Hello xiaora2004,
many thanks to you! I'm glad you've enjoyed Teudogar so much so far.
> 3 days [...] and got 4000+ silver and 1000+ gold coins
Seems to me you've been pretty industrious...
> what is the maximum weight the character can carry
The absolute maximum you can carry around with you (not just lift) is about 50kg/110lbs if your strength is 'average', about 60kg/130lbs if 'good', and about 65kg/140lbs if 'very good'.
While this is what you can carry, actually doing so would of course make you far too encumbered to fight. The amount you can carry without being encumbered is half that, i.e., 25kg/55lbs 'average', 30kg/66lbs 'good', 33kg/73lbs 'very good'.
I think these numbers are realistic, considering that most of that weight would usually come from your body armor, which is far more convenient to carry than, say, 4 heavy shopping bags would be, since the armor's weight rests on your upper body, without any need for you exert muscular strength.
> How to increase strengh?
Basically, every time you make use of a skill that requires strength, you'll gain not just experience in that skill, but also in strength. These gains are minimal but accumulate over time. So things like combat and combat practice will help, but this takes time and you won't make as much progress as in most fantasy rpgs.
One of the main causes for being overburdened is wearing a heavy chain mail shirt. The best thing you can do is to replace that with a Roman segmented cuirass (there are several opportunities for winning these as booty in the full version): This type of armor had been newly invented by the Romans during the beginning of Augustus' reign. It's made of flexible metal segments that tend to give in and crumple when hit, just like the crushable bin of a modern car. That effectively blunts the impact, i.e., protection is just as good or even better than that offered by a chain mail, but it requires a lot less metal and is therefore much lighter.
Another thing you might do is to swap some of your silver for gold or golden jewelry (1 piece of gold is worth as much as 25 pieces of silver). The merchant at Cattanford is good for this. He may not have enough gold the first time you visit him, but the more you trade with him, the more goods he'll have to offer when you'll visit him again later.
> how to let someone drink a sleep potion?
Use the sleeping potion on a cup of wine or beer, give that cup to your victim.
However, some noblemen are too worried about getting poisoned to drink anything given to them. And people familiar with magic will usually not drink anything that smells suspicious. Sometimes getting people drunk first by giving them un-poisoned cups of wine/beer/etc first will help; but some people are just too careful.
> if there is a walkthrough in the full version ?
Yes, in the Help Menu (F1), and it's sorted by chapters (place/point of plot), so you can look up specific situations without spoiling the rest of the game for yourself.
> female hero
I like some of your ideas very well. And indeed, some Germanic women were quite powerful; e.g. the priestess Veleda more or less led a Germanic uprising against the Romans in 80 A.D. by issuing prophecies from her tower (though the military and political leadership was done by two Germanic noblemen who had been mercenaries for the Romans). And there's as much bloodthirstyness as shown by men. E.g., Queen Kriemhilda from the Nibelung legend killed her brothers and her second husband in order to avenge the murder of her first husband Siegfried. The Cimbrian women in 100 B.C. sent their fleeing men back to the battlefield against the Romans, demanding they fight bravely; when defeat became unavoidable, they killed their children and committed mass suicide in order to avoid getting enslaved by the victorious Romans. In general, lots of Germanic women seemed to be just as active, strong and heroic as men were.
However, men's and women's roles were totally different. A woman simply couldn't act the way men did, nor vice versa - it wouldn't have been tolerated by society. Nominally, every woman was subject to a guardian (her father or husband), who had responsibility and right of command over her. It's not that women were rightless - they ruled the private and economic spheres; but they were pretty rightless in the public sphere. The state was mainly there to wage war, and since men were the ones doing the fighting, they reserved the right to decide about war or peace for themselves: Women had no political rights (even though they'd often bear the burden of the men's decisions). Consequently, no woman could have proposed a tribal alliance to another chieftain in a formal way without being ridiculed. (That's not to say women didn't discuss or promote such alliances; they just couldn't do the formal, ceremonial part.) Additionally, in a lawless and violent world, having on average 20% less physical strength than men meant yet another restriction for women: While it was common for a well-armed man to travel alone, a woman couldn't even leave her village on her own without facing a serious risk of getting raped or being kidnapped and made a slave.
In practice, that meant that women mainly had to act through men - convincing men, enticing men, prodding men to do their bidding. E.g., Germanic women were just as keen on revenge as men were; but while men could simply kill their foe in an open duel, women usually had to find and convince another man to act on her behalf. Or if you favored war against the Romans, as a man you could simply stand up in the people's assembly and hold a speech making your point. As a woman, you would have had to find and convince a man to hold such a speech.
So while it was possible to find some workarounds around all of these restrictions, it pretty much comes down to the point Cedric made: It wouldn't have been possible to play the existing plot as a woman; you would have had to find different solutions in countless instances. That is, it basically would have had to be a totally new plot, which would have been an awful lot of extra work.
On top of this, there's the problem with graphics: Both your animated figure (middle of the screen) and your inventory paper doll are male. A female option would have required around 30 extra sets of animated npc armor and equipment (no big deal for helmets, but quite a lot of work for body armor etc), resulting in a total of around 1,500 extra animation phases, as well as dozens of extra equipment pictures (new, used, and damaged) for the paper doll.
So I decided to let it be for the time being...
> dude: I don't think my character's strength ever increased
Your strength doesn't improve a great deal; it's really not significant compared to what you can do in some fantasy rpgs. However, even this small gain only exists since version 1.01: Originally I'd assumed that the timespan of the storyline was too brief for you to really change your body, i.e., originally, there was only gain in skills, not in strength.
I still think this makes sense with regard to intelligence: If you've got an IQ of 110, you will still have an IQ of 110 after graduating from university; i.e., your basic mental abilities remain static, only your skills improve. But with regard to gaining strength this was obviously absurd; you can do a lot in this regard in just a few weeks; so I added gaining strength in version 1.01.
If you're still playing version 1.00, there's a free update patch at
http://www.teudogar.com/downl.htm; downloading and running this will update your installed version; your saved games will remain fully usable.
