Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Metro]

Mentioned it in another Gold Box thread but I got through all of these games never using a single multi-class character. The harder encounters are easily overcome with haste, prayer, and good ol' not so delayed blast fireball.

 

[Gregz]

Re: PoD

A number of people online claim to have (legitimately) dual classed at 39, and built a 40/39 (mage/ranger) or 40/39 (x/x) party.

So I believe there's plenty of opportunity to XP late game.

I rather foolheartedly attempted a 3 paladin 3 ranger party that I intended to dual to clerics and mages when they reached 39. This ended up more of an an excercise in masochism than fun gaming. So I gave up around level 19 or so. I may give it another go later.

 

[Erebus]

Mentioned it in another Gold Box thread but I got through all of these games never using a single multi-class character.

I mostly use single-classed characters, but I think it's worth multi-classing clerics (you need them for their healing spells, but they kinda suck in combat once the enemies get decent saving throws).

 

[Kersey]

Thanks for the replies everyone! Good to hear that PoD may not be quite as hard as I thought it would be. My impression was based on things I've read over the years, "oh the final battle is so hard no-one has probably beaten it without turning the difficulty all the way down" and the like. And I was worried that if I dual class early, I'd have a band of fragile too-low-level fighters slash mediocre mages for the final confrontation. Good to know that I can start dualing right away, though I don't think I'll be going back to SotSB for it this time around.

I did plan ahead with character creation and gave most of my chars a high intelligence, and the paladin can indeed dual class (although I'm sure I read somewhere that he shouldn't be able to). So here's what I'm planning now:

Fighter/Magic-User
Paladin/Cleric
Fighter/Thief (unchanged)
Cleric/Magic-User
Ranger/Magic-User
Magic-User (unchanged)

This is somewhat suboptimal I know, but it seems like the best I can do. I thought of dualing the mage into cleric as well but I like the idea of having a ridiculously high level pure mage in the party. I know the fighter/magic-user combo isn't the best but it seems possible to have a semi-decent AC even without wearing armor and the guy has a ton of HP so I think I might as well. Although he certainly would have been a cleric if he was wise enough.

How excactly does this work? Does info from Hillsfar get transfered to CoAB, and then you get Journal Entries you otherwise would not get?

I think there's a flag in the character file for completing Hillsfar, and you get a few journal entries for it "attached to that character's chest" or something like that. I don't remember getting those when I played some of Curse with a new party some time ago. The entries are like this one I got when I first moved around the world map:

Journal Entry 24
The letter reads, "Hail Harper's Friend, we must warn you that Dracandros of Thay seeks to use you against dragonkind. To protect yourself you should seek a deadly blade that he has secreted in the caves below his tower. Still avoid the dragons if possible, they are quite deadly."
The letter is unsigned.

BTW, you must have skipped a lot of battles if your ranger is only lvl 15. On my latest playthrough I dualed my ranger to magic user quite early in Secret of the Silver Blades when he was level 15. I got a Gold Box overdose so I put Pools of Darkness on a temporary hold when reaching the Fire Giant caves, at which point my former lvl 15 ranger was still only a lvl 13 magic user.
So dualing too late may not be a good idea

I did skip a lot especially towards the end of SotSB, and the optional dungeons of CotAB would probably have had a lot of XP in them as well. Many of my characters have also lost a level's worth of XP for level drain/restoration, but I can't remember if any of that happened after PoR. The ranger might have been the one I really messed up with in SotSB at one point, returning from slogging through both the western and eastern crevasses only to realize I had so much XP on one of my chars that they basically lost an entire level's worth of it leveling up. I always figured that the XP losses aren't that big a deal though. There's plenty of XP to go around and you accumulate it at an ever increasing rate.

 

[octavius]

I did plan ahead with character creation and gave most of my chars a high intelligence, and the paladin can indeed dual class (although I'm sure I read somewhere that he shouldn't be able to). So here's what I'm planning now:

Fighter/Magic-User
Paladin/Cleric
Fighter/Thief (unchanged)
Cleric/Magic-User
Ranger/Magic-User
Magic-User (unchanged)

This is somewhat suboptimal I know, but it seems like the best I can do. I thought of dualing the mage into cleric as well but I like the idea of having a ridiculously high level pure mage in the party. I know the fighter/magic-user combo isn't the best but it seems possible to have a semi-decent AC even without wearing armor and the guy has a ton of HP so I think I might as well. Although he certainly would have been a cleric if he was wise enough.

