I can either go on to the land of the troglodytee or do what I assume in advancing the main story in going to Erika’s Tower. I think I’m going to stick with the surface for right now.

You should probably go see Erika at some point relatively soon.

The terrain really matters, a lot more so than with the combat-grid Ultima games (3-5). This is transformational in the dungeons, where you can position your bow-users literally in the back line with your melee fighters clogging up a bottleneck.

Playing the Gold Box games I see alot of the seeds of Exile/Avernum, and this is one of the things people credit them for innovating. The Ultima games are all older than that.

and other Spiderweb games, as intended. Jeff Vogel has his quirks but he’s a very talented developer.

Yeah, I probably should have gotten the Geneforge games back in the 2000s, I’ll start playing the remakes soon.

Curious to see if you like Avadon, because I’m really disappointed with it, but people who have the same issues I do think it’s an outlier in his games. I might wait a year or more and restart them game with a different character, the one I chose probably wasn’t very good. You don’t create characters from scratch, there are 3 or 4, and you get paired with NPCs.

I’m curious to figure out what other games, aside from the early Fallout games, scratch the same itch. Baldur’s Gate looks like it does. There’s a reamke coming out, but I’ll probably play the Enhanced Edition of the original first in this case.

Exile is older than Badlur’s Gate. I dunno who else was making comparably sophisticated games in this genre at the time. The original Wasteland from 1988 is comparable in some ways, but the combat is alot more primitive & is all text, and the interface is clunkier.

Am I at the point where I can wind down adding skill points to first aid, tool use, narure lore, and arcane lore?

You never need nature lore, IMHO. It should be easy to tell if you’re first aid is high enough. If you’re happy with it, it’s fine.
With Tool Use and Arcane Lore, if you’re not sure, just see if you run into places where you need them to be hire, and make some kind of note for yourself as to where that was. I don’t think it will stall the entire game if they’re temporarily lower than you wanted.

I wish there were an “AFK mode” for GOG and Steam that let you pause the gameplay clock.

Yeah, it should be called the “guilt clock.” On turn based games like this sometimes I just leave them running to skew the numbers so I feel like I don’t know how much time I’ve been spending.