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[twillight]

After all the not-great to piss-poor experience with game, I went back the Baldur's Gate, and started a second Solo Poverty playthrough.

I made the first with a Sorcerer/ess, who is currently residing befor Abazigail. What means like 3 more battles, butI'm just doubting it, and got bored - you know the feeling.

This one is a Medic/Thief. Yes, I'm starting the movement of removing racism and biggotry from RPG again. Sue me. Point is, I'm kinda enjoying this character. With a ton of stat-requirement and min-maxing my chances, s/he has 3 charisma, so it is interresting to see what NPCs even if their life depends on it won't hire an ugly hero. The other fun thing is to use all the unused spells, like Barkskin, Shillelagh (which I still can't write down w/o looking up the spelling) etc.

The Solo Poverty Challenge by the way can only be taken a very selected few character.
Obvioulsy no character who is not a caster can do it. And the caster must be a pure caster to get access spells asap, and in large quantity. The only exception from this might seem to be the monk, although with its piss-poor conditions that'd likely fall back to South Park-style WoW-exping, exp-cap obviously removed (set to 8,000,000 of ToB). Its problem is Spellhold, where you MUST cause some ranged damage to get rid of goblins on pillars, and monk has no such ability, not even from HLAs.
And thieves' only real and above all lethal power is laying traps, what is not possible in every situation.

This leaves Sorcerer/ess, Medics, and Tree-huggers.

Hippis though get the short end of the stick with their spell-selection from the three. They have poor casting conditions (Call Lightning only works outside), sluggish casting speed, terrible stat-requirement (charisma as not-dump-stat?!? Good luck rolling.), questionable spell-advancement (they get their first summon/meatshield/attack power at 7,500 exp when Medics get at3,000!), and they can't multiclass. Their only advantage can be the Summon Elemental Prince HLA, but you have to reach there first.

Now Medics have the issue on theother hand, that they don't realy have a progress in High Levels. Not many abilities, no repeatable selection. They are also slow casters, and the class' biggest advantage, namely items that can buff them to outshadow pure fighters-without-whirlwind does not play in Poverty (aka. no use of any items). So it seems the ideal setup is running a Medic/Thief. I find 19 STR very useful for combat and bashing doors (and other locks), so I go with Half Orc, though for Shorty Saves you might choose Gnome, like this guy did:



And on GoG's board someone pointed out a technicality. Mages in theory can start each section of the BG-trilogy separately. This means they can pre-pick a lot of spells, thus might not have to rely on scrolls to have a partitura.
Well, none tried that, and without looking up what this selection can be, I simply mention it.
But might turn out like Sorceress, which is far away from being overpovered w/o Robe of Vecna and Amulet of Power (aka. the items which lessen casting speed), and have to have a very specific set of spells to succeeed:

Latest spell list:

lvl 1: 1) find familiar 2) magic missile 3) (identify) 4) prot from evil 5) prot from petrification
lvl 2: 1) knock 2) melf's acidic arrow 3) mirror image 4) resist fear 5) (blur)
lvl 3: 1) ghost armor 2) melf's minute meteors 3) skull trap 4) - 5) -
lvl 4: 1) improved invisibility 2) stone skin 3) spider spawn 4) - 5) -
lvl 5: 1) spell immunity 2) (prot from electricity) 3) sunfire 4) (cloudkill) 5) -
lvl 6: 1) death spell 2) prot. from magic weapons 3) true sight 4) improved haste 5) (true sight)
lvl 7: 1) mordekainen's sword 2) limited wish 3) (khelben's warding whip) 4) - 5) -
lvl 8: 1) pierce shield 2) abi dhalzim's 3) (simulacrum) 4) -
lvl 9: 1) chain contignency X) dragon's breath X) summon planetar 2) wish 3) time stop 4) improved alactricity

In brackets are spells I did use, or consider a good choice for later but actualy could (have) live(d) without it to that point, so can be changed. "-" means on that slvl I did not use any more spells from the selection, so can be inserted any from the tier. As this is/was a prototype character, Shadowkeeper was used to prevent me from the need of constant re-starting. Medics and Druids don't have this problem as they get access to all spells of their levels.

An additional note: I considered quest rewards as quest items, and tomes/manuals to be unanounced quests, and their use for quest purpose to consume them. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I thought that was ok, and as a price I included Identify to my spell-selection, so there.
My Medic/Thief does not use this ~exploit.

And before I forget, here is the Basilisk Area of BG1, so you don't have to waste time exploring. Blue means random monsters (gnolls and such), purple is the adventurer-group, grey are the basilisks (including Mutamin's group).


Baldr104.jpg

[twillight]

Well, I pushed my Sorcerer/ess to Abazigail. Have no real interrest trying to push through the last couple of fights, I simply do not believe in this character, my joy gotkilled.