Sounds good, except I wouldn't dual the paladin to cleric. A paladin is already basically a fighter/cleric, so all you'll gain is a few more cleric spells. And with your cleric turned into a mage you'll be very short on healing power.
And you whole party will be very weak if you dual four of the six characters at the same time.

 

[Kersey]

Sounds good, except I wouldn't dual the paladin to cleric. A paladin is already basically a fighter/cleric, so all you'll gain is a few more cleric spells. And with your cleric turned into a mage you'll be very short on healing power.
And you whole party will be very weak if you dual four of the six characters at the same time.

A boost in the healing power is what I was thinking of with dualing one of the fighter types to a cleric. Naturally this would have been the fighter but he's just not cut out for it (I didn't think too far ahear when creating him since I was originally planning to ditch him after PoR). The paladin's not too bad a healer as it is so I'll take your advice and leave him as is. And I won't be dualing everyone at the same time. I'll try to manage it so I'll have at least semi-decent spellcasting and healing power all the way through.

Oh, and depending on how this goes I might be looking into starting the Krynn games soon (unless I, like, get employed or something), though I doubt I'll need much help with those. There's already a quite recent thread with some good tips for starting Champions of Krynn. How very pleasant that these games are still being discussed somewhere to such an extent.

 

[Joonas]

I've put some Gold Box related stuff here. Has links to various forum threads related to these games.
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/

Started with Pool and just recently finished Secret, transferring characters from game to game. One character has 3.8 million xp. Even if bored with all the grinding in Secret, the loot is surely going to help in Pools. I decided not to dual-class instead cheated a little with multi-classing.
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/sotsb.html

What do you think of the Savage Frontier -games? I've played the Realms/Krynn-games several times in but never the SF-games. They aren't discussed nearly as much.

 

[octavius]

What do you think of the Savage Frontier -games? I've played the Realms/Krynn-games several times in but never the SF-games. They aren't discussed nearly as much.

Worst encounter design of the Gold Box games, but otherwise they are good.

 

[Kersey]

I've put some Gold Box related stuff here. Has links to various forum threads related to these games.
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/gbc/

Looks nice, though I'm finding the games very enjoyable without the (mild) cheating. The absence of the fix command in PoR for example, only time I felt like I would've liked for it to be there was near the very end. That being the only time my characters had enough HPs and the enemies were hitting hard enough to make healing everyone in one or two passes impossible, making it a little bit of a chore.

What I REALLY would like is an automap feature where more of the map is revealed as I explore. Even that's not essential to my enjoyment but would significantly enhance it.

But good work in any case.

What do you think of the Savage Frontier -games? I've played the Realms/Krynn-games several times in but never the SF-games. They aren't discussed nearly as much.

I'm planning to do those at some point, unless I get all gold boxed out before getting that far (unlikely). All I can say so far is that they look really nice in my opinion. From what I understand they both feature endless streams of random encounters with little variety. I wonder why it was so hard to duplicate the excellent design of Pool of Radiance in that regard.

 

[kmonster]

Sounds good, except I wouldn't dual the paladin to cleric. A paladin is already basically a fighter/cleric, so all you'll gain is a few more cleric spells. And with your cleric turned into a mage you'll be very short on healing power.

The paladin's not too bad a healer as it is so I'll take your advice and leave him as is.

I recommend dualing your paladin to cleric. With lousy level 1-4 spells you won't be able to heal much outside resting, clerics get heal, resurrection and restoration, your other cleric won't have many spells since you dual him. Even a level 9 cleric gets more spells than a level 40 paladin. If you don't dual this character to cleric dual to mage instead.

 

[octavius]

Re: PoD

A number of people online claim to have (legitimately) dual classed at 39, and built a 40/39 (mage/ranger) or 40/39 (x/x) party.

So I believe there's plenty of opportunity to XP late game.

I rather foolheartedly attempted a 3 paladin 3 ranger party that I intended to dual to clerics and mages when they reached 39. This ended up more of an an excercise in masochism than fun gaming. So I gave up around level 19 or so. I may give it another go later.

How do you get enough XP for this?
XP from monsters are not much, unless they are carrying obscene amounts of coins, like Giants for some reason do in AD&D.
In Gateway to the Savage Frontier I remember there were some outdoor areas where you could gain so much XP and money from killing realtively harmless Hill Giants that it unbalanced the game.

 

[Jaesun]

What do you think of the Savage Frontier -games? I've played the Realms/Krynn-games several times in but never the SF-games. They aren't discussed nearly as much.

