"Odyssey of The Summoner" is OUT!! Find it here...

[Arsonius]

Here is the error screenshoot, forgot to put it in when posting: http://imgur.com/a/8lRz1

It happened several times, all of them in vaults that have lava floor, burning you each turn.

[daed4]

Giving speed to player on start is good, but it doesn't help at all when patrol is next to Derth at the game start. Maybe you also/instead could nerf the speed of Allied patrols so it would be at least in line with adventurers and Zigur? They seem to be at least twice as fast and always keep following you step by step when Zigur patrol would long ago stop and wander off in a different direction.

How about:
Make it work like the chest.
IE: Get it once and it stays friendly forever. And yes, yes, lorebits and all that. But patrols on itself are awful to start with and it's annoying as all hell to rush to derth first and then do anything to avoid patrols.

[nekarcos]

@Arsonius
... Yuuuuuuup... There it is. Finally, an error with the Default Projector (which "Odyssey of The Summoner" overloads). I have been dreading this problem for a very long time, and it looks like it's finally shown itself up.

I'll look into the projector code. It might actually be VERY easy to simply turn it into a (somewhat awkward) superload. However, without a means to test this myself, I would only be shooting in the dark. Don't worry though, I'm FAIRLY confident this might resolve the problem. It's not about creating compatibility-- It's about NOT using MY overload when it isn't relevant (the same way I do it for "Weapon Quick Swap" logic).


@daed4
It's not exactly like it's HARD or "time-consuming" to simply make the Allied Kingdoms faction friendly with you. This behavior is entirely by design and intentional, and I DO want you to be antagonized by Patrols at the start. However, it's just unfortunate that they're programmed to spawn right next to Derth, which means the player doesn't even really get a chance to, at least, AVOID them.
Maybe I'll figure something out, but, for now, this issue is close enough to the start of the game that I shouldn't hear so much griping about it. Do some jukes... Fool them. It's honestly not that hard to get around Patrols, in my opinion. It's obnoxious-- But hey, it's a part of the game.




NOTICE: About Patrols
Patrols are an unfortunate part of ToME that I simply can't help. I will not remove patrols. I will not create some sort of opt-in if you encounter one. I will not "teleport" you to Derth. I have given you a speed boost that lasts long enough for you to run into Derth before a patrol even gets a chance to move. I'm not really sure how much more I can help you without outright holding your hand.

With that said, please remember that "Tales of Maj'Eyal" is a rather hard game with VARIOUS difficulty settings (including an "easier" mode). Do not ask me to tweak things such that it would ease difficulty or remove ANY behaviors/functionalities. I am responsible ONLY for "Odyssey of The Summoner" content, AND NOTHING ELSE. End of discussion.

I will not respond to any further talk about patrols or how they might interact with Avatars. Please ask the right people about this-- Not me.

[daed4]

@daed4
It's not exactly like it's HARD or "time-consuming" to simply make the Allied Kingdoms faction friendly with you. This behavior is entirely by design and intentional, and I DO want you to be antagonized by Patrols at the start. However, it's just unfortunate that they're programmed to spawn right next to Derth, which means the player doesn't even really get a chance to, at least, AVOID them.
Maybe I'll figure something out, but, for now, this issue is close enough to the start of the game that I shouldn't hear so much griping about it. Do some jukes... Fool them. It's honestly not that hard to get around Patrols, in my opinion. It's obnoxious-- But hey, it's a part of the game.

Well, then what do they really add mechanically to have to rush to derth every single time? Yes, it's a very RPG-y thing, but you don't re-start an RPG 5 to 10 times in a row. IE: What happens if I never go to derth? Do I get anything special? What purpose does it serve other than fluffy bits?

Again, I find them hellishly easy to avoid so I just (normally when I play stuff I'm not 100% confident) just activate the anti-patrols addon(s) since otherwise they're boring as all hell.

