Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Incendax]

I have never run into a random fight with more than 2x mages of any kind. The fixed encounters are the ones with large number of casters from every direction (e.g. that fight in Tremor's lair).

I've run into 8 casters at once on trash fights (2 Mages + 2 Clerics on one side, 2 Mages + 2 Clerics on the other side). It obviously depends on your location. Hawkbluff is especially bad.

 

[Cael]

I have never run into a random fight with more than 2x mages of any kind. The fixed encounters are the ones with large number of casters from every direction (e.g. that fight in Tremor's lair).

I've run into 8 casters at once on trash fights (2 Mages + 2 Clerics on one side, 2 Mages + 2 Clerics on the other side). It obviously depends on your location. Hawkbluff is especially bad.

I only run into the one with 3 clerics and a whole mess of zombies or minotaur zombies. Boring as hell.

 

[pjs]

I have never run into a random fight with more than 2x mages of any kind. The fixed encounters are the ones with large number of casters from every direction (e.g. that fight in Tremor's lair).

I've run into 8 casters at once on trash fights (2 Mages + 2 Clerics on one side, 2 Mages + 2 Clerics on the other side). It obviously depends on your location. Hawkbluff is especially bad.

It may be worth noting that Thenol Wizards are a bit easier to deal with because they don't have fire shield (cold) activated, while Dark Wizards do. Both have Globes and several other spells active. So you can take down or disrupt spellcasting of Thenol Wizards, Clerics, etc. with DBFs etc., not just Power Word Kills. (Thenol Wizards and Priests are still fire resistant, so they take only 1/2 or 1/4 of damage, so you usually need a bunch of DBFs depending on difficulty level.)

I thought big and scattered hordes of vampires, especially vampire mages, were at least as tedious as Thenol Wizards, because vampire mages are unaffected by both fire (due to fire shield) and cold. So you had to use bows and magic missiles to take them down. The upside is that they don't cast DBFs. A couple of enchanted draconians, especially bozaks, also required quite bit of time and care to deal with.

 

[Erebus]

As long as you have Davik with you, use the secret passages as much as possible and don't tour the entire place, I don't think you have to deal with that many random fights in Hawkbluff. The most dangerous part is when you're chasing after Trandamere, but it's actually completely optional ; you can just ignore him and go straight for the Book.

 

[Cael]

As long as you have Davik with you, use the secret passages as much as possible and don't tour the entire place, I don't think you have to deal with that many random fights in Hawkbluff. The most dangerous part is when you're chasing after Trandamere, but it's actually completely optional ; you can just ignore him and go straight for the Book.

That would be why. I always go straight for Davik, go after Trandy, get the book, then explore.

 

[Incendax]

As long as you have Davik with you, use the secret passages as much as possible and don't tour the entire place, I don't think you have to deal with that many random fights in Hawkbluff. The most dangerous part is when you're chasing after Trandamere, but it's actually completely optional ; you can just ignore him and go straight for the Book.

Hahaha. I fought everything as I mapped the entire place, and ran into Trandy before Davik.

 

[pjs]

I played through Gateway and Treasures, so a few questions and writeups:

Gateway is a really underrated game. It's a great starting point if you don't want to deal with Pool of Radiance's lack of features (though Pool is such a great game).

You can actually play the same party from Pool of Radiance > Gateway > Curse > Treasures > Secret > Pools of Darkness for an epic 6 game romp.
Some item corruption can occur, but it's not a big deal.

How do you accomplish Treasures -> Secret? The character file formats are somewhat different across the games, and SSB does not recognize TSF character files. https://goldbox.fandom.com/wiki/Gold_Box_Forgotten_Realms_GOG_Transfer_Guide seems to suggests you can only export to POD from Treasures (without some conversion).

Anyway, I once again tried Gateway to the Savage Frontier, and while I did try a run some months ago, this time I intended to play further, and I beat the game. It was definitely not a bad experience at all. Here are some more or less random remarks and thoughts I have about this game:
...
-The economy is not as broken as in most of the other goldbox games. Only towards the end did the economy feel moving downturn, but it was still not too bad (compared to the other games...)
...
-After some enemies (more towards the end of the game) diseased a char in my party, I cast a "Cure Disease" spell on him and he seemed ok. But the character had lost some STR while being diseased, and that attribute wouldn´t return to his normal value, untiil I cast "Enlarge" on him. After the initial effect of the Enlarge spell had worn off, that character would regain his normal STR value.

