>if you don't have clerics and magic users you're screwed lol
My mix now is one cleric, two mages, and three fighters. I have been swapping several characters in so I have a good mix of them. I think I created ten characters and I adventure with six, the max, right now. Sometimes I sub in a thief for one of the magic users to level her up.I might make another cleric before too long too. I did a bit of checking and you eventually want to have a woman, a thief and a dwarf in the party at once, for certain quests. Made my thief a woman too so that kills two birds with one stone.Engine is great but there's a bit of disk swapping on the C64, it's really not that bad though. Load times are quick with JiffyDOS, I can't imagine how long disk operations would take without it. 8-12x as long IIRC. Fastloader or JiffyDOS is essential even if you're emulating.
One downside of the C64 version? You can't move around without the joystick in combat. In the 3D view it works fine. But you absolutely need a joystick in port 2 to actually play the game. At least as far as I can tell. It'd be great to do it all from the keyboard.
Best game in the whole gold box. Nothing else matches it. The later games get less fun because they use lots of status effects and in this engine, half of them are an instant kill
I liked the dos version, no loading and good keyboard controls. But the next game (azure bonds), the dos ui is ugly af and beautiful on amiga
>>12797148I'm enjoying it. It's slower paced. An encounter takes a bit.
SFX are OK on C64. I don't know if it has more music than just the title screen yet. That was OK, vaguely heroic.
I got into a bar fight too. That was completely unexpected. I won and got EXP too.
>>12797537Low level D&D games are the best. The numbers and gear upgrades are maximally satisfying. the difficulty is high but doesn’t have any of the really evil stuff that requires savestate scumming
>>12797550I happened to have bought some Gold Box games at one of those antique mall places, $15 each, so I have the manuals etc. for the correct version that I'm playing. It's nice to look the things up in the book. The manuals and code wheel are printed with multicolor ink (red and black) and have good detail. Whoever bought Pool of Radiance also bought the clue book which was sized to go in the box, where it was. I decided to use it for the city, but haven't turned the page yet to look at the slums map or keys. I'm gonna clear that one out manually unless I get totally stumped.
>>12797558Yeah the clue book is a weird thing for Gold Box. All the games give you a full automap for free, unlike EotB and those games. You hardly even benefit from it
Well most of the games at least. Silver Blades maps are outrageous
>>12797562It's enough to orient yourself without a map, I like it. It has no fog of war so you can see if you're moving toward some danger zone though.
>>12797079You should have just used 3 Half-Elf Fighter/Clerics and 3 Half-Elf Fighter/Mages.
>>12797051>if you don't have these extremely baseline members of a typical party composition, you're screwed
IIRC I didn't "clear" the Slums at the start of the game and left the battle at the south west for later
>>12797741I don't know anything, I'm old enough to have played this game when new but just never did at the time.
