Bay 12 Games Forum

Also: it took years before I realized that if you just designate a room as a bedroom, a dwarf will come along and claim it without needing to be assigned it.

Waterfalls fix everything. I think they literally give the highest happiness value in the game. And what could be easier than arranging a bunch of falling water?

Either flood your main staircase with everyone around it (you lose a few bottom levels and stragglers, but save the fort)

or

invest in a proper waterfall device. I personally like arranging pumps in a circle in a z-level above a major dining room and sending a single tile of water moving in a perpetual loop. Here's a little screen from my fort (first image is the z-level above the second image), the mists gets in the way but you get the idea:
The single tile of water is held in the tank with the statue and refilled with buckets when evaporation depletes it. The six pumps move it in a loop. Each pumps drops the water (making mist) but the water never hits the ground because the next pump has already caught it and is the process of dumping it into the receiving zone of the next pump (and making mist), and so on and so forth.

The apparatus is powered by a small perpetual motion reactor (water wheel based) built into the ceiling of the room (which happens to be the royal throne room)

The RPS review weirdly convinced me that this is going to be a disaster, while the Kotaku review merely provoked a "meh".

The Kotaku review accuses thief of not being the thieving simulator thewriter imagined. OK.

The RPS review says that the new Thief is good, maybe really good. But then it fails to explain what is good about it, instead dropping vague comments that seem to apply to any stealth game. Furthermore a whole section is about how great it is that you can turn off a bunch of features. I am not sure this is a compliment to the game, but it is presented as such.

Thief seems like it copies Dishonored (esp. the "swoop") but badly misses what made Dishonored fun (no free movement, not even real rope arrows). I didn't want a copy of Dishonored, I am still enjoying Brigmore Witches, thanks. I wanted a revamp of Thief, and I am pretty sure that this is ain't it. By sound of it a good part of the content is ripped off too: e.g. the list of female characters in the review were: murderous younger thief, wise old woman with mysticism, high society seductress. I am pretty sure that covers Billie Lurk, Granny Rags and Lady Boyle. If in Dishonored these were interesting characters, here they are explicitly criticized as cookie-cutter

Getting rather convinced this can wait until the inevitable gog sale ten years from now.

Good god, make this game happen! This is like seeing the DNA double-helix in a dream. Well almost that...

There is actually a perfectly reasonable answer: the more elves like you the more value they bring you by weight, in the caravan.

Thus is elves love you, they will bring the most valuable object by weight: cloth, lots and lots of cloth

If elves have no strong feelings, they will bring a couple of animals too: low value by the pound

Finally, if elves hate you, they will brings tons of giant animals which take up almost all the caravan weight and cost pennies on the pound.

Killing elves makes for better caravans.

Quote from: nenjin on January 19, 2014, 05:46:41 pm

That's one thing that really disappointed me about later Elder Scrolls games. Making your own items in Morrowind was just fun, balanced be damned. Same story with making your own spells. By Skyrim enchanting and spell crafting is so tepid, developer-made items are spells are just flat out better than anything you can make for the most part.

Same thing for the prices, really. In Morrowind, magic items are so valuable that you actually can't find people to buy them at cost.

Best thing about Morrowind in comparison, though, was the fact that you could kill anybody. If you wanted to, you could wipe out all elven life.

The degree of customization this allowed was nuts: I had an atronarch character whose clothing was enchanted to do anything to expensive to simply cast. The left glove caused levitate, the right caused water breathing, the rings killed and healed, the boots were the boots of blinding speed. 

Granted I also exploited the "religious" atronarch exploit, by praying all the damn time and never running low on mana as an outcome. 

Honestly, aside from the record-clearing thing, the Thieves Guild is not useful.  It also exposes one of the few major shortcomings of Morrowind, necessary but major.  Because every single area and quest in Morrowind had to be hand crafted, most of the many guild quest lines are fairly short and easily completed aside from the occasional wicked hard combat.  Because the Thieves Guild quests involve no combat (that I can remember) and sneaking can be accomplished as easily as just staying out of ray-tracing range, you can easily become Master of the Thieves Guild in about a week, at level 1.  And then... you have nothing else to do with the Thieves Guild.

Becoming leader of the Great Houses has the same issue, you just find yourself wishing there was more to do after all that work.  I'm sure there's mods for that though.  Goodness are there mods.

I'm not sure you remember the thieves' guild that well: a lot of the quests are very hard early on (especially the second quest you get in Balmora: pickpocketing is not easy in Morrowind, lotsa reload try agains). Lockpicking is skill based, but you do meet the Security master early, so it isn't hard to maximize. Also the last two quests are to kill some of the more dangerous opponents in the game: the top two enforcers in the Camonna Tong and the Master of the Fighters Guild.

