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Completed Let's become the bookhouse boys in Magic and Magic VI!

Storyfag

Perfidious Pole
Patron
Joined
Feb 17, 2011
Messages
15,894
Location
Stealth Orbital Nuke Control Centre
Also, gives insight on your extremely interesting theories regarding all manner of game-building. This is great :salute:
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
KK, so I'm kinda anxious and not being able to do absolutely anything due to my beautiful long-distance relationship finally coming to my town next week (yeah, I know, long-distance relationships are stupid and I loathed them as much as everyone else but derp, a person as batshit insane as I am is bound to have hard time finding a decent couple in my kinda smallish town, the hell you can do?), so atm I can't quite get into the ranting mode, therefore, I'll finish this whole "m&m and fun" thing in the next update. Besides, that one is going to be kinda grindy (i think), so it'll need an extra flavouring, while this one will be interesting (I hope) even without it as we'll discuss economic part of the Mandate of Heaven.

Part V:



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One of the biggest hurdles in a completionist speedrun of M&M 6 is getting to the magical shops. As you just can't afford to sleep around, you're bound to do plenty of adventuring in evenings and at nights, and those lazy shopkeepers work only 8 hours per day - where the hell do they think they're living in, a democratic country? Maybe they want a union too? Some benefits, good insurance and early retirement plans? Lazy bastards. If only instead of the bookhouse boys here was our M&M VIII lich, oh he'd shown him... But nah, we're the good guys here, unfortunately.

The point is, it took us a while to get to the shop & identify all those amulets & rings we've looted from the drake swarm, but at least our patience was rewarded with an excellent air magic amulet. Sparks is our main damage dealing spell and getting +5 dmg per spark (+25 per cast at expert level) is pretty significant. Can't have enough of those. Well, you can, but it's hard to.

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Cleaning up some inventory space, we proceed with our adventure.

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Shadow Guild is an easy, but flavorful dungeon. Monsters here are ridiculously low-tier - you'd have to rush the game areas in an obsessively specific order for them to give you any sort of challenge.

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However, the place is heavily trapped - sometimes (like with these spikes) it's just for show, but there are lots of places here that deal slight magical damage to you.

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And, as you can see, that slight damage can accumulate quite unpleasantly.

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The greatest thing about this place (apart from the fluff and an extremely good loot-to-difficulty ratio) is that it's one of the few dungeons in the game that actually features puzzle. There's a hidden room here, which you can reach only by jumping between different "suspicious floor" tiles in this room. The overall sequence of jumps isn't exactly logical...

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But once you do enough jumps, the gate opens (and if you're lucky, you're even teleported to it).

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It also spawns a single genie - a foe of much bigger caliber than the local rogues, but even so he can't do much on his own.

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The room we teleport in features another genie (this one is unique monsters, but in this case it's actually much weaker than the average one), some rogues...

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And four closed doors, locked by the classical parser riddles. This is nothing surprising for a blobber, but in this game, considering it's mostly about hack&slash, it really felt weird.

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More genies & more loot, but the greatest reward of this place are these 4 teleporting doors.

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Specifically the two of them that are able to bring you to Castle Ironfist. In my lazy speedrun it's not as important, but in a true rush (especially in the 5-day challenge - it's impossible if you don't use these) they're priceless.

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Our priorities lie elsewhere, though. So, cleaning the guild, we've jumped to the Kriegspire. We already know there's an awesome temporary boosting, drake fodder spawning well here, but it's not alone in its greatness - there's another excellent artificial excavation here, pretty much making the game economy's on its own.

It allows us to buy 5k xp for 5k gold (not for entire party - for the person who drinks from the well), basically, it converts gold to xp. Compare our gold reserves - yeah, just now we've bought 85k xp per character, that's about two and a half levels at this point. That's like completing two or three major quests or like killing 30 tier-3 dragons (and that's not an easy feat to accomplish). It's not exactly gamebreaking or overpowering (not for the mage party, at least), but it gives you an actual way to spend your money. Furthermore, it gives some food for the thoughts.

For example, why am I dragging Hawk's merchant skills to the mark of 13? Because selling items is your main source of income, especially with mystic+spell master combo making us gain but 70% of the gold we find. And the difference between merchant 7 (the minimal requirement for skill mastery) and merchant 13 is being able to sell for 66% and 100% at New Sorpigal correspondingly. Yeah, so merchant 13 gives us 1.5 times more gold (roughly).

Now, with it you'll be able to dump somewhere about 3.5kk gold into the well, meaning that this 63 skill points investment buys you an extra 1kk of experience - that's at least 8 levels which at the same stage will bring you at least 120 skill points (and HPs & MPs, obviously). And that's in a semi-speedrun - in longer game (with wiping those dragon areas at least twice) you'll gain an even greater profits out of that.

Another thing to consider (in the same longer game) is gaining merchant mastery for everyone. Training becomes incredibly expensive in the late game so if you go to level 130 (at least), you'll surely recoup your 18 points investment. If you want to go crazy munchkin about this, you can even play crazy munchkin with hireling switching. It goes like that:

1. You kill large batches of monsters (multiple dungeons or overworld maps) with your average traveling npcs. For mages party, it's our current combo, for everyone else it's instructor+teacher for 25% xp bonus (and no, instructor+banker for 15% xp and 100% gold found retained isn't better - the thing is, most monsters give much more XPs than gold, so 10% in xp rewards is usually bigger than 25% in gold reward). You don't loot the monsters.

2. Then, once you've killed lots of crap, you switch your henchmen for a merchant+banker combo and loot the hell out of it.

3. Then you hire a merchant+trader combo and sell your stuff/train. At late levels, just merchant's +6 skill bonus applied to master level skill can easily save you 3k+ gold per trained level.

You train, hire your traveling npc back and, when the need arises, rinse and repeat. Oh, and you don't just hire travelers from streets - you map the houses in towns which contain them so you're not wasting excessive time looking for them. But, all in all, that's really excessive, so do it only if you're, like, absolutely mad about this whole thing (or attempting to go singleton - singleton runs may require this to be successful).

One other thing to note is that you can easily break the game with this (which is not advised) - there are at least 3 sources of infinite gold in it, after all (NWC 10k chest; circus; dragon looting). And this infinite gold means infinite xps, meaning that if you decide to grind the hell out of this, the whole game loses its fucking point. So don't please- even if you want to, just use editor, save your time.

Another this to consider is, well... See, in mage party, every member is more or less equally useful so we spread the xps. In melee party, however, the majority of your late game damage comes from your hour of power+day of the gods combo, meaning that your light caster trumps everyone else. Therefore, you dump all of that bonus xps on said caster, trying to get your light magic skill to a ridiculously high point. Because, well, 1 point in light magic is, like, 1.5 damage from heroism, 1.5 armor from stoneskin, 1.5 attack bonus from bless and a longer haste duration (because it always runs out of power in the most unpleasant moment imaginable). And it's also +6 to your stats, so 4 points in light magic is another 1 damage, 1 armor, 1 attack bonus, 1 lvl worth of hp&mps and 1 recovery speed (which is huge for all non-dagger weapons). I'm counting with the light magic ring bonus here, but you'll find at least one in the obelisk treasure so it's guaranteed. And that's for each party member - no other skill will give you as much. So if you go into melee or balanced build, you just overcharge the light mage.

One word about well's weird scripting - either it's bugged or specifically limited, but it'll either give you 10 uses per visit (until you rest), infinite uses per visit (groovy) or no uses per visit (bogus).

Finally, I must say that this well is one damn great design feature here. It's small, it hardly required any work, yet it makes a whole economy of the game work (which, let's admit, is extremely rare in the world of RPGs) and creates a bunch of interesting choices. It's only flaw is, probably, low profile - this feature should've been more formalized in the game, like, introduced to every training center or whatever as one well is really easy to miss. Still, it details like this that make me say that M&M 6 is vastly superior in design to VII and VIII. Yeah, they've expanded on the system, opening more party compositions & stuff, but most of that expansion were extremely hastily thought so the quality suffered.

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KK, enough chatter, let's do some adventuring. Or, rather, prepare to do some adventuring by training our dagger skills (though we won't need them at this point, but whatever).

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Let's mop up another rather effortless dungeon - Free Haven's sewers.

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They're pretty huge, but they're not as densely populated as the size would imply and monsters here are really weak. I mean, rats, what else needs to be said?

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So it's mostly a matter of long-distance running, a marathon of some sorts.

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There are also some hidden goodies, hidden in the grates here...

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But their quality matches the level of local inhabitants.

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Somewhere in the western section of sewers there's a prince of thieves hideout. The whole affair with Anthony Stone saying that the bugger will hide under his bed (and him literally doing this) is fun, but not extremely hard to solve - in this game, you usually click on everything unusual you see, just in case.

