Incline Elminage Gothic (former Japan only dungeon crawler)

[aweigh]

Courtier

summoner takes too much work. i'm lazy.

i don't know if you've yet discovered how ridiculously broken the ninja's Replicate ex-skill is dude. (who once created functions EXACTLY as a summoned party member except he has 3/4's of your ninja's stats)

it has a curious "bug", or rather i prefer ot think of it as a feature, where the ninja's duplicate is created with exactly the same gear equipped as the party ninja. makes sense, obviously. now what you want to do is....

been using your ninja as a back-row shuriken thrower? or a front-line beheader? want his clone to do the opposite? gear up your ninja for front-row or for back-row, create the ninja clone, then re-equip your ninja. voila.

the computer-controlled ninja clone will have 3/4's of the ninja's stats, obviously including HP, but most importantly he will behead like a motherfucker if your ninja has behead-enchanted weapons on the moment of clone-creation.

now to maximize the ninja clone's effectiveness what you want to do is make sure that your ninja doesn't have too many spell schools. preferably only one, because the computer sometimes goes brain-dead and decideds to cast fucking MAGLASS or some shit instead of using the 2 DEATH-ARMS you put on him!

it's basically the same, or BETTER, as having a high-level enemy Ninja as a summon except the ninja duplicate scales in stats/HP/etc along with your Ninja and if he does you just resurrect him. he can even turn into ashes! if that happens you have to remove everybody from the group at the bar then add everyone back in so the ashy ninja clone is gone, then recuperate your SP (creating a ninja clone eliminates a ninja's SP, so if the ninja has other SP-using abilities from elsewhere, like hiding in shadows, he CANNOT use them as he is always at 0 SP while the clone is alive) and create the fucker again.

just fuckingm ake sure you had the equipment you wanted the clone to have equipped on the ninja, hehe.

btw, one ridiculously stupid bug/trick/feature: want unlimited pickaxes? equip the ninja with a pickaxe, create clone, and dequip the pickaxe from the party ninja and "drop" any pickaxes you may have; then go to the Ore deposit and activate it and guess what? the fucking ninja clone will use his equipped pickaxe and do it for ya :D

that trick also works with the +2 Ore deposits in Ibag's Tower which are 1 Million GP a pop, i.e. each +2 Ore deposit in Ibag's Tower requires a Philosopher's Stone + Pickaxe in order to yield +2 Ore, and Philosopher Stones cost 1 Million GP (you buy them in a secret room, from a secret NPC, inisde the Cave of the Ancient Gods).

sooooo yep, equip ninja with philosopher stone, create clone, have everyone in party "drop" and/or get rid of the philosopher stones, and then have the clone use his to mine the +2 Ore. Oh, i haven't mentioned why this is awesome: the "bug" is that the game will never break the ninja clone's pickaxe or his philosopher stone. For whatever reason they never got around to coding that circumstance, hehe.

so in resume: i prefer using the ninja clone as my summon because you have complete control over what gear they will be utilizing during battle, and if you prepped your ninja right from the game beginning then you won't have to worry about the ninja clone using dumb commands that you don't want like dumb spells or hiding in shadow.

pure thief gangsta, hermit's knife in royal tomb, become teh ninja, acquire many Ores to make many beheading weapons, create ninja clone = profit forever.

two fuckers throwing half-moon rings or dual-wielding death-arms is fucking crazy. also it's great when enemies use their beheading abilities on the ninja clone, sparing your party

unlike summons it's no muss or fuss; just resurrect him, if he ashes out then go to bar, re-group, sleep at inn to regain SP, and create ninja clone again. chances of the clone reviving are same as any other party member AFAIK.

no finagling with spell slots or what have you. very straightfoward shit.

EDIT: AFAIK the ninja clone will almost definitely be the lower AC "summon" by post-game as they'll take their AC straight from the ninja character. a -35 ninja party member who creates a clone will be probbaly around -22-27, i don't know whatever 3/4's is of -35.

