Arcanum First time Arcanum player, need some general guidance

[Master]

Just buy two other rings, what's the big deal.

 

[Nas92]

Spoiler

Can I get Arronax to join me if I'm lower level than he is? I know that as a rule a follower won't join you if they're higher level, but wouldn't this be an exception. Also, how come Virgil doesn't say shit during the conversation with Arronax? I feel as if he's supposed to say something.

 

[Egosphere]

Can't answer about Arronax, but Virgil will talk when he meets

Spoiler

Kerghan

 

[Nas92]

Spoiler

Okay, so he does join me, but his portrait won't show up. Though that may be because I already have so many followers there that the portrait is simply not added. Whatever the reason, it will def be more cumbersome to bring him along, but maybe he's a voiced companion and that's always welcome. Also, how come he is such a shit wizard? He doesn't even have a single spell school fully learned, let alone being a master in anything.

 

[Egosphere]

It won't matter. By the time you reach the end, you should be eviscerating the villain in a few turns even without Arronax

 

[Elex]

no point discussing arcanum balance

 

[Egosphere]

no point discussing arcanum balance

The game needed Sawyer, disciple of Kaitan

 

[Master]

Actually Arcanum is supposed to be disbalanced but with tech stronger than magic so I wonder how Sawyer would be able to cope with this basic premise of the game.

 

[Nas92]

So I finished the game.

Spoiler

Did not bother at all with the other exiles, too much trouble. I picked up Arronax and went straight into Kerghan's castle. With Persuade Master I managed to talk him into jumping into the Vendigroth Device. My only question is: When did Nasrudin die? Arronax's ending says he buried his father. I was not aware he died at all. Is this something that would have been in the game had they not been forced to release a year earlier? Also, I did not get an ending for Cumbria, even though I did all the quests.

 

[Harold]

Nasrudin - It's implied that banishing you to the void kills him, since he has to do it all by himself instead of with the help of his other mage buddies from the council, as he did previously with the other exiles - i.e. the banishing spell is very taxing. In fact, if you kill him when you meet him, you instantly get banished - as if he had it stored BG2-style as a contingency upon his death.

The ending slides sometimes bug out & skip over stuff. You should get a slide if you either did the taxes quest or arranged for the old king to be brought back from the Isle of Despair.

 

[Average Manatee]

Real talk: Constitution is the true dump stat of Arcanum. Investing in Fatigue gives 4 fatigue per point, in Constitution 2 fatigue per point + very minor regen. 8->20 in constitution adds 24 fatigue and .3 fatigue gain per second vs. 48 fatigue from direct investment in fatigue, or 160 seconds of waiting around in combat for Constitution to be better than pure fatigue investment. And does anyone think pure fatigue investment is a good idea? I thought so.

Beauty is pretty shit but I'd take 1 Constitution any day without blinking while 1 Beauty kind of sucks unless you spend your whole time in towns with multiple Purity of Waters running (which is 100% viable even for tech characters, so do as you please).

Doing a Half-Ogre techie gunslinger w/ Miracle Operation and its pretty dang good. Basically only need to raise Dex, since Int and Per can be buffed to the needed values just by consumables. Net useful points from background is +8, which is fucking ridiculous. Of course you need to know where to snatch the Looking Glass Rifle or beeline to Elephant gun in order to actually fight.

Question for those knowledgeable: Do guns work like magic spells where the damage isn't truly random but depends on your tech affinity? e.g. raising your magic affinity makes harm more powerful, does tech affinity make your guns similarly more powerful, or is it just avoiding critical failures by being non-magic?

Actually Arcanum is supposed to be disbalanced but with tech stronger than magic so I wonder how Sawyer would be able to cope with this basic premise of the game.

It's sensible in the context of the game. Tech is overall supposed to be stronger than Magic, but there's nothing in the game to suggest that the single strongest tech character is supposed to be more powerful than the single strongest magic character. Indeed the game generally assumes the opposite, all of the big bads of the game are ancient magic powerhouses, not super-tech guys.

The advantage of tech over magic is in things like industrial production, huge population growth, massive conscript armies, and railroad logistics. The whole Dernholm vs. Tarant war is all about a tiny group of elite knights that can massacre whole armies if they get close, but Tarant can field immense numbers of gun-wielders that require no real training or skill to annihilate Dernholm's armies on the open field. This obviously isn't something the player character's small group really takes advantage of, for them the best possible strategy is still wading into melee and massacring things with 20 attacks per turn at +20 strength damage per hit. Sadly there's no option to charge into the void with 5,000 level 5 soldiers wielding basic rifles to shoot Khergan's shit up.

 

[Master]

Yes but there's no reason magic couldn't do those (massive armies, populations etc) too. Transportation for example, even more efficiently. I can't remember where it was but somewhere in the game it's suggested that the prevalence of either tech or magic, is periodic. Something about the world passing through some kind of "fields" or dimensions in periodic intervals. So the current state has less to do with Tarrant ingeniously applying tech but more just being technology's "due time". Bates's engine could be just a coincidence and at another time it might've simply not worked.