[Xeno The Morph]

I've been playing Odyssey off an on for a little while, great job!, and I'm really quite fond of Ritches & Hydra

My feedback is in regards to Fire Drakes and their Drakelings, that I only really started playing in the last few days as I was concentrating on getting to know the other Avatars.

a) There still seems to be at least 1 old message from when I assume you had more direct control of your Drakelings, this is the one you get when they get thier first talent points and it tells you to choose them from the party roster and press 'G' to assign them, but you can't take direct control anymore and only get the inventory option. Presumably this is now all handled by the 'automatic' attempts to imitate some of your talents when you have learnt the respective talents to enable this.

b) The Drakelings AI seems to have some minor issues
i) They can easilly get stuck in small diagonal cul-de-sacs when following you, where normally 2 get stuck as they try to follow you and just swap positions constantly (it looks like 1 tries to follow you displacing the other one, that then itself does the same thing, looping the actions). This is especially common in places like the Trollmire but can occur elsewhere. If resolving this isn't feasible then possibly you could give a free talent that can 'summon' them to you if there are no enemies in sight and they are fairly close by? (I know that you can just leave the level and return but sometimes this is rather difficult to do and can get you into sticky situations)
ii) They almost always seem to follow you in a single file line, would it be possible for them to try to cluster around a little bit when you you stop? i.e. if going diagonally would put them closer to you than just sitting behind the next nearest Drakeling they might do that (if not always)
iii) Can there be some way to tell they to wait (possibly only a somewhat short while similar to Escorts?), as sometimes them following you will either potentially kill them or stop you going into some trapped vaults (such as the two ended, two trapped, skeleton vault with the 4 cubicals. I just have to skip them every time or the traps can often kill 1 or more of my Drakelings while I'm trying to get the goodies ). If you don'y want to allow that level of control over them another possibility might be to automatically move away from a trap if they are taking damage from it.

But to sum up, thank you very much for making Odyssey of the Summoner it is great fun, very distinct from the base campaign while keeping the Tome 'feel', and the new mechanics & 'lore' are really keeping my interest!

[nekarcos]

"Odyssey of The Summoner" has been updated!! (Version 0.4.4)

*** Version: 0.4.4 ~ "Now with less love and more tossing!"

[STORY]
(CHANGES)
- There is now a log pop-up whenever you get talent levels in "Summoner Bond" or "Summoner Disparity".

(BUGS)
- Fixed a certain issue involving Melinda. I'm an idiot, guys.


[GENERAL]
(NEW)
- Non-artifact objects upchucked via "Gluttony" (activating it or dying) will now cause them to become "tarnished", significantly reducing the value of "precious" objects.
*** "Tarnishing" is displayed in the object description where power sources are listed. Use this to tell if an object has already been ruined.
*** Note that objects upchucked through "Relief" will NOT become tarnished!
- In regards to the "upchuck" change, "Gluttony" will now confirm if you really want to empty your stomach of items or not.


