Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Hobo Elf]

The kobold cave is really messing me up. I can handle the first two fights (against the trolls and then the boars) in the room where you fight three waves, but by the time I get to the 3rd encounter I'm down to half my party. Is there a way to disable the turret before the 2nd fight or do I just have to live with the party damage?

 

[CryptRat]

I'm not sure there's something you can do, these battles sure are hard.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Well, I managed to beat the fights. I fucked up the final encounter majorly by slapping stinking cloud on some trolls and my strongest fighter who then got KO'd, but he was the only casualty, so I'll take it. Now I just need to drag my way back to town and rez him somehow, while everyone is at low hp and spells.

 

[Cael]

GBC optionally allows you to level up demihumans without level caps if that's what you want. It switches them to humans only for an instant, then gives them back the original race.

What setting is that? I haven't seen it. I would love to take the level caps off Treasures of the Savage Frontier and the Krynn series.

 

[octavius]

Most frustrating thing about the tribold fight was when the game sometimes crashes when the boars rise.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Most frustrating thing about the tribold fight was when the game sometimes crashes when the boars rise.

This happened to me earlier today with the Mace fight at the Bane temple. I had used Raise Dead on one of my NPC party members (Skullcrusher?) and after several attempts I twice got close to winning that fight, but then the NPC would freak out, collapse and then cause the game to crash. In the end the only solution was to kick the NPC out of the party.

 

[Ladonna]

What is causing all these crashes? Is this something that happens with the PC version?

 

[DavidBVal]

GBC optionally allows you to level up demihumans without level caps if that's what you want. It switches them to humans only for an instant, then gives them back the original race.

What setting is that? I haven't seen it. I would love to take the level caps off Treasures of the Savage Frontier and the Krynn series.

That's my elf. Leveling up through that button ignores any caps, although I am not sure if I had to modify any default settings (I don't think so). In any case I am not using that function so I don't really know if it has any other drawbacks or limits.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Sat down last evening and did the Pyramid dungeon close to Phlan. That dungeon was a little bit of a bitch. I'm not a fan of teleporter dungeons (who is? Why do they keep making them?) but this one was on the milder end of the spectrum. I tracked my progress on graph paper and that made it a lot easier, as expected (and intended). The biggest problem was when I got to the walls that had to be thrown with a stone before passing. This could've used some kind of visual que, or at least a text prompt that gives the player some understanding as to which end point the teleport is tied to. Otherwise there wasn't anything that difficult in this dungeon. My magic-user nuked the boss and his lizardmen with fireballs and that was the end of that.

The game is a fair bit longer than I expected, but the pacing is great. The dungeons are generally pretty fast and nothing ever feels like it's overstaying its welcome. I hope the future games keep providing with this kind of pacing.

 

[Cael]

GBC optionally allows you to level up demihumans without level caps if that's what you want. It switches them to humans only for an instant, then gives them back the original race.

What setting is that? I haven't seen it. I would love to take the level caps off Treasures of the Savage Frontier and the Krynn series.

View attachment 17427

That's my elf. Leveling up through that button ignores any caps, although I am not sure if I had to modify any default settings (I don't think so). In any case I am not using that function so I don't really know if it has any other drawbacks or limits.

Oh, thanks. I didn't even consider the menu.

How do you tell if your elf is ready for a level, though? All the colour changes and bars stops at level limit, don't they?

 

[DavidBVal]

GBC optionally allows you to level up demihumans without level caps if that's what you want. It switches them to humans only for an instant, then gives them back the original race.

What setting is that? I haven't seen it. I would love to take the level caps off Treasures of the Savage Frontier and the Krynn series.

View attachment 17427

That's my elf. Leveling up through that button ignores any caps, although I am not sure if I had to modify any default settings (I don't think so). In any case I am not using that function so I don't really know if it has any other drawbacks or limits.

Oh, thanks. I didn't even consider the menu.

How do you tell if your elf is ready for a level, though? All the colour changes and bars stops at level limit, don't they?

Not in my case, bar became orange indicating the elf was ready for a level up. Because of the cap, my demihumans are always like that

 

[Cael]

GBC optionally allows you to level up demihumans without level caps if that's what you want. It switches them to humans only for an instant, then gives them back the original race.

What setting is that? I haven't seen it. I would love to take the level caps off Treasures of the Savage Frontier and the Krynn series.

View attachment 17427

That's my elf. Leveling up through that button ignores any caps, although I am not sure if I had to modify any default settings (I don't think so). In any case I am not using that function so I don't really know if it has any other drawbacks or limits.

Oh, thanks. I didn't even consider the menu.

How do you tell if your elf is ready for a level, though? All the colour changes and bars stops at level limit, don't they?

Not in my case, bar became orange indicating the elf was ready for a level up. Because of the cap, my demihumans are always like that

Hmm... I will have to replay the Savage Frontier series now :D

Thanks, bud.

 

[Null Null]

I suspect teleporter dungeons were at least in part a way around memory limitations. You can't make a dungeon bigger than 16x16, but you can stick pieces of it together to make a dungeon that's functionally longer or wider. This was used later in Curse and got everyone sick of it in Secret, where you had huge confusing dungeons with nothing in them (or, in the case of the ice caves, too much in them!)

