https://www.pcmrace.com/2024/10/28/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-pc/

This is why he was banned. He made it a CON that they focused so hard gender on identiy (You can make your character non-binary or trans THIS IS TRUE ONG ) ResetEra stans devolve into seething about 'nazi' game reviewers.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-thread.1020987/page-9#post-130774476

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-thread.1676719/post-269735487

This CHUD starts gloating in Neogaf ( ) for being banned.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-thread.1676719/post-269735777

!chuds banned the transphobia

"This review and SkillUp's couldn't be further apart. I'm feeling that this game is going to massively cluster reviews on both ends of the 1 to 10 scale. Interesting."

"I'm sure you are being honest, but this does kind of confirm what fextralife was saying about how the developer was screening reviewers and only giving keys to those who were more positive about the game in order to attempt to inflate the scores, which is quite deceptive on the developers part. I hope everyone that gets the game enjoys it, but shady business practices like that get a hard pass from me."

Went to a Halloween party, too hungover for an effort post.

Naturally, the Anti Girl Peepee Aut Right Chuds are big mad that the game isnt a failure.

Turns out its getting good reviews

Naturally the Pro Girl duck Aut Shift Lib Chads are more positive that the game is reviewing well.

Radical Centrist Redditors

https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ge47j2/dragon_age_the_veilguard_review_thread/

Dragon Age Fanboys

https://old.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/1gds5y6/dav_spoilers_general_review_embargo_lift/

Generally people are shocked that Eurog*mer gave this a perfect score, and people are pooping/praising tthe Skullup guy.

In general it reminds alot of people of Mass Effect 2, which is good enough for me.

ok so I will try and keep it open literally all day, I wfh today so Ill be checking in occasionally

im literally screaming, Ill update the post if the server crashes and we have to restart

i feel like lobby code: VOBRY

I just think it's funny that ( )

Theres no way elder scrolls lore is popular enough for 50 metal bands to pop up, there hasnt been a tes game in like 13 years and one that has mattered in 20

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

Miners working in the Erzgebirge. I forgot to include this in the last episode am using this as a segue from the last episode.

Hunt for Formulas

A few of the more important cities have universities, the same ones that had one in real life. There's one in Leipzig but we're heading to Bohemia anyway so let's go to Prague. Charles University was established in 1348 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV as the first university in Central Europe. There was like, I dunno, 8 universities in Europe at this point and most were in Italy, so this was a really big deal. About 80% of the students were foreign as it was the only university in the eastern half of Europe. The Hussite revolution of 1415 that wracked the whole Empire began here. It's one of the oldest universities still operating today.

To save time, we'll take a boat up the Elbe. One criticism I hear of the game is that the cities are all interchangable. Obviously that's a really tarded observation because the city couldn't be nearly this complex if you made them unique. And there are some subtle differences that you'll pick up on if you know your history. Like notice here that the castle is the Hradcany.

Academia is full of uncooperative peepeeheads just like in our time. It'll be tough to find someone who can navigate their bullshit. One person in the party is the "leader". This is the person who will take on any solo task that doesn't depend on the whole party. For almost the entire game up to this point I've left Sasha as the leader because almost all of those tasks involved talking to people and she's the charismatic one. But these university students are a bunch of spergs so we have to deal with them on their own level. Yuna is perceptive and has 29 in Speak Latin, but Redactor has the same skill and slightly more when we add up the other two attributes.

I'll get Thunderbolt. It's explosives. (I'll describe these in detail below.)

After that it was night time so we had to leave. Let's try this again tomorrow. Wow! Redactor pulled it off again. What to get now? Noxious Aroma and Eyeburn are fairly useful in combat. (These are the two potions that evil alchemist used against our guys in the last fight.) Unfortunately the formulas they're selling are for the best versions of it, so they're probably way too hard to make until Redactor gets extremely good at alchemy. So we'll get Black Cloud. This isn't used in combat, but in a lot of dangerous situations it lets you create a smokescreen. Now that Redactor has 5 formulas it's more likely that other alchemists will trade formulas with him.

Having gone through all that ordeal of finding a university and convincing them to sell me a formula, I remember that actually the regular local alchemist will also sell them in any relatively big city. Well at least you guys got to hear the university music. Let's take a look at our formulas. (No I will not call them "formulae".) "Mystical number" is the difficulty. 112 is fairly easy. There's only three ingredients which means it's very likely I'll find both of them soon. (BTW: "Pitchblende" is a uranium ore. Marie Curie first discovered uranium in pitchblende from the Erzgebirge.) Looking at my other formulas I see that actually I've collected all the ingredients needed to make Quickmove, so I could have demonstrated alchemy to you guys a whole episode ago. Oh well. I'll do it now.

Alchemy

We could just stay at the inn and do our alchemy here, but some of these potions will blow up in your face if you make a mistake. If that happens I don't want it to happen in the middle of Prague. So we go camp just outside the city. Quickmove temporarily increases agility, which doesn't help much in combat but is very important in a lot of other situations, like any time you need to climb. Let's look at that equation:

• +100 - Bonus for making just one

• +18ps - The quality of my philosopher's stone. This is something you keep permanently that helps you do alchemy. I picked up a cheap one at some point. Getting a really high level one is expensive and a pain in the butt since you have to deal with the university.

• +42int - I hope this is obvious.

• +44alch - My alchemy skill

• -101mn - The mystical number of the formula.

We got enough ingredients to make more than one, so let's do that. Generally you mix up potions in big batches. It gets increasingly difficult after the third one though. If we try to make 4, that +100 bonus turns into +50 and our chance of success drops to 53%. At a batch of 6 it's a +33 bonus, and so on. So obviously we'll make 3. Nice. That's what I like to see. I'll actually stay here and make a few more batches. You can sell the potions for a profit. Late in the game you can make obscene amounts of money this way, but late in the game you've already got all the money you'll ever need.