On economy: I agree it was an interesting situation when you actually didn't have enough gold pieces to train your characters at start. I took an "easy way out" and resolved this by going outdoors to the hills nearby and killed a dozen or two parties of hill giants. Very easy to get money and the early levelups (felt almost like cheating because the game was so easy afterwards).

On disease: the mummy attack, when it weakened the character (IIRC it didn't always happen; you could get diseased without it as well) resulting in STR permaloss(?) was annoying and I couldn't figure out how to solve it. (So I tried to avoid those mummies.) Not sure if this is a bug or feature and whether there is supposed to be an actual way to fix that instead of resorting to Enlarge (nice tip!).

A few notes on GSF/TSF run in contrast to Curse/SSB post earlier:

A small writeup on reflections of Curse and SSB (POD still pending, I don't expect much surprises on that front):

I ended up skipping Pool of Radiance, because it does not offer paladin or ranger as an option, and I didn't want to resort to hex-editing the characters to a different class in Curse.

So I started Curse with 1 paladin, 3 rangers, 1 mage and 1 cleric. Dual-classed one L10 ranger (after Zhentil Keep) to mage and did some grinding so the mage obtained L11. The rest I left to be dual classed in SSB
....

Ran with Champion difficulty. I wanted to try something different and picked 2 paladins, 3 rangers and 1 cleric. GATEWAY was easy even without a mage (you just had to use bows to shoot down enemy spellcasters). Likely the computer AI scaled down most of the encounters for some reason (like in POR). The whole game resulted in about 200K xp. (NB. Cleric level cap was ridiculous, you got maxed out at 27K xp! Likely due to the developers not wanting to implement level 4 spells.)

Continuing in TREASURES, I ran the party maybe 1/4 way (additional 150K xp) and when the rangers reached level 10 at 325K xp (max level with 8+4 hit points), I dual classed one ranger to mage. The mage reached level 11 and unlocked ranger capabilities somewhere about Luskan so just in time to get the benefits before the endgame. I had the idea that if I were to continue to SSB, I would switch paladins to mages when they would reach level 13, the remaining two rangers to mages when they would reach level 15. I also had intended to switch the cleric to mage at some point (maybe at level 11 or 12, so it could in the end access "heal"); preferably I would have wanted to run it longer, but I could not dual-class it the same time as the paladins because then I would not have any healing capability in the party for a while. If this would have been sufficient wrt. clerical skills, the party would have been even stronger than the previous one because 5 characters would have warrior background and everyone would develop to a level 30+ mage in POD.

The first phase of TSF when I had no mage at all was not too difficult. Maybe the "fixed" encounters were somewhat scaled based on party strength (for example, in some cases the clue book said an encounter would have "sorceresses" in plural, while my encounter only had one). It may have been a coincidence, but almost immediately after dual-classing one ranger to mage, the enemy spell casters seemed grow in number. At times having just one mage required attention.

In TSF the most tricky enemies were certain black-robed mage and spy encounters and springing up from every direction. But a couple of uses of haste and regular buffs (and/or luck) dealt with this rather smoothly. The end battle was much easier than I expected based on some youtube vids and cluebook warnings; maybe I just got lucky with the initiatives, because I only lost one party member to a slay living spell, one of them was held during in the first battle, and only one was dragon breathed down in the second battle.

 

[Null Null]

As far as I know the only transfers are Curse <-> Gateway (with some item corruption in Curse) and Pools <-> Treasures (with some item corruption in Pools). I haven't heard of transferring parties to Secret (except from Curse of course).

You could do Pool->Curse->Gateway->Treasures->Pools (perhaps dualling a bunch of people in Gateway), or Gateway->Curse->Secret->Pools (temporary)->Treasures->Pools. Gateway, Treasures, and Pools came as a set in one of the collectors' editions, and you could have your Treasures party finish up in Pools, but you want to grind them so they'll be just below 13th level levels of XP in Treasures, because Pools starts you at 13th level or so and is pretty tough.

