October: Shard of Spring

[Emphyrio]

Think this game is doable without reloading? Make a new party each time you wipe? The manual makes adding new characters to a party sound like a pita

[Watser]

Think this game is doable without reloading? Make a new party each time you wipe? The manual makes adding new characters to a party sound like a pita

There's a fairly large variance in the difficulty of the random encounters, at least from my experience, so it's easy to get caught at a bad time in a bad encounter. If there is a way to run I haven't found it yet.
Doing it without reloading sounds like a bit of a masochistic challenge.

[Emphyrio]

Think this game is doable without reloading? Make a new party each time you wipe? The manual makes adding new characters to a party sound like a pita

There's a fairly large variance in the difficulty of the random encounters, at least from my experience, so it's easy to get caught at a bad time in a bad encounter. If there is a way to run I haven't found it yet.
Doing it without reloading sounds like a bit of a masochistic challenge.

The manual says you run away by moving your guys all to one dot on the map edge

[rusty_shackleford]

[Watser]

Think this game is doable without reloading? Make a new party each time you wipe? The manual makes adding new characters to a party sound like a pita

There's a fairly large variance in the difficulty of the random encounters, at least from my experience, so it's easy to get caught at a bad time in a bad encounter. If there is a way to run I haven't found it yet.
Doing it without reloading sounds like a bit of a masochistic challenge.

The manual says you run away by moving your guys all to one dot on the map edge

Then it might be doable. Note mass damage spells are not available in the first round so I hope it'll be the same case for enemy spellcasters too (the ones I've met thus far have only casted debuffs).
Some enemies are very fast, but there's no attack of opportunity. This actually surprised me as PoR has AoO implemented and was released only 2 years later. I guess Wizard's Crown don't have them either?

[rusty_shackleford]

[rusty_shackleford]

To cast spells in the DOS version you have to type the names manually, in the C64 version you can select them.
Is there an easy way to exit back to menu from combat when it's an obvious loss?

[Watser]

To cast spells in the DOS version you have to type the names manually, in the C64 version you can select them.
Is there an easy way to exit back to menu from combat when it's an obvious loss?

On VICE I've just been doing resets. On the positive side this has also prevented the temptation of going munchkin on level up as having to reset takes too long for me to bother going for even somewhat good rolls.

[Watser]

Having cleared out the first dungeon I was wondering why it was so void of special encounters, just a series of empty rooms.
Turns out I had forgotten to reset the dungeons...

[rusty_shackleford]

Any tips on cheaper healing or faster/cheaper SP recovery?

[rusty_shackleford]

GOG version has the cycles set too high with 'auto' btw, I set it to 600 which is ~2x default.

[Watser]

Any tips on cheaper healing or faster/cheaper SP recovery?

For SP let your fighters do the brunt of the work, reserve your casters for when you stumble into a nasty encounter. Against low-level foes I very rarely get hit, and with leather armor the damage is either 0 or low. I found a town, Green Hamlet way north of the starting town, which will sell both robe, leather and chain armor if you haven't found anything yet.
Resting while camping heals a bit of HP and SP, if you have hunting on your fighters it's self sustainable so you don't have to worry about provisions. Also, so far all unidentified blue potions have been health potions.
Healing in town is only 2g per hp which may be cheaper than resting at the inn. Most encounters will net you 20+ gold so you should fairly quickly be able to build up a bank.

[rusty_shackleford]

Any tips on cheaper healing or faster/cheaper SP recovery?

For SP let your fighters do the brunt of the work, reserve your casters for when you stumble into a nasty encounter. Against low-level foes I very rarely get hit, and with leather armor the damage is either 0 or low. I found a town, Green Hamlet way north of the starting town, which will sell both robe, leather and chain armor if you haven't found anything yet.
Resting while camping heals a bit of HP and SP, if you have hunting on your fighters it's self sustainable so you don't have to worry about provisions. Also, so far all unidentified blue potions have been health potions.
Healing in town is only 2g per hp which may be cheaper than resting at the inn. Most encounters will net you 20+ gold so you should fairly quickly be able to build up a bank.

Green Hamlet is the starting town.
I think you're playing a save that was already in progress.

[Watser]

Any tips on cheaper healing or faster/cheaper SP recovery?

For SP let your fighters do the brunt of the work, reserve your casters for when you stumble into a nasty encounter. Against low-level foes I very rarely get hit, and with leather armor the damage is either 0 or low. I found a town, Green Hamlet way north of the starting town, which will sell both robe, leather and chain armor if you haven't found anything yet.
Resting while camping heals a bit of HP and SP, if you have hunting on your fighters it's self sustainable so you don't have to worry about provisions. Also, so far all unidentified blue potions have been health potions.
Healing in town is only 2g per hp which may be cheaper than resting at the inn. Most encounters will net you 20+ gold so you should fairly quickly be able to build up a bank.