It's also one of the easiest things to do on a primitive computer--just change a few bytes in memory! Wizardry made huge use of it as I recall.

 

[octavius]

Well, it's better than lazy wraparound maps, which was quite common in Bard's Tale.
I think the only Gold Box game that used it was Death Knights of Krynn for Daargard Vingaard Keep.

 

[Cael]

Well, it's better than lazy wraparound maps, which was quite common in Bard's Tale.
I think the only Gold Box game that used it was Death Knights of Krynn for Daargard Keep.

Vingaard Keep had endless streets because they wrap around on each other.
Throlt Catacombs had a long passage which used a wrap around to achieve the length.

DQK had a few also, notably the temple in Hawkbluff.

 

[Sceptic]

The game is a fair bit longer than I expected, but the pacing is great. The dungeons are generally pretty fast and nothing ever feels like it's overstaying its welcome. I hope the future games keep providing with this kind of pacing.

Unfortunately I don't think any of the other games hit the sweet spot as well as POR. Silver Blades in particular is pretty bad about seemingly never-ending dungeons and is very linear. If you can live with that the rest of the series is still great, as are some of the other Gold Box series (especially the Krynn trilogy IMO)

 

[DavidBVal]

The game is a fair bit longer than I expected, but the pacing is great. The dungeons are generally pretty fast and nothing ever feels like it's overstaying its welcome. I hope the future games keep providing with this kind of pacing.

Unfortunately I don't think any of the other games hit the sweet spot as well as POR. Silver Blades in particular is pretty bad about seemingly never-ending dungeons and is very linear. If you can live with that the rest of the series is still great, as are some of the other Gold Box series (especially the Krynn trilogy IMO)

Pools of Darkness is reasonably open and nonlinear, and pretty epic. But IMO the game is far less exciting than PoR. You start at level 13, so basically you'll just gain a couple more spell levels and maybe duplicate your spell capacity via dual-classing, but nothing comparable to getting that first Fireball and roasting 15 orcs in PoR.

 

[octavius]

I think Dark Queen provides the most consistent quite high level of challenge.
But Pool of Radiance is maybe the CRPG with the highest amount of memorable combat encounters, with perhaps only Baldur's Gate as a contender (but still it's the trash mobs many prefer to remember).

 

[Cael]

I think Dark Queen provides the most consistent quite high level of challenge.
But Pool of Radiance is maybe the CRPG with the highest amount of memorable combat encounters, with perhaps only Baldur's Gate as a contender (but still it's the trash mobs many prefer to remember).

For DQK, you need to turn up the difficulty and therefore, HP, of enemies. Otherwise, a barrage of high-level DBF will end most fights on the first turn.

 

[octavius]

"A barrage of high-level DBF" sound like assuming rest spamming. I prefer to turn up difficulty by using magic sparingly and only rest once each game day.

 

[Cael]

"A barrage of high-level DBF" sound like assuming rest spamming. I prefer to turn up difficulty by using magic sparingly and only rest once each game day.

When you have 3-4 mages in the party, you'd have to be completely incompetent to be rest spamming, but that is just me.

 

[DavidBVal]

We all feel the urge to dualclass/multiclass so we can have 4 Mages and 4 Clerics in the party, all of them in high AC and big HP. But the price to pay is, obviously, that the games were designed for "normal people" and such optimizations will make many encounters trivial. Can't have everything.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Welp, I finished PoR. What an absolutely amazing game. The penultimate fight against the group of 8th level fighters was harder than Tyranthraxus, but it was still a fight that made me sweat a little bit. The Hill Giant pots I had been hoarding were likely what saved me in the dragon fight as they allowed my best fighter and f/m hybrid to hit him consistently. After a few rounds of missing, drinking pots and then whacking the dragon down he went. The praise the game has gotten is well deserved, this is definitely one of the better RPGs I've played.

I think for now I might be moving on to the first of the Krynn games before immediately continuing to CotAB, though I definitely plan on getting to that game as well eventually. I'm less familiar with Krynn as a setting (having only read the very first Dragonlance book) so any character tips are welcome. I looked a bit at the classes already and I'm probably gonna take a Knight, though I'm not entirely sure what separates them from a Fighter and Paladin, and I think I want a Cleric of Majere as their special ability is to Turn Undead at twice their level, which should be quite nice for wrecking undead enemies.

 

[octavius]

Knights are easily the best warrior types in the game. They can use the best non-magical armour and at higher levels they are almost as good as a Cleric when it comes to spell casting.
Paladins feel like an anachronism to me, at least based on my knowledge of Krynn from the Dragonlance books.

 

[EtcEtcEtc]

The character combat icon editor is quite nice. For such an old and low graphical game, you sure are able to make quite an an immersive looking party with a large enough selection of body parts and colors. I feel more immersed in my party of 2 framed sprites than the modern 3D cRPGs are able to provide.
.

It's pretty good, but get prepped if you play the rest of the goldbox games because those icons are going to be your only options for three of the Forgotten Realms games, two of the Krynn games, and one(? i believe) of the savage frontier games.

Assuming you plan to play the rest of the series, and if you like to tinker, download the Gold Box Companion - it's pretty great - http://gbc.zorbus.net/ - adds a lot of nice QOL things to the game and lets you import your own custom sprites as long as they fit whatever size the games run under.