More Wandering

At this point I think we're pretty well ready to get into mid-game content with one exception. We really need Redactor to make some potions for us because we're going to run into trouble that you don't want to face with just steel. Also the game will tell us when we're ready. So I'm going to do more wandering, focusing on learning new formulas and stockpiling alchemical components.

We run across a rural monastery. Let's go in. They usually have a lot to offer.

Well these guys seem like peepees. Monasteries run the spectrum from honest to wicked. (Reading the game's data files, there was going to be crypto-Satanic monasteries where if you spend the night they send a Satanic nun or monk to try to seduce one of your party. If they fail a Virtue check they... do things that you're not supposed to outside of marriage. I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that got cut just because they were so far behind schedule.)

This is not my kind of monastacism!

I can't complain about their library though. Books can't be corrupted. We pick up St. Hubert. He was a bishop in the Ardennes in the 600s-700s who is famous for spending a lot of time hunting and just hanging out in the forest with the animals and converting the people around Liege. In the game, he'll help us out a lot. If we run into an encounter in the wilderness that we want to run away from (this will happen) our Woodwise and Stealth skills will be tested. Even Nathan only has 24 in each.

I wandered over to St. Joachimsthal and it definitely wasn't just an excuse to give you a history lesson. It only has a couple thousand inhabitants now, but it was a boom town after the discovery of silver in 1512. Coins were minted called Joachimstaler. This was soon abbreviated as thaler and evolved into the word "dollar". Agricola, who revolutionized metallurgy and geology and pushed alchemy toward being science instead of bullshit did much of his studies here.

Wolves! With our equipment we should be pretty well immune to their attacks, but they're always a little scary. In Darklands if you lose a battle most opponents will take all your money and equipment but leave you alive. Wolves are one of the exceptions. If you lose they'll eat one of your people. I'm glad our New World wolves are nicer. Wolves attacking humans is pretty much unheard of in North America.

Notice how they've landed a 1 point and a 2 point hit on us. That indicates they're not penetrating our armor.

They're not a big threat during the day though. One of the great things in this game that they really follow through on is the day/night cycle. Before electricity a lot of your life was dictated by where the sun was. The Darklands are much more dangerous when it's literally dark.

Kutna Hora, the other important center of silver mining in Bohemia. It played an important role in the Hussite Wars in the early 1400s. Actually I'm pissed because it's depicted in the game as being a small town when in real life it was a major city in this era. If Arnold Hendrick were still around I'd give him an earful.

I guess I'll have to pay. It would be a pretty major sin to get in a physical fight with a bishop even if he is in the wrong.

We go east and spend some time in Moravia. We can get good bows there. Thrown weapons are just not going to be viable going forward because they only have 2-3 penetration. I get Sasha and Yuna longbows. These have 6 penetration, which cuts through any armor an ordinary human wears.

Well we can't let this happen. This aggression cannot go unchecked. It's time to draw a line in the sand.

A surprisingly easy fight. Sasha got beat up pretty bad because she's not strong enough to wear the same level of armor as everyone else. I'm gonna have to figure out what to do about that. I might have to actually do some math and see how much weight we can cut by losing the longbow and maybe even giving her a lighter weapon. I don't need her out there slaughtering the enemy, the rest of my party can do that, but I do need her to stay in the fight. If she gets knocked out there's just 3 of us and we'll get swamped by whatever enemy we're facing.

Castle

Eventually my wandering takes me to the castle of Zossen in Brandenburg.

Sasha tries to figure out if the local lord is a good guy by talking to people but can't figure out anything definitive.

Yuna prays to St. Dorothea of Montau, a native to these parts who lived a pretty hard life. She reveals to her what this guy's true nature is. Woodchippers haven't been invented yet, but we all know what needs to happen to male feminists.

How are we going to get in? We could try to bribe someone but they might just con us. Nathan is very agile (and we could give him one of those Quickmove potions we made to increase his agility even more) but there's always risk there. Yuna could implore St. Reinold, the patron of stonemasons to help.

I'm gonna pick the last one just because even after all these years I've never done this yet. Nice. Now we're going to get into an extended combat, like the raubritter castles but bigger.

Oh wait, actually we won't. We happened to climb into the room where the castle lord is so this will be a quick fight to the death.

Whoa... -17... I think that's the single worst hit we've ever taken so far.

It gets pretty chaotic. Yuna is knocked out but the lord is taken down at about the same time. These guys were wearing brigandine armor, level 4, same as chainmail, so it wasn't easy, but we prevailed.

Zossen turns from a castle into an ordinary village. Let's stop in and see if we can heal our wounds here. Hey wait, wtf, they're Satanic??? Maybe they did need some brutality to keep them in line. We'll mend our wounds and then come back and massacre them.

More Wandering

Eventually we come back to Magdeburg. Everyone loves us in Saxony so it's good to be back home. It's a good place to sell off some of our loot, taking advantage of the bonus from our local reputation.

I bounce around the region for a while doing various boring things. We had about 50 florins worth of dead people's armor to sell off and we invest most of that into alchemical components for Redactor. We concentrate on stuff we need for the formulas we already know, but get a little of everything in case we learn something new. We can afford to now. Also we do some more training.

We've now collected the ingredients for every formula Redactor knows. I was a bit surprised by this. We must have gotten lucky with what happened to be available in the towns we visited. Let's go camp out in the woods and start cooking up some potions.

Alchemy - Mass Production

Of the 6 formulas that Redactor knows, we've made a lot of Black Cloud and Quickmove. We'll only need to use these on rare occasions and we already have more than enough. As for the other 4