Ending: Saboteur [SPOILER]

[dragonslayer]

Screenshots tell everything, quite simple with a godly invisible/hide in shadow mage.

Invisible is too powerful in my opinion, only a few enemies (devilmander, spirits) can see invisible and even if they see you, they still get -90% hit rate modifier to attack the invisible mage.

[Randomizer]

Congratulations Dragonslayer

Some of those challenges are truly tedious. Journeyman.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Congrats! I wondered how long before that would be discovered. Awesome score too- if that is 100% natural (no cheating), you kicked ass!

And yes, before the Grammar Harpies descend to pluck out my eyes, the word "broken" should just be "broke".

[Eschalonian]

And yes, before the Grammar Harpies descend to pluck out my eyes, the word "broken" should just be "broke".

No, "broken" is correct.

[Apoteos]

With the chancellor from book 1 in mind, figuring out there was a "destroyer-ish" end wasn´t very difficult. I had to start another game to achieve it though, my fencing burglar was not made with power in mind, but rather to try out everything new in the game.

[slm]

Great find, dragonslayer. I tried to take the Crux of Ages, but the game would not let me. I never thought of killing Korren.

[silverkitty]

This game really discourages out of the box thinking.

Given Goal: prevent the 4 crux from being united.
Given Knowledge: you do not know Neo, er, I mean "the One" exists, you think the Head Taurax is in charge of the campaign to unite them

a) if you can sneak into the darn fortress and kill Captain Taurax, why not just do that? Why bother to worry about the positions of the Cruces at all? Given what you knew before entering the fortress, it would seem rating you as sufficient to kill the general of the enemy army is the same as rating you as sufficient to stop the threat.

b) why take the darn Crux of Fire with you into the enemy stronghold? why not leave it with the dwarves or with the secret guild? Retrive the Crux of Ages and destroy them later. Or wrap it in a lead box and drop it in the deepest deep of the oceans. If you get captured or killed, it's bad, but at least strategically the situation hasn't changed.

c) or substitute the Crux of Fire with a magically trapped fake, and giggle when Captain Taurax blows himself to smithereens.

d) Rig the dwarf mines to collapse. Now it's easier for Captain Taurax (remember you sitll don't know he's not the enemy) to find another Crux than to dig out the mine while you're leading a harassing campaign against his flank.

There are a zillion things smarter to do than what you're assumed to do. Basically, to believe this game at all, you have to believe your character is an idiot.

Given that you aren't an idiot, but just concerned with the life of your people, and after you know the true story of the Orakur (note this might count as an "evil" ending, whatever. a nefarious one at least):
Just hand over the two Cruces and let The One fly off. Make peace with the remaining Orakur until they die of old age. Whatever. Like you care about them getting home.

[BasiliskWrangler]

silverkitty: I actually wrote counter points to each of your statements similar to what Jedi_Learner did (only more specific to the storyline), but then realized I am giving away too much info about what is to come.

Let me just say: your statements are made on assumptions. You assume you know who is good and who is not. You are assuming that the characters know more than they do. You assume just because you are given some "inside information" at the end of the game that you already know the full story.

That is all I will say about it.

[silverkitty]

You are assuming that the characters know more than they do. You assume just because you are given some "inside information" at the end of the game that you already know the full story.

Quite the opposite - actually, I'm assuming that I don't know anything - which is the problem.

If you come up to me and say "there's four things you need to make sure never get in one spot and into the hands of the bad guys," the very, very, very last thing I'd do is haul one of those things into the hands of the bad guys. I kept expecting the twist ending to be having Ghorr say, "thanks for saving me the hassle of getting the Crux of Fire the hard way."

(*) I didn't suspect The One existed - I thought Ghorr was behind the mind control - and so, therefore, did my character. In a land of magic, there's no reason to just assume offhand a Taurax can't behind the mind control -- he may have found the Mystic McGuffin of Foo which allows him to do things beyond normal Taurax capacity. Which is why killing Ghorr should have seemed sufficient. In fact, contact with Julian, Wendy, and Sparrow is totally optional - even if those contacts explicitly told me Ghorr was a pawn (which they didn't) - I still have every chance of getting near the ending without knowing that anyone is behind this except Ghorr (minus the meta-game knowledge that obviously someone else has to be the bad guy for the sequel).