 

[Average Manatee]

Nah, there was a definite population explosion of humans almost immediately after Gilbert Bates revealed the steam engine.

It's hard to speculate exactly what magic can and can't do but it seems that magic is almost always only active on a personal level. Maintaining spells on other people in-game is very taxing for a mage and can't be done long, there's no real way to do something like maintain a large, constant crop fertility spell that would compete with the ease of fertilizer. Maybe some of the greatest mages in history, but there might be a dozen of them on the planet and they can't be everywhere. Similarly tech equipment is easily mass-producible while magic equipment may not even really be producible at all. Almost all major magical equipment is found on powerful magical NPCs, it's entirely possible that the major enchantments aren't directly doable and only achieved by the ambient magic aura of a powerful character slowly seeping in to what they use. The only in-game thing that really breaks these constraints is teleportation, but I'm chalking that up to convenience and saying that magical teleportation in-universe would be a lot more limited in terms of transporting companions and lots of equipment.

As to magic waning, that's just a theory in-game. But we know that there was no huge population of previous magical races, all of the races were supposed to be in some kind of harmony previously. The greatest city of ancient history was technology-aligned (well sort of) Vendigroth. I see no reason to accept the slow waning theory, the game very clearly ties it all to a very sudden, extreme spike in people looking for technology thanks to Gilbert Bates. We know that the Dwarves had the device for untold generations, it just sort of happened to slip out to GB and humans.

 

[Master]

Nah, there was a definite population explosion of humans almost immediately after Gilbert Bates revealed the steam engine.

I agree but it may be that it was bound to happen sooner or later, if not by Bates then by someone else(Appleby?). Maybe. Cant remember that book, but it was in Tarrants Library. I only half read it and tossed it in the bin, and now its gone.

Similarly tech equipment is easily mass-producible while magic equipment may not even really be producible at all. Almost all major magical equipment is found on powerful magical NPCs, it's entirely possible that the major enchantments aren't directly doable and only achieved by the ambient magic aura of a powerful character slowly seeping in to what they use.

This can be done and they mention it in the papers; the blacksmith from Stillwater who enchants his swords.

As to magic waning, that's just a theory in-game. But we know that there was no huge population of previous magical races, all of the races were supposed to be in some kind of harmony previously.

We dont really know that much. It seems in the game they are just beginning to uncover the past. In the manual they mention only six thousand years of recorded history while also knowing by some bones that Elves were around 900 000 years before that and had civilization. Who knows what happened back then?
Also it says:

"Roughly 900,000 before the present day, the fossil record shows us a wild outburst of magickal activity, an unprecedented surge of sorcery which affected life on Arcanum for millennia after. What caused this sudden cataclysmic storm of Supernatural Selection, we may never know for certain; all that we can say now is that the magickal agencies at work at that time were enormously strong, far more powerful than the forces which any modern-day mage can command."

So there was a sudden surge of Magical dominance, just like of Tech in the present era...

 

[ilitarist]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Kerghan uses magic to destroy the world, doesn't he? Damned, sounds very Final Fantasy when you put it like that, but still. Magic is still quite powerful. Tech is still far away from anything nuclear that could destroy the world.

We also know that Vendigroth was no less advanced that current civilization of Tarant/Caladon, they have some tech that Tarant didn't have. It's entirely possible that tech dominance is entirely social/political/economic trend, magic is just out of fashion. Cumbria may crumble not just because they disallow technology; it's the fact that they have obsolete monarchy with absolutist voluntarism, they listen to a king who can make such decisions on his own. As it seems other nations may not be properly democratic but they're controlled by some sort of consulates or oligarchs. Caladon and Tarant are similar to 19th century Great Britain or USA. Cumbria is more of a ill-managed autocrat Russia or Austria-Hungary.

 

[Elex]

Nah, there was a definite population explosion of humans almost immediately after Gilbert Bates revealed the steam engine.

It's hard to speculate exactly what magic can and can't do but it seems that magic is almost always only active on a personal level. Maintaining spells on other people in-game is very taxing for a mage and can't be done long, there's no real way to do something like maintain a large, constant crop fertility spell that would compete with the ease of fertilizer. Maybe some of the greatest mages in history, but there might be a dozen of them on the planet and they can't be everywhere. Similarly tech equipment is easily mass-producible while magic equipment may not even really be producible at all. Almost all major magical equipment is found on powerful magical NPCs, it's entirely possible that the major enchantments aren't directly doable and only achieved by the ambient magic aura of a powerful character slowly seeping in to what they use. The only in-game thing that really breaks these constraints is teleportation, but I'm chalking that up to convenience and saying that magical teleportation in-universe would be a lot more limited in terms of transporting companions and lots of equipment.

As to magic waning, that's just a theory in-game. But we know that there was no huge population of previous magical races, all of the races were supposed to be in some kind of harmony previously. The greatest city of ancient history was technology-aligned (well sort of) Vendigroth. I see no reason to accept the slow waning theory, the game very clearly ties it all to a very sudden, extreme spike in people looking for technology thanks to Gilbert Bates. We know that the Dwarves had the device for untold generations, it just sort of happened to slip out to GB and humans.

a book in game cleary explain that a magician can basically do what he want but the power required for "maintain" the reallity he want is immense, but not impossible to achive simply hard. For that reason magic and tecnology are two face of the same coin they aren't in war but they are in a cicle. An inventor that mass produce some advanced tech is the equivalent of a single powerfull mage capable of reshape the world.

