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[Casublett]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Kosta @ Jan 24 2005, 11:24 PM) [snapback]56466[/snapback]</div>

Feel free to comment and discuss this game here. Also, if you have any useful tips or tricks don't hesitate to share them with the others! Thanks!

Review & Download
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Despite all the positive press on this game, I could never get into it. It just never hooked me... although I never played over an hour or two.

I'm not sure what it is, but for me Amberstar is the best rpg game out there.
I've played it so many times, and it won't lose it's affection on me. Maybe it's
the overall feeling or the great musical score, but somehow it keeps me captivated.
Unlike the newer rpg's, it's paced really good and it's gets you hooked early on, since
the world is so open and you could do the things at your own time. It also has these
fantastic puzzles which really requires some thought.

10/10 easily in my opinion (and I've played through a lot of rpg's)!

[Torquemada10]

There seems to be a bug in this game, well it certainly appears to be a bug, my paladin can´t learn spells from scroll he has well enough spell learning points but every time I try to learn a scroll it fails and the scroll disappears.
I've tried loading countless times and tried to learn a full inventory of scrolls but it always fails. Anyone encountered this?

[Acethor]

Originally Posted by Torquemada10

There seems to be a bug in this game, well it certainly appears to be a bug, my paladin can´t learn spells from scroll he has well enough spell learning points but every time I try to learn a scroll it fails and the scroll disappears.
I've tried loading countless times and tried to learn a full inventory of scrolls but it always fails. Anyone encountered this?

#1 - Make sure it's a scroll that paladins can learn from
#2 - Make sure the level of the scroll isn't too high for your character

Most common mistake is using a scroll which has a spell that is too powerful for your character to learn. He must have a higher level first. This game has no bug like that, as my paladin (Gryban) has learned lots of spells. One of the most important is healing and anti-poison/blindness/paralysis spells, and for that reason Crag (White Wizard) is almost ALWAYS in my party.

I've finished this entire game several times and I've experimented with different characters and this is my usual party:

Atebash (Warrior) - Primary Melee Fighter
Torg (Warrior) - Secondary Melee Fighter
Silk (Warrior - NOT a thief!!) - Tertiary Melee Fighter
Boldin (Thief) - Primary Thief/Ranged Fighter (ditch Silk/Torg/Crag - your choice)
Trasric (Black Wizard) - Primary Spellcaster (All your main killing spells here)
Crag (White Wizard) - Secondary Spellcaster (All your main healing and protection spells here)
Gryban (Paladin) - Melee Fighter/Tertiary Spellcaster (Healing and Benefit spells)

I'll usually start with Atebash, Silk, Spike the dog, and grab Torg from Jonathan's house. Then when I'm done with Twinlake and the surrounding area I'll head north to Crystal and grab Crag who lives in a little tower in the forest south-east of Crystal. In Crystal, grab Trasric and Gryban and complete all quests. Make sure you complete "Spike's quest" (no spoilers ) before ditching him. From here you can either take the boat and go explore the world, or head to the elven village which lies in a south-western direction from Crystal. In this elven village is the quest where you can gain one of the most important items in the game: the Eagle Flute. I'll usually ditch either Silk or Torg and grab Boldin (Thief) from the fortress across the water to the north-west. Boldin is 100% A MUST if you expect to get anywhere in this game.

An alternative to this is leaving out Crag and just keeping an extra warrior, but in this case you'll have to stock up on ALOT of herbs/scrolls/potions for healing the dreaded Blind (playing area goes black), Paralysis (Character can't move), Madness (character can't fucking do anything, completely insane and even attacks your own party )... Sorry if I spoiled too much

[Torquemada10]

Originally Posted by Acethor

#1 - Make sure it's a scroll that paladins can learn from
#2 - Make sure the level of the scroll isn't too high for your character

Well my main character is lvl 2 paladin and has 21 SLP (spell learning points?) and according to the manual you should only need 2 SLP to learn healing 1 scroll, but my character always fails.

Ok I found out what's wrong, turns out I have zero RMS.

[Torquemada10]

Although the game looks promising it has a HUGE flaw!
It allows only ONE save game! So what? Well I'm gonna tell you what's what from my own experience.
So I've established a nice party and have started to get the hang on the game and it's strange and very uninformative rules. I am crawling through a dungeon, killing orcs and goblins, I enter a room which contains a teleport, naturally I enter the teleporter to see whats on the other side. On the other side is an island namely the lost island! Well that's nice but after some exploring I realise that there is NO way off the island save for another teleporter which is located behind a locked door. I had saved my game before attempting to lockpick it to save lockpicks, turns out it can´t be picked and it requires a key which I DON´T HAVE YET!
Yay! Im stuck on this god forsaken island without any chance of getting back with my only save game wasted inside this entrapment.
How is this possible? What where the creators thinking? I can´t even kill myself, the only method to do that is drowning but my characters are to good swimmers to drown. For shame!