Green Hamlet is the starting town.
I think you're playing a save that was already in progress.

Yeah I did get the feeling that was the case when I realized I had 3k gold. The starting party was in #5 so I just rolled my characters and joined them in #1 and went on my way, started in Spider Bay.
Spider Bay has weapons if you need them.

EDIT: and more importantly, level up your fighters.

[rusty_shackleford]

Spider Bay at the far southwest has a fighter trainer FYI. I don't know where the wizard trainer is yet.
Found 5 towns so far:

► Show Spoiler

• Green Hamlet in the northwest(starting area)
• Southeast(from Green Hamlet, south across the bridge then east) of Green Hamlet is Arcania
  • Southwest of Arcania and Southeast-ish of Green Hamlet is a dungeon, Blackfort.
• Southeast of Arcania is Precious Planes, another small town. It is on the planes tiles.
• Southeast of Precious Planes is Woodhaven, on forest tiles.
• Southwest of Woodhaven is Spider Bay, north of Spider Bay is a lake so you might encounter water tiles that are not the ocean.

Think I'm going to get my fighters to level 3 then go back to Blackfort.

[Watser]

The tavern rumour in Spider Bay gives you the direction for the wizard trainer, "Terynor for mage trainers far to the northeast". I managed to find it earlier and it's a fair ways east of the forest surrounding Woodhaven. My party is lvl 5 now making good progress.

[rusty_shackleford]

Price for an unbind is too high, had a character bound for a while now because I can't afford the unbinding.

[edit]
Oh, just noticed the Break Bonds spell.

[rusty_shackleford]

Having to find trainers to level up was a good mechanic that needs brought back btw

[Emphyrio]

I can't find the gog version at a reasonable and fair price ($0)

[rusty_shackleford]

I can't find the gog version at a reasonable and fair price ($0)

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[Emphyrio]

My 1 hour review

Things I like:
The top-down combat format is better than blobbers
Every stat is useful for both classes
No stupid D&D classes
Armor provides DR
Buffs are strong

Things I don't like:
Combat is slow and guys miss a lot
You're surrounded in every combat
Big group of level 2 wizards wiped my party with mass damage spells (my fault, could have escaped with Wind Walk maybe nope it doesn't work in combat. Whats the point then?)
Seems JRPG grindy and combat is mostly boring
Loot is trash so far

[Emphyrio]

Trolls are shit
"Wings of Victory" is a strong spell

[rusty_shackleford]

I like trolls.

[Emphyrio]

I like trolls.

-3 spd = one less attack each turn. the str doesn't make up for it and the end isn't useful

maybe if you had a party of 4 trolls you could just stand in the middle and tank everything

[rusty_shackleford]

I like trolls.

-3 spd = one less attack each turn. the str doesn't make up for it and the end isn't useful

maybe if you had a party of 4 trolls you could just stand in the middle and tank everything

Yea but you get +5 strength and +5 endurance. One of my trolls fighters has something like 18 movement points now, the bonus strength/endurance far outweighs 3 speed on him.

[Emphyrio]

Seems like this game has Oblivion-tier level scaling. I have now reached a point where I can't go anywhere without a bunch of level 3 or 4 wizards spawning on top of me. I've spent half the game trying to save up money to get my full party rezzed (the free version doesn't seem to work).

[Watser]

Seems like this game has Oblivion-tier level scaling. I have now reached a point where I can't go anywhere without a bunch of level 3 or 4 wizards spawning on top of me. I've spent half the game trying to save up money to get my full party rezzed (the free version doesn't seem to work).

I was wondering whether that was the case as well, but on the C64 version I get harder encounters the further east I go. Around the starting towns I still mostly meet low level monsters (spiders, snakes, kobolds etc.) while at the eastern end I meet the level 4 characters, baby dragons and skeleton mages. There is likely some level scaling but not as extreme as it might be on the DOS version. Can try reenter Blackfort to see if the encounters have changed in there.

My human fighter kind of suck compared to my dwarf, he keeps getting intelligence on level up and not a lot of HP... Stats should be capped at 20 so eventually the madness has to end.

[rusty_shackleford]

Enemy level increases the further east you go, I went back to the starter town to get armor and the enemies were much weaker.

[Acrux]

I'm not even playing this game and I knew that because I read the manual rusty posted earlier.

[Tweed]

The HQer is not a learning animal.