Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

[trejo]

A while ago, I tried this game after downloading it from an Abandonware site. I thought to myself, "This would be more fun if I had the manual, so that I could understand the game's RPG rules."

Then I got my hands on the manual, and found out it doesn't explain the RPG rules at all. At all. And this is one of those fantasy RPG games with tons

Comments

[conditor_maloru]

I have not!

I generally go for Death Trolls. It's a horribly cheat-y setup, if you have the patience. Not too good for rushing, but:

1) Go with just straight Death magic, You have to have Black Channels for this. Also, it's a really good idea to select Alchemy. It's way easier to get gold than to get mana, and Trolls can't built Alchemist Guilds, so it'll give you magic weapons for them.
2) Get Myrran, and select Trolls as your race.
3) Build up your capital city. When you can, start building War Trolls. Get them up as high in XP as you can. When you can't take them any further - either because they're maxed, or cus' there's nothing left to fight, or whatever - cast Black Channels on each of them.
4) You now have Death Trolls. Their upkeep is 1 mana/turn for a stack, which is 4 of 'em. They've got all the buffs of an undead creature, the immunities, etc, plus an attack and armor bonus from Black Channels. The only downside to Black Channels? Well, undead can't heal.

But Trolls have Regeneration.

And they keep it.

So your Death Trolls auto-heal every turn, and even if all but one member of one stack dies in combat, they're all back the second combat ends.

I've taken out a node full of Sky Drakes with Death Trolls + a good hero.

(I don't really remember, re: Exult. It's been, like, 10 years since I played U7 in actual DOS.)

[conditor_maloru]

Also, yeah, DOSBox defaults to "so slow some games won't even load right." But if you've got a decent CPU and some RAM, you can just up the CPU cycles. I run MoM with... I think, like, 1500? I can't really remember. Maybe another 0 on that.

[trejo]

I've now tried Ultima 7 with DOSBox. Works okay so far. I found a config file specifically for it. It starts off at 9000 cycles. However, walking around is slower than it is in Exult, and I haven't seen how it handles fighting yet. Mind you, in Exult, walking and fighting were almost too quick, that I recall.

[trejo]

Now that's pretty goddamn sweet. I loved how MoM let you make up your own tactics and tricks. I bought Age of Wonders at rebate, under the impression it was like MoM. However I suck at that game. I can't even figure out how to win the first scenario.