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Zereth posted:... How does that work? Each character gets a stun meter and a HP meter that have the same max value. When you get hit in battle they deplete at close to the same rate, with stun taking slightly higher damage than HP. If you run out of stun, you’re knocked out until the fight is over, and everything other than I think maybe AOE effects ignore knocked out characters. Running out of HP kills you, which in most cases is effectively permanent. Stun refills to full at the end of battle. HP is also filled for free with the medic skill, but the amount varies on your skill level. Going into battle without full HP or close to it is bad because the greater the disparity between your stun and HP, the better the chance you’ll run out of HP first and die. You can probably see where this is going—say you can heal 17 points of HP with your medic skill, and have a character with 30 max HP. Eventually that character will be going into a battle with 17 HP and 30 stun—the HP will be much more likely to reach 0 before the stun and kill the character. You’d be much better off with a character with 15 HP as you could fill them to max after every battle.
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Dec 12, 2023 19:46
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Genpei Turtle posted:Each character gets a stun meter and a HP meter that have the same max value. When you get hit in battle they deplete at close to the same rate, with stun taking slightly higher damage than HP. If you run out of stun, you’re knocked out until the fight is over, and everything other than I think maybe AOE effects ignore knocked out characters. Running out of HP kills you, which in most cases is effectively permanent. Right. And MP is very limited so you don't want to use healing spells unless it's an emergency. The biggest thing is you absolutely 100% need the Bandage skill, and you should put as many points into it as possible so you can safely give your party extra HP. And yeah, importing characters into Dragon Wars doesn't work well at all, sadly. If you're playing for the first time, I recommend trying out the default party before experimenting.
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Dec 12, 2023 20:04
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rujasu posted:And yeah, importing characters into Dragon Wars doesn't work well at all, sadly. This can work if you know what you're doing, but you have to be spoiled to not get screwed over. The same thing applies to importing from Might and Magic I to II. In both cases, you won't know if you just shafted yourself.
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Dec 12, 2023 20:20
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Boldor posted:This can work if you know what you're doing, but you have to be spoiled to not get screwed over. The issue with importing into M&M2 was something to do with resistances, right? I remember the manual being pretty clear about what else carried over but not touching on that.
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Dec 12, 2023 23:02
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Thuryl posted:The issue with importing into M&M2 was something to do with resistances, right? That's one of the problems: resistance transfer caps below what you can start with as a brand new character in MM2. You can beat this profitably if you make sure you transfer with a bunch of other resistances from equipment. The other is that you transfer above level 1, so you don't get the benefit of more max HP from level up with higher Endurance. Not as relevant, because you have to be already familiar with the game to profit from this, and even that becomes irrelevant once you reach any of the places later in the game that give you piles of max HP. On the other hand, you're stuck with the above lower resistances forever. Thuryl posted:I remember the manual being pretty clear about what else carried over but not touching on that. I wouldn't trust the documentation of any game of any complexity to get fine details right.
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Dec 13, 2023 01:47
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Yeah, I thought of the HP thing but figured that in practice there wouldn't really be a point where the difference mattered more than starting with a few extra levels. (I think which town's training grounds you used also affected your HP gains in M&M2, didn't it?)
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Dec 13, 2023 02:09
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Thuryl posted:Yeah, I thought of the HP thing but figured that in practice there wouldn't really be a point where the difference mattered more than starting with a few extra levels. (I think which town's training grounds you used also affected your HP gains in M&M2, didn't it?) Yes, the premium you pay in the higher-level towns gets you more HP when you train. (And as you might expect, Middlegate < Sandsobar < Tundara < Vulcania < Atlantium. Both in cost and max HP gained.) That does matter earlier in the game. You also usually get a few levels quickly anyway; there's quite a lot of time between that and any of the later-game hit point dispensers.
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Dec 13, 2023 02:37
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Isn't there a quest that allows the player to get the maximum theoretical HP? I seem to remember such a thing from Thuryl's LP. By the way, I actually found an Abandonware site that distributes M&M2 for Mac, the best version, wrapped and ready to go. Surprised the piss out of me.
