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Awright, this is starting! Here's my character submission; I'll try to get graphics for him later. Name: John Race: Crystal Golem ("Human") Traits: Good Constitution, Recuperation, Ambidextrous, Highly Alert, Exceptional Strength Initial training: a little of everything.      Background: After the end of the Exile-Empire war, the Empire was forced to abandon all of their subterranean outposts. They did their best to wipe away any information or intelligence they had gathered before they left, and in this they were aided by the fact that many of these outposts had been badly damaged by Art and her crew. However, they weren't quite as thorough as they might have liked. We discovered "John" in one of the experimental labs at Akhronath. He appears to be an extension of standard golem magic, based on what the Empire was able to glean from their research into the Crystal Souls. Unfortunately, all notes on his manufacture were destroyed by Quickfire; he is literally one of a kind. When he was discovered, he was badly-damaged by that same Quickfire, and behaved erratically and violently. Fortunately, we were able to contain him until his inbuilt regenerative capabilities restored his crystalline structure, after which point he calmed down and was willing to be taken into custody. John appears to be a "blank slate", and was unable to tell us anything about how he came to be. We estimate him to be of slightly above-average intelligence, and he is a rapid learner with an apparently perfect memory. However, he tends to be incurious and has precisely zero self-motivation: he instead will follow any order he is given unless prior orders conflict. As this represents a clear potential security problem, we have spent a great deal of time "programming" him with safeguard orders. Our testing indicates that he should make an admirable field agent and observer; the fact that we can rely on his witness testimony to be impartial and exact is an excellent bonus. We would of course have appreciated having more time to test his capabilities and provide him with a more focused baseline training, but I understand that time presses. I do however request that we have the opportunity to inspect him from time to time during this operation. Signed, Redacted TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 19:00
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I'm guessing that Art is going to spend a bit less time on the front lines this time around? At least, it seems like a middle-aged priest would fare better than a middle-aged warrior would. Also, we're probably going to want at least one mage! Or not, y'know, I don't judge. Oh, and there's an incorrect tag ("nobel" instead of "noble") and I think a missing close-italics in the first update?
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Mar 7, 2016 19:50
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Anyone seeking to make custom graphics should be aware that the graphics for Blades of Exile (the scenario-based pseudo-expansion to Exile III) are available here. Also, I think you got the size backwards, berryjon: the sprites are 28x36 (i.e. 28 wide, 36 tall), not 36x28. On that note, have some graphics for John (also edited into my earlier post). The battle sprites are adapted from in-game sprites; the portrait was taken from this commercial product and then lightly tweaked.
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Mar 8, 2016 02:46
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Vil posted:I could have sworn there was a limit of 2 traits you could grab, but that might have been Avernum rather than Exile. Yeah, that's Avernum. In Exile 2/3 you can create a single-character-party, give them all of the positive traits, and still level up like crazy despite the ~250% experience penalty.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:38
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Wow, we got some pretty great character submissions this time around. I'm going to refrain from using -1s for the moment (but I reserve the right to edit them into this post later  ).+4 to John, +3 to Blue, +2 to Ni'aurrl, +1 to Arcturus. (I'm guessing the sprites aren't their final choices, since several characters have generic-human sprites and Ni'aurrl doesn't have a nephil sprite) TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 05:33
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berryjon posted:Just like last time, it's +4/+3/+2/+1/(-1/-1). Please clarify your voting! So noted, and done! Last time was ages ago, so I hope you forgive me for forgetting! BTW, in case it wasn't clear from John's description, I had in mind that he could act as a sort of "political officer" to help keep Art in line (from the perspective of her nominal superiors). Who knows what orders he's received while he was being evaluated?