I actually brought my Pools party into Treasures, and it's fun if you're into powergaming. The 'sea of men and monsters' at the start falls quickly to a Delayed Blast Fireball, and given the paucity of magic-resistant monsters in Treasures spamming Delayed Blast Fireball is a pretty effective way to go.

They usually say to swap over the rangers at level 9 because that's when you can start using mage spells in armor...but level 10 does get you that extra d8+CON bonus.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

What was the difficulty settings % stats on the creatures? Ac, hp, damage, exp? I don't recall the exact data on this.

 

[Cael]

What wS the difficulty settings % stats on the creatures? Ac, hp, damage, exp? I don't recall the exact data on this.

Just HP. It gest doubled in the highest difficulty. There might be some bonus to saves, but at the end of the day, it is just HP bloat and extra slog. Nothing else changes. You don't even get extra XP for playing at a higher level.

 

[pjs]

In Champion difficulty, the enemies have 50 % more HP compared to the default (which means 3x HP compared to Novice). In addition to some buffs in saves, etc., the resting/fixing is significantly more difficult in some locations (even practically impossible) and you seem to get way more random encounters. But as Cael said, you don't get any bonuses, even extra XP, in higher difficulty levels.

I just did a test run, continuing from GATEWAY to CURSE; with imported characters, I played without a mage until getting rid of the first bond (Dracandros). It was reasonably easy with so much fighting power even without haste and other buffs (I skipped only the room full of otyoghs and the drow cleric and mage quarters). Then I went to Shadowdale dungeons, developed the rangers to level 10, switched one to mage and grinded it up on a good start. I don't recall if went all the way to L11 there or whether I continued with the bonds quests. At any rate with all the superb warriors (now also boosted with enlarge), one cleric and one dual class ranger/mage, the rest of CURSE went very smoothly.

I also played through SECRET again. Very soon the cleric got to L12 (ie. access to two heals), I dual-classed it to mage. Now the healing was at the hands of my two paladins, I had to wait until the cleric/mage reached mage level 13 (ie. 1.125M xp); this was about the same time as paladins got to level 14. To speed up the process (also after switching the paladins) I also did some XP grinding. Drider Base fire giant section seemed ideal for this. Just rest 3-4 days in the right place (a certain corridor provided ideal battlescape properties) and along comes a patrol of 5 fire giants and some hellhounds, which gives you about 10,000 xp. The battles are so easy that I ran them through with Quick mode and maximal speed with melee weapons only; essentially only Vala, my ranger/cleric, and cleric/mage took down the enemies because the other four were still developing as their mage class. Each battle took about 15 seconds, and you could typically Fix right after it (and even if not, the party could take down a couple of additional patrols). Essentially this meant that you could get about 1 million XP in about an hour (including running back to the town and scribing new spells etc). Maybe it would have been possible to grind less, but then the game would otherwise required way more attention towards the end. Now I could just run through most battles towards the endgame with auto, just having to take note if there were spellcasters or some more dangerous enemies.

So if you are interested in maximising the power of your characters in POD, it is actually possible to start with 2 paladins, 3 rangers and 1 cleric in Gateway, run through Curse and SSB and eventually have 4 warriors of two attacks per round, 1 warrior with 1,5 attacks per round, one about L12 cleric (the only drawback here is no direct access to restoration), and all of these dual-classed to mages that get more and more powerful as the game progresses.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I don't recall but does GBC allow you to play say POR up to level 40 and dual class? I can't imagine the horrible grind that would take tbh.


I didn't experiment with the monk either. I'm guessing Buck Rogers & Neverwinter Nights was excluded as well?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What's the differences between the non-Sega versions of Countdown to Doomsday?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Well.... annoying fucking music for sega ver.




http://www.honestgamers.com/8341/pc/buck-rogers-countdown-to-doomsday/review.html

SEGA MEGADRIVE/Genesis
Description
This version of Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday retains most of the story and the core gameplay of the computer version of the same name, but differs in several gameplay- and interface-related aspects.

