakily hidden; check near wall decorations. I can't remember the specific one for that wall though. Maybe it's just in a storeroom or something.
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Jan 29, 2015 03:11
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MagusofStars posted:No remake of Blades of Avernum given the whole "it nearly killed the company" thing. Frankly, I'm amazed he even tried. I mean, Blades of Exile was pretty great, but it also came out in a time where there really weren't many good options for making your own CRPG. By the time Avernum 3 came out (early 2000s, IIRC), there was a lot more competition in the space.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:25
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Xander77 posted:Yeah, but... what was it, what was wrong with it, why didn't it sell? Blades of Exile/Avernum were RPG game creation toolkits that let you make your own scenarios and play other peoples' scenarios, using the same engine as the Exile/early Avernum games. And it's been described why BoA didn't sell well (BoE was quite popular) -- it was too hard to make scenarios, so there wasn't as much content available, so people didn't buy the game.
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Jan 31, 2015 17:30
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Ijuuin Enzan posted:It's not really the same sort of thing. There are several scenarios with long coherent narrative flows. They're still nowhere near the size of the full games, though. Usually they range anywhere from being about like Chapter 2 of Exile 2 to being about the size of, say, the eastern third of Exile. You can fit a lot of plot into such an area, but most scenarios have a somewhat smaller scope. "Episodic" is a pretty good description honestly. Blades of Exile shipped with three scenarios written by Jeff Vogel (i.e. Spiderweb Software) that were designed difficulty-wise to be played in sequence with the same party, but narratively they have nothing to do with each other.
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Feb 3, 2015 17:54
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Parts Kit posted:Do the remakes (and newer games I guess) still have pop-culture references buried in them? It was kinda funny realizing that one entire town in E3 was a reference to Babylon 5, in addition to the odd Happy Fun Ball reference and in Blades the South Park references. Not that I'm all that great at noticing references, but I think so. At the very least, NPCs don't generally get new names/personalities, so when a town's NPCs are lifted from a TV show (and Bab5 isn't the only such instance), they'll still be like that in the remakes.
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Feb 4, 2015 04:01
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Zereth posted:Public service announcement: When Patrick wants a Fine Steel Waveblade, he can and will take better, magic ones instead, right out of your sword-user's hands. Even if you have a Fine Steel one in your inventory. Be careful and save often. I was distinctly unimpressed by waveblades in this version. Same damage as broadswords, but while waveblades are a bit more accurate (mostly pointless past the early game), broadswords give melee damage protection. So I ended up selling all the waveblades I found, leaving none left in the world to satisfy Patrick's quest Meiteron posted:Does anyone remember where the alchemist who makes Wisdom Crystals is? I'm wrapping up the game and want to convert all my mandrake roots and associated herbs into raw experience but I never wrote down where the dude who can make them was and now I can't find him again. He's in Patrick's Tower.
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Feb 7, 2015 17:03
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sitchelin posted:I just recovered my first crystal soul and had forgotten all about my old friend Mr. Doomguard. I burned through just about every drat consumable I had tearing that guy apart. Focused attacks are your friends with these guys. Don't bother attacking at all until you're in position to get your entire team to apply as much damage as possible in a single turn. You might have to eat an attack or two in the short term but long-term the fight will go much more smoothly.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:46
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Tuxedo Ted posted:Which bring me to why I'm here! I got the big collection package on GoG a little while back, but I'm having trouble building my party in Avernum 1. I can't remember what I did when I first bought it, and even then I don't think I ever got very far. What are some simple tips to follow for a first playthrough so I don't end up restarting five times as I work it out trial-and-error style? Is this the "original" Avernum 1, or Avernum: Escape from the Pit which came out a year or two ago? The two have dramatically different customization processes. For the more recent Avernum I favor making two dual-wielding sword dudes (put all points into STR from now until the end of time), and two casters, one holy and one magical (put all points into INT etc.). Arguably 3 casters is "more optimal" but whatever. If you want to really nuke the difficulty curve, get your casters 15 points in basic combat skills (melee/poles/archery/throwing, any combination) so they can use the combat discipline Adrenaline Rush to cast three spells in a row. For the older Avernum, I don't really remember builds, but if I recall correctly there are "secret" skills out there that you can't train in until you've accomplished some task. Some of them are really useful, like Anatomy makes your fighters way more effective against humanoid enemies. So it's worth keeping some skillpoints in reserve (over the course of the game, not right at the start) for when you find those skills.
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Feb 8, 2015 16:12
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I just hope the Golem Factory is as good as the one in Exile 3, and not the lame one we got in Avernum 3.
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Feb 8, 2015 20:15
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Agnostalgia posted:Playing Crystal Souls, is there any way to respec a character in game or would i need to activate the character editor for that? I'm like level twenty so I don't want to restart, but I'm tired of one of my characters being total dead weight for most of the game. Gotta use the editor, unfortunately. That's basically what it's there for. How'd you manage to make a dead-weight character? Tried to do a dual fighter-caster?