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Dec 13, 2023 03:07
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JustJeff88 posted:Isn't there a quest that allows the player to get the maximum theoretical HP? I seem to remember such a thing from Thuryl's LP. There's a Dragon's Dominion HP bonus that will give you 25 hp and can be used as much as you want. However that's gonna take forever as the max HP is 65535. There's another method here and it's really detailed: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564550-might-and-magic-ii/faqs/29710
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Dec 13, 2023 03:25
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There are actually two permanent HP bonus spots in the Dragon's Dominion: one that gives +25 HP and one that gives +1000 HP (although the latter requires getting past an Ancient Dragon). There's also an "HP Maximizer" in one of the dungeons (Luxus Palace, I think?) that retroactively sets your max HP to what it would be if you'd trained up in Atlantium with your current Endurance for every level in exchange for 1 million gold. By the time you can access any of those methods, you probably don't really need them. But the game is pretty comfortably beatable at level 20 or so and the level cap is 255, so it's very much a game where optimization is something you do for fun rather than because it's needed.
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Dec 13, 2023 05:01
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Genpei Turtle posted:Each character gets a stun meter and a HP meter that have the same max value. When you get hit in battle they deplete at close to the same rate, with stun taking slightly higher damage than HP. If you run out of stun, you’re knocked out until the fight is over, and everything other than I think maybe AOE effects ignore knocked out characters. Running out of HP kills you, which in most cases is effectively permanent. Thuryl posted:There are actually two permanent HP bonus spots in the Dragon's Dominion: one that gives +25 HP and one that gives +1000 HP (although the latter requires getting past an Ancient Dragon). There's also an "HP Maximizer" in one of the dungeons (Luxus Palace, I think?) that retroactively sets your max HP to what it would be if you'd trained up in Atlantium with your current Endurance for every level in exchange for 1 million gold.
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Dec 13, 2023 08:55
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Zereth posted:Ah, some bad balance decisions. I assume you do also want enough max HP to not get instantly killed by high damage things, too, so it's an awful, horrible balancing act. That part is actually not that bad. Leveling and stat gains proceed at a glacial pace in Dragon Wars and damage remains consistently low. An endgame character might have 5 more max HP than they did at level 1. 15-20 max HP or so is enough to see you through the whole game easily.
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Dec 13, 2023 17:02
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Zereth posted:Won't doing the required-to-trigger-endgame Plus quests get you significantly over level 20 anyway? Yes, but you arguably shouldn't actually train past level ~19 (about when paladins/archers top off in natural spell progression), since MM2 has scaling combat. If you've played before, MM2 ought to be beatable at level 1. (MM3/4/5/6/7 definitely are.) Genpei Turtle posted:That part is actually not that bad. Leveling and stat gains proceed at a glacial pace in Dragon Wars and damage remains consistently low. An endgame character might have 5 more max HP than they did at level 1. 15-20 max HP or so is enough to see you through the whole game easily. An increase of 5 max HP is a ton, for those not familiar with the game. You shouldn't be actually that tempted to take that many max HP increases to begin with, even going in blind. You aren't getting many skill points, and nothing should one-hit you for 18+ damage except against enemies the game makes clear you're not supposed to be fighting. Becoming buff enough to take on those optional fights was something I'd thought about trying, but you really do need to be so absurdly over-the-top strong that I doubt I'll ever do it. (It's probably faster than attempting to level-cap a full party in Wizardry 8 or Matrix Cubed, at least!)
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Dec 13, 2023 19:14
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Thuryl posted:There's also an "HP Maximizer" in one of the dungeons (Luxus Palace, I think?) that retroactively sets your max HP to what it would be if you'd trained up in Atlantium with your current Endurance for every level in exchange for 1 million gold. This is what I meant. I reread your LPs this summer, so it was fairly fresh in my mind. One thing that I do not like about M&M2 is how the promotion quests work. Since they are class exclusive, it makes it impossible for a regular, diversified party to do them sequentially (with one exception). I'm the sort of person who is going to have at most one of each class in his party and not rotate, unlike in the LP, and I feel like these quests are antithetical to how RPGs work.