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But we're not done here, not that fast. One of the downsides of being a hero is that you've got to fight all evil you find, no matter how boring that may be. Now, the designers provided us with well of infinite (but slow) healing here to soothe our pain, but, in the end, all this does is making this dungeon even more boring.

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And no, effortless slaughter of hordes of small monsters doesn't make it fun. I mean, it was fine at level 5, but how do you get here at level 5? Well, if you're not rushing it specifically.

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There are also lots of coffee ingredients here. Too bad there's no cherry pies lying around, but it can't be all good and perfect, you know.

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At last, the vermin here comes to an end. Couldn't 've been soon enough.

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And the reward is also weak. The monetary part of it - xps are fine.

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After such borefest it's only inevitable that we do something dangerous for a change.

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The entrance of this dungeon is somewhat confusing - first you have to run around the door until it sucks you int (it seems like a puzzle, only it's not)...

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Then you encounter some really weak (at this stage of the game) enemies, possibly misleading you about the nature of this dungeon...

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Nah, main dwellers of this place are rock hard. Well, death knights, the lowest tier of them, are more or less tolerable...

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But cuisinarts are ferocious - basically, in terms of damage output & durability they're as tough as red dragons. And that's nothing to be ashamed of.

Also, one of the biggest disappointments in my gaming career is related to them. See, I was loving this game as a kid. Didn't know the language that well (that hardly has changed, though), but played it in english because russian translation I had was critically bugged. So, obviously, lots of the things in this game looked crazy awesome to me back then and among the best were these guys - Cuisinarts. Soulless pieces of animated plate armor, hell yeah, whatever. The only problem is, no dictionary contained translation of the word "Cuisinart". But I've never despaired, knowing that it probably meant something like "villain" or "slayer" only, y'know, much more obscure, extreme and cool. Then I grow up, gain access to the internet and what do I learn? That cuisinart is a fucking brand of fucking food processors. Fuck.

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So these guys aren't as spectacular as dragons, but take lots of punishment while dealing plenty of damage. We understand that it's not a time to be conservative and unleash our full magical power on them.

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Shrapmetal is especially good against them since their physical resistance is significantly lower than their magical ones.

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Thankfully, this place is not 100% cuisinarts or else we'd deplete our mana pools instantly. Also note that these enemies are able to invoke the "afraid" condition on our party, however, it barely means anything.

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Apart from the tough monsters, this place isn't special at all - there is, like, one secret room here, but it's not that hard to find and it's not required to solve this dungeon.

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Killing all fighters on the floor level of fortress, we find the quest item we need. But hey, who leaves before exploring the whole place?

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Well, maybe I do. But only to heal then charge back into fray.

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So the rest of this place is uneventful - sparks for the smaller ones...

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Shrapmetal for the bigger ones. And we're done here.

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Ahem, not before looting the treasure ones - the obvious one, opened with two keys, taken from the corpses...

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And not so obvious one, located behind the hidden door on the floor level. I almost forgot about it, but the treasure signs on the minimap helped me here - wizard eye never ceases to be cool.

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We-e-e a-a-are the champions, my frie-e-end.... Honorary ones, yes.

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Darkmoor - time to do one of the worst chores in this game, killing all trashmobs in this area.

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Local undead are weak, but numerous. Even by the standards of this game, extremely so. And they're immune to armageddon spell (that's even if we were using it). And there are also harpies who could've fallen victim to armageddon, but as I've said, that's out of our reach. So we have to kill them manually (well, magically, but with less comfortable magic) while suffering the effects of their curses.

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Lots of skeletons here. Lots and lots and lots.

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We try to kite them so they gather into hordes, becoming choicer targets for meteor showers. Even so, it's tedious.

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Luckily, there's another of those baa temples here so we have access to almost free regeneration. Now if only they could regenerate the time you waste on this crap...

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But we're not here for skeletons, wights or whatever.

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We're after dwarves. Bad dwarves.

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Some oozes, too. It makes zero sense for oozes to be here and for dwarves to tolerate them (well, considering there were oozes in mines of M&M 7, I guess caverns are their natural habitat in this world, and so are mines, still, doesn't explain the friendship between these ones - can you, like, train them? pet oozes, huh?), but we're not here in search of any kind of sense anyways. Besides, as a magic-bases party, we're always happy to see oozes in any shapes and amounts.

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We also find library here, with some spellbooks, even. But they're of the lowest levels possible and are really useless to us.

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Of course, after our struggles with cuisinarts, local dwarves look barely imposing. That's one of the problems with this game - there's too many low-level and mid-level dungeons and too few high ones, so once you level up a bit (and it's extremely easy to level up even without having vast knowledge of this game) going through them becomes less exciting.

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On the bright side, I do love M&M VI for its textures - it really shows that they had more time to polish this game, so unlike with 7 & 8 where all dungeons looked alike, here lots of them have more or less unique looks.

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Another thing I like about this dungeon is that it actually shows devils infiltrating different layers of enrothian society, trying to provoke rebellions & unrest in each one of them. IIRC, it's not even mentioned or hinted anywhere that dwarven usurper Snergle is a pawn of theirs, but once you see these devils here you quickly understand what's going around. Yeah, that's what I like about VI's lore, an atmosphere of mass infiltration and total corruption.

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Wish they had better infiltrators, though, as those devils aren't quite a threat as they should've been. Well, at least we're killing everyone here really, really fast.

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And from one of the local prison cells...

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We get what we need to proceed with these dwarven subquests.

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Doesn't mean we're leaving anyone alive here, though - they're all traitors so it's for their own good.

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We also find that it's finally wednesday so we can travel to castle Alamos.

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We won't spent much time here, however - it's just to make Andy a master of light magic (and also strengthen his sperms in the process, I hope, he could always use some help with that).

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As we've discovered a sign of devil conspiracy, let's strike them back.

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Devil's outpost is a pretty simple... You can't even call it a dungeon - just a room full of devils. We spam shrapmetal ASAP...

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As they can burn out our mana pools with a single attack, so what's the point? Besides, we're not that good at tanking them.

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Had to burn through couple of black coffee bottles, but still, we've cleared this place from our first attempt. Time to learn what the hell those devils are doing (though it would be only logical for them to actually do hell, well, at least raise it a bit)...

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And deviler said information to proper authorities.

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We also bulk up a bit. A tiny bit - I go greedy here and decide not to master body building because, well, mages get only 84 hp out of it. Still, I probably should have - don't think in pure hps here, think in levels. That's still 21 level worth of hps for ya, and if I'm glad to get that +30 lvl well bonus, I should've been glad to master the bodybuilding. Ah, what's done is done, anyways.

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Enough distractions - let's finish our dwarven affairs.

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This place has a different layout, but all in all, it's just snergle's mine mark II (no oozes here).

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One of the points is interest here are ore patches on the walls - they can either give you some money or damage your whole party. Both money & damage come in insignificant amounts, so it's more about cutesy than anything else.

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There are also some bats here, but they're so weak at this stage it's not even funny. We allow Andy to test his light magic mastery on them - why not?

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And some of those crystals can be gathered & sold in the magical shops.

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Waterfall nearby also features a small secret - a random item - but we were not very lucky with that.

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Yeah, tons of small rewards here - slight (but always useful) bonuses to our resistances.

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All this stuff really tries to excuse this dungeon being more of the same.

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Meh, they can't be all winners. At least this place is easy & fast enough to clean up with fireballs..,

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Unless we're talking about final battle, that is, where you are put knee deep in the dwarves - literally, you open the door that key open and a boatload of bearded fellows spawns around you.

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And another horde rushes towards you from that room, so you're literally drowning in them.

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However mediocre they are, in such insane quantities they begin to pose a threat, so we're forced to fire our most powerful spells...

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And when that proves to be too slow, we retreat and scorch them from a considerable distance.

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I don't complain, though - it was actually good to feel at least a tint of danger here, even if it was created by means as stupid as insane copy/pasting. Well, truth to be told, they're not that stupid and can (or, rather, should) be used while designing a good game, it's just that they should be used carefully - once in a while it's fun to get completely overwhelmed (especially if game offers you AoE damage sources, as blasting crowds of enemies at once is excellent), it's just that M&M pulls that trick a little bit too often.

Once we destroy the horde, we meet the little man in the red...



No, not this little man.

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This one. Different fashion sense, different hue, beard and no love for dancing.

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Despite him being a scary usurper, he's a total wuss in melee. Eh, he should've taken lesson from Hitler and never met armed hero without a powered exoskeleton & couple of miniguns.