 

[Courtier]

That's excellent, but the clone's stats/damage/hp will never scale as ridiculously fast as a summon's will, and they are limited to one action. Of course by no means are you required to have a summoner, but if you want to have an easier time in the top floors I can't recommend them enough. It was pretty much smooth sailing after I first got Akabey (Guatella grotto master), and then later a Stargazer. I only ever found one or two +2 ores though and didn't use the tower deposits, so finished the postgame with relatively mediocre enchanted gear...(swapped out and stopped leveling my Alchemist in his 50s too)

Another thing I wanted to mention is how important the defend command is - when selected, characters that are defending another will always do so pre-emptively and take damage instead of the target (allowing e.g. a low AC ninja or brawler to defend against lightning strikes to your back row). Universally useful and prevents many deaths even from spells. This and decoy/hide spells save you a lot of trouble

 

[Dorarnae]

yeah summoner are crazy. they're cool in other elminage game, in gothic with those monster in Tbag tower it's....the foe in final main story dungeon was a very good summon and then yeah star gazer is <3

eventually for the last few floor on the tower, I used the dove bell I think they're called? it removes fixed encounter, so lot less chance to meet those star gazer group, black dragon, belial....

have they fixed the bug of monster trying to call help? I remember this wasn't working, like vampire lord or angel tries to summon allies but it doesn't do anything. this was something I reported during beta...
also the time thing when you go back to a party in a dungeon. the ''x time has passed'' is supposed to be only when you first enter a dungeon, not when you select a party that is currently in a dungeon.

 

[Courtier]

It was probably fixed since I deliberately abused that for leveling (greater demons), I did notice ''x time has passed'' popping up awfully often. And yea I also used many dove bells, almost ran out of materials for them because of many trips in 15-20F

 

[Dorarnae]

It was probably fixed since I deliberately abused that for leveling (greater demons), I did notice ''x time has passed'' popping up awfully often. And yea I also used many dove bells, almost ran out of materials for them because of many trips in 15-20F

greater demon and chaos demon were fine. but for vampire lord, angel and some other monster, it was like a different skill.

 

[aweigh]

yeah, defend command is quite epic. the non-stop beheadings in elminage gothic's post-game that seem like they're motherfucking pre-programmed: they are not only not pre-programmed but all beheadings are a status-affliction that must be delievered via some type of attack that will always resolve itself against the character's armor class.

in Gothic when a character "Defends" their AC is lowered automatically by -4. In elminage: Original it would lower by -10.

btw, the same applies to enemies when they turtle.

what this means is that having the highest, er, i mean the lowest AC char defending others is a very viable strategy to ensure those dudes don't get beheaded.

yes, strictly speaking there are at least two specific end-game shields that come with built-in native 50% beheading enchantment defense and they can be further upgraded but of the two the one with actually 50% off the bat can only be acquired so late as to not even be worth the bother.

and as i'm sure you've noticed it really doesn't seem like enchantments against stuff like paralysys, petrification or beheading end up being worth all of the investment in terms of enchantment Ore, don't you think? i was super zealous about having my resistances as high as possible but the reality is that if the enemy's instant-death attack, i.e. the beheading attack (almost always a melee attack, in fact i don't think there are any exceptions); instead of wasting time grinding up enchantments against party-wiper bullshit like (example...) the Polyete archer enemy that lightning-strikes twice in a row and both of her attacks almost always result in two decapitated party members, making you feel that it's completely random.

it is not, though. it is not random at all; all of her attacks resolve against the receiving character's armor class and the lower it is the better chance of surviving. it isn't as basic as attack VERSUS -AC, of course, as just like the player characters themselves the enemy attacks are "enchanted" as well. if you've browsed through the bestiary and looked at the stats on the ibag's tower enemies.... man, there is some crazy shit in there. since the enemies don't really have access to an alchemy warehouse what Starfish did is simply slot into the enemy abilities what a player would normally have as an enchantment.

