Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Very low level identifying stuff used to be debilitating in Elona, but in E+ even a completely full inventory of unidentified stuff from the Puppy Cave usually is only maybe 2k-4k tops.

Quote from: Sirus on December 24, 2017, 07:06:27 pm

Is there any particular trick in dealing with Hungry Demons? I'm a gunner with decent skill and a submachine gun, yet these jerks can dance around my shots, touch me once or twice, and kill me even when Bloated. They, along with Kobolds, are probably the cause of most of my deaths. Thank the gods Elona isn't perma-death.

They're dodgy little jerks, if you aren't using heavy armor or a Medium Armor + Shield equipment loadout, try branching out into magic.

Hungry Demons don't have a lot of hitpoints, so even a low level Magic Dart will take it out in a few hits. Magic never misses, after all. Or use Rods. Magic Device doesn't need an entire set of skills to get started with, and you'll eventually get the Draw Charge/Fill Charge abilities to let you keep your favorite rods topped off (and gives a use to the less useful rods as well). Other than that... I think there is a few tricks you can pull out against hyper-evasive enemies; but none come to mind just yet.

There's an active skill called Squeeze that you start with (I think). In addition to hugging your allies, you can use it to death-hug enemies. It costs 10 SP, does fairly low damage, but always hits, so if you can get adjacent to a fast but low HP target you can just use that to crush them to death.

Also try to select gear for to-hit bonuses early on, you need those more than damage until your skills get raised a bit.

Looks like this time around DE swapped the global health pool for a preset decaying one. You've got a bit under three days for each one by my calculation, and a new one shows up at 3:15 PM EST each day. Torment isn't even below 80% after 12 hours up, he normally is dead before that, so it's gotta be a fixed rate, especially since they drop at the same rate whether hidden or not.

Also some speculation that their node visibility is on a timer, since it seems to come up in roughly the same intervals. That, and it seems like they're showing up a whole lot on a limited set of nodes. Mostly Akkad, Hydron, Spy nodes, and low-level exterminations, so I kinda suspect even the nodes aren't random, as that looks a lot like a mix of easy-but-not-rushable and "here newbies, learn the basics of some of the usual starchart stumbling blocks if you want loot".

Basically there's not much rush this time around, and you can run 3-4 missions for each period of visibility since they don't get instantly gibbed whenever they appear. It's ~4% drop rate for Argon Scope and Memeing Strike, but without true global healthpools that's actually a realistic goal. Even if you miss 'em, the market is crashing hard now that people know about the change to the event.

Since I'm kinda doing this Claymore as a no buff/attack magic challenge for as long as I can, the "You prefer to work alone" feat is really coming in handy... but I'm visualizing it as basically the weebiest shit ever whenever I run into something that can kill my allies. "Just run away for now, I'll have to go all-out." *snrk*

217 speed without magic/consumable buffs at lv32 is really nice, though.

I've never actually manipulated any genes ever. I keep putting it off. I'm worried that it's going to add a wrong limb to one of my main allies and they will be screwed.

Just make sure to check the donor tables/donor limb counts. In most circumstances if the donor has the same number of a type of body part as the recipient, no new ones will be added-i.e. if you graft a normal human onto another one, no new limbs. Limb growth comes when the donor has more parts (i.e. putting an asura or horse into a human) or the recipient has fewer (i.e. putting almost anything into a bell).

The only penalties I'm aware of are for having >2 legs through gene engineering or for having >13 body parts in total. As long as you stay away from melding things with >2 legs into ones with 2 or fewer and don't go super crazy slapping things with lots of a single type of body part.

If you're playing on E+C and genuinely worried, there's a menu option to turn on savescum quickloading with F2, nothing wrong with having a safety net while you figure out how the system works. If all you're doing is buying slaves and melting them down to boost up your allies I can't think of anything bad apart from buying slaves that won't give anything because you don't know what they give yet... and they're 1-2k gold a pop, so that's hardly awful.

I mean, saying the release of HD was bungled kind of glosses over the fact that it's been consistently worse than Voobly... Pretty much forever.

The Liereyy-Biper series was apparently very good, I still need to watch it. KotD has had some great moments.

I mean, yeah, I just wasn't aiming to go on a tirade. Doesn't change the fact that it brought a lot more attention (and overpowered civs lul) to AoC.

Quote from: Flying Dice on December 19, 2017, 09:07:43 pm

How can one man be this goddamn good? Rip larry, vipeh probably swept the series if he could win Franks vs. Aztecs with such an aggressive setback early.

It still blows my mind that AoE2 is still active and is still being developed and updated every now and again.

Yep, Voobly is running strong. As much as the launch was bungled, the HD re-release and new expansions really brought some attention back-the scene never really went away, but basically the entire generation of people that played AoK/AoC back in the day got the memo that it was still being actively played online.

Quote from: Flying Dice on December 19, 2017, 09:07:43 pm

How can one man be this goddamn good? Rip larry, vipeh probably swept the series if he could win Franks vs. Aztecs with such an aggressive setback early.

Today I learned "Persian Douche" is a term in online age of empires 2

Yep. Basically it works like this: Persians have more health on their Town Center. The Persian Douche is an all-in Dark Age rush where the Persian player quickly gathers res, deletes their starting TC and builds one within range of the other player's, garrisons all their villagers in it, and uses that extra HP to win the TC war. If it succeeds, the other player is massively set back (and maybe even stuck without the resources to rebuild their TC), but if it fails (usually because it was scouted before the Persian TC went up) the Persian player is fucked.

Quote from: Jilladilla on December 19, 2017, 09:21:21 am

Quote from: RickRollYou2 on December 19, 2017, 01:07:55 am

On a side note... the fact that dead pets count towards number of allies is also complete rubbish.

Dead pets can be revived with an NPC in towns, with their equipment and everything. So they're not gone for good, don't worry.

I know, but I was trying to kill off my pets so I could do escort missions/sell some at the slave trader. Ended up just merging them using the gene machine

That's one way to describe it.