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After long looting of those many corpses, we find the last curiosity point of this dungeon...

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And finish the quest. Obviously, we have no need for the master axe skill - no one without masochistic tendencies should have a need for it.

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The final dungeon of this update is one of the best ones in this game (if not the best one).

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Too bad you can't quite relay it's grandeur in static pictures.

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Exploring the halls of the firelord is real fun - lots of pathways to explore, some secrets to uncover, some clever trap, good stuff.

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Another strong point is that enemies are pretty weak here, so the focus is on exploring, not fighting.

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The place also looks really pretty (at least by this game's standards, but I really have nothing against VI's graphics) with lots of varying textures.

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Yeah, there are monster filled places here...

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But, as the monsters are weak, even some bad spells can be used to quickly get rid of them.

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And then it's just exploring-exploring-exploring, exploring the different corridors so you can help the Firelord.

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Not to mention that this place features a great foreshadowing, offering you to find an item that won't be useful atm, but will help you a lot much later in the game. And to get it, you need to fight this strange, out of place looking monster. Man, wish there was more stuff like this in this game's dungeons.

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TBH, there's so many pathways here that it's quite difficult to kill everything in this dungeon - you have to be really methodical to find all of the goblins & ogres here. Well, at least the main quest here is not as hard to complete.

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We inform the Firelord...

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But we're not done until we get the strange creature's treasure.

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Then we sell some of the amber that could've been found in the Halls - it's not that profitable, but hey, it's better than just throwing that stuff away.

End of part V.
 

Broseph

Dangerous JB
Patron
Joined
Nov 24, 2012
Messages
4,394
Location
Globohomo Gayplex
Awesome stuff. I feel bad about rushing through MM6 now because I missed almost all of the dungeons you covered in this part.
 

CappenVarra

phase-based phantasmist
Patron
Joined
Mar 14, 2011
Messages
2,912
Location
Ardamai
And deviler said information
:iseewhatyoudidthere:

Also: yay, an update! :D

Try not to get killed by your long-distance visitor, so you can deviler us more of these delicious updates.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
The Pope is still messing around with his beautiful fiancee (although not in a totally codex-unapproved ways - for example, we've played through the VtM:B together) so, while I have little time to lurk over the netz (via the stupid 3g modem, meh), I don't really have the possibility to make an awesome update. Still, next week my fun will end so yours will begin, I think.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
Dianne, it's 1:52 PM (at least at the moment I'm starting to write this update) and I ask you, what is the greatest disadvantage of having a damn good time? That's a rhetorical question, however, so I'll answer it myself - the greatest disadvantage of a damn good time is that, as all times eventually do, it ends. And while bad times do not necessarily follow, in comparison to the damn good time, any other kind of time seriously pales.

And it's been more than a week already, actually, it's just that after all the fun stuff it was kinda hard to return to the usual life. Extremely hard, even. Well, the hell you can do? I can do an update, I guess.

Still, I can't wait for the next summer when, if the things go the right way, we'll be getting married. A scary word for most, but in my case, I really can't be asking for more - she's beautiful, she's smart, she's talented (it's the person who draws my webcomic, fyi), she's a good christian, we're both sociopathic in similar ways, we both love more or less similar music (that's how we got acquainted - and mind you, we're into the drone/ambient scene so finding people with similar tastes is hard), basically, everything is great. Except that we're living a thousand kilometers apart, but that's temporary, I hope.

KK, enough feeding info to all the dangerous stalkers here, let's get some work done.

Part Vi:



(somehow, the twin peaks theme was playing in my head for the whole first two days of my meeting with her, lol)

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We don't really need anything here atm but it's not like we've got something better to do.


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We're greeted by the hissing of cobras, but they're here just for the numbers.


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And numbers are what we can solve, even the big ones.


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Mow, mow, mow, mow,

Mow through hordes of filler mobs!


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By the time we get to our first medusa (which are also more like annoyance mob - they can't really kill your party unless they're unbelievably lucky, but they can stone one or two of your members so you're forced to run back; and that's especially obnoxious when they kill your mobility characters - either the fly or town portal dude means wasting your time; tbh, that's one of the most questionable features of M&M VI - it uses your time as it's main currency and I'm not sure if that's acceptable), we get bored already so we wipe this room and leave. We'll have to return later but for now it's some kind of reprieve.


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Let's work on another promotion quest.


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Y'know, I'm beginning to think that M&M Vi was actually designed with the thought of your party getting ridiculously strong somewhere midway through the game so popamoling through half of the dungeons here is by design.


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Seems like a bad choice, tbh. I'm not sure if Wizardry 8 with its "you think it's just a crab? no, it's never just a crab..." level scaling approach fares better here (because even interesting battles become tedious once you repeat them one after another), but then, is that a level scaling issue or a constant respawn issue?


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I think it's the latter, and level scaling, no matter how reviled it is, must be inevitable.


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For if a dungeon's monsters have became so weak they no longer pose a challenge (meaning they're no longer fun to kill - the thrill of being super-powered melts down to a chore in, like, five minutes), isn't it easier to just empty the dungeon for player? I guess that's another solution, though - just make an insta-wipe option for really underleveled dungeons (just like they did with armageddon spell, you know) so there's less pointless grind in the game.


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I mean, hey, I really love the flavour of corlagon's estate, but it's no Morrowind, you can't get away by the force of sheer flavor here (and, frankly, Morrowind also couldn't - you can fiddle with it, but it's extremely hard to finish it or even walk through the half of it, in my last completionist attempt I've done, like, 35, maybe 40% and then I gave up).


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Another thing that this game lacks is shortcuts. Like, here we do see one - this switch opens the road to the big mofo and can only be accessible if you press another switch (doing a bit of slogging) or if you have telekinesis spell. That's cool, but that's one of, like, two such places in the game. Maybe three. Considering how fun it is to discover such shortcuts (though they should be less obvious, obviously, just having telekinesis to succeed is no fun), they really should've pressed this angle harder.


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And, obviously, Corlagon himself is as disappointing as other bosses of this game. But that's semi-forgivable - considering this engine's mechanics, it's really hard to make a challenging solitary boss.


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The precious gem is in our hands...


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But since we're in a completionist walkthrough, let's suffer some more.


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Boy, at times I feel I'd achieved great things if only I applied my iron will and perseverance to something other than games. But nah, can't do that - where will Enroth be without me? (destroyed as it already is, obviously)


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We spend the rest of the night by clearing Infested Waters from everything.


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Armageddon takes care of the "Eel" part - biggest sea monsters survive with few hps, so we fly here and there, ending them.


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The part of "infested waters" is immune to the magic damage (which armageddon deals) however, so we evaporate some wapory dudes...


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And stir-fry coulds o fugly monsters (who also didn't care about magic damage - armageddon is much more broken in 7&8, where due to probably a bug it completely ignores resistances so it kills even dark magic immune monsters).


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The way aerial combat works here, fireballs aren't that effective at hitting everyone and some of them get into melee range - their damage is laughable but the highest tier can stone our guys.


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Interesting, can you boil coffee with them? I bet you can...


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Suddenly, it's march 20 and it's like Hawk's birthday but better - he always has been a great druid, but now is officially so. TBH, we're having a rather slow completionist speedrun - that's due this being my first speedrun and, since I haven't consulted anything about this, I've missed some tricks here.


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We've met too much stoners in this update - time to do something about that. Of course, nothing protects the stone removing character from getting stoned, so we still rely on our luck in this department.


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Well, let's test this.


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For the bookhouse boys, the greatest threat of this dungeon are these townsmen which medusae are apparently using as a living shield. We're heros so we can't let a single innocent die, yet those dumb people always tend to be crossing the line of fire...


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Still, it's a Twin Peaks playthrough (really), not a Collateral Damage playthrough (because who loves old Arnie?), so rest assured - they'll be safe. Now, Medusae - not so much...


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The chest near the entrance holds a real treasure for potion making - now if only you could've automate said task somehow...

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And then we stumble onto another real treasure of this dungeon - a golden dragon, guarding the entry to lower level. He's no big deal because it's very easy to defeat him (as you can see in Azira's LP), and even without exploiting the engine's weaknesses, it's still just one monster. As long as he's not one-shotting your characters, you'll do fine.

I must add that, while many people hate on the sorts of cheese tactics that Azira have used (if you're too lazy to check - shooting the dragon to death from around the corner where poor beast's blasts can't reach you; not directly in his LP, but you can encounter some negativity towards them in "best M&M" thread), they're missing the point here. M&M VI is an exploration game, and, as I've said, this sort of games must have shortcuts. Finding secrets, finding better ways, finding hidden options - it's a cornerstone element here, so even if developers won't bother to put enough shortcuts into their game, the players will try to make their own, no matter how stupid they will turn out to be. It's something that cannot (and probably shouldn't) be fought. Perhaps, it should actually be encouraged.

