Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Wayward Son]

Did you try DOSBox?

 

[Elwro]

Yes. Was that a joke? Not sure anymore.

The game itself runs in Dosbox, but when you run it in Dosbox under Linux, then the GBC running under Wine (I don't have a VM) will not see it. So you need to run the game in Dosbox under Wine, but then I got the inconsistent results I wrote about.

 

[Wayward Son]

Yes. Was that a joke? Not sure anymore.

Trust me, work in IT long enough and you learn how to ask the stupid questions. Such as, "Is it turned ON?" I don't know about your situation, have you tried looking at WINEHQ for a solution?

 

[Elwro]

Thanks! Unfortunately, WineHQ has no entry regarding the Companion...

 

[Comte]

Thinking about starting another attempt at completing Pools of Darkness this fall. What is a good party that can complete the infamous end game battle? I am assuming several multiclasses.

 

[ProphetSword]

Has anyone worked out a way of running the GBC in Linux? I managed to get it to recognize Champions of Krynn when both it and the game were ran in Wine, but the behaviour was so inconsistent (sometimes I couldn't get back in the game) I stopped trying. Anyone?

You can try asking over at the FRUA Forums, where the developer of GBC tends to answer questions.

This thread, in particular: http://ua.reonis.com/index.php?topic=1913.0

 

[octavius]

Thinking about starting another attempt at completing Pools of Darkness this fall. What is a good party that can complete the infamous end game battle? I am assuming several multiclasses.

You need two characters who can cast Delayed Blast Fireball, and all characters should have 18 Dex (for the all important initiative).
The rest is pretty optional.
A Fighter/Thief is very usefuld for most of the series, but not so much in the final battles. Same with a single class Cleric.
Dualed Ranger/Mages are the ultimate characters IMO.

 

[Comte]

You need two characters who can cast Delayed Blast Fireball, and all characters should have 18 Dex (for the all important initiative).
The rest is pretty optional.
A Fighter/Thief is very usefuld for most of the series, but not so much in the final battles. Same with a single class Cleric.
Dualed Ranger/Mages are the ultimate characters IMO.

Are there level caps in Pools of Darkness for the non human races? So say I make two half elf ranger/mages will they be restricted?

 

[mediocrepoet]

From http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/docs.php?id=1256 - page 47

I'm not editing this for readability, figure it out.

Maximum Level Limits by Race, Class and Prime Requisite

CLASS ABILITY DWARF ELF GNOME HALF-ELF HALFLING HUMAN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cleric Any No No No 5 No max
Fighter STR 16- 7 5 5 6 4 max
STR 17 8 6 5 7 5 max
STR 18+ 9 7 6 8 6 max
Paladin Any No No No No No max
Ranger STR 16- No No No 6 No max
STR 17 No No No 7 No max
STR 18+ No No No 8 No max
Magic-User INT 16- No 9 No 6 No max
INT 17 No 10 No 7 No max
INT 18 No 11 No 8 No max
Thief Any max max max max max max

No: Characters of this race cannot be of this class.
Max: Highest Level Available in Pools of Darkness.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Basically, you want human single or dual classes. Except for your thief who can be whatever.

Edit: I'm not sure how accurate this thing is. It's been awhile, but I could've sworn that elves had a higher magic user max. for example and dwarves a higher fighter max. Might be thinking of 2nd ed. rules though. Gold box is 1st ed.

 

[octavius]

Basically, you want human single or dual classes. Except for your thief who can be whatever.

This.

Edit: I'm not sure how accurate this thing is. It's been awhile, but I could've sworn that elves had a higher magic user max. for example and dwarves a higher fighter max. Might be thinking of 2nd ed. rules though. Gold box is 1st ed.

Or maybe you are thinking of the Krynn games, in which demihuman multiclasses are viable.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Basically, you want human single or dual classes. Except for your thief who can be whatever.

This.

Edit: I'm not sure how accurate this thing is. It's been awhile, but I could've sworn that elves had a higher magic user max. for example and dwarves a higher fighter max. Might be thinking of 2nd ed. rules though. Gold box is 1st ed.

Or maybe you are thinking of the Krynn games, in which demihuman multiclasses are viable.

Maybe a bit of both. As far as tabletop goes, I mostly played 2nd edition, so those racial maxes are pretty much ingrained in my psyche. They sucked, but they weren't as punishing as 1st ed.

 

[Null Null]

Thinking about starting another attempt at completing Pools of Darkness this fall. What is a good party that can complete the infamous end game battle? I am assuming several multiclasses.

Essentially, Octavius has it--get 18 DEX for everyone (because a lot depends on the random number generator) and at least two mages capable of casting Delayed Blast Fireball (DBF)--in practice this indicates a human. As others have stated, no nonhumans are recommended except as thieves. A fighter/mage/thief is more useful since even with the level limits you can use extra Haste spells, though you have to pick between elves (max mage level 11 and can cast Hold Monsters on the dracoliches--yes, you can hold them) and half-elves (max mage level 8, but can be resurrected. Characters die a lot in Pools). Also, dual from a higher-HP class to a lower-HP class as HP are preserved and only begin going up again after the old class level is surpassed. That means dual from fighter/ranger/paladin to cleric or mage and from cleric to mage.