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Mar 11, 2016 15:40
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JustJeff88 posted:I have noticed, though, that having a bit of priestly magic in this game can be useful, but in terms of "arcane" casting you either need to commit fully or not bother. The spell list is largely the same in Exile 3 as it was in Exile 2. But yes, that means that most L1-L3 spells are still not worth all that much outside of the early game. That doesn't mean that you can't make use of a dual-caster, though. They'd probably top out at L4 spells for the most part (which is where you get stuff like Slow Group and Curse All) and spend the rest of their time slinging Fireballs, helping out with healing, and topping off buffs on the frontliners.
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Mar 11, 2016 17:19
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Xander77 posted:Wonder how long until Avernum 3 (Mark II) comes out. I'm pretty sure that Jeff is working on Avadon 3 right now, and Avernum 3 will be the next project after that. Then presumably he'll start remaking the early Geneforge games and starting either Avadon 4 or some new series.
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Mar 12, 2016 00:33
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While I'm thinking about it: party member portraits could probably be pulled from the reremakes. This is probably most useful for the slith and nephil characters, since there's plenty of art/photos of humans available (and to be honest, the artwork isn't the greatest quality anyway). Conveniently, I've already extracted headshots of all the slith and nephil characters from Avernum 2: Crystal Souls:        I seem to recall that similar options may be available from the first set of remakes, if anyone wants to go to the effort to dig them up.
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Mar 14, 2016 05:02
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Aw dang. Missed the proposed characters. I wanted one with everything that would level at like, less than half the rate than the others. This is great fun if you aren't running a full party (and thus experience gains are more concentrated), but I suspect it would kind of suck if you were. The skillpoints you get from leveling up are most of what determine how capable you are. And the different positive traits all affect different things. A caster doesn't need Ambidextrous or Tough or Fast Recovery because they aren't going to be getting hit all that much; a fighter doesn't need Magically Apt because typically they can't cast anything anyway due to wearing heavy armor (and even if you keep them in lightweight armor, when they're on the front lines they're usually better-served by just hitting things). And only one person in the party really needs Cave Lore or Wilderness Lore.
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Mar 15, 2016 17:56
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Redmark posted:Did anyone actually explore Upper Exile first, up to places like Portal Fortress? I know I just went for the surface first thing I generally at least hit up the recommended starter dungeons (the ones in that little map you can find in Fort Emergence). They're convenient, and they're never going to be any more level-appropriate than when you're level 1! But there's certainly no need to explore the entirety of Upper Exile.
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Mar 17, 2016 04:25
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A few quick notes: 1) There's a secret passage on the western side of that lava moat in Fort Emergence. 2) If your caster has 2 points of encumbrance, then they cannot cast spells. The Defense skill can mitigate this, but from what I recall it's a random thing -- you make a die roll, and if it succeeds, then you're allowed to cast the spell. Who wants to have a chance of successfully casting a spell, though? Keep your casters in light armor. Fortunately there's a fair amount of high-quality non-encumbering armor in the game. 3) All enemies appear to have access to the same set of spells (gated by their spellcasting ability). For example, all enemies with access to Priest 1 can cast Minor Bless, Minor Heal, Stumble...and nothing else from that set. In other words, certain spells are marked as AI-eligible, and all others are ignored. Mostly this saves the AI from having to cope with spells that it wouldn't know what to do with. 4) A high-INT caster's Bless spells basically make your characters invulnerable in combat. Armor helps a lot too, of course, but Bless can easily take you from "routinely gets hit for middling damage" to "never gets hit. Ever." 5) Items now have flavor descriptions! Go on, inspect a rock, or some garbage, or a pair of pants. Pay attention to item weights, too, because some items that have the same name as generic crap are actually special and you can only tell by the differing weight (or by picking up and identifying every item you find, but seriously, who has the time for that?).
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Mar 21, 2016 20:58
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Ideally you just give your characters 5 or so STR relatively early and then never spend a single skillpoint on HP ever. However, like with the previous games, you can always grind for cash and then spend it on skillpoint potions, so you don't really need to worry about "ruining" your characters if your build isn't perfectly optimal from the get-go.