for example some enemies have as a "class ability" the dragon roars ability which is an ability that they activate as a free action and it does not consume their turn, and it boosts their stats by a lot and prolly does a bunch of other bullshit i don't remember right now. basically there are a ton of enemy-only EX-skills, is what i'm saying, but they function under the same game rules as the players actions do too. there's no cheating.

i suppose this would logically mean the best post-game party is any party that has a majority of Lowered AC ability classes in it, like ninjas and brawlers, as they will eventually reach a point where their AC will be too low for "random beheadings", i think that point is probably around the -40's, and for certain once they reach -50's.

it's because of this stuff that i ended up discovering how incredibly good Hunters were in ibag's tower due to their lightning strike ability. looking at the bestiary you can actually see that the majority of enemies that are front-loaded with stuff like 2-or-3 actions per turn, and each action is a melee attack which inflicts beheading status, well they're not really very well rounded.

if you want to go look up enemies like Polyete or the giant skeleton Scythe-for-hands monster: that skeleton bastard is weak to sleep (or was it confuse? it's one of the two), and pretty much the same type of weaknesses, be it either glaring holes in their resistances to a specific affliction like sleep, confuse or whatever, or shockingly "average" armor class, which means the Hunter will always Lightning Strike Polyete dead ASAP. (i.e. not really impressive stats, or amount of hit points).

there are some enemies that are obviously just bullshit, of course, but that's to be expected.

another great danger inside ibag's tower aside from beheading is getting charmed, and once again the majority of enemies who inflict charm do it via 2 ways: singing, which will resolve solely versus that character's charm resistance (i assume...), or a melee attack like the fencing faggot Skulldugory or whatever his name is who can inflict charm, level-drain and beheading randomly with each melee attack.

obviously his attacks resolve first versus the character's armor class, and if the attack bypasses that THEN the character's resistances are called.

another little thing i found pretty fucking useful was making everyone "hidden". the Alchemy spell that hides people, man, seriously.

the only other thing that comes to mind at the moment is that you realize how incredibly important AGILITY becomes in the post-game. getting to act before the enemy is more important than basically any other facet of the battle. like, there's no way to argue against this. and once you know exactly what debuffs or status afflictions to throw at them then you just do that before they can fuck you up and send them to sleep land or whatever.

you realize those status/ailment/etc weaknesses are 100% on purpose because when you view their stats in the bestiary you see:

100% Silence
100% Dark
100% Holy
100% Fire
100% Charm
5% Sleep

basically something just like that. :D

 

[aweigh]

oh, as for the ninja clone not scaling... i dunno dude, yeah summon creatures have way better stats then the player-races and shit, but a level 200 ninja with godlike -AC and tons of hit points is going to make a clone that is 3/4's of all of those numbers. And I have to stress again the importance of the clone's weapons:

basically there are only 1 or, at most 3 "end-game" ninja weapons, and that applies to all classes of course, that is normal, and if you have more than 1 ninja in your party then only 1 ninja will get to play with that uber weapon, and the other ninja will have to use something else because there simply isn't another one.

however a ninja clone will be using the weapons the ninja had equipped when he created the clone, and this includes enchanted weaponry. I've looked at the data and the ninja clone is a 1:1 copy in terms of equipment. i've seen in the save files the section where the data for the ninja clone is and the ninja clone is a duplicate basically of the character data of the player's ninja character, with the exact same hexadecimal values for the gear, the spells, everything, even the age.

so that means that while there are definitely super OP summons you can get, you can also just be lazy and use ninja clones with beheading enchanted end game weaponry and have the two fuckers behead 2 enemies each per turn, heh. ideally.

in fact, to be honest, i think the ninja replica ex-skill is completely unnecessary. it's ridiculously good, sure, but it kind of takes away from the Summoning space because you can't have both a clone and a summon. I would have rather the game just make summoning more integrated into the critical gameplay experience.

like in wizardry empire 1, 3 and 3 basically where each summon is part of the dungeon.