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Dec 13, 2023 20:50
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I remember you can have your quest specific character with your thief and hirelings. It's still annoying but you don't have to create another party to complete those class quests. It's kinda why MM2 is my least liked MM game, it's too big for it's gameplay. The first one had a brisk pace and MM2 just felt like a drag. Joe Chill fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Dec 13, 2023 |
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Dec 13, 2023 23:20
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JustJeff88 posted:This is what I meant. I reread your LPs this summer, so it was fairly fresh in my mind. The whole party roster concept from 1980s-era RPGs is kind of weird from the outset. It almost feels like they expected multiple different people to play with their own separate parties on the same disc, but that was never super practical (I know, because I tried back in the day). I can see how it's trying to replicate the feel of really old D&D games where the DM would just run a game with whoever showed up to the session that week, but a video game just doesn't work the same way. (Well, maybe an MMO kind of does, but those weren't invented yet.) also please forgive the thuryl of ~2010 for anything in those LPs that the thuryl of 2023 would not be proud of having written
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Dec 14, 2023 01:58
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Thuryl posted:also please forgive the thuryl of ~2010 for anything in those LPs that the thuryl of 2023 would not be proud of having written I'm not sure what you're worried about; they are just silly, light-hearted LPs with goofy orcs and such. In any event, I reverse my outrage for actually important things, like classism and climate collapse.
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Dec 14, 2023 02:07
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It's been 13 years?!?!
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Dec 14, 2023 02:18
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Genpei Turtle posted:That part is actually not that bad. Leveling and stat gains proceed at a glacial pace in Dragon Wars and damage remains consistently low. An endgame character might have 5 more max HP than they did at level 1. 15-20 max HP or so is enough to see you through the whole game easily.  WHAT
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Dec 14, 2023 15:17
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The Famicom release of Dragon Wars fixes much of the HP weirdness... ...by automatically giving you HP every level, introducing a lot more combat, and making the game super grindy
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Dec 14, 2023 20:25
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Zereth posted:
If you've ever played the original Wasteland, Dragon Wars will feel familiar as it takes a lot of inspiration from it in terms of character advancement. The only thing you get on level-ups is 2 skill points per level, which can be spent to raise stats or skills. It's just that since you'll only raise 10 levels or so thoughout the course of the entire game you only get 20ish points to spend on improvements, the rest is set during character creation. It's just that since skill points are at a premium, as Boldor mentioned you're probably not going to want to spend many on HP if at all, especially since some of the better skills (e.g. Bandage) take 2 points to raise a level. Also worth noting is that with a few exceptions such as Lockpicking most skills don't benefit from having more than a level or two in them. It works well if you understand how the skill/leveling system works but unfortunately that's not super obvious so it is easy to create useless characters by spending your skill points carelessly.
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Dec 14, 2023 21:37
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Dragon Wars inherits its HP weirdness from the Bard's Tale games. Your charcters can typically expect to face the big hit-point-damage spells you yourself can cast in most other RPGs. These games are all not what people expect there, and this weirdness varies by game:
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Dec 14, 2023 22:04
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Zereth posted:Ah, some bad balance decisions. I assume you do also want enough max HP to not get instantly killed by high damage things, too, so it's an awful, horrible balancing act. EDIT: I usually give my Bandage guy a few ranks in the bow skill and equip them with the Gatlin Bow and Magic Quiver so you don't even notice them not having the full combat capacity of your 'main' fighters.
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Dec 14, 2023 22:13
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NorgLyle posted:And honestly in my experience, the 'bad balancing' is kind of overstated. One of the secrets to easy mode Dragon Wars is to make one of your characters a full-time Bandage skill sink and just ensure that you can full heal after every combat with a macro. The manual just straight-up says that the Bandage skill is "very important", so if you failed to put multiple points in that, that's your fault. Same thing for, say, Intelligence in Wasteland.
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Dec 15, 2023 22:25
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Meanwhile, Intelligence does absolutely jack in Dragon Wars.
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Dec 18, 2023 00:09
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rujasu posted:Meanwhile, Intelligence does absolutely jack in Dragon Wars. Ah, the Final Fantasy 1 school of game design.