Another point of dissent here is multi-looting the dragon - save-scumming so his corpse stays here indefinitely and you can loot infinite items from him. I've criticized him for doing this, but now I've changed my mind somewhat. I still don't approve of it (I'm against savescumming), but, while it will ruin your game in M&M VII (if you do it on the first island) and VIII (because artifacts are really powerful there), it's not that big of a deal in VI. You can't kill dragons early enough for it to really matter (unless you build your party around it, but that's a spellcaster party and it has little to loot out of them), items are kinda sucky im M&M VI and, unless you spend hours and hours doing so, you won't accumulate enough gold to well-level insanely. It's still not a great thing to do, though - as you will see, there are easier ways of getting the proper junk for your party.

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Well, maybe I was understating the power of said dragon in fair combat for just a li-i-ittle bit...

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But it's ok, we heal up and head to gather some snake skin for a pair of new boots.

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Heck, that's a lot of pairs of new boots I see slithering around...

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We kill about half of them and then about half of us becomes rocky.



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But it doesn't matter as now we have a spell for this. The only problem is that we somehow managed to kill one of the peasants - heck, what am I gonna do now, it's out of the character, the whole LP is ruined!!! I'm finishing it right here!!!

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Well, maybe not. Let's show in a lazy excuse that he was a drug pushing pimp or something like that and be done with that.

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What matters is that we've rescued our target...

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But we're not done there - you know whom we're going to kill (well, probably know if you've had experience with this game, but it's not like I'm writing this LP for people who know nothing about M&M, it's not an introductory one).

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There are many intricate strategies to killing Q, but we decide to simply blast the living crap outta him. Even with his thousands of HPs, he shouldn't last long against us.

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Besides, his only offensive capacity is his finger of death spell (with low chance to proc due to our resistance - 2 or 3 % maybe), and even that is easily mitigated by raise dead spell.

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And so after a bunch of rounds he falls. If you ask me, the "proper" solution here (i.e., the one that was forethought by the designers) is easy - it's not about kiting or overleveling or whatever. Q has zero resistance to everything and in this room there's a chest with five finger of death wands. See what I'm getting at? My theory is that they thought you'll grab those wands and let the bastard taste his own medicine. But it's not a word of god - just a theory of mine.

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Reward is nifty, though - knowing the monsters hp isn't really useful due to your damage output being totally random, but it's nifty.

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Training time. A little lesson about training costs - here's what training costs for Hawk with his merchant skill...

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Here's what training costs for Coop. The difference seems negligible, but let me remind you - Coop is at his first profession atm, Hawk is at second so his training should be twice as expensive.

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If we'll advance our sorcs up to the archmages (which we can do but are delaying to save some money), that's what his number will look like. That's just an example - obviously I'm not advancing yet, I don't want to waste cash.

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After mastering water and fire and becoming an ultimate merchant, Hawk focuses on his body magic skills. He'll want at least 20 points here, and maybe even 30. Generally it's considered absolutely not worth it, but what can I say - they don't know what they don't know.

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For Coop and Harry, it's highway into darkness.

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Andy also can't quite escape the pull of the Black Lodge, however, his inner silliness directs him to the White Lodge with much greater power.

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Well, we didn't put points into body magic for no reason...

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And now we cash in on our toiling through Corlagon's estate.

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Then master the body magic.

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So here's how we look after gaining another fifteen levels. Hawk misses his final promotion atm, that's why he's scrawnier than the rest of our party.

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Time for some truly serious business - let's take on the hardest overworld map in the game, Dragonsands. We come in the usual way, via New Sorpigal hidden teleporter.

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Then, as before, we rush to oasis area. We set up a beacon here...

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And proceed to nuke up this land. Thankfully, there's no innocents here (and oasis locals don't seem to be bothered by it).

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Obviously, our armageddons barely kill anyone, but finishing the lower monsters after them is much easier than killing them from the scratch.

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Soon, we kill enough monsters so we can do a modicum of safe looting.

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And we're lucky - immediately we find one of the key items for us, a ring of light magic.

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Just look how pumped up we've become.

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We've also forgot that with the archmage status comes the mastery of air magic - let's rectify our mistake.

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Now that the easy mobs are mostly gone, let's clash with the dragons. For a mage party, it's rather easy - you just hower in the air, dodge incoming shots and cast meteor showers and starbursts until you run out of mana. Of course, you can do likewise even if you have just 1 elemental caster in your party, but it's much more tedious that way.

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Because it's not like there's one or two or three dragon packs here - there are dozens of them.

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So with but one caster, you're in for a long and definitely pleasant time...

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But when there are 4x ICBM spells on an autocast, it's easy to get the job done.

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Hmm, about getting job done... We've got a thing to do here.

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We open this battle with an energy saving fireball...

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But then I think - what the hell? We won't burn all our mana anyway and I'm visiting temple afterwards - let's rock without worries!

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As it is midnight, we're promoting Hawk to the really awesome archdruid rank immediately.

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Now he has the proper stats. Note that later into game druidic bonus to mana becomes somewhat irrelevant- like, 60 or so extra mana is nice, but not as noticeable. Better than nothing, i guess.

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We spend the rest of the night in monotonous nuking of dragons.

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Maybe it's not that entertaining, but hey, even the glorious "shrapmetal to face" doesn't work that well against them so it's either that or skipping them altogether.

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And the fun part lies not in slaying the dragons, but in the aftermath of the carnage...

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Generally, items with bonuses to resistances suck in M&M, but Odin is one of the few rare exceptions - it just gives too much not to be useful. Even if you have, like, 500 resistance, a 10% increase is still more or less useful. And, under a day of gods, small speed debuff is insignificant.

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Athena is for the circus games - we'll come to that later.

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Igraine is awesome, but redundant - we'll find another one later on. Still, let me spoil you one of the greatest secrets of this game - artifact & relic rings "of magic" stack with the common ones in M&M VI.

Not only that - they stack cumulatively, meaning that, if you have magic skill of 20, the first one will propel it to 30 and the second one will propel it to mark of 45. Add additional 7 from our henchmen and you're getting effective skill level of 52. The difference is huge - without all the bling, level 20 power cure heals ~50 HP. With it - ~110. That's a great difference there, and that's why it is worth to have body magic of 20 or even 30 (about 150 HPs healed). And just you wait until we find that artifact "of light and darkness" ring...

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Divine Intervention isn't that great, but it has its uses - yeah, if all of our mobility mages are dead, it can bail us out, albeit at the cost of time. It also can spare us a visit to temple if we're lucky. It's hard to use this spell often because of the timing issue (it's available 2 game hours per game day), but hey, it saves us at least a bit of tedium so it's ok in my book.

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Hera is pretty awesome. It's drawback is irrelevant as we won't give it to Hawk, obviously, and huge HP & MP boost is like gaining 10 extra levels for one of our sorcs.

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And here's the rarest enchantment in the game. It can be on any item, iirc, but you'll be lucky to find more than one or two in one playthrough.

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It's cool - it adds 20 hp and 25 mp to one of our boys, that's as good as it gets for the non-artifact items. And having it on a crossbow is even better because it's the only way for our party to benefit from being equipped with bows.

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Dark magic ring - it's hard to have enough (meaning 3) of those, so I'm happy to loot it here.

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Arthur is somewhat mediocre, but at least it's usable enough to keep it.

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Getting done with our many riches, we notice that it's april - let's visit the shrine then.

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KK, enough of sniping targets from afar - let's get visceral.

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If you have at least an expert perception skill (which we do for a long time), you can loot spell scrolls from those skull piles (and so we loot - not that we need them, but the completionism can be quite compulsive-obsessive at some times)

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Then we encounter a local greeting comittee. Well, outer levels of this dungeon aren't that hard - there are few foes here, they're scattered around and, despite what I've said about getting visceral, usually die before they get to melee.

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There are also fillery swordsmen and oozes here. Well, oozes can be hard to chew for a fighter party, but even then it's not about risk - it's about time it takes to whittle them down.

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it's good to fling mighty fireballs around, eh?

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That's the point of my party composition - the only thing that is broken here (because the proper melee party is as broken as it is and also has no problem in cleaning the dragonsands; and mind you, not nuking it slowly - I'm talking about punching a whole desert of dragons) is tedium.

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Also, we're at the point where, if we're too tired to cast spells...

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We can do some melee. Not as efficiently (that'll come after a "light and dark" artifact ring), but we can do it.

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In this corner of dungeon, we find a ghost of some unlucky bastard, bossing us around. The stuff you do for those extra xps...