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Mar 22, 2016 01:06
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The only things you get when you level up are 5 skillpoints (reduced to 4 after, I think, 20 levels) and some HP based on your STR score. Everything else you have to buy.
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Mar 22, 2016 18:45
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Going onto the surface for the first time is actually super disconcerting. The color palette for surface terrain is totally different from the color palette for the caves, and looks wrong for a few minutes, until your eyes adjust. Or at least, it did for me. Acid is a surprisingly dangerous debuff. While it wears off faster than poison, it also deals more damage than poison, and stacks much more aggressively. If you get hit a few times with acid, then you can easily be taking your entire HP pool in acid damage every turn. It's also difficult to get rid of; IIRC there's no magical way to get rid of it. That fraudulent mage in Krizsan (which, incidentally, is named after Jeff Vogel's wife) (EDIT: the city, not the mage) can identify items for you. And finally, there are a lot of those little dialogs with Anaximander. If you don't check in with him very often, you can get a couple dozen of them all at once, which is kind of amusing. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Mar 24, 2016 |
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Mar 24, 2016 04:33
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Pierzak posted:There are no enemy nations. There is only the Empire. That said, the Empire's control is not literally absolute. Rebellions have been known to happen from time to time. King Micah was a rebel leader who was exiled rather than executed to avoid making him into a martyr.
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Mar 24, 2016 14:18
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Redmark posted:Does the Imperial Capital have a name? The wiki has an entry for it but it's hard to tell whether its info is actually from the games or fan-created. If it gets mentioned, then it's not in the original trilogy. I haven't played 4 in ages and never played 5 or 6 so I suppose it could be mentioned in those games.
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Mar 25, 2016 02:59
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Montegoraon posted:The situation in Valorim must be extremely bad if trade between cities has totally collapsed. But about the Empire being at the peak of its power, is it really? Hawthorne and Grazhad were supposed to be an exceptional administrator and an extraordinarily powerful archmage, respectively. Based on what we've seen already, I can't help but wonder if the Empire has been suffering from a sudden drop in its fortunes, become generally more bureaucratic and less effective. The Empire is literally a world-spanning organization, of course it's bureaucratic and inefficient. Trade has collapsed because ordinary people aren't able to deal with the monsters, the in-place military is too small to deal with them effectively (being reduced largely to defending towns), and no reinforcements are arriving for reasons that will eventually be made clear but would be spoilers to talk about now. Incidentally, while wandering around these towns, periodically some slimes will spawn on the edge of town and get attacked by the guards. quote:So, cities will gradually fall over the course of months if you don't solve problems quickly enough, right? That makes me think one could write a different story of playing through this game, where you let the surfacers of Valorim die off so Exile can move into the area uncontested. I'd at least like to see what happens when a city is wiped out. Do they get just a message explaining what happened, or are they replaced with actual ruined city maps? If so, that seems like a lot of work must have gone into it, and it would be a shame not to see. Letting the monsters destroy the continent would be a travesty. Exile doesn't actually hate Imperial citizenry; it just has a beef with the whole "being a penal colony" thing. Plus, if Exile is seen to profit from the monsters' destruction, then this all would just be a prelude to the Second Empire/Exile War. Destroyed cities are replaced by different maps, if I recall correctly. Plot-essential NPCs take refuge elsewhere so you can still always complete the major quests, but you may be cut out of other content. I don't think I had more than a couple of cities get destroyed the first time I played the game, though, so the "time limit" is extremely generous.
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Mar 25, 2016 18:38
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LuffyVeggies posted:Oh boy, an Anama run? That sounds so fun and yet so hard. This may be a bit of a spoiler for me to ask, but is it impossible to complete the first quest if you're an Anama member? There are items that can compensate.
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Mar 25, 2016 19:56
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If you're finding Chronic Disease to be too much of a hassle, I for one wouldn't complain if you just shoved some Graymold Salve down Matthias' throat and replaced that defect with something less irritating, like Bad Back + Frail.