[HYDRA]
(BUFFS)
- Improved the secondary healing effect of "Recuperate" (from 5~12% to 10~20%)


~~~ VOLATILE ~~~
[Hydra]
> Continuing investigation on "Recuperate" after small buff. Will be concluded next update.

[Fire Drake]
> Fire absorption is still on-going

[Ritch]
> Free Cold Blood is still on-going
> Locked trees is still on-going

[Almonihah]

Okay, I have to quit lurking and say, this is amazing. I've gotten a hydra (http://te4.org/characters/45587/tome/cf ... c91b4dadb4) through the backup guardians and to the point of starting to rampage through the orc prides, and I've been immensely enjoying it. I'm continually surprised by just how much work you've already put into this, and I can't wait to see what more you add!

As you can see from the character vault, I've gone for more of a feral hydra, that tends to breath on things as they approach then tear them apart or just eat them in melee. If you'd like, I can try to give some detailed comments on the talents I've taken.

Oh, given your post above, is Relief actually working again?

[Arsonius]

I can't get Relief to upchunk items at all in the current version.

Playing Fire drake at the moment and build is, well, Fire. I haven't played drake before volatile change, but it must've been difficult to use all those AoE talents with friendly fire drakelings. It's already a pain to save all those escorts, especially hard to save them from drakelings who seem pretty intent on frying pesky humans at every opportunity.

Tooltip of Clasp doesn't mention that you can clasp hats, while as a drake you can do so from start.

Apparently drakelings are sometimes stuck in infinite loop in narrow passages when farthest one goes first and swaps with the second, the second goes and swaps with the first and they repeat it. Not sure if this behaviour was there before as I haven't played Fire drake much. Otherwise AI is certainly better and I like that now they are actively attacking and using talents.

[tabs]

Just entered Tannen's tower. Now have zero equilibrium drain. This seems like a big "screw you" to the player.

[Almonihah]

There. My hydra just ate the Sorcerers.

And yeah, Tannen's tower was nasty, but discussion of it should probably go in the spoiler thread.

[nekarcos]

@Almonihah
Ah! Thank you sir, I'm honoured!
I must always remind-- This is only a fraction of the vision I had in mind. It's kind of embarrassing that people are so blown away by something I consider incomplete and having so many problems, hahaha...
But anywho-- Let's talk about stuff--

RE: Tearing things up!
THIS has always been the feeling I had about post-dreadfell gameplay for Avatars. There's this sudden spike in "easiness" as the exponential nature of Natural Combat starts kicking in, and the "behavior" of your opponents suddenly turns into derpy, super-bulky, meat-headed target dummies-- Which are basically an Avatar's specialty-- Prey who are just WAITING to die.
This said though-- Hydra has been the one class I've worked on the most and was my starting point for Avatars in general. I'm STILL trying to figure out how to replicate that very nice balance I've struck with it and make it work for Fire Drake and Ritch-- But I think the reality is that Drakelings are far too detached a concept for ToME and will be VERY hard to make click "just right", while Ritch (although following the rules of ToME "weapon" combat) introduces a sort of alien concept of "longevity" with equipment-- Which I personally don't think weakens it, but DOES throw people for a loop and causes them to approach Ritch in a very silly way sometimes, hahaha...

Anyways-- These are just my thoughts with the place that each class is at. "Tenacious Hydra" (the "ultra-tank" build that your character is going for) is one of the most tested and observed builds I've tuned, and it sounds like it's working exactly as intended. However, I need to make this happen for A LOT of OTHER playstyles-- And this is primarily what this current phase of balancing is for. I guess I was kinda hoping people would help me discover some of them, but instead, it's turned up A LOT more frustration than actual discoveries, hmmm...


RE: Relief is working?!
No. Relief is being stupid as usual. I am probably going to ABSOLUTELY overhaul this talent in the next update. As you can see, I'm already taking some measures to make it a little bit more useful. Emphasis: "A little". When I introduced "Gluttony", I completely blew away Relief's usefulness because I didn't implement ANY drawbacks to using Gluttony AT ALL. Now, I'm putting some of them in, and you're going to start regretting losing all those lovely items you've eaten. Particularly, "average" items (no egos/special effects) are going to be entirely DESTROYED when upchucked through Gluttony, while "magic/ego" items will only be damaged-- Although, this is really just a thought, not a certainty...