My actions make more sense once I know the ending - but before the ending when I was ignorant, I kept screaming "why the heck am I doing this? this is dumb!"

If you kill General Ghorr and leave, another would simply take his place. Ghorr isn't making the decisions, “The One” is.

Before meeting Shira, for all I know, Ghorr is the One. For the reasons I explained above in the starred paragraph.

Do you really think "The One" would let you survive, or keep your free will after your assault on Talushorn?

What does he care for Talushorn? His home is elsewhere.

Thousands of individuals are under his influence. Wouldn't they just destroy everyone after he left? I don't know the details of how mind control works with regards to “The One”, but were he to die, would everyone under his influence be free from his taint?

I don't know the details, either - but if the mind control requires any effort on his part, then, yes, the mind control should cease, for the simple reason of: "what does he care?" why contribute effort to something you intend to leave behind as trash?

Oh, sure, he might just be comically, over-the-top, exagguratedly evil in the "I wear a black hat and I'm proud" way enough to just mind control civilizations to kill each other just to watch the guts spill - but I take BW as a better writer than to have such a 2D evil villain. Assume his actions are rational - that he really does just need 2 drive stones to split and all the war is just because he considers us so many bugs in the way of his acquiring them, and, then, yes, the main threat to this world (that we know of. at the end, but not before the meeting with Shira) leaves with him.

Destroying the crux in Amireth is a good idea because no humans or dwarves live there, and Korren tells you there is a high chance a massive explosion will occur when the crux hit each other.

Even so, it seems smarter to leave the Crux of Fire with Korren while I go clear the place out - that way, if I die/fail, the Crux isn't automatically in enemy hands. They still have to attack Mistfell, which gives Korren a chance to hide it (no, I don't "know" Korren is a good guy, but my character seems willing to trust him enough to take on a suicide mission, so why not trust him enough to hold the MacGuffin in case said suicide mission fails?)

I'm sure someone could devise a spell to raise the crux back to the surface. It wouldn't be hard, after all each crux is unique.

I have no idea how hard it is to make new spells, beyond that it's not easy enough for my character to do. So I can't say "wouldn't be hard" to overcome 10 kilometers of depth and a hundred Mega-Pascals of pressure without more knowledge of how the world works. I do know the hiding it "well enough" seems to be an impediment to finding it (at least to people of this world - the only people I know exist before the last few minutes) because otherwise they wouldn't be griping about the Crux of Terra being in parts unknown.

And "The One" has technology not of this world which would help.

A fact which I'm totally ignorant of until the last few minutes, so it wouldn't enter into my planning for the assault on Talushorn.

---

side note: do you know what happens if you leave the Crux of Fire somewhere safe before entering Talushorn level 4?

I do. The answer is "Nothing". The game ends the same, as if you were holding it, even though it's actually in a barrel far, far away.

[dragonslayer]

It is 100% legit, except i did lots of save/load and made a plan withe the post of skill book/trainers list on the forum. took more than 50 hours as you can see in the score page. next time if i ever replay it, less than half time it will take.

The story is not new or exciting, but i like the style for this turn based old school rpg and plan carefully to make your character powerful, let me remember those old days with Ultima...Thanks for the great game and I am looking forward to see Book3.

btw:
Even if you applied the no random item generation rule, you can still be able to make the shop to generate different items, the shop item generation is based on the day you visit it.

e.g:
You know at day 10 the shop will have new items, and you need certain skill book or spell scrolls. go there at day 10, make a save, check the shop, if no item you need, load the save, rest or sleep to day 11, visit shop again, they will provide you new items, same to day 12, 13... do this until you see the item you need, remember which day it is, let's say day 15. load the day 10 save, do killing/exploring until day 15 and visit the shop for the item you need. you don't have to wait 7 days each time for the new items.

