Pool of Radiance on C=64... That brings back some memories.
I admire you, opting to play it on good old Commodore, with 8 discs that you have to switch more often than not. And I had misfortune that one of the discs had it's battle bit broken, so if it came to the battle, I had to switch quickly to another disc or the game would crash.
But all in all it was a great game which I enjoyed very much.
Some tips, well, as you know the game uses the old AD&D set of rules, which had this stupid idea that to compesate for humans not having any advantages to other races, they should put the level cap on those races for certain classes and live it unlimitted for humans. If I recall correctly, half elf clerics can only advance to level 5 and dwarf warriors can go only to level 9. The only exception are halfling thiefs that have no limit here.
It won't make too much difference to you, considering that level 6 was the top limit for all classes in this game, but if you wanted to transfer your characters to the Curse of the Azure Bonds, for example, it becomes annoying.
You obviously noticed that this game has no Ranger or Paladin class. To compensate that, they were giving the player an option to change his fighters into one of those classes in CotAB. But that's a different story.
As for in game tip, the game has an ability to measure your party strenght when deciding on opponents to send against you. That's for the random ecounters, of course, not pre set ones. For example, when you walk into The Slums at the beginning, you will fight only goblins and kobolds. But when you advance a level or get some magic items, it adds a bugbear to them, or brings some orcs. Very clever, but due to games general inbalance that could mean that you will get smashed as soon as you get a level for your thief, with the rest of your characters still level 1. So sometimes it's worth postponing advancing a level, but don't wait to long. If you have enough experience to advance a couple of levels, as soon as you advance the first one, the game will round your experience down to the minimum for the next level - 1xp. Very dumb.
That imbalance shows all through the game, to the very end. So, even if you modify your characters to have maximum stats (you can do that when creating them) and you advance them all to the maximum level and have them all have the best equipment available in the game, you will still have hard time going through the last couple of battles.
But even with all those flaws, it was one of the best games when it came out and after all this years it's still a great fun playing it. Enjoy!
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