 

[Dorarnae]

problem is the ninja clone can be summoned only once(so black dragon and some other monster/boss will be a pain) if I remember (well I know in elminage 3 it took all skill point to summon one). with summoner you have more charge.
ninja clone are good....but gothic on 3ds with a boss like that:

good thing tackle exist. shame we didn't get that version, the game is easier but the thief is a lot more interesting to play in that version and couple other things that are nice.

 

[Celerity]

Yeah, you can beat most low level floormasters really easily with paralysis or petrification, provided you can deal with their regen. Of course there's one asshole one that will take out your entire party in one round with double Maglass...

And enemies use Tarot well before that, there's some fucking Bards in Igdra Underground Church that use it. Worse I've seen it do is make people run away though.

 

[Dorateen]

Enemy tarot cards can also Cham, which is a bitch to deal with. Late game, one of the most dreaded opponents is our party's own Ninja turned against us.

Dorarnae I recall Archangels would summon other angels.

 

[Dorarnae]

Enemy tarot cards can also Cham, which is a bitch to deal with. Late game, one of the most dreaded opponents is our party's own Ninja turned against us.

Dorarnae I recall Archangels would summon other angels.

kk maybe they fixed it.

 

[aweigh]

Dorarnae

i actually played about 17 solid hours of elminage 3 in japanese before dropping it because i wasn't enjoying playing it in japanese.

it's basically proto-Gothic as it was the introduction of the EX-Skills, and also the introduction of FOEs, who are much, much more annoying and dangerous than the mostly static ones found in Gothic. I had quite a few jump-scares hehe

the night/day cycle system was good, but honestly the hours i played it i never once gave a single thought to the weather, so it might as well not have been a thing.

mechanics wise it is basically identical to what ended up being Gothic, however it features the "difficulty" in terms of enemy balancing and the like from elminage: original and elminage 2; it is not intentionally designed to be a hard, stimulating game like Gothic was designed. However mechanically they are identically.

i've never enjoyed summoning, on any level, in the Elminage series. i much prefer how starfish did it in wizardry empire 1, 2 and 3 where each dungeon has a secret, hidden/optional Summon Monster you fight and when you win you recruit it as a summon.

it made exploring the dungeons much better as a summoner instead of playing repetitive, frustrating Pokemon games in Elminage... then when i discovered how awesome the ninja clone ability is i completely gave up on ever making an Elminage summoner.

 

[Dorarnae]

yeah elminage 3 has a couple new things. there's a dungeon when the weather is a thunder storm, there'll be a tornado roaming the map and when you get it, it'll teleport you to a new dungeon.
as for day/night, there's a dungeon where the water can rise or lower, you can wait a bit for the water to lower a bit so you can explore the first floor without the seed to breath underwater.
there's a map in one dungeon that is completely different during night time.

other than that, the weather and day/night thing is pretty much for solving some quest...

Elminage 3 overall is solid/fun, I played it a couple time. but now that I know the trick with the feature to create your own dungeon, that thing destroy the game (well one item you can get there).

 

[aweigh]

personally what happened to me, to make me stop playing elminage 2 and 3, was that i just got tired of playing those two games in a completely unkonwn language. yes, elminage games are 100% playable without any language skills necessary because they're hard-core, early-Wizardry 'crawlers. The meat of the elminage games is in the dungeoneering.

starfish did go to a lot of effort to make a bunch of fun characters, and since Gothic was my first Elminage, and in Gothic you barely ever have a conversation with an NPC other than to provide a tidbit of story line information or to give you a pseudo-quest; when i eventually did play elmi: Original i was completely shocked at how incredibly different the game was from Gothic.

i'm not even referring to gameplay stuff: i mean Origina's upbeat soundtrack, the tons and tons of NPCs you meet along your journey who both help move the story along but also create a respectable cast of characters.

i was genuinely emotionally moved when i went to Orlando's shop to gear up while playing Original one day and.... well, you know.

all of that sort of stuff, not just the fact that there are many characters and that the tone is different; i mean that non-Gothic elminage games actually WANT TO TELL A STORY. Lighthearted fun ones, of course, and all the better for it.

