Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Zomg]

Oh, and the extra year haste added didn't hurt too much as they were elves. Adding one year (out of hundreds) meant so little in that game. Even with some libearal hasting I still only added about 25 years to my party artificially in all 3 games

Aging isn't implemented, so moot point. Feel free to run your humans up to age 65535.

Was there any dust of disappearance in PoR? I vaguely remember quasi-cheating to win the final battle.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Always move away from walls when a dragon is present.

I have only defeated "the Boss" once without a death, but never actually lost the battle. I thought the final battle in Curse was harder personally.

And don't skip over POR. While some of the mechanics are not streamlined, the actual game itself is second to none in the series, and this is coming from someone who enjoys almost all of them (I actually enjoyed the Krynn series and the Buck Rogers games more than the rest of the forgotten realms games).

 

[bgillisp]

Have fun with the POR final battle...has anyone here beat it without lowering the difficultty?

Yes my first Party of:
1 Human Fighter
2 Half-Elf F/C
2 Elf F/M
1 Dwarf F/T

(After quite a few re-loads) I was able to. I casted Haste after the first battle with the fighters before the final Boss. IF you can get your fucking characters AWAY from the wall before the Boss does his breath attack = WIN.

Haha...oops, I was tired when I wrote that. I meant Pools of Darkness (POD) not Pools of Raidence (POR).

 

[PorkaMorka]

This may be close to LARPing, but

you could always just run through POR with a bunch of fighters and then use UGE or hex editing (or just recreating them with the same name/stats) to turn them into Rangers and Paladins for Curse of the Azure Bonds. There is an UGE module for it.

Since you lose your gear, one dude with all 18s and 18/00 str is pretty much interchangeable with another, heh.

 

[jaylittle]

4 humans, fighter, cleric, wizard, and thief. That is all you need.

I haven't done it recently, but I surely did it 'back in the day'...except for pools of darkness, I never played that one.

If you haven't played PoD, your advice is worthless. PoD takes pain to a whole new level. It makes the first three games look like panzy shit.

That having been said, I started a run through the last three games about a year ago that I put down and haven't finished. I started with Curse because I needed Rangers to make the whole thing work. My classes were as follows:

3 Human Rangers
2 Human Clerics
1 Human Mage

Around level 25 - 30 I would then begin dual classing them in PoD in a staggered fashion to:

3 Human Rangers/Mages
2 Human Clerics/Mages
1 Human Mage/Cleric

The reason for this is simple: The last sequence of three battles in PoD are nearly impossible to beat. You want to know what it's like to fight 20 Bits O' Moander along with 20 Dracolichs at the same time? Well thats the first battle. The next battle are about 20 of the undead beholders (the exact name of which escape me at the moment). The final battle (which I've only made it to once and that was pure dumb luck) is the actual final guy along with his demon minions.

Having a lot of high level mage spells at your disposal is a must here. The Rangers are important because as best as I could tell from the manuals, the Ranger is the only class that can dual over to a Mage and still be able to cast all of the spells while holding a sword and a shield. Yet another dumbass 2nd edition rule (much like the horrible gimping of all demi-human races).

I made it through Curse and got to the very end of Secret of the Silver Blades (right outside the final castle). I've just never gone back. Mostly because Secret of the Silver Blades is a really shitty game. PoD is actually one of the best Goldbox games out there, but it is also one of the hardest. There are tons of insane high level D&D battles scattered throughout the game. It reminds of the insanity present within BG2: ToB in a way.

Anyway for those of you who haven't played PoD, I highly recommend it. And if you can beat it, you'll need to back that shit up with some screenshots. The only FAQ for PoD on Gamefaqs pretty much says this in regards to the final battles:

"Turn the difficultly down to easy and pray"

Or something like that.

 

[jaylittle]

Have fun with the POR final battle...has anyone here beat it without lowering the difficultty? If so I'd love to hear how, best I ever pulled off was getting one person to the final wave (stupid 8 beholder wave), who, needless to say, lost

I think you mean PoD. Everybody who responded assumed you meant the Gold Dragon at the end of Pool of Radiance. Pools of Darkness is the one with the three wave final battle. The second wave is a group of about 20 undead beholders.

