I plowed through the slime subquest and then recovered the Orb of Thralni. 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.

Strategy continues to improve now that I’m playing the game straight and need to think to survive, not being able to just steamroll theough things. 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.

You get a lot out of the gane playing even at minimal difficulty than completely OP just to clear out tour backlog. I’m used to meeting little meaningful resistance running through JRPGs since if you keep up with all the new equipment and never run from a fight you’ll be comfortably ten levels above where you need to be. I remember why I preferred Ultima to Final Fantasy. I’ll definitely be playing 4-6, and other Spiderweb games, as intended. Jeff Vogel has his quirks but he’s a very talented developer.

I’m at the point where enemies can be categorized as one-hit, two-hit, and miniboss/boss, plus drakes and things like that. Am I at the point where I can wind down adding skill points to first aid, tool use, narure lore, and arcane lore? I haven’t failed a skill check in some time and I’m pretty much topped off after every battle (plus you can do that cheap thing where you exit out of battle whenever you can just for the first aid before battle starts aftesh).

I assume you’ll always want as muck luck as you can spare. This isn’t my first dice-roll CRPG

I wish there were an “AFK mode” for GOG and Steam that let you pause the gameplay clock. My Avernum 3’s clock is at an impressive 86 hours, but that includes leaving it running overnight and through large portions of the day while I’m doing other things. Turns don’t automatically pass so you can leave it running indefinitely, even in combat, and come back to it exactly as you left it. I guess that’s a niche practice though that wouldn’t make sense with most games.