Worst encounter design of the Gold Box games, but otherwise they are good.

Can you possibly expand a bit more on this? Perhaps once Dungeon Craft reaches a 1.0 Version and I finish my other Modules, I might make a go of doing an "Improved" version of the Gateway series to fix/alter such problems.

 

[Crispy]

I would just like to add that Gateway was always one of my favorites of the GB series, if only for its exotic setting. Where Storm of Zehir tries (and miserably fails) to capture that cool, dark jungle essence, Gateway succeeds and lends a nice bit of spice in doing so.

I also appreciated starting fresh in that campaign, as well, low-level always being my preference. It's always a trip to go from super-powered PC's back to starting level ones.

 

[octavius]

What do you think of the Savage Frontier -games? I've played the Realms/Krynn-games several times in but never the SF-games. They aren't discussed nearly as much.

Worst encounter design of the Gold Box games, but otherwise they are good.

Can you possibly expand a bit more on this? Perhaps once Dungeon Craft reaches a 1.0 Version and I finish my other Modules, I might make a go of doing an "Improved" version of the Gateway series to fix/alter such problems.

I've mentioned it several times before, so I didn't want to "spam" this thread with it, but since you ask:

In Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds each area has a finite amount of random encounters or patrols, and they are generally quite diverse.
Secret of the Silver Blades has endless random encounters, but it makes more sense since the areas are huge, although there should have been a finite number of those mid level Black Circle mages.
Champions of Krynn has less variation and more illogical enemies (lots of hostile elves is a direct contradiction of what the Dragonlance books say about elves), but there is a finite number of patrols in each area. Hower, unlike PoR and CotAB, the patrols are reset each time you leave and come back to an area.
I haven't "studied" Death Knights of Krynn, Dark Queen of Krynn and Pools of Darkness in detail, but AFAIK they have finite amount of random encounters.

In the Savage Frontier games OTOH, each area has only one or two types of random encounters, they are endless and the chances (D6) are the same outdoors as in dungeons. In one area you would meet either two Ankhegs or one Troll, for example. In another you would always encounter two Hill Giants. In a third it was always 6 guards. You get the drift.
As if that is not enough, in Savage Frontier they had ditched the Parlay [sic] option, and you were left with Fight or Flee.
So the encounter designe of Savage Frontier was a huge decline compared to Pool of Radiance. Rember the first monster area in Phlan? You could meet goblins, kobolds or orcs. They could either surprises you, flee or evade you. You could parley with them in different tones - Nice, Haughty, Abusive, Meek and Sly.
And there was even choices&consequences to how you treated people. If you helped the Nomads against the Kobolds they would later always be friendly to you if you encountered Nomads in the wilderness.

I think the reason for this decline was the SSI had "outsiders" do the Savage Frontier games, while the Forgotten Realms and Krynn games were made in-house by people with a better understanding of the rules, sometimes even designed by people who wrote pen&paper modules.

So an improved version of the Savage Frontier games need better random encounter design, more variation and bring back parlay. The set encounters (especially the end battle of Gateway) and the story of the SF are just fine, though.

 

[Gregz]

Re: PoD

A number of people online claim to have (legitimately) dual classed at 39, and built a 40/39 (mage/ranger) or 40/39 (x/x) party.

So I believe there's plenty of opportunity to XP late game.

I rather foolheartedly attempted a 3 paladin 3 ranger party that I intended to dual to clerics and mages when they reached 39. This ended up more of an an excercise in masochism than fun gaming. So I gave up around level 19 or so. I may give it another go later.

How do you get enough XP for this?
XP from monsters are not much, unless they are carrying obscene amounts of coins, like Giants for some reason do in AD&D.
In Gateway to the Savage Frontier I remember there were some outdoor areas where you could gain so much XP and money from killing realtively harmless Hill Giants that it unbalanced the game.

I have no idea and I'm probably wrong. The last time I played PoD was about 5 years ago and I only got about halfway through. There are character editors for PoD, so the screenshots I saw online are suspect...although in the thread about high dual-classing, several people were claiming to have done it legitimately. I would link the thread, but I lost it and I'm too lazy to dig it up again.

 

[Jaesun]

So an improved version of the Savage Frontier games need better random encounter design, more variation and bring back parlay. The set encounters (especially the end battle of Gateway) and the story of the SF are just fine, though.

Thank you sir.

When/if I get to such a project I'll keep your notes above for reference.