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Dec 18, 2023 00:10
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Pro tip on Legends of Amberland 2: when somebody tells you "the next area has monsters that can paralyze you, bring resistances", listen to them. Status effects start showing up quite a while before you can easily cure them, and going back to town for healing gets expensive (not to mention annoying). Status resistances seem to be a flat deduction from the base chance of getting hit with a status, so even a 30% resistance is pretty effective in keeping your frontliners from getting incapacitated. edit: game cleared in 15 hours on normal difficulty, I did everything except the pirate treasure quest because I didn't find the last piece of the map and couldn't think of anywhere else to look (and nobody on the Steam forums has shared the location yet either). I wanted to waste two days of my life playing an open-world blobber and that's exactly what I got. It's basically the same as the first game but with somewhat more interesting dungeon design and slightly rebalanced character classes (the good classes are still good, the bad classes are still bad, the so-so classes got a little bit better or worse). Thuryl fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 06:03
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I make no recommendation because I haven't played it, but old school revival game Caves of Lore is on sale on Steam until the 5th of January: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2227130/Caves_of_Lore/
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Dec 24, 2023 05:18
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From the Fresh Releases thread, SSI's Phantasie and Star Command on Steam: Play posted:https://store.steampowered.com/app/2702090/Star_Command/
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Dec 27, 2023 00:31
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Star Command is the game I am most upset I forgot to get around to reviewing for that big RPG retrospective book; if it had been made in virtually the same fashion just a few years later with the benefit of VGA and sound card capability I probably would still be occasionally playing it to this day, given it combines so many different fun things from other RPGs; space travel/exploration, grid-based "dungeons" with automap and tactical combat, ship-to-ship tactical combat, and poorly-disguised Jedi though still well-enough disguised that I somehow did not understand the relationship as a young dumb child. But yeah, CGA and PC Speaker is a rough era, even if this game literally looks about as good as CGA possibly can given how black backgrounds are passably believable 90% of the time
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Dec 27, 2023 00:53
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I don't know why, but I've always liked phantasie. The 2nd game is a bit of a mess but for 80s rpgs, they are very playable. Very finishable, too. Maybe that is why I like them.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:02
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It's also on GOG. But neither offers a Mac option which is kinda weird for a 35 year old game running in dosbox.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:10
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Yeah going for DOS + the Apple version of 2 seems like an odd choice. Either go with the Apple versions for all of them so you can transfer characters, or go with a nicer looking/sounding version like the Amiga version. DOS versions of games that old are usually really bad ports.
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Jan 2, 2024 20:12
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Wait....they aren't even compatible versions? What's the point?
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Jan 2, 2024 20:15
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Does GOG sell any Amiga or old Mac games? I assume they are using the Dos version because they already have a setup with Dosobox, but not anything similar for mac or Amiga emulators.
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Jan 2, 2024 20:17
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Waltzing Along posted:Wait....they aren't even compatible versions? What's the point? Phantasie 2 was released on a very limited number of platforms. It’s basically a choice of the original Apple II version or the C64/Atari 8-bit ports, neither of which was very good. It’s also kind of a Phantasie 1.5 in terms of how similar it was. 3 was different enough that it got a release on a larger number of platforms.
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Jan 2, 2024 20:51
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Hel posted:Does GOG sell any Amiga or old Mac games? I assume they are using the Dos version because they already have a setup with Dosobox, but not anything similar for mac or Amiga emulators. I can guess copyright of those OSs prevent distributing.
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Jan 2, 2024 21:54
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Hel posted:Does GOG sell any Amiga or old Mac games? I assume they are using the Dos version because they already have a setup with Dosobox, but not anything similar for mac or Amiga emulators. Yes, they have some games that are explicitly emulated Amiga versions.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:04
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Dr. Quarex posted:But yeah, CGA and PC Speaker is a rough era I search for Phantasie on Youtube and I see this Atari ST version presented in glorious extra-color. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXegh8In3N0 and here's Phantasie III on Amiga, which looks even better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9AsIfhyK08 Licensing an emulator wasn't possible, maybe? Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 22:29
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Well those videos just make me even more wistful about the missed opportunity when I almost got an Atari ST. I would have loved those games so hard at the time (Phantasie III was still fun even in its CGA nightmare form when I played it about 15 years ago, honestly) Also always nice to see Shadow's Nose videos; he is one of my favorite retro game YouTubers because he is incredibly bad at almost every game and gets so mad but puts out absolute shitloads of videos anyway Plus he blew my mind when he made ... well here let me show you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5C75MbpbvA&t=10s Nothing more old school PC RPG than drinking rootbeer by an 8-bit computer
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Jan 2, 2024 23:01
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