@Arsonius
RE: Relief is still broken
... I'll be totally honest: I KNEW that nobody even uses Relief anyways, so I didn't even bother to test if it was still working for this update. I plan to completely overhaul this talent, so I just felt no necessity whatsoever to patch it up. It's an extremely redundant talent anyways and doesn't work most of the time... But I need to stop making excuses. It SHOULD be working correctly, but I have no doubt it's not. I'll fix it soon, I promise.


RE: Friendly Fire is ok!
Yeah, that's what I thought. I think it takes too much effort to give Drakelings that level of "Fire Protection" a parent requires them to have, so maybe it should be an innate ability that all Drakelings have-- Being healed by their parent's fire, ALWAYS.

Next update, I'm going to improve the amount of healing Drakelings receive when in "Anti-Death" state. I feel that if the player is already going through the effort to SAVE a Drakeling, they should be rewarded for their concern, because doing something like spending an entire Fiery Breath on a "dead" party member who can't even fight that effectively... Doesn't feel too good.

PS: Oh crap... Are Drakelings attempting to melt Escorts with their "healing" flames?? I could swear I defined this behavior, but I didn't really investigate this much... I hope they're not, hahaha!


RE: Clasping Hats
Hrrrrmmmm... Can you clasp ANY hat...? I don't think I intended that behavior... I'll have to definitely take a deeper look at this, since I've already gotten a report about hat-wearing Fire Drakes earlier too.


RE: Drakeling "Pardon Me" dance
OHHHH NOOOOOOO!!!!!

I have tried SO hard to weed out that possible "AI loop"... Dammit! Right back to the drawing board with me...


RE: Drakelings are more active
I intend to bring them to a point where you, the player, can sit back and simply WATCH them fight. However, there is always a lingering concern about Drakelings throwing themselves into inescapable danger, so I'm going to be VERY patient about how and when I implement this kind of behavior...



@tabs
RE: Tannen's Tower
TANNEN'S TOWER. ALRIGHT. THIS PLACE.
Because it was a HUGE spoiler, it has been VERY hard to discuss "the things that happen" in this place-- And trust me. I KNEW there would be issues. LOTS of issues-- And I have been anxiously awaiting people to get here and... Well... "Express their discontents".
... In fact, I'm sorta REALLY surprised no one has voiced their absolute OUTRAGE about this place until... Well-- Until jenx recently (apparently) quit OoTS for good because of it, hahaha...

But yeah-- The idea here is that being able to use "Blighted" talents usually requires an EXTREMELY steep investment of points, and a rather nasty loss in critical stats-- However, it was going to be THIS place that "opens up" that possibility and gives you a taste of what you have probably been missing.
I don't know if you noticed this, but you were automatically given 5 Talent Levels of EACH blighted talent-- And I can tell you right now: ALL Blighted talents are extremely powerful and each designed to COMPLETELY replace standard Avatar play. However, it has always been an unexpected side effect that this ALSO turns your Equilibrium Drain off. I suppose I was curious to see if anyone else considered this as much of an inconvenience as I did, or if they would go power-crazy with Blighted talents and not even notice AT ALL.

But yeaaaah... Long story short: Tannen's Tower is A THING and I expected many complaints/issues/bugs concerning this area. It's just a shame it's so far into the game, so these kinds of reports of far rather than near, hahaha...




PS: Well said, Almonihah. I think I'll be "lifting" the spoiler warning for Tannen's Tower, because it's honestly a place of MUCH ire, and I NEED to hear some stuff about what's going on there. So yeah, go ahead and tell me some of the issues you encounter.
Particularly, I'm going to add a message that tells you that you've learned blighted talents-- If I haven't already that is. I don't recall...

[Arsonius]

I don't think drakes were trying to "heal" escorts, they just don't care if escort is in the way between them and enemy. Sort of like escorts don't care if you're in the path of their Mind Sear anyway.

Well, not any hat, cloth and leather only. Well, I thought it was intended.

As for drakelings - maybe until their AI is perfect we could get "Drakeling Recall" as a talent? So that it takes 20-30 turns (not during battle obviously) and teleports drakelings to you at the end. At least that way there is no need to dig, dance around or change location to get them out of the loop.