And no, I've never beat it. But I've always refused to turn down the difficulty as well. I literally spent an entire night in a hospital room (sitting with my wife watching over my mother-in-law who was recovering from surgery) playing through the PoD final battle on a laptop. I made it to the final wave once and that was pure dumb luck. At the time I had a party of four characters all human (2 Fighters, 1 Mage, 1 Cleric) that I had taken up all the way through PoR. The next time I played through all four Forgotten Realms games, I had a party of six. Don't remember the exact load out but the results were very similar.

 

[Jasede]

Doesn't PoD have an optional dungeon/boss that's even harder?

 

[mondblut]

Having a lot of high level mage spells at your disposal is a must here. The Rangers are important because as best as I could tell from the manuals, the Ranger is the only class that can dual over to a Mage and still be able to cast all of the spells while holding a sword and a shield. Yet another dumbass 2nd edition rule (much like the horrible gimping of all demi-human races).

Hm, any dualclassed mage can cast spells with swords and shields. The only spellcasting limitation I remember is multiclassed mages being unable to cast while wearing armor, solved by bracers of ac 2. Rangers are essential due to protection from fire spell. And all goldboxes are 1st edition

"Turn the difficultly down to easy and pray"

Or something like that.

I didn't have any hardships with final battle, but it *was* on easy. And my party was like 39/40, specifically grinded to test the engine limits. Final battle sequence in Gateway to Savage Frontier was much harder, you couldn't grind to near unlimited levels first.

 

[jaylittle]

First Edition, bah, whatever Anyway yeah perhaps it was the armor. Nonetheless being able to hold a +5 shield and wear +5 plate is a pretty big advantage if you are throwing out high level mage spells. Plate Mail +5 comes out to AC -2 whereas Bracers AC 2 are a bit weaker, yeah?

Of course one of the biggest annoyances with Gold Box is the fact that none of these details are discussed within the game manuals themselves. So you either learn them through experience, find somebody else who knows or do the research yourself.

 

[jaylittle]

Doesn't PoD have an optional dungeon/boss that's even harder?

Yeah after you beat the final battle sequence there is a special dungeon with some insane shit inside.

 

[bgillisp]

Anyway for those of you who haven't played PoD, I highly recommend it. And if you can beat it, you'll need to back that shit up with some screenshots. The only FAQ for PoD on Gamefaqs pretty much says this in regards to the final battles:

"Turn the difficultly down to easy and pray"

Or something like that.

That about sums up my luck with that final battle in PoD. I beat it once on the 2nd easiest with a party that was specially min/maxd (18 in all stats, dual classed all mages at 18th level to fighter, all fighters at 15th to mage), then hasted everyone. The minor globes on invunerability kept the beholders from slowing the fighters, then it was pray the disintigrate/stone to flesh/kill rays all failed and hope I get them dead fast enough. Still took some luck to win battle 3 with all those blue bane mimions...who thought someone could beat monsters with perpetual fire shield and no magic anyways???

 

[bgillisp]

Though watch those difficulty settings in the other games too. My first time in Secret of the Silver Blades I was fiddling with the settings and didn't know what the default difficutly was so I set it to Champion by mistake. Man those 132 HP dragons were brutal to my 32 HP mages. Didn't realize my mistake until I played the game over again

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Gateway to the Savage frontier was indeed a dog of a battle. I did it with 2 characters left. Have not replayed the game yet.

Isn't it possible to grab the jewels, or whatever they are, and then run for it? I thought I heard it was possible to win without taking on the Vaalgaamon hoardes.

 

[Zomg]

Anyone tried to ironman these? I'd think the balance would be off for the higher level ones with all the save or die spamming. Gonna try it with PoR and characters with the first stat rolls I get.

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

Anyone tried to ironman these? I'd think the balance would be off for the higher level ones with all the save or die spamming. Gonna try it with PoR and characters with the first stat rolls I get.

I might try this with the Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA) version of PoR. Paladins and Rangers are available, demi-humans don't have level limits (aside from PoRs normal low levels), and demi-human class restrictions are much looser (Dwarves can be Clerics, Elves can be Rangers, etc.).

 

[Zomg]

After playing through the slums with completely terrible level 1 characters, I gotta say ironman PoR requires tactics that are too boring to be palatable.