i played through almost entire psp copy of japanese elminage 2, and i fucking loved playing it, but i started elmi 3 immediately afterwards (did not do the post-game on #2) and i was just completely burnt out on the gameplay.

i found myself needing something extra, like, you know, being able to read in english the dialog and shit. among a few other reasons that experience is actually why i started translating wizardry empire 1 for PC.

off and on i'm slowly, VERY slowly translating into english all 700+ items/weapons/etc in elminage 3, and whenever i finish doing that i'll swap in the menu textures with the english ones from psp Original; just like i did on psp Elminage 2. i want to finish playing it eventually but i want at least my items, spells, menus, etc, in english. since no one else will do it i'm slowly doing it myself. i don't work on elminage 3 menu translation much really since it's not a priority: because the actual dialog will never get translated, so it's more like a mod of the game than anything else.

i did finish in its entirety wizardry empire 3, PSP version, in japanese. unlike elminage 2 and 3 which feature so many reasons to want to understand and enjoy its "story", or whatever, in contrast Wizardry Empire 3 is incredibly empty.

i'm intimately familiar by now with both Empire 1 and Empire 2 and one thing in common is that there is absolutely a lot of fucking dialog. Sure, all of the dialog is between like 5-7 NPCs in TOTAL (Faust, Ryan, Turkey, King Murphy, Murphy JR, Gnilda, Lilun, etc), but when you're playing Empire 1 or Empire 2 there is ALWAYS at LEAST one (1) NPC that has a lot talk to you with in every single floor of every dungeon.

i was genuinely surprised at how Starfish did Empire 3 then, which features maybe a grand total of 3 NPCs that have dialog in the entire game and you probably talk to them once every 2 dungeons. In short it's the complete opposite to Empire 1 and Empire 2 in terms of storyline, NPCs to interact with, world-building and of course, dungeon design.

i gave Empire 3 a ton of shit when i played it months ago simply because it is completely different from Empire 1 and Empire 2: even the goddamn NAMING SYSTEM for the weapons is different!

but i realize now after time thinking on the game, and playing it some more, that all Starfish was trying to do was to make a stripped-down, minimalist Empire 3 game that would "flow" and "fit together" like it was made in 1987; not gameplay wise i mean, in actuality it has the best gameplay of the 3 Empire games simply because all of the mechanics are already perfectly balanced; i mean in the way all of the Empire 3 dungeons are designed (very similar to the early dungeons in Wizardry 1; google Wiz 1 maps and compare them to Empire 3 maps and you will see what i mean); but also how the focus is not on telling you a story it's just straightfoward dungeon crawling.

of course i fully admit none of that truly matters: the real reason it is not as good as the first two is the boring, bland dungeon design, however for anyone who wants to play it without knowing japanese it is not a problem because you are almost never required to understand something being displayed in text or via dialog. maybe, MAYBE, 1 or 2 wooden sign-posts per dungeon... which is nothing compared to the millions of sign-post signs in empire 1 and 2.

recently i downloaded the mecha-crawler LOST HEROES, psp version, both to play it and to see if i can do a menu translation of sorts.

 

[Viata]

Replaying Elminage Gothic because I wanted to try different classes that I had not played as before and also to try that Grid Cartographer software. P. good software, btw.
My team right now is:
Front: Dwarf Brawler*, Dragonewt* Hunter* and Fairy* Thief.
Back: Elf Alchemist*, Elf Mage and Human Cleric.
I'll probably change thief to ninja and another one to Valkyrie down the road. May change one to samurai, but I'll see how the Brawler and Hunter classes are. The * indicates class and race that I had not played as before.

 

[Celerity]

"So why is this new area 4 skulls? The previous was 3 and was far more dangerous all around, also far more puzzling and confusing. Wtf game?"

Oh. Alright then. Carry on.