And actually, I have a question about drakelings: I left them with summoner while doing Sandworm lair. How do I get them back now? I return to Summoner and they're there, circling around me, but not as a party members. When quitting location they don't go with me and Summoner isn't saying anything about them.

[nekarcos]

@Arsonius
RE: Burning Escorts
Guess it can't be helped then, huh? ToME's "tactical AI" is a... "Contemplative" AI that ONLY makes such decisions if either their AI is ruthless ("Drakelings" occasionally stop caring about friends if they get angry enough), or the amount of harmed enemies would be equal/greater than the number of harmed allies.
Long story short: Everything about this behavior is "intended", but to the player... Boy, is it not "desired"...

RE: Wearing hats
There is a "specific" type of hat they CAN wear... But definitely not silly leather/cloth hats!

RE: Recalling Drakelings
Maybe... I might end up doing exactly that-- But that doesn't actually "solve" the problem (since they'll just get hung up again). The only cure for this is figuring out how to replicate the situation, and implementing a surgical solution for it. However, to this date, producing the "pardon-me dance" has always been hard to "consistently" do...

RE: No party members?!
Whoa... My guess is that a LUA error happened DURING the partying-- Meaning there's an issue with my code. I'll have to try that out myself and see what's going on.

[Almonihah]

Well, if Tannen's Tower discussion is allowed here... I actually thought it was a clever thing from a story perspective. After all, why would Tannen leave you with this powerful artifact that may be the key to your power, which is, after all, what he's trying to study? That being said, though, the loss of Wild Power is an enormous blow gameplay-wise. I was fortunate that I'd actually spent almost as many points on other generic talents, so I wasn't totally crippled, but it did knock almost half my max health off, which made me very nervous the whole time. The loss of your actives on Natural Combat is a massive blow, too, since they're kind of taking the place of vital Inscriptions--fortunately I had plenty of those stockpiled, so I could just eat one if I needed to. Still, that made activating them go from instantaneous to taking a turn, which is a dangerous thing.

I noticed the gain of the blighted talents. However, after reading them over, I dismissed them as too risky (cost 25% of max health? When I've already lost almost half of my max health? Nope!). Perhaps I didn't give them enough of a read-through, but my breaths-then-Tear-Apart strategy still worked well enough, so I didn't feel the need to risk trying them. The fact that I could still clear what is normally a rather difficult area while I was at basically half-power does seem to indicate that my hydra had gotten rather overpowered at that point... though ToME is somewhat less vulnerable to such things.

That being said, I was definitely much more powerful than I'm accustomed to being for the last ten levels of the game. Part of it is Wild-Power, yes, but part of it was just the nature of the hydra--you get an increasing number of increasingly-powerful attacks as your stats go up, and I had my relevant stats high enough by the end there to kill even some uniques on a single bump-attack. That meant that I could kill some bosses with Tear Apart.

Oh, and Split Wounds has some rather strange behavior that I'm not sure is intentional or not. Its max health gain seems to scale off of max health... which, of course, is going up as it stacks. This is made worse by the fact that the max health gains are bigger than advertised--probably the Elite multiplier is being applied to them? Whatever the case, by Dreadfell it claimed the cap was ~400 HP, it would end up stacking up to ~900 HP, and the actual effective health gain was ~1400 HP, which got a little insane. This helped me a great deal once I got Draconic Body, since it meant that 40% of my health in healing (multiplied by my nearly 100% healing mod) was an enormous number.

So yeah, I still saw some issues with the mod, particularly in the post-Dreadfell phase of gameplay... but I still enjoyed it immensely even in its incomplete state. I have a lot more thoughts I want to share, but this post is getting long and I have other things to do now.

[Micbran]

I guess make a map/zone that looks like this?

Code: Select all

{         
            XXXoooXXX
              XXoXX
              XXoXX
              XXoXX
              XXoXX
            XXXoooXXX
            XooooooooX
            Xooo0ooooX
            XXXXXXXXXX
}

X = wall, o = empty, 0 = spawn

Or just run around Dreadfell/Kor'Pul (IIRC elven ruins has a lot of1x1 hallways too) in dev mode with drakelings.