 

[Metro]

He's right about the encounter design although, overall, I enjoyed Treasures of the Savage Frontier quite a bit. Seemed like it came much closer to Pool of Radiance in having a more interesting over world map with hidden locations than the other Gold Box games.

 

[Kersey]

I recommend dualing your paladin to cleric. With lousy level 1-4 spells you won't be able to heal much outside resting, clerics get heal, resurrection and restoration, your other cleric won't have many spells since you dual him. Even a level 9 cleric gets more spells than a level 40 paladin. If you don't dual this character to cleric dual to mage instead.

Having made some progress in the game yesterday I came to the same conclusion. The cleric's usefulness has declined greatly and I will be dualing her to magic-user soon. And the paladin isn't as useful for healing as I thought he would be. I dualed the ranger and the fighter first and they are making excellent progress. Both can now cast delayed blast fireball and the ranger is already close to getting the ranger abilities back, so I'm looking to dual the next batch soon.

So far I'm really liking Pools of Darkness. The atmosphere is great and it's chock full of quality content, there are things to do wherever I go. Also the graphics are nicely done.

 

[octavius]

OK, I agree that a Paladin/Cleric is better than a pure paladin, but it just doesn't feel right to me...

 

[kmonster]

Don't wait too long with your cleric to dual to mage, it's going to be only your backup cleric and the other characters are already far ahead in the mage class where each level increases the damage dealt with fireballs.
Don't wait too long with your paladin either, you can use the fix command even with a level 1 cleric.

 

[Kersey]

OK, I agree that a Paladin/Cleric is better than a pure paladin, but it just doesn't feel right to me...

I do feel like I've taken the step into powergaming with the dualclassing but it seems required to keep the characters developing in a meaningful way, and the fights are getting quite tough in places. I certainly didn't have an easy time with the dragons at Thorne's cave.

Don't wait too long with your cleric to dual to mage, it's going to be only your backup cleric and the other characters are already far ahead in the mage class where each level increases the damage dealt with fireballs.
Don't wait too long with your paladin either, you can use the fix command even with a level 1 cleric.

I went to the game for a bit right after writing my previous message and dualed them both to see if I can pull it off now. Seems okay so I'm keeping them that way. Paladin is kicking ass with the flail+4 and the cleric/magic-user will soon be useful in combat. I did a few encounters worth of grinding to get them both up to level 5-6 (1 encounter = 1 level up). I might have been better off dualing them earlier though, the cleric was on level 23 already. Will be interesting to see if she ever gets her cleric spells back.

 

[kmonster]

Which levels did you finally dual your characters, which level are they now and how far in the story did you progress ?
Did you find a good grinding location ?

 

[Kersey]

Which levels did you finally dual your characters, which level are they now and how far in the story did you progress ?
Did you find a good grinding location ?

I've been playing a lot today. A damn addictive game, this one. I just entered Kalistes' dimension or some such after a long stretch of fighting drow in and around Zhentil Keep. My party met Silk again but there was no special dialogue as far as I could tell for my ranger being sort of part of her group from Curse of the Azure Bonds. Too bad, I was hoping for something extra there for keeping the same party from game to game. But then, Secret of the Silver Blades had a few familiar characters from before too and none of them seemed to remember my party either.

My party right now:
Level 11 Cleric(/Level 16 Paladin)
Level 9/20 Fighter/Thief
Level 16 Magic-User/Level 15 Ranger
Level 12 Magic-User(/Level 23 Cleric)
Level 16 Magic-User(/Level 18 Fighter)
Level 22 Magic-User

I'm pretty comfortable with the party, although there have been encounters for which they are a bit weak. The ranger just got her ranger privileges back so I expect to kick all kinds of ass soon. I didn't do a lot of grinding, just a bit to start the newly dual classed ones off. I did that by travelling back and forth between Zhentil Keep and that other place, Dragonhorn something IIRC. There was almost always a pretty weak drow patrol on the way and the other place had a training hall I could use between combats.

 

[Achmed1974]

Maybe my memory is flawed here. But was there any mouse support for Curse of the Azure bonds on DosBox? The interface just is very weird where the > < are used to cycle left and right and 7 and 1 is keybinded to scroll up an down. And the mouse pointer just transparent and non functional. I know the Amiga version of this and later Gold Box games had no issue. So is something configured improperly or was the interface this gay on DOS back in the day? Makes for painfully slow post battle management and sorting.

 

[Jaesun]

It's honestly much faster and more easier to use the keyboard commands than mouse support.