 

[jaylittle]

Surviving the first couple levels in PoR takes some careful maneuvering. PoR is very non-linear in the respect that you can just wander into a higher level area by accident at any given time. You've got to be real careful

And year, an iron man would be boring. The graphics are nothing to write home about. The battles themselves are pretty much 98% of the game. So really all you would be posting is a bunch of battle screenshots, an occasional widescreen storyboard story and maybe a overland map shot

 

[Zomg]

I've played the shit out of PoR, which is why I'd try the game equivalent of licking my plate (ironman) to get another run out of it.

It's a big problem that there's just too much mediocre combat combined with a sluggish interface to play with an ironman protocol. With normal, "save between set piece fights" style you can just autofight random battles (and it's near instantaneous on the highest game speed - I wouldn't mind crappy attrition combats in the newer RPGs if they'd just make it GB fast, dammit) and reload in the rare case where there's a freak disaster with a couple of idiot AIs jamming themselves into the melee range of eight enemies or whatever. I really can't see myself playing out every single attack over the course of killing the fifty thousand random encounter kobolds and orcs and goblins that are in PoR.

 

[santino27]

This thread inspired me to reinstall the full series, plus gates/treasures. Do people use DOS boot disks, emulators, or just run directly from windows?

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

This thread inspired me to reinstall the full series, plus gates/treasures. Do people use DOS boot disks, emulators, or just run directly from windows?

A painful question.

There is a problem with the Goldbox games, and it is this: the different versions of the games offer different experiences, especially in the early games.

The PC versions of POR, CAB, and Champions of Krynn are, apart from loading speed, worse than the Amiga versions, and in some way even worse than the C64 versions.

However, if you wanted to do a full run through using the Amiga emulator, you can only do the Krynn Trilogy, as the last games in the Forgotten realms, Buck Rogers, and Savage frontier were never ported.

If you are used to the PC versions of the early games, you are fine. My problem was that I was accustomed to the C64/Amiga versions, and when I tried to replay them not long ago with the PC versions, I almost died of the horrors. I had do a manual swap over by making characters that were the same and editing them for equipment, levels etc, once I made the jump over to the final games on the PC.

 

[Luzur]

This thread inspired me to reinstall the full series, plus gates/treasures. Do people use DOS boot disks, emulators, or just run directly from windows?

i use the AD&D Collectors Edition and Dosbox.

but if i want i can play them on Amiga,original 486 PC or C64 too since i own all the Goldbox games already.

 

[jaylittle]

DOSBox is the way to go man.

 

[mondblut]

First Edition, bah, whatever Anyway yeah perhaps it was the armor. Nonetheless being able to hold a +5 shield and wear +5 plate is a pretty big advantage if you are throwing out high level mage spells. Plate Mail +5 comes out to AC -2 whereas Bracers AC 2 are a bit weaker, yeah?

But bracers of protection are cumulative with cloaks of protection, whereas magical armor is not (I don't remember about the rings). Bracers AC2 and cloak +5 come to AC -3 OK, PM+5 and cloak of displacement (cumulative here) are -4, but that's a minor difference. Besides, you lose 3 movement points in magical plate.

And, wasn't AC limited to -10 anyway? At least in some GB games it definitely was.

This thread inspired me to reinstall the full series, plus gates/treasures. Do people use DOS boot disks, emulators, or just run directly from windows?

Directly from windows here. Apart from sound (which is nonexistant/sucky anyway), they run flawlessly without any emulation.

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

I've started an ironman game of the FRUA version of PoR. I created all new characters using the first roll for each (except modifying hit points to maximum), and worked my way through about half of the slums. The FRUA version is easier to work with; the graphics are much better than the original, and some of the interface problems are cleaned up. Here's a screenshot:



My party consists of:

Human Paladin
Elf Cleric/Ranger
Dwarf Cleric/Fighter
Elf Fighter/Magic-User
Half-Elf Cleric/Magic-User
Elf Magic-User/Thief

 

[made]

However, if you wanted to do a full run through using the Amiga emulator, you can only do the Krynn Trilogy, as the last games in the Forgotten realms, Buck Rogers, and Savage frontier were never ported.

That's not quite true. The only game that didn't have an Amiga port was Matrix Cubed, iirc.