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Apr 2, 2016 03:14
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Oh, that room leading up to the Jordan fight is a pain in the rear end, too. It's a zigzag corridor of columns, with some Mauve Slimes (the magic type) in the back slinging spells at you. And to make matters worse, if I recall correctly, you periodically get zapped for damage while walking through the room. The icing on the cake is that I basically never have Move Mountains when I take this dungeon on. 
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Apr 2, 2016 04:41
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And relatedly, some monsters can spam sleep clouds at the party, and that "boatloads of damage" thing applies just fine in the other direction.
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Apr 3, 2016 14:59
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Cripes guys, slow down with the spoilers already. This is turning into a CIA document.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:53
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Random_Username posted:Does web count as a hostile spell? If you use it and it hits a guard, is that bad news or do they not care? I'm pretty sure, but not 100% positive, that friendlies only care if you directly deal damage to them. But there's precious few ways to mess with friendlies without hurting them. Amusingly, I'm pretty sure dumping Quickfire in a town is not considered a hostile act so long as the initial tile is not on a friendly creature.
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Apr 9, 2016 18:25
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One of the things I really like about this game is that the various plagues mostly feel legitimately threatening. Even the slimes, which are Cliche Introductory Monster #1, are causing major trouble, and are a believable threat both narratively and mechanistically. That Helm of Alertness is about as good as helmets get, by the way -- 4+1 defense, no encumbrance, and a useful special ability. There are other top-tier helms, but when I last played I ended up using that helm for most of the game on my solo "party". The Basic Necklace is a mainstay as well, what with how unrelentingly nasty acid can be.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:19
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Random_Username posted:I was always annoyed by the force barrier in the slime pit. I don't like not being able to explore something fully and having to backtrack. I think there may have been a secret passage in there with a piercing crystal, though (or maybe I just cheated one in?)? Those things were rare as hell and I always saved/reloaded after using them to find out what's behind a barrier and whether it's worth my time. Piercing Crystals can be bought cheaply in this game if you know where to look. I presume that berryjon will show off that particular section of the game when it becomes relevant. But the whole "try something, if it fails, reload save" thing is sadly not too uncommon in these games -- piercing crystals, lockpicks, and alchemy all can fail and use up consumables in the process. And there's also Capture Soul -- you can "capture" friendly NPCs like that Empire Archer, say, and summon them later, but the spell is so expensive energy-wise that when you fail you'll probably want to save/reload (faster than leaving town, resting, and coming back).
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Apr 13, 2016 22:44
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The fact that the slimes are masters at infiltration is also notable. You have a wall? They'll ooze through the cracks. No cracks? They'll erode it until there are some. Just look at Colchis -- those ruins didn't come from human action. Nowhere on land is safe -- and presumably, once they'd done enough damage locally, they'd start creating more slime pits to spread even further...
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Apr 14, 2016 01:31
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Getting access to the Tower of the Magi is the most important part of cheesing your mages in this game. Not just because of Solberg, X, and Mother Clarisse, oh no. That tithe box? If you donate there, then pray at the altar, then the INT of everyone in your party is increased by 2 points, assuming it's not below...I think, 15. Which is a nice and reasonable reward for the pious...except that Jeff Vogel forgot to make it non-repeatable. So you can trivially get 10+ points' of INT (6 levels' worth of skillpoints) on every caster as soon as you get to the Tower, making your Bless, Haste, and attack spells all preposterously powerful for this point in the game.