GB is just the equivalent of a young wizard that read some powerfull forbidden spell from an ancient book.

 

[Falksi]

First time I've ever had a blast on this. Looking forward to it

 

[Falksi]

So it's taken me some getting into that's for sure, on my 4th character and I'm still no further than Shrouded Hill, but FINALLY I'm starting to get sucked in to the game 6 hours on.

Has to be said, even though I'm not for hand-holding, it's a hell of a slog to get into at first. Yes everything makes sense when you've become more familiar with it all, but it really could have done with being a tad more accessible.

Now that the train's a rollin' though it's really starting to get interesting & one thing I thrive on in particular is the soundtrack, great stuff.

 

[Egosphere]

So it's taken me some getting into that's for sure, on my 4th character and I'm still no further than Shrouded Hill, but FINALLY I'm starting to get sucked in to the game 6 hours on.

Has to be said, even though I'm not for hand-holding, it's a hell of a slog to get into at first. Yes everything makes sense when you've become more familiar with it all, but it really could have done with being a tad more accessible.

Now that the train's a rollin' though it's really starting to get interesting & one thing I thrive on in particular is the soundtrack, great stuff.

Did you read the manual? It's a pretty great read that embellishes the lore whilst describing the mechanics

 

[C.H.A.R.L.I.E]

play combat in real time

 

[Falksi]

So it's taken me some getting into that's for sure, on my 4th character and I'm still no further than Shrouded Hill, but FINALLY I'm starting to get sucked in to the game 6 hours on.

Has to be said, even though I'm not for hand-holding, it's a hell of a slog to get into at first. Yes everything makes sense when you've become more familiar with it all, but it really could have done with being a tad more accessible.

Now that the train's a rollin' though it's really starting to get interesting & one thing I thrive on in particular is the soundtrack, great stuff.

Did you read the manual? It's a pretty great read that embellishes the lore whilst describing the mechanics

I started it and, whilst I think it is a great read, I just couldn't be arsed to finish it before playing the game. As great a read as it is, I don't get enough spare time to myself as it is nowadays, and want to spend it playing games, not preparing to play them.

 

[Bester]

So, a few questions...

1. I raised Pick Lock TWICE and got an apprentice rank and still wasn't able to pick a single lock in the game even with save scamming. WHAT THE FUCK? Did they forget to balance all locks in the game somehow?

2. I find magical items that say "Magic Power Available: 12%". How do I "repair" them to be 100%? Otherwise they're useless, they don't do anything. A ring that's supposed to give +2 Beauty and that's at 12% doesn't raise anything.

3. Iron Ore golem in Black Rock Mountain is unbeatable. Had to retreat. Any tips?

4. Is experience shared between me and companions or divided between us? (found about it in the manual)

5. I got this chick companion that was supposed to be able to brew chemistry and herbology. I leveled her up. It's like she didn't get any level up points and didn't invest them anywhere. Is she ever going to learn new recipes?

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

1. I raised Pick Lock TWICE and got an apprentice rank and still wasn't able to pick a single lock in the game even with save scamming. WHAT THE FUCK? Did they forget to balance all locks in the game somehow?

There is no level scaling, so not all locks will be pickabe just because you dropped a few points in lockpick.

Also, you need to train lockpick at a trainer like any other skill, so even if you max it with points, you'll still be an amateur until you pay trainers to get you to the higher levels.

2. I find magical items that say "Magic Power Available: 12%". How do I "repair" them to be 100%? Otherwise they're useless, they don't do anything. A ring that's supposed to give +2 Beauty and that's at 12% doesn't raise anything.

That number indicates your magic aptitude level, not how full it is of magic power.

The fact that you've raised lockpick (a tech skill) will have lowered your magic aptitude - not that it starts out high as it is.

3. Iron Ore golem in Black Rock Mountain is unbeatable. Had to retreat. Any tips?

Don't be weak?

But seriously, either use weapons that you don't care about breaking, attack from a distance or use explosives.

You can also hire a stronger follower if you're weak.

Last resort: do more quests and level up first.

5. I got this chick companion that was supposed to be able to brew chemistry and herbology. I leveled her up. It's like she didn't get any level up points and didn't invest them anywhere. Is she ever going to learn new recipes?

Probably.

Companions have their own leveling schemes, so no points for you to mess with.

 

[Bester]

There is no level scaling, so not all locks will be pickabe just because you dropped a few points in lockpick.

I can't lockpick a locked barrel in fucking Shrouded Hills near the bridge in broad daylight.

I went to elven ruins. There are 6th level zombies and a locked chest. Sure as fuck I can't pick it either after save scamming for 10 minutes straight.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

I can't lockpick a locked barrel in fucking Shrouded Hills near the bridge in broad daylight.

And? I bet you're not even an apprentice in lockpicking.