If you like drugs this game has drugs in it. You can get addicted to it. I remember it happened to me in Exile III. I thought I would be careful, I thought I was in control, but soon it didn’t even make me feel better, I just needed it to function.

This is the biggest Avernum game, and I think it’s the biggest Spidweb game. There are dungeons. Yeah, you need to walk around alot. Every province has a big capital city, so be sure to find those and talk to people, they’re important to the main quests. Remember to report back to your people at Fort Emergence too.

You actually never needed to rest in Inns. In Exile you could camp on the overworld, although there was a danger of monster parties attacking you while you rested. You did also replenish health just walking around. In towns and dungeons you could use a “Wait 40 moves” command to replenish a little health. That did let monsters respawn in the dungeons though.

Yes, you needed to eat in Exile. The food was a stat like money, you didn’t have to carry specific food items in your inventory. In Avernum food just heals you.

Exile was more complex in a lot of ways, although Avernum did add things, they didn’t just simplify the game. It was alot more grounded in tabletop gaming mechanics where you have to “roll” for everything. There was stuff like an alchemy ability that lets you make potions and poison. It was always supposed to be a major part of the game, but I think Jeff Vogel eventually realized that most people didn’t think it was worth putting XP into and eliminated it started with the original versions of the second trilogy. Now you just take the ingredients to someone and they make the potions for you, without you having to buy recipes, put XP into the skill, and then have your attempt to make a potion fail. You did need alchemy in the first game, to make graymold salve to cure Patrick’s wife, but you didn’t need it in any other part of any other game. Although if you didn’t make resurrection balm using alchemy, you couldn’t cast raise dead spells. But resurrecting characters with magic/alchemy had a chance of reducing their stats (this is true in Wizardy, where it makes more sense, and I think is from D&D and is in some of the old D&D games). So I never used it, and usually just went back to a save if someone died. You could pay a crap ton of money to a healer in a town to resurrect someone.

Off the top of my head I thought strength affected missiles, but I just pulled up Avernum II (I don’t have III loaded on the computer right now) and it tells you about the stats when you hover over them with the cursor. Based on that, I think it doesn’t.

you should invest in first aid, it’s one of the most useful abilities in dungeons.