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Feb 10, 2015 05:32
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JustJeff88 posted:I read that brief guide and it just sounds like Crystal Souls is poorly balanced. Kind of depressing, really. As I understand it, the goal was to have a character-build system that made it harder to make useless characters. Unfortunately, what that really amounts to is limiting the degree to which character customization can affect your success, which means the build system is not especially meaningful. It's balanced, in the sense that you should have the right amount of power for the fights you get into; it's just not interesting.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:39
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Jesto posted:I wonder, was Avernum 'simplified' (fewer spells, fewer party members, simplified everything) in order to run well on mobile devices? I expect the main concession made to the mobile version is that in combat your characters will automatically path to their targets instead of you having to input each individual step you want to take. Everything else I can easily believe was part of the "vision" of the remakes. I just wish there was some way to turn that off, or a popup that said "your mage will end their turn before they get into range to cast a spell where you clicked, are you sure you want to do this?"
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Apr 22, 2015 14:50
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The Geneforge games are completely different from those, too, though I seem to recall reading that their current plan is to finish the Exile 3 reremake, then do Avadon 3, then start remaking the Geneforge series (presumably while either continuing Avadon or starting up a new series). Anyway, that means that a Geneforge 1 remake is probably not more than 3-5 years out.
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May 2, 2015 14:36
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Roadie posted:All the time Jeff spends making and remaking and reremaking engines only to run into inevitable compatibility issues makes me think he'd be better off just putting the whole shebang into Unity or something. Unity has been a major concern for, like, a quarter as long as as Jeff has been in business. Just putting that out there. But yeah, if he found himself needing a new engine now, it'd definitely be worth considering going with one of the big names to help him with his deployment efforts if nothing else. Problem is, he already has a perfectly serviceable engine and if I know him he's going to wring every cent of value out of it before he moves on.
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May 3, 2015 06:59
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DACK FAYDEN posted:I'm reading this correctly, right - still got a shot at Crystal Souls on iPad? My reading is "I was having a hard time due to health issues, Apple broke compatibility with my engine right before release, I got disillusioned, I cancelled the Crystal Souls release; now I'm feeling better and I'm going to go back and Do It Properly." So yeah, it's sounding promising.
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Jun 12, 2015 00:31
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Xander77 posted:Anything I should know about Crystal Souls before I start playing? Still the standard "1 dual-wielding warriors, 3 spell casters" setup? I ran with two dual-wielders and two casters and didn't feel like I was crippling myself (though I didn't bother with higher difficulties either). Combat's nearly identical to Avernum 1, just with a few minor tweaks. You'll still want to get Adrenaline Rush ASAP, but it's harder to get without lots of hard skillpoints unless you know where specific items are.
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Jun 16, 2015 17:07
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Heavy neutrino posted:I bought the whole bundle of Spiderweb games during the Steam sale, and I have a question: I'm playing Avernum 6 right now, and given that the dialogue looks written as if you only had one character, is it possible to play through the game solo? I haven't played Avernum 6, but generally speaking all of Foglio's games are solo-able, though playing solo on the higher difficulty levels tends to be an exercise in tedium and frustration. And yeah, some traits are fantastic, and the way experience scales, you won't be short on levels anyway because you get way less experience for killing enemies you outlevel. So it just takes the over-traited characters a bit longer to get up to par when you move to a new enemy set.
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Jun 23, 2015 21:55
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Zereth posted:... Did you mean Vogel's games? Goddammit, yes, sorry. For some reason ever since Foglio did some illustrations for Exile/Avernum, I occasionally mix their names up.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:35
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THE MACHO MAN posted:I've been plugging away at Avernum 5. I never played much of 6 but played the others to completion or close to it (my comp blew up right towards the end of 4). Am I alone in thinking that 5 is probably the best game that isn't 3? Everyone thinks 3 is the king of the series right? I found 4 to be rather weak, and I can't remember which of 5 and 6 I played but I remember making it halfway through the demo and realizing that my warriors were totally incompetent compared to my mages, who were vastly more effective at killing things and had tons of SP capacity, which could be easily refilled by walking back to town. Presumably this got less bad as the game went on but it was very clear that early-game fighters were solely there to present a barrier monsters would have to hack through to get to the mages...and whatever plot hooks got set up clearly weren't enough to get me to stick with the game long enough to pass that hump.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:24
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Thuryl posted:Spellcasters outmatch fighters to some degree in nearly every Spiderweb game ever made, honestly. Some games just make it easier than others to use them to full effect. Yeah, if I recall correctly my fighters, who were fully-specced as fighters and had reasonable stats, were struggling to kill basic mooks, while my casters could fling something like 20-40 basic attack spells before needing to recover, and those spells did full damage and always hit. In most Spiderweb games your casters can't afford to be profligate with their attack spells and are usually most effective in the early game when acting as fighter support/alpha-strike characters. Maybe I just got an unlucky start for some reason. 
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Jul 7, 2015 15:52
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