Also started a Monk. It was ok until the Save The Princes part I think, then realised,Sarevok will simply murder me unless I push the exp to lvl 20 to become immun to normal weapons. THEN I realised Monks can not pass Spellhold lacking ranged damage, thus I abandoned the character.


Then there's my latest Cleric/Thief. I don'trly mind the cleric part here, as I just pretend it is a Thief-kit. Either way prefer to call it Medic when I have to.
It lacks raw head-front power, but it's realy a new experience because of it. It lacks casting speed, so it falls back to the never-before used summoned gear (weapons, armor), summoned things (types I never used before as they are weaker than Planetar), and buffs. And Hidein Shadows/Sanctuary.
Yes, a lot of fights simply got skipped for lacking the power, or more often speed to deal with it. Fortunately solo characters are never short on exp.
I'd say, by the look of it, C/T is what's made for Poverty runs IF you consider Throne of Bhaal, and it is pretty solid for BG1 to. TheBG2part won't offer that much difference, might even be underwhelming for not being able to do the usual things, but for BG1 I recommend trying it for its uniqueness.
And wish me luck for ToB.

[twillight]

Tried to look up some mobile-games because why not, and:
- there is no arcade shooter category
- can't find Diablo Immortal! Not that I wanned to have anything with it, I justhad mobile device in my hand, and though look up how it goes for Blizzard. Seems not good.

[twillight]

1) Can you escape the 100 rooms - 50 rooms: this is some bullshit find item / point&click combination game, which just doesn't work. Theclunky, unintuitive controls are one thing. But imagine this: right in the first room there is an electrical padlock. There are 9 buttons on it. There are NO clues what you have to type in, how long the sequence is, howmany sequence you need to type in... You actualy have to GUESS like halfadozen combinations, which range from 7 to whatever button pushed.
This is just crap.

2) Shooter. Yes, that's the title. It's your generic arcade shot'em-up. That was one thing I was looking for. The problem is, like with many other mobile games of this kind, that itlags I assume. The plane does not follow your finger fast enough, and even slips from under it. That's just bullshit.
Then for this take into account that the powerups don't make you stronger in the normal sense, they make you BIGGER. Now that's bullshit in these bullet-hell games.

3) Exiled Kingdoms: this is an honestly pretty good RPG. I'm notsurehow RPG it is of course, but you get NPCs, timered skills, skillpoints, quests, areas...
Here is where my problems begin. In a PC-game you have pretty good hardware when it comes to that. On moblie your memory is VERY limited, andI assume very static, the world is not dinamicly created, meaning the whole area -wether you see it or not - is rendered.
Then the graphic: a bit lackluster, like PC decades ago had this quality.
So I think mobile is just not the platform for these kinds of games, especialy considering mobile devices feed on energy, you can't play 24/7.

4) Fallout Shelter: man, I need a manual. The texts are too many, go away too fast, things happen too frequently to read the instructions, and some darn forsight would be welcomed, like I built - as instructed - 4-6 rooms or so, only THEN the game told me, it'd be a good idea to build the rooms expandable. Thank you game.

5) Dark Sword: your average beat-em-up game, like Golden Axe, only simpler but with more abilities. It looks ok.
UPDATE: this is heavily currency-based, and to top it of, aside the highly overpriced shop, it doesn't play the adverts for the by the way miniscule free stuff. So my hopes are diminished. We'll see how far I get. I bet not far.
UPDATE: Well, this thing is crap. You don't get extra moves daily, or other regular intervals. Maybe monthly? So it's uninstall.

6) Swat And Zombies 2: obviously based upon Plants vs Zombies, and is obviously built as a money-thinker, but if I can figure out the monetary system, this might just be fine.

[kunleben]

Me i don't really fancy adventure games... i prefer Pes or FIFA!

[twillight]

Originally Posted by kunleben

Me i don't really fancy adventure games... i prefer Pes or FIFA!

I've never managed to figure out group-sports-games. And they obviously cheat a LOT. Sorry.

[DrWho42]

i'm fond of fancy adventure games personally

[twillight]

Originally Posted by DrWho42

i'm fond of fancy adventure games personally

Ok, I'll pull out my adventure games from the pantry.


Let's mention that Im currently updating a gamebook which I was never satisfied with (for really bad editing).

[twillight]

As GoG gave a special discount in email, while the game was not even on sale (usualy it is +5% in comparsion of the sale-price), I took it. And with 32 bit really running thin, I'll have to upgrade to 64 bit, and then I'll maybe be able to play this.
It is the definitive edition by the way, so good for me. This might turn out to be my next classic-level game finaly.

[twillight]

GF is literaly ancient now. I have no idea about videocard-requirements and such utter &#@, but it not evenstarting is &@#.


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Otherwise I think during the weekend I'll finish Kult:Heretic Kingdoms:Inquisitor, and these games wait on my backlog to atleastbe installed:


- toonstruck
- obscuritas
- noctropolis
- cosmic star heroism
- dex
- whispers of a machine
- mary skelter
- mable&the wood
- book of demons