 

[Courtier]

Replaying

How far did you get last time? You get bag of brofists from me if you reached ancient cave, and lifetime supply of headpats + honorary title ''Titty Monster'' if you beat the tower

 

[Viata]

Replaying

How far did you get last time? You get bag of brofists from me if you reached ancient cave, and lifetime supply of headpats + honorary title ''Titty Monster'' if you beat the tower

Not that much, I believe it was the soldier gold or something like that. But it was the pirate version and I stop to buy the game to support the devs. This time I'll play the whole game.

 

[aweigh]

Gothic is one of the few games I actually bought specifically to support the devs. months after playing the pirated verison to death.. Well, that and it was like 2.99.

 

[Viata]

It was my first steam game. Always pirated, didn't give a fuck. Still, I had to buy this game because I want more like this.

 

[Shackleton]

I loved Gothic and I consider it probably the best crawler I've played, but every time I think about replaying I just shudder at the amount of time I spent grinding first Lesser Demons in the Church and then Greater Demons in the later dungeon whose name escapes me.

One day I'll delve in again and have a go at clearing the tower, but not today...

 

[aweigh]

i only ever grinded them for a while in my 1st playthrough.

if you play the post-game dungeons (there are 3, the third being Ibag's Tower which has 20 floors and all things considered is probably about the same 'length' as half of the story dungeons put together end-to-end)-- if you play the post-game you will see that the experience will no longer be a problem.

when you initially begin the 1st of the post-game dungeons yes you will be under-levelled and out-gunned but unlike the story-dungeons the enemies in the post-game actually give huge amounts of XP so you there is no longer any need whatsoever to farm or to grind any specific places or specific areas.

instead simply by clearing every since tile in the post-game dungeons, naturally so, your characters will begin gaining a ton of levels and always at a steady pace that continues rising in experience gains all the way to the 20th floor of Ibag's Tower where a single encounter can yield 1 million xp.

this was a very intelligent move on their part as the difficulty rises so exceptionally in Ibag's Tower that they did not want players to have to spend hours grinding single-encounters of demons (and they know players do this, as this something that can be done since elminage: Original, and of course in many other older 'crawlers); instead they simply made every encounter super hard and every encounter give a shit ton of XP and, most importantly, that every floor onwards in the 3 post-game dungeons continue to keep raising the XP gain, UNLIKE most of the story dungeons where XP seems "normalized" somewhat regardless of dungeon's skull ratings.

 

[Courtier]

It's great how you start getting levels faster and faster in postgame, because exp req per level caps in mid teens. Yet enemies always remain dangerous because many parts of the stat & combat system work independently of just level, which is why characters can beat monsters many times their level and vice versa. It is so much better and less arbitrary than systems where overall power is wholly dependent on level. You're not just crunching numbers against each other, there's real tactics involved here. But you can still increase the odds with more HPs and spells from levels.

 

[Dorateen]

Strange Miasma Wave. That's one of the aggressive mimic's friendly little specialties. So even if you have a maxed out character with 9,999 hit points, one attack can wipe out half that mountain of health. And multiple attacks can reduce a high level party to very little in a hurry.

 

[aweigh]

Dorateen

which is why the player has such resources like:

- Miracle spell.

- That Cleric spell that automatically cuts down by 80% the enemy's total hit points (has to be used by an "Innicent" cleric in order to work fully; if the Cleric has multi-classed or if the spell is cast by a class other than Cleric w/ access to Cleric-spells then that spell only cuts down the enemy remaining hit points by a mere 20%.

- Tarot cards.

- And lastly, and to a lesser extent, the ability to "hide" characters via the Alchemy spell. Some of those end-game enemy EX-skills, such as MIASMA WAVE, ROAR OF THE DRAGON, NIGHT OF TERROR, CRUSHING EARTH, etc, don't know which but some of them also hit "hidden" chars anyway, but it's still a viable option.

- And probably lots of other options I can't recall right now.

I love Elminage: Gothic SO MUCH because it is a 'crawler where a random encounter enemy in the post-game dungeons can, and will (!), randomly decided to cast MIRACLE on you and the effect the game might choose is to teleport the party into rock resulting in immediate wipe.

you have to love the balls on that.