[Sslaxx]

"Thief" is spelt wrong in that screenshot, by the way. Is this 1.01 or 1.02 you're using, dragonslayer?

[silverkitty]

Incidentally, I like the game. I really do. I played the first one over and over, and I'm playing this one a second time already. I'm sorry I don't love the game so much that I can't possibly acknowledge the hint of any shade of a flaw in it, but it's not my girlfriend - it's just my favorite game for the moment. Without prompting from the forums, without knowing the ending or what was ahead, and long before I could articulate the whole of my recent arguments - I spent, in my first play through, the entire time from the moment Korren said "save the bad guys some effort by taking the Crux straight into their hands" to the moment the Crux was the only thing that saved me, muttering to myself that I'm my character is an idiot with no sense of strategy at all.

There's a minor possibility that I was absolutely unique in that, and that everyone else saw ahead to the ending and realized the Crux would be the shield against instant death when some new bad guy shows up at the last moment and takes over for the Big Bad and tries to kill off the main character - I dunno. But I wasn't psychic, I was ignorant of the ending. And in my ignorance of the ending, I thought my actions were pathetically stupid.

The encounter with Wendy is really, really optional and something I nearly missed because my first play through I was trying to be 'good' and not break into places people lived - I found out about her later when I found Ruel's house and read about his sister in the forums. I also knew Sparrow was avoidable the instant it happened because it broke True Healer. That leaves Julian's rants as my only knowledge of "The One" and there's nothing he says that doesn't make me think Ghorr isn't the Big Bad with some kind of mind control power. Or that he's anything but a nut job.

Either mind control takes effort or it doesn't, or takes effort once but lasts forever. Since every other magic in the game requires constant renewal to work, and that renewal costs mana, I have no reason to assume the mind control lasts for long without the Big Bad around to re-up it. Once I "know" (unless Shira is lying, of course) the Big Bad's plan is to power up his mini-saucer and split (and you know it's going to be saucer shaped because the aliens look like freaking Grays. The most generic aliens out there, sigh), it's reasonable to assume, based on the way everything else in the game works, that he'll stop re-upping control over his hordes, because he has no more use for fiddling with the ants on their hill. If I'm wrong, his armies are still finite and mortal without him around to infect new generations of people - plus, I just killed the General of the local big army, which can't be good for their organizational skills.

[Slarty]

I guess you could take that remark to be vulgar, but I didn't -- I just took it as an analogy for something else you might want to "defend" when it's criticized. (It's also sexist and heteronormative, but I digress

As somebody else who really likes Eschalon, but also sees a few irritating flaws in it, I can also understand where silverkitty is coming from. I restrict the opinions I post on this forum because I know that if I express one that's too negative -- whether it is about an aspect of plot, or interface, or gameplay mechanics -- I will get jumped on by a brigade of zealous Eschalon defenders who tell me that my opinion is wrong and I'm playing the game wrong. And to be honest, I'm just glad Eschalon is popular enough to have dedicated fanboys like that! Eschalon is a good game that deserves to be played, enjoyed, explored, and yes, maybe even debated.

[silverkitty]

It's a turn of phrase I picked up from Bill Mahr's description of rabid Obamalove shortly after the election - "he's not your girlfriend, he's just the President. He's allowed to have flaws." Guilty on the sexist and heteronormative - always a risk with quotes or borrowings - but the sentiment is merely one of "new lovers who see each other as perfect." Something else I've been guilty of a few times

Slarty's second paragraph is a much better description of my feelings, though.

[BasiliskWrangler]

I encourage everyone to continue this conversation, but not here. This thread has been hijacked and no longer follows the topic. Likewise, debate is fine but lets get away from flames. It just doesn't help anything.

I'd split this topic into another thread, but the last time I tried that I deleted half the posts. If you have anything to add to the topic "Ending: Saboteur" please feel free to post, otherwise start a new topic.