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So we slog all the way to the other corner of dungeon, encountering nothing interesting....

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And, eventually, getting our prize.

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So this place a purified...

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But not quite yet. As I've said, things do get visceral here.

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In close quarters, greater wolvies pose a significant threat as their attacks can auto-K.O. our party members and that's just not nice. They still are more of a tedium threat than actual threat, but that's as dangerous as it gets in this game.

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Yeah, it's totally gritty here. I dunno. It's not like I'm some kind of prude or whatever (though I actually am, just not in the Al Gore department), but it's kinda strange to see things as mature in M&M Vi. Apart from that, it's anything but dark and gritty, so few assets like these ones really stand out. I can't say that it broke my immersion, it's just a weird move.

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Hey, guys, weren't we defeating you handily, like, 40 levels ago?

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Unlike their bigger brothers, small wolvies are also fodder.

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I wonder what would Josh Sawyer say about this game...

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So we get to the most intense part of this dungeon where the werewolves become really numerous and then our progress is hampered by a stupid annoyance - we're out of inventory space and all the shops are closed down. Meh.

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So we're spending the time until dawn by vanquishing another, now slightly smaller mega-pack of energy drakes in Kriegspire...

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And then we decide to explore another dungeon in this area, one that is easier to backtrack to...

End of part VI.
 

Azira

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 3, 2004
Messages
8,519
Location
Copenhagen, Denmark
Codex 2012
Good luck with that relationship there. Sounds like a good thing. :thumbsup:

But really, one of you needs to move. Long-distance relationships suck.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
Cool update
I was wondering if you will make a LP out of Expeditions Conquistador the way you did Underrail, from His Holiness perspective? Seems like a perfect game for your way of building a narrative in LP
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
But really, one of you needs to move. Long-distance relationships suck.

Sure they do. But not much can be done here until the next summer - she has to finish her last year in the uni so she can't move in here (where we have an apartments to live) and I can't move there because there's nowhere to live (and renting is such a bitch). Not to mention that I'd rather stay as far as possible from her family.

I was wondering if you will make a LP out of Expeditions Conquistador the way you did Underrail, from His Holiness perspective? Seems like a perfect game for your way of building a narrative in LP

My hardware is too old for it, unfortunately. And, to be honest, I was never interested by historical settings, of all options available, they're my least favourite. Dunno why. Currently in my plans there's a LP of Fallout 2 (another one - codex lacks a comlete ironman walkthrough and I will purge it of this shame), then it depends. Maybe it's Fallout of Nevada (if they finish it until then), maybe it's Geneforge 2, maybe it's Star Wolves 3: Civil War.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
Let’s finally talk about the Black Lodge techniques. Actually, let’s not talk about them much because, frankly speaking, it’s not a thing that I’m paying a lot of thought to. It’s logical to be interested in good design approaches, not in the scrappy and scammy ones, right?


First (but mind you, there’s no particular order here) there are good and trusty _xploitation games. It’s a commonplace & basic thing all around the media, but if anyone still wants a simple definition, here it is - _xploitation is all about parasitizing on some rather strong superficial feature that is supposedly worth lots of attention. Putting it in a crude way, it’s all about pooping out piece of shit stinky enough to attract lots, lots of otherwise undeserved attention.


The only curious thing here is that games gave birth to new and rather specific forms of _xploitation. For example, sexploitation, one of the most common forms of it, is not that dominating here (mind you, there’s a big difference between sexploitation and erotics&porn – in latter, sex is the sole purpose of the deal; in former, sex is more like a seasoning to something that can be completely unrelated to it; compare any virtual porn simulator or hentai game to something like post-Lowe leisure suit larries or these new-fashioned erotica mmorpgs). It’s not absent, of course, but it’s not as wide-spread as one would presume. Sure, lots of games exploit sexiness, but they usually have lots of other stuff going around – despite all the Ass Effect jokes, people don’t play ME series solely for that. Ihope. I hope too much.


On the other hand, it’s much easier to find examples of game-birthed _xploitation genres. How about artxploitation? You see, with other mediums there never was much discussion about whether or not said medium is art, but with games... You know how bad it is. So surely, valiant defenders of “games ARE art” quickly appeared, eager to cash in on their noble purposes. Not far from it lies indiexploitation – I have nothing against indie developers, obviously, I’m a freaking indie developer wannabe myself, proudly toiling on another piece of vapourware, even so, I’m strictly against the notion “if it’s indie it’s AWESOME”. No, graphics from 2546 B.C. don’t make you look hip, you’re just saving money there. And you’re also economizing with those chiptune sound effects because realistically sounding ones are a bitch to produce. And our world doesn’t really need yet another gimmicky platformer. However, considering amount of such games released weekly, those arguments are totally futile.


Another trend that I’m sure we’ll see much more of in the upcoming year will be gayxploitation (actually, it’s more like lgbtxploitation, but that’s a mess of consonants) and femxploitation. With the amount of related articles popping on major websites and lots of, shall I say politely, funny people actually listening to that shit, you know there’s an auditory for this thing. Heck, we’ve already gor one feminist hack slurping 120k dollars for simple videos (imagine if she kickstartered a feminist game – I guess that’s what she’ll do once she runs out of attention and money) and we have the now famous “Gone Shit” apparently selling for the completely inappropriate price tag it has. Because sure, it’s art and it touches really important social issues. Just like “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS” is a deep & profound masterpiece depicting the horrors of nazi regime, hell yeah.


Enough with this crap (though, considering the nature of this post, there’s nothing but crap on our menu). Next one on our list is “assuming direct control” mode. It’s when instead of game designer it’s the psychologist who sets up the game, trying to make some kind of Pavlov’s dog out of his “customer”. It’s mostly an app/social stuff malady but that doesn’t make it any better. Honestly, in civilised society, companies should be sued for pulling shit like that. As if we live in one.


Often closely tied to it is social stuff. See, theoretically, multiplayer games must be part of the white lodge techniques – hey, you and your mates having cheerful times together, what could be wrong with that? Problem is, no one wants you to have good times – everyone wants you to spend money or effort (it’s a very literal “your purse or your life” threat). And everyone designs games around that, so instead of friendship and fair sportsmanship it’s social domination & griefing who set the rules.


When it comes to social domination, there are two types of it, both dependant on your real life status (another thing that I hate, bringing IRL shit into games). For the socially unsuccessful folks, there’s always “hey, I put 16 hours per day into this game, I’m awesome! No, you’re weak motherfucker because I put 17 hours! Suck off, you niggas, you don’t ever dare dreaming about my 20 hours!” Ah, don’t we all love a life productively spent?


Countepart to those is entertainment for succesful boys. You know, those korean/russian f2p bloodsuckers where even $200 per month might not be enough. Hell, on some russian lineage 2 shards (fucking shards, man, fucking pirate servers!) people may spend a $1k or more on their overbuffed gear. Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. (also, in many mmos a bridge between these two conditions exists – slavemasters mercifully allowing their victims to choose their favourite form of servitude).


There’s also griefing-based social gameplay that works on a different principle. It may also require lots of time and/or money invested, but the point here is that your progress can be easily erased by other players. You too can erase their progress, though, so it’s like kicking each other’s sand castles. The more effort they put into it, the more fun it’s to crush it. It sucks to have your castle crushed, though. That’s the nature of griefing games – everyone fucks everyone. And it wouldn’t be that bad if only those players weren’t spending their lives achieving exactly fucking what?


Finally there’s an incredibly popular trend atm, how would I call it... Let’s start from example. So you’re in an adventure game and you encounter a bomb. A puzzle bomb – there are, say, 8 wires, and there are lots of convoluted, really convoluted and hard tips, seemingly hinting at the right ones. So you sit, you think, maybe you do some notes, maybe you drink lots of coffee, maybe you walk around, you put lots of effort in it. At last, you input your decision and voila! You’re some smart motherfucker – your choice is right. You save and, out of curiosity, reload to see what happens if you’d chose wrongly – what if there’s one of those awesome and gritty death animations? So you input a different, blatantly wrong answer and, to your suprise, you succeed. Ok, maybe the riddle is proceduraly generated and resets with each reload? You reload some more times, you check the tips (no, they’re not changing with reloads), you methodically input each one of the six remaining wires AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE IS CORRECT.


Ah, the joys of modern gaming. See, when you strip it down to the core, the game is a simple thing – designer sets up a challenge of some sorts, the player completes it, feeling fun in the process. If the game is decent, of course. But nowadays, there’s another approach to this – designer looks like he’s setting up a challenge when in actuality there’s no challenge at all. And people buy this, acting like they’re completing this challenge when in reality said challenge completes itself. An ultimate larping experience, fauxdesign.