A few side points are worth mentioning.

If you are creating characters for Pools, it's probably easier to have only one pure mage and dual-class your ranger soon afterwards (level 15 or so) as ranger/mages can cast spells in armor, unlike paladin/mages, fighter/mages, and cleric/mages. You should make a beeline for the Hill Giant Steading if you are going to do this as it is the closest place that will allow training.

A little grinding may be in order as a more powerful DBF will allow you to eliminate enemies even if they save. Up to you. A good place is actually the Web Dimension right outside the entry portal before defeating Kalistes--there's a huge random battle with iron golems if you rest that's annoying as heck but can give lots of XP.

 

[Elwro]

So, I'm playing Champions of Krynn and I have a question about the 'Fix' command (of the game, not the GBC, I'm not using that command from there). As far as I can see (which is also what the manual says) it only heals. It does not rememorize spells. So I'm rememorizing them after each combat, which is tedious. I thought the Fix command was supposed to do that. Any help? Or should I use the GBC's store / restore functionality; have you guys tried this?

 

[Jaesun]

Elwro later on in the series (I *believe* after Champions of Kryn), SSI updated the "Fix" command in later games, to heal and then advance time to also re-memorize all the healing spells you have. In Champions of Kryn, the game only heals, you have to manually rest and recover spells. The Gold Box Companion has the improved Fix command, that heals and advances time to re-memorize spells. He added that function so that you could finally use the Fix command while playing Pools of Radiance (which didn't even HAVE the Fix command at the time).

 

[Elwro]

So I have two things, one regarding CoK, the other about the Companion.

First: I explored Throtl a bit and found 4 magical items via Detect Magic. Two of them were scrolls which I gave to one of my clerics. The others were a potion and a shield which I decided to keep on the character who detected the magic for now, because who knows, maybe they're cursed or something. But... they kind of disappeared. Instead of the 2 items there is just one line in the inventory with an empty name (when i {R}eady it, it says 'wrong class', and the char is a mage, so I suspect it's the shield):

WTF? Does stuff like this happen regularly?

Second, I'm afraid I have to report that the Companion 'Fix' command does only what the game's command does: it's just a shortcut for 'encamp - fix', that is, it only heals. What's more, the 'restore spells' command of the companion only partially works: it seems that it does not reselect bonus spells, so I have to reselect Sleep after each combat for memorizing. It's getting kinda tedious...

 

[octavius]

Never seen that bug before, but I rarely if ever use Detect Magic, since with some experience you'll get an idea of which weapons and armour are magic, and can test them by equipping them.

 

[Comte]

I completed the Krynn trilogy last year and didn't experience any item bugs with detect magic. I played vanilla without the Gold Box Companion mod.

 

[ProphetSword]

I will also chime in and say that across all the times I have played the Gold Box games, I have never seen this either. You have either found a rare glitch or some interaction with GBC that has caused an error. Might be worth reporting if you think it's the latter.

 

[Elwro]

Thanks. Still, before I'm sure there's something wrong with the GBC, I think I shouldn't report it. Maybe it will happen again.

But the 'restore spells' option is driving me nuts Can you guys confirm it's working as intended for you? Maybe I'm missing something obvious...

 

[Joonas]

GBC restore spells:
Click STORE SPELLS to store the currently memorized spells and RESTORE SPELLS to get them back. If you change your memorized spells, you have to store them again.
The Krynn-games are problematic as the moon positions affect the number of available bonus spell slots. Bonus spells vs moon positions is not implemented in GBC, storing simply saves the currently memorized spells, including bonus spells.

Item corrupting in Champions:
There was a bug in GBC before v2.33 where autoidentify was always on. This shouldn't corrupt the items itself but use the latest version still. Autoidentify is off by default.

GBC fix-command:
This simply sets hit points to the max. There's no spell memorization / casting simulation / camp interruption as that would have been very hard thing to do.

 

[Elwro]

Regarding the spells: fantastic, so the moon changed its phase and some additional bonus slot became available, which I thought had been filled with one copy of Sleep I used. Thanks! So, to check if I got this, after clicking 'restore spells' I should see more resting time displayed after 'encamp - rest'?

As for the item corruption, well, I'm using 2.34.

Thank you very much for this wonderful tool!

 

[Null Null]

I've gotten mysterious non-items that behaved similarly when repetitively reloading before Yarash's treasure rooms to study the Pool of Radiance random item generator (it's the place it's easiest to generate 9 random items quickly). There'd just be an empty line, and you could pick it up, as I recall. I never tried to do anything with it or ready it, even. I'd just dump it and reload if possible--there really isn't any good that can come of it. You don't know what the effects on your saved game or character files could be if the 1990-era code with 1990-era safeguards is expecting to read in 208 bytes and finds 192.

Some of you FRUAites may remember the mage scroll spell bug that would crash if you scribed all the spells from a scroll (it's avoidable by checking the character's inventory afterwards).

 

[Metro]

Dual-classing is for weaklings. Paladin/Knight, Fighter, Ranger, Thief, Cleric, Mage. Man up, ladies.

 

[Jaesun]

A true D&D game only needs a Paladin, Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Mage and Ranger.