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Apr 21, 2016 22:20
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Man, I'd hate to have to drop everything and run back to a specific town that has a healer, to pay an extortionate fee every time one of my party members died. And don't dead party members drop all their gear? Hope you have spare inventory space/carrying capacity for it all! Solo parties for life, yo -- any death is a de facto party wipe. I think this is one area where the reremakes made a significant improvement. Death is still problematic in the short-term, since there's only rare consumables and an extremely expensive spell to fix it. But in the long term it's easier to fix. And to compensate, it's a lot easier for characters to die, as the last-chance hitpoint thing (where you can only die if damaged when at 0HP) was removed. Well, easier except for original-series basilisks (reremake basilisks just paralyze you). Why Vogel ever thought it was a good idea to give a monster a spammable ranged attack that can instantly kill your characters, I have no idea.
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Apr 22, 2016 19:16
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I'm pretty sure that Exile 3 finally made it so the various "Mass Whatever" spells only affect enemies that you can see. No more casting Slow Group and slowing everything in the dungeon, no more using Shockwave and "accidentally" clearing the dungeon out. They're still broken as hell spells...they just aren't quite as broken.
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Apr 23, 2016 00:46
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Tax Refund posted:I wonder who knows Erika's personal sigil and could copy it? And would be foolish enough to do so, given how Erika would react to being framed? Art was behind it all along! 
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Apr 23, 2016 01:30
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berryjon posted:
To see Erika's reaction when she realizes what you've done? Yes.
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Apr 23, 2016 02:20
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"Do I look like someone who will summon a tentacle monster?!?!
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LuffyVeggies posted:There are others such as "expensive", "somewhat pricey," and "utterly ridiculous," but I don't know their exact changes. What I do know is that I believe there is only one shop in the game that has the latter price, and the description is entirely accurate. I'm pretty sure that Utterly Ridiculous shows up several times. Generally it's when the shopkeeper hates your guts.
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Apr 27, 2016 01:09
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JustJeff88 posted:That is a bonus non-canon update after everything is done if I've ever heard one. It'd basically amount to dousing her in an antimagic field and then surrounding her so she can't move. Her melee is nothing much, so that renders her helpless, giving you time to take out the Doomguards (or just ignore them; a sufficiently strong Bless spell will make your party borderline impossible to be hit in melee). Then it's just a matter of overcoming her 40 armor so you can damage her, which is IIRC not an insurmountable task. It'd take a long time and be expensive on the energy potions, but those are available in infinite supply with enough grinding (as is, thanks to the random shops, everything that is not literally unique).
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Apr 27, 2016 02:15
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It might also be something as simple as "exposure to any light that ultimately came from the sun is lethal". In which case reflected moonlight might kill her too...and thus even if she were on the surface, she wouldn't be able to see anything unless she was in a sealed room using candlelight, glowing moss, etc. In which case, what does being on the surface accomplish?
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Apr 27, 2016 18:43
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Zebrin posted:But on the other hand, there is no real way for her to, you know, come to the surface to place the thing in the first place. ...god dammit, of all the reasons why Erika didn't do this, why didn't I ever think of that one? 
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Apr 29, 2016 02:56
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Merry is by far the most important of the generic shopkeepers, since he/she provides identification and buys loot. So it's a good thing Merry is so common. The other generics IIRC are Provisioner, Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Fletcher, and Tailor...food is kind of important but there tends to be plenty available unless you do a lot of resting, arrows are only important if you're running an archer (not generally advisable), and as for the others, you generally find your gear in this game, rather than buy it.
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May 1, 2016 03:00
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That would be telling.  But multi-tile monsters will still usually be pretty rare.
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May 2, 2016 01:08
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Charm Foe has one amusing use in this game beyond its obvious application: there's at least one NPC in a town that uses the Evil Priest sprite. Evil Priests are normally hostile. Jeff Vogel forgot to make this one non-hostile. So you'll be exploring an otherwise-friendly town, open up the door to the scribe's shop, and a priest will start throwing Wound and Summon Spirit spells at you. But if you charm him, you can talk to him anyway! I think he sells identification services.
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May 5, 2016 01:13
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berryjon posted:You can also take a boat there, if you're willing to take the long way around. (spoilers, you can get a boat on the Surface) Wait wut. 
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May 5, 2016 01:59
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