[Acethor]

Hehehe... don't worry my friend, I'm pretty sure this has probably happened to anyone who ever played this game. I made the same mistake myself. If you were paying closer attention, and heeded the warning on the door, then you might have had some clue that danger was within the door, and beyond the teleporter. I'm sorry to say there is nothing you can do, and you must either keep trying and kill off your characters by drowning, or reinstall the game . Something of this exact nature also happens again if you go to the Ancient Mines of the Dwarves to the south-east of Twinlake. IMO it's only a small flaw on the developers' part.

Luckily though, you haven't gone far into the game though, so it won't be too much of a hassle to start again ... hopefully.

I will also warn you about the Tomb of the Pharaoh in the desert to the south. Once you enter, the entrance will close behind you, and you will have to traverse the ENTIRE tomb before getting out. And it's a pretty gigantic tomb with ALOT of monsters. So make sure you stock up on torches, food, and healing stuff before going in there. Especially torches, because if you run out of torches down there, YOU ARE DEAD!! Unless you are super lucky and find some (doubtful) or if you have a Grey Wizard that can cast Light, the game will end for you again right there.

For that matter, Amberstar has alot of places like this, where the entrance closes behind you, and you have to clear out the whole dungeon before being able to escape. If you are really wary of entering places, you could save, then copy the whole Amberstar directory somewhere (don't know if there are .SAV files inside, if there are just copy those), then enter the place, run around as usual and save where you like. If something bad happens, you can just copy back the directory (or the .SAV) files, and the game that you originally saved will be restored.

[Torquemada10]

It would be wise to keep backup of your save files, there are 4 files that need to be backed up:
AUTOMAPS.VGA
AUTOMAPS.DAT
CHARDATA.VGA
PARTYDAT.SAV

To make life easier I made a batch file that copies those files into folder named backup1, the previous files in that folder are moved to backup2 which in turn are moved to backup3 which are again moved forward to backup4, the result is ordered sequence of backups where the newest backup is always in backup1 and the oldest in backup4.
After each backup the previous contains of backup4 is lost.
Naturally running backup.bat does NOT save your game, you need to save in game and then run backup.bat. The backup.bat file must be located inside the amberstar folder but you can make a shortcut of it and put it anywhere you like.

For those interested I attached the batch file to this message.

Originally Posted by Acethor

I've finished this entire game several times and I've experimented with different characters and this is my usual party:

Atebash (Warrior) - Primary Melee Fighter
Torg (Warrior) - Secondary Melee Fighter
Silk (Warrior - NOT a thief!!) - Tertiary Melee Fighter
Boldin (Thief) - Primary Thief/Ranged Fighter (ditch Silk/Torg/Crag - your choice)
Trasric (Black Wizard) - Primary Spellcaster (All your main killing spells here)
Crag (White Wizard) - Secondary Spellcaster (All your main healing and protection spells here)
Gryban (Paladin) - Melee Fighter/Tertiary Spellcaster (Healing and Benefit spells)

I am trying to recruit Boldin the thief, found in the dragons castle, but he says he is not interested in joining my party. Are there any prerequisites needed for him? My main character is a level 2 warrior with a Charme value of 26 or something around that. Do you need high charme for him to join? (I already opened the first puzzlemouth in the castle gardens but did not kill the dragon yet. Well I think you can picture that, since I'm on level 2 and the warrior dwarf from Gemstone is still level 7 )

[Acethor]

No, I'm pretty sure there aren't any pre-requisites for getting Boldin. Having a higher Charisma level only affects the amount of gold you can receive for selling items at shops, and makes items cheaper to buy in shops. But this skill is fairly useless, as even with an almost full Charisma level, the difference is redundant. You save about 100 gold when buying stuff, so it's just a crappy attribute altogether.

What other characters do you have in your party? If you have others, you can try selecting each one and then try to have Boldin join the party. Also make sure the party isn't full, of course

The only other reason that a character would refuse to join you, as I've found out in my many travels, is if you let them leave the party too many times - maybe two or three, it could be different for different chars. But this probably wasn't the reason for your dilemma. And just to test it out, I fired up a game of AS, used makechar to roll my hero as low a Charisma as I could get (6 in this case), and then went straight to the castle and picked up Boldin. It worked fine. So idk what's the problem for you, try the stuff I mentioned up there.

And btw, Gelinda's castle is quite tough for your characters at the levels you mentioned, they definitely wouldn't make it. I suggest going to Crystal and completing quests there first like Lord Chancellor Drebin's quest and Orlando's quest. Hope this helps!