And it’s everywhere. It’s not only infesting core gameplay – sure, there are shooters and slashers where you almost can’t die, but that’s not just it. It’s also in exploration (because when you have linear levels peppered with quest compasses there’s no getting lost and there’s no discovering, only handholding) and management (well, fauxgames are rarely complex enough to include proper management mechanics, but you can see the decline in the choice&consequence sections – say, it turns to the point where it doesn’t matter whether your potential love interest admires your actions or despises them, it’ll fuck your character anyways if you wish so; and don’t even get me started on the lack of negative consequences for making obviously stupid choices). And the only reason this decline is not yet in story is because their low-tier fanfic grade babbling doesn’t even deserve to be qualified as a story.


KK, contrary to my initial intention, I myself have babbled quite a lot so “the fun of later M&Ms” will happen in the next update (if I’m not too lazy). Now is


Part VII:



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Caves of the dragon riders is an extremely simple and to the point dungeon.

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There are dragons (kinda), there are riders (kinda) and there's good loot (if you're lucky). Of course, since we're out of inventory space, we won't be looting this place yet, but it's easy architecture & ease of access is the reason why are we cleaning it now.

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Not much tactics here - you throw your best AoE spells (read - fireballs; as you've seen, even in such situations prismatic light is almost worthless) until they approach you, then, once they're close, you unleash your best close combat spells. Usually shrapmetal, but against last survivors you can use sparks for the sake of mana efficiency.

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Once you're out of mana, port out, port in, keep the fun going.

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Rinse...

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And repeat.

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We try prismatic light once again, and once again it turns out mech. Well, it's not a spell for light-wielding wizards - it's for melee party light clerics, who otherwise don't have access to AoE spells (except for the dragon's breath, but those wyrms are immune to poison so it's useless).

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We're also at the point when we begin to get adequate in melee.

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Our sparks are mightier, obviously, but I'm knifing the lone survivors for the sake of real time preservation - there are situations where killing monster in melee is faster than frying it to death with magic. Or maybe i was just tired from mashing one button and wanted to hold (yeah, you don't mash autoattack - you hold it) another?

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Anyhow, the morning has come so we're able to empty our inventories and also gather & sell the dragon riders' loot. The sole thing of notice was this bow - I guess it would've been awesome for low-level balanced party, but how do you actually find it that early? This late into game, bows are worthless.

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Back to our hairy friends. A specialty of this dungeon is that it has several "spawn" points scattered inside - every time you step on one of those, a small group of either low-tier werewolves or swordsmen spawns in one of two preset locations. If you walk around a lot, you'll encounter a ton of them as the result. Nice idea in theory, but it's way too hard to imagine a situation where this sudden spawn will actually threat your party - they're too low-tier for those numbers to mean something.

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More somewhat out of place gore.

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And the final showdown with the terribly huge pack of werewolves. Despite us practically breezing through this place, it would be unwise to rush headlong to their ranks - their insta-KO attacks can still cause us nuisance.

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Andy tries his thing once again - results are the same. And, btw, this thing doesn't hit every monster on the screen - it has a limited range, so it might miss those that are visible, but far away.

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That's more like it.

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You can't kill them all from the safe distance, though - after a certain point, you have to run in. I guess you can run out instantly, kiting and stuff...

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But we choose to stay and fight. Oh, as you see, Harry was knocked out in the previous screenshot, but that was nothing a cup of black coffee couldn't fix.

Also, werewolf boss is another disappointment. It's quite easy to kill this whole mob without actually noticing their leader is here.

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The deed is done, and it all wasn't for nothing - it was for fame, experience and money. And the greater good, I guess.

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Another night to spend somehow - let's do a quest.

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It's an exploration based quest so, unfortunately, it doesn't have much replay value - just teleporting from one pedestal...

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To another.

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Thankfully, our vast teleportation network gives us easy and fast access to almost all of this game's maps.

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Almost, but not all. We'll have to finish this quest somewhat later.

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I also remember that I forgot do another thing in the furrie dungeon, so we have to backtrack a little.

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Hey, he's not dead, he's just alternatively existing! Honestly, man, what's with the discrimination against the undead? Some of my best friends are liches, you know.

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Ok, now we're tying loose ends, prepping to go through the main storyline quests.

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Unlike with Eel infested waters, abominations here are much more manageable - they're tightly packed so fireballs incinerate them much faster.

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The real threat here are the eyes - an extremely annoying kind of monster since they just love to dispel all your buffs. But they have one great weakness - their poison resistance is zero, meaning that they can't resist it at all. So poison spray, toxic cloud and, most importantly, dragon's breath - they're extremely effective against them. Here you see us absolutely ripping one pack of them with one mighty dragon's breath. Just one survives, and that's not for long.

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After we're done here, Agar will probably be forced to open an "Agar's Fried Chicken" restaurant here.

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We'll even help him cook more eye-a-salad here.

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Of course, at close distance and versus solitary eyes we're using toxic cloud - I don't even want to think what'd happen to us if we blast ourselves with our own breath. We won't die, probably, as our resistances are huge, but it'll hurt.

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And the final room, where our buffs finally got removed - see, I had a lucky run here, killing all eyes before they could blink, but that didn't last forever. Oh, ok, at least they're all dropping in an instant. Somewhere amongst them is Agar himself - unlike your usual lich, he's not immune to poison (which is strange, considering the working conditions of his job) so he dropped in this huge blast.

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Eyes drop great amulets & rings, btw - we've found another air magic ring and that's great, sparks is our main spell, after all.

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Training time - 14 levels in one big whoop.

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Hawk gets to the benchmark point of 20 in body magic then switches his attention to elemental magic - he's not gonna be healing us every turn so I don't want his offensive powers to lag on us.

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Coop & Harry spread between air & dark magic...

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While for Andy it's all about black & white matters.

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Here's how Harry looks at this point (and the rest of our party doesn't really differ from him)

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And here's the party sheet.

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Now is the final council quest dungeon - gharik's forge.

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I've delayed it for "quite a bit", as you see, but it had nothing to do with difficulty and everything to do with random chance. See, fire elementals are extremely annoying enemies because they float around so you can't get close to them. That means sparks & shrapmetal is out of question, and they're immune to fireballs (obviously) and dragon breaths/toxic clouds.

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Meaning that our main repertoire is useless against them, so we needed stuff like lightning bolts & ice bolts to hit him. And for the whole 4 game months we just couldn't find enough of those for the entirety of our party.

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Random chance is hell. And the downside is that now this really hard dungeon isn't that hard for us.

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Heck, we, a four caster party, can easily kill local mages in melee - much to their disappointment, I presume. I think they totally expected to engage in an arcane duel of epic proportions, but instead they got four raving lunatics (raving thanks to warlock's efforts, though), unsophisticatedly gutting them with knives.

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This place is still no cakewalk, btw - even with our insane magic skills, lightning bolts deal laughable amounts of damage...

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And there's lots of fire elementals here.

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There's also another place where telekinesis spell becomes handy - we need to push some levers in the correct order to continue exploring the forge, and said spells saves us lots of running (and makes the whole puzzle easier to crack).

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Solving that puzzle also opens door to some minor treasure behind which is easy to miss if you rush ahead.

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More stabbing work for us.

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Oh, and in case someone didn't believe me or wanted to see the effect physically - look at what body magic level 20 + ring + artifact ring + henchmen does.

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114 hp per cast. That's, like, one-fifth of our health pool - quite solid, if you ask me.

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Now for the toughest part of this dungeon. First we're assaulted by this group of warlocks - shiving 'em up would take way too much time so we remember that we have fiery spells (don't forget that they're immune to air - that's another reason we're stabbing them, sparks don't work here).

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But that's just a warm-up before the great number of fire elementals...

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That awaits us in this narrow tunnel. Oh, lightning bolts are so-o-o awesome...

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We're in no danger, but killing them all is kinda grindy.

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At least we get some treasure as a reward for this.

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That wasn't our goal here, though - we were actually headed for this library. After beating the last warlock down...

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We put our hands on this probably magnificent quest item.

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The council work is done.

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Well, almost.

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Search for the cure? Can't you just bring the dude to the temple? Especially to one of those cheap Baa ones - they heal everything and they're really cost effective. Oh, wait...

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Let's get another quest done. So we offer Nicolai a trip to the circus.

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Outside, we get distracted for, like, five minutes, and the little bugger is gone.

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We port to the blackshire (iirc) immediately and guess who we found in the local circus... My only question is how he got here that fast? Like, Nicolai is also a water magic master? Ok, but if he is, why he needs us to escape his castle?

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Well, at least we've done this quest and the ironfist castle is once again accessible for us. We gain no reward for this, but you know...



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Today, our present is gonna be circus games.

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Or, rather, circus prizes.

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Lots of them. See, in M&M VI, dragon looting is pointless because you have circuses. They serve the same purpose and they do it legally. The scheme is simple - you pay a little fee (25 gold, iirc), you get a chance of playing a game, basically, rolling off one of your statistics. There's a game for each stat with sole exception of personality - yeah, as if magic of the self needed to be even worse here. If you win, you get various junk that's worth points. Collect 30 of those points and you get a golded pyramid from circus master (who is a dragon and that's awesome).

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Then go to Abdul's resort in dragonsands and you can change pyramids for highest tier items (there are also kegs, but they aren't worth it - they cost 15 circus points, but they give mediocre tiers so 1 pyramid is always better than 2 kegs).

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The greatest thing about this is that you're getting your items precisely, so if you need accessories (and you need them more than any other kind of items - a simple example here, you need 1 armour per character, 2 daggers per character and 6 rings per character; obviously, rings are the hardest slot to fill here), that's what you're getting here.

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You can easily get elemental rings here. Heck, you can easily get light & dark rings here, so it's a great opportunity if you can't find them elsewhere. And racking the stats to win circus games consistently is not that hard - some wells, some shrines, some pilgrimages, some enchanted items (not to mention the artifacts, that +100 artifact ring really helps here) and you're all set. The only thing is that you must show self-restraint - don't spend hours on this shit, it's not worth it. Besides, it gives you tons of extra gold and extra gold means extra experience - you can break the game if you're overeager here.

Oh, and another thing I'll suggest - see, when collecting his 30 prize points, the dragon will take all the point items from your inventory. LIke, if you have 300 prize points, he'll get them all (and you still will gain but one pyramid). So, since you don't really want to run from one circus tent to another, do this - first, win a ton of point items with your high stat character. Then, drop all of those items in front of the main tent. Then gather 30 points from resulting mound and exchange them. Continue this way until the mound is no more. It's still tedious, but faster this way.

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Kk, now a rather peculiar ordeal awaits for us. Our reputation is golden - that won't do, we need to ruin it to infiltrate a certain part of Enrothian society. Usually, all it'd take is one or two armageddon spells, but we're the heroes here. We can't massacre innocents for our needs, no matter how convenient it would be. So we need to do this the hard way.

First, we collect all the bones from mire of the damned's dragon cavern, outlying areas of bootleg bay & temple of tsantsa, and sell them to this shady guy. Our reputation takes a great hit, but it's not done yet.

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So we go around and mess with ordinary citizens. It's not that easy, though. We must find someone who is scared of us and he must be susceptible to effective forms of messing up.

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See, the most reputation ruining option here is threatening. Next one is bribing, but it quickly gets way too expensive - the cost rises each time you bribe someone and this increase is global. Begging is free, but it's also the least harming one. And some NPCs are immune to either one or two of those options - like, militant ones aren't afraid of your threats, greedy or pious one don't care for your filthy gold, and prudish one won't listen to your begging. Your reputation decreases only for successful attempts, btw.

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And you can't exploit one and the same npc repeatedly, so we travel across all the land, searching for suitable targets.

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In between, we find this excellent NPC. You see, on of the biggest mistakes of this speedrun LP was not abusing such NPCs in the initial exploration, wasting tons of time as a result. You need two of them (there are lots of different kinds), so those 5 day travel times get cut down to 1 day.

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Our reputation is finally ruined, by the way. Jeez, folks here surely have a short memory. You save them and help them and it's all fine and dandy, but throw a slur or two and what you're instantly worse than Hitler & Stalin slash fic'd.

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But, well, we're already screwed our early journeys won't bother with finding another one travel aide - 2 day journey will do.

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Disappointingly, there isn't much to do in Sweet Water. Probably the most important thing here is the obelisk.

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Touching in, we paint the night red with armageddons...

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And fight the survivors. Killing king devils from the ground is almost impossible since they wreck you up with high-level meteor showers...

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But if you're in air (as you must be), you're fine. The worst they can do is draining your mana dry. Annoying, but manageable.
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Killing the devils, we place the fifth statuette on the pedestal...

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Kill some more devils...

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Then travel down to paradise valley. Atm, we're basically on a business trip here - we touch the pedestal and rush into local city, paying zero attention to the monsters.

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Inside, we reap the reward for total ruination of our pristine reputation - a highest level initiation into the Black Lodge. Our souls are probably at risk now, but it's still better for them than for the souls of our enemies which are getting definitely obliterated.

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Setting a beacon here, we march southward...

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To Hermit's Isle. Once again, we skip through everything and rush to this obelisk. Touching it, we finally complete the most important side-quest in this game.

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Back to the comfort & safety of the civilised areas. For the starters, let's stich-up our public image.

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People's opinions are really cheap here...

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Then we have to find a replacement mystic - we're not going anywhere without one of those. This one won't do, however - she's too black for my tastes.

She's way into black magic, I mean - did you think I meant something else?

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This one doesn't look like she's able to cast level zero cantrip.

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Hmm, this one looks cute enough for me. Hail to game sexism!!!

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Now for the real pleasant part - obelisk treasure. Ever noticed how pleasure and treasure do rhyme?

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Plenty of gold and some goodies!

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The only downside of Morgan is that it's an amulet, and amulet slot is highly contested. But hey, it's not like you're getting more than two of them (yeah, two - each of obelisk treasure artifacts can be looted from the high-tier monsters either before or after you open the treasure; we've already found igraine that way) so you can probably fit everything. And Morgan is awesome for any kind of druid or sorcerer - one way or another, you'll have at least 12 points either water+fire or air+fire combos, add in a couple of common elemental rings (remember, they do stack) and you're damage potential is more than doubled up.

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The second Igraine is redundant, though - no self-respecting party should have more than one self-magic caster. Guess we can use it as +25 mana ring.

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And guinevere is beyond awesome. Dark magic is really powerful, light magic is really powerful (albeit less so for us), and when you add 125% bonus to them... Wait for a moment, I'll show you.

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First we'll deal with these two books. Dark containment is absolute trash - it applies all the debuffs in the game to one monster and that's pointless. Spells that focus on one monster are pointless in this game in general, as you've had many opportunities to see, because this game is about fighting HORDES, but it's even more stupid than your usual spell. Why? Because, in addition to other debuffs, it stones monster, making you actually unable to hit it. Yeah, it makes huge monsters totally weak and killable, except you can't kill them. Great design.

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Second divine intervention is... Well, you don't need much to use it so it's another sureproof layer - now even if both Hawk and Andy are dead, Coop can drag us back from the netherworld.

So you wanna see how good our buffs did become? Here they are. Watch in awe:

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End of part VII.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
Developer
Joined
Mar 1, 2012
Messages
2,052
So this update comes kinda late. And why? Part of the reason is that I'm currently working on my own game and writing a book, all while trying to get rid of my stupidly distracting net browsing habits - many of you probably know how it goes, too much time wasted on God knows what. And the remaining time was dedicated to another stupid experiment of mine - singletoning M&M VI with a sorcerer. Unlike VII and VIII, sorc is really the only option here - you can consider druid but even he is way too grindy for my tastes.

Here's the winning list - I've already posted in in "best might & magic" thread, but here I'll go in details about it. But, before that, something for the mood:



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One surprising thing that I'll confess is that said singleton didn't go as stupidly or tediously as I thought it would - in fact, I enjoyed it much more than your average playthrough of this game. Theoretically, I saw these potential hurdles here:

1. Unlike VIII, quest xp is always spread around the party here, therefore, those three corpses you'll be dragging around for the game will leech millions of XP out of you. Six millions total, to be precise.

2. Huge packs of trashmobs will take years to clean up. Also, having one character instead of four means you'll receive 4x more damage from those packs and there's nothing like the insanely broken Souldrinker - you have no healing spells as a sorc. Moon ray doesn't fucking count and you can't use divine intervention because it'll resurrect your deadbeat party members and that's a big no-no.

3. Some of those trashmobs feature insta-death attacks and there's no sureproof ways to protect yourself from those. It's all about savescumming and that's way too dirty.

That's what I thought and, boy, I was wrong.

1. True, those corpses do steal precious xp from you. However, you have henchmen in VI, and having a teacher+instructor combo (which is useless for your average caster party) pretty much redeems all losses. There's plenty of monster experience in VI and even by cleaning nothing but initial respawns (meaning finishing game in under 6 months) you'll easily reach lvl 180. If not greater - see, my build, which I'll show in a couple of moments, was somewhat inefficient.