The main differences involve reduction of some of the skills and equipment types present in the computer version. Limitations have been imposed on character creation as well: there are only four character classes (Warrior, Rocketjock, Medic, and Rogue) and three races (Human, Desert Runner, and Tinker) to choose from, as opposed to five character classes and six races in the computer release.

You play as a party of new recruits to the organisation NEO which is fighting the RAM faction, a group of tyrants who previously ruled the solar system. The game begins with you preventing an invasion of earth headquarters by alien mutants. After this you transit to an orbital command base where you take on several different missions.

In the computer version, first-person view and pseudo-3D graphics were used for navigation, while combat was viewed from isometric perspective. In this release, isometric view is used both for navigation and combat, the player-controlled party visible from third-person perspective.

PC version you can transfer your characters to Matrix Cubed (the less than stellar sequel)

 

[Arrowgrab]

I've only ever played the PC version, but AFAIK one difference is that shops in the SEGA version have much nicer stock, including "magical" (+x) weapons and heavy armour. Grind a bit for money, and you can kit your team out rather nicely.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Every video for PC sound is like ass but the early gold box was like that. Amiga had sone good sound and animation. Movement outside of combat looked different. I always meant to play the sega version but Starflight took me away from that game. I look at my 5 1/4" diskettes for dos and laugh.

 

[Ladonna]

I have only played the C64 version of Countdown, a number of times. I still have the novel that came with it, and bought the other 5 in the series. They seemed good back in the day, and I read them again sometimes for a laugh.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

non-Sega versions

the Sega version has the most obvious(and well-documented) differences, but I'm curious if there's differences between the other versions too. Guess I'll have to roll my sleeves up and play through it on each platform.
Guess I could start by comparing the included files though I suppose

 

[ReneGanon]

Hello, I am currently playing Curse of the Azure Bonds and I encountered "unable to load geo in Load3DMap" error.
The error occurs when I load in Zhentil, if I load earlier and come to Zhentil, then there is no city or its replaced by the dungeon I was in before.
I know that another person in this thread was helped with a similar error. Can anyone help me please?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Buck Rogers needs Twiki.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

As this has become harder to find, I thought I'd share it here to help it be less lost.
Here's the official offline version of AOL's MMO Neverwinter Nights that closed down in 1997. It is not the last version released(v2.22), but it is close(v2.20)

What does this have to do with Goldbox, you ask?
It was a Goldbox game converted to online play... converted to offline play.

https://archive.org/details/NWNOffline

With regards to ownership: This thing is pretty much only a curiosity/museum piece. It was never for sale.
This is unrelated to the FRUA remake and similar, this is the official offline version.

 

[unseeingeye]

As this has become harder to find, I thought I'd share it here to help it be less lost.
Here's the official offline version of AOL's MMO Neverwinter Nights that closed down in 1997. It is not the last version released(v2.22), but it is close(v2.20)

I didn't even know this existed, I've only gotten the FRUA version. Thank you very much, I've always been curious about it!

 

[ProphetSword]

As this has become harder to find, I thought I'd share it here to help it be less lost.
Here's the official offline version of AOL's MMO Neverwinter Nights that closed down in 1997. It is not the last version released(v2.22), but it is close(v2.20)

What does this have to do with Goldbox, you ask?
It was a Goldbox game converted to online play... converted to offline play.

https://archive.org/details/NWNOffline

With regards to ownership: This thing is pretty much only a curiosity/museum piece. It was never for sale.
This is unrelated to the FRUA remake and similar, this is the official offline version.

Biggest problem with this game in its current state is that there’s no way to save…so each time you leave the game, you lose all progress. You can get around this by using a version of DOSBox that allows for save states. The other issue is that there isn’t much going on in the game without other players and with the bare-bones content it contains.

 

[Ethaliel]

Didn't CRPG Addict reviewed offline version?
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2017/02/game-241-neverwinter-nights-1991.html
If it's the same version there isn't much to do - no quests, no fixed encounters or combats etc.

 

[Null Null]

The FRUA version is at http://frua.rosedragon.org/pc/modules/n/neverwin.zip , produced by GoldBoxFan (who's no longer around the forums). It's a FRUA mod, so it can save etc. I wasn't able to get too far--I couldn't get my guys past first or second level after clearing out the first couple of easy areas. But maybe I was doing something wrong.