Thieves' guild is not the quickest way to get rich, but it is important in providing fences and bounty reduction. It is also one of the "good guy" factions in a largely morally ambivalent game. Compared to Hlaalu and fighter's guild, the thieves' guild are saints.

And yeah the mod I posted early in the thread: Antares big mod, makes it a lot more fun. You can choose "target" as an option in conversation marking anyone for robbery and send thieves to procure their items for you. I've only used it with a character who wouldn't personally steal (to keep an air of propriety, Redoran etc), and with my master thief, who ordered underlings to do it in exchange for promotions (I think I got a second land deed that way to start building two strongholds)

I'm playing the Game of the Year Edition on Steam - how do I get these mods and install them, exactly? There doesn't seem to be a Steam workshop page for it.

Thanks for all the tips! To be honest, I'm really not worried about becoming powerful, as long as there's more places to see and explore without getting instantly killed. It sounds like I'll be able to go for quite a while without worrying about getting stronger.

EDIT: By the way, I haven't come across any bugs yet, and visually the game looks pretty good to me so far. Not sure if it's just my love of older games, or if the version I'm playing is already updated in some way. It does seem to include 2 expansions.

The mods are available here: I am linking you straight to one of the greatest mods of all: Antares big mod which adds depth and roleplay rather than graphics and power. Specifically the mod allows you to act as a real member of a Morrowind organization up to Patriarch or archmage. It lets you hire scouts to lead you places, agents to give you info or help you out with bounties, thieves to steal and assassins to assassinate.

Antares integrates all this fairly smoothly, even fitting it with the lore (thus good luck getting Ashlander scouts to guide you to an ashlander tomb, or hiring assassins against a member of the Camonna Tong or any great house: only the Morag tong will handle that, and even then its a bit tricky). Instead of "Patriarch" being just a pretty title with no reduction in ordinator sneering, you get the ability to anathema people from the temple, to order ordinators around etc etc. It is an amazing bit of work.

I also love the passive cliff races mod (makes them peaceful unless diseased or blighted), the multiple mark mod (allows you to mark and recall to up to 10 locations rather than one, opens a chat menu to choose when you cast either spell), and the necromancy mod (forget which one) which drops the permanent summons scrolls in tombs all across the land, so you have to find them like a real grave robber. If you want to play a werewolf the mod which regionalizes and temporalizes wereful recognition to small areas is vital: otherwise one exposure and the whole world is hostile. The "you are being mugged" mod is perfect for playing bandits since it let's you rob people without killing them.

Basically mods in Morrowind are awesome. The community is insane and makes projects of staggering ambition (Tamriel rebuilt which sought and still seeks to build, as it says on the tin, the rest of the Tamriel continent around Morrowind)

As far as leveling. In Morrowind it is rather easy to become powerful fast. Brokenly easy actually. I don't know what class you picked, but there is almost certainly a way to level endlessly in it: magic you can make a cantrip costing one mana and practice casting it before resting gaining levels quickly, or you can jump around everywhere with acrobatics. I like the feeling of mid-level epicness, no longer easy meat, but not a walking reincarnation of the god of war that you become later in the game. At this point I know the game well enough that assembling the (incomplete~ damn that pauldron) Daedric armor with daedric crescent and some insane rings is dull. I like my character's stylishly dressed in light netch leather armor (chitin for ashland trips) and/ or expensive clothing I've enchanted, which lets me breathe water, fly and teleport to a safe location if I am threatened.

What I like to do to facilitate these play styles is pace my leveling process. Otherwise, I get too powerful, have to up the difficulty and end up in bloodmoon, which has a bad habit of ending my characters as I stubbornly try not to get bored with the obligations of werewolfdom, and inevitably do.

To control my leveling: I pick armor skills and magic skills for all my major and minor skills: they are slow to level, but you can grind them if you need to and they come with spells. I pick one weapon skill just for early survival, but rarely use that weapon in practice. I almost always take speechcraft and acrobatics (hard to level, slow to level, important). The result is say: Acrobatics, Speechcraft, Mysticism, Sneak, Illusion for major Marksman, alteration, light armor, medium armor, heavy armor for minor.

I pick minor and major skills not on the basis of which I want to be more powerful (cheaper to train low skills), but which I want to be high now: thus I want acrobatics to maneuver now, sneak to succeed now, mysticism to make me a billion dollars in trapped souls, speechcraft to succeed now etc

Couldn't you just turn off "cook" or whatever for the plump helmets so they're in your Kitchen as brew-only? I've never had a problem with this, and that's the only thing I do - any brewable item immediately becomes brew-only, no cooking allowed.

Came here to say this: the kitchen menu should let you decide what gets cooked and what gets brewed (or rather what is forbidden for cooking and brewing): shut off plump helmets on cooking and you still have the issue of people eating them raw, but frankly with better meals around, you should only lose a few to the dwarves that realy, *really* love plump helmets.