2. Huge hp bloat of monsters, hell yeah. But you have one thing to combat them - see, as well as in VII and VIII, skills in VI are capped at 60. You can't train them higher than that. However, contrary to the latter games, skill bonuses are not capped. In VII-VIII, if you have 50 dark magic and wear a ring of dark magic, you're not gaining +25 bonus - you gain only +10, up to the limit.

In VI, if you have 60 dark magic, Igraine and an average dark magic ring, well, that's effective skill level of 135 for you. It's a 135d25 dragon breath and 7x135d6 shrapmetal. Oh, and +540 to all resistances from day of protection spell. Radical. To make the things even more grotesque, spell master and mystic bonuses also stack with those, so you can add another 7 points to that on the final missions. Even the huge hp bloat of M&M VI can do nothing against that kind of power.

As for the healing - black coffee becomes decent enough in singleton games. As you've seen, it's pretty hard to boost your healing spells to the mark of healing 100 hps per cast and it's probably not worth it to pump them even further. So 100 hp a pop is as good as it gets, besides, while it's hard to scavenge enough reagents to provide your whole party with black potions, it's not that hard to have them available for a single char.

3. It's not a bug - it's a feature. This seems annoying as hell but if you think for a while you'll see that all of it is avoidable. Let's look at them closely:

Paralysis & Stoning - these are the easiest ones. Just find an appropriate ring/item of protection and there's nothing to worry about.

Instant knock-out - not a big deal for common party, but it's equal to insta-death to you. Unpleasant, but see, all of the monsters that have it are melee - grand werewolves, spectres and earth elementals. Therefore, the answer is obvious - just keep your distance and you'll do fine.

Finger of death - since this attack is ranged, keeping away won't do you much good. Well, it's all about not being unlucky here - see, even with 300 resistances (that's low for a singleton run), this spell will have but 10% chance of succeeding. And that's not succeeding in killing you - that's being allowed to roll another check to see whether it kills you or not. 14% to succeed there. All in all, 1.4% in total. With your end game resistance, that goes even lower - down to 0.7%. So you have to be really, really unlucky to get wasted like that. Just murder those minotaur kings ASAP with your freaking shrapmetals and you should be safe.

Ranged insta-death or eradication - titans & terminators here. These ones are much more dangerous as they're just 5-10% of killing you. Considering how many attacks are floating at you each turn, that's a really huge percentage. But it's not as scary as it seems. Titans are bound to overland maps where it's ridiculously easy to dodge their scary attacks via basic fly tactics. Terminators... They sound like a real bitch, eh? Well, give me another moment and I'll show you my key to them.

So yeah, all of those imaginary troubles turned out to be hardly problems at all. And there were some serious silver lining to this playthrough:

1. Less micro. One of the most tiring aspects of this game is having to manage your 4 member party through lots of similar combats. And, even if you're mega-powerful, you can't do by pushing the same button in caster party (that's the greatest benefint of melee one, lol) - since monsters have immunities & shit, you have to switch between 2-3 spells in each dungeon. Now, if only you could've put more than 1 spell on autocast buttons, that wouldn't be a problem. But you can't, so it's about opening your spellbook a hundred of times to cast a hundred of fireballs or shrapmetals or whatever it is for the day. Singleton char suffers from the same problem, but at least you have to open it 4x times less. Same goes for other stuff - you're not as annoyed by repairing all of those broken items in lategame and, as I've said, alchemy becomes viable.

2. More variation. You have to use more spells to get through such playthrough and you have the extra points to put into those spells - that's how it works. Yeah, and those extra challenges require extra thinking which is always good.

3. High score. It's much easier to get a good high score with a singleton character than with a full party. See, it's all about experience - after the time spent, it plays the biggest role in determining your score. And, as I've said, singleton char can afford to use "teacher+instructor" combo without losing much effectiveness and he can afford to have learning skill of at least 20. And even 30 or 40 might be doable. 40 is a stretch, though, but 30 is definitely good. Whereas for full party 14 is max - anything more won't pay off in a speedrun. So, it's 151% versus 224% experience earned - 1.5 time difference. That's great.

4. Last one is kinda stupid, but, while in reality singleton character damage output is at best equal to full party output (for example - while storming the final areas of the game, Snake had dark magic skill of 142; during the last update, the Bookhouse Boys had summary black magic skill of 126 and they're far from their peak), it's really pleasing to throw those 1.5k damage dragon breaths and shrapmetals with 500 damage apiece. Yeah, killing supreme titan with one push of a button is nice.

Now for some screenshots.

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Here's our hero. Anti-hero, pardon me. Blaster in his hands (for most of the game we've used Merlin staff - +40 mana is nice), relic crown & relic boots, other equipment gives bonuses to either hp or AC. Jewelry is morgan, guinevere and lots of magical rings - dark magic, fire magic, air magic, water magic, all of the useful ones. Oh, and as you've noticed, there's no level cap in VI - you can traing as high as you want.

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Here's our build. It's kinda messed up because I've had no experience with this and took just 20 learning - should've gone for 30 if not 40. Otherwise, it's all pretty much fine. Note that I've skilled air magic in the last moment - for the majority of the game it was 8 and only for the final dungeon I racked it up to 30. Those pesky devils are immune to fire and I wanted to have some cheap & efficient spells - we don't have enough mana to shrapmetal each and every small fry.

Another mistake I made was staying too long with fire magic 20 - should've upped it to 30 or 40 earlier as it's your main damage dealing skill throughout the game. Dark magic is more awesome, sure, but you just can't use it often enough without abusing the living hell out of lloyd's beacons. And, as you see, I've took a bit of extra meditation - that also was at the last moment. No point in maxing up fire magic when you're headed for the Hive, you see. It's pleasant, but not as efficient to be useful immediately.

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Now, for some of the toughest moments of the game. Killing all these beholders was hard - see, there's so much of them that, if you're careless in approaching them, they'll stunlock you to death. Literally, you end your turn and they hit you so much that you're always experiencing recovery penalty and your next turn never begins. Key to surviving through this was going all-popamole - sticking to the wall before us, shooting from cover so only part of them can see us. Truly a next-gen experience.

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There were no cover to exploit with this pack of genies, however. Still, they were packed in a couple of really tight clusters, so, with careful approach, we could've dragon breathed those clusters one after another without receiving much return fire. We did it in one go, actually - no beaconing here.


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I've said I'll show you an easy way of dealing with terminators - here it is. They cannot hit what they cannot see...

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You, however, totally can. Ring of Fire is absolute king of the control center - it's not particularly fast, but it allows you to slaughter terminator units through the walls, without being exposed to their deadly fire. Because that's how it works - it totally hits monsters through the walls, and in quite a large radius - see how far that terminator is floating from us. And we still reach them. Is it a dirty trick? Sure it is. But we're anti-hero so it's only logical to use it.

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And not even ashes remain.

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Final encounter with devils - they're pushovers, but we don't want our mana drained. So we accurately lure them out with these spark spells and kill them as they ascend in small numbers with either shrapmetals, dragon breaths or toxic clouds.

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P.S. In the process of this playthrough, I learned how to actually beat those ungodly high scores of 1-3kk of the 5 day speedrunners. Actually, it's rather obvious - the first spell of dark magic is reanimate and it's horribly underused. It allows you to resurrect one dead monster so you can kill it again, gaining the full experience for this. Out of curiosity, I've earned about 10kk of experience that way in this playthrough - got myself a corpse of supreme titan (not the best target due to insta-kill attack and but 9.9k experience reward), raised it with reanimate spell, instantly killed it with a single shrapmetal spell. Rince and repeat. In one minute of real time (which also took 30 minutes of game time) I've earned about 300k experience - mind you, that's with suboptimal build (learning 40 is key for this shit) and monster. Best target here is Agar, the unique lich - boasting xp reward of 11k experience (that's as high as it gets in the game - the only other monster with equal reward is gold dragon), he comes with measly 325 hps and pathetic elemental resistances of 20. Yeah, he's immune to physical, so what? You don't need shrapmetal to kill him anyways - a fire blast or even sparks will do.

So, according to my rough (extremely rough) calculations, it'll take somewhere from 20 to 30 hours of real life grinding to get yourself a 3kk+ high score so you can tell those speedrunning bastards to shove their presumably "high" scores up their asses. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly autistic enough to attempt something like that, but if you a couple of useless days in your life and want to get the highest legitimate M&M VI score in human history... You know what to do.

P.P.S. I'll try to make a proper update in a couple of days - don't promise anything, though.
 

TOME

Cuckmaster General
Joined
May 25, 2012
Messages
1,820
I'll read these in a couple of days. In the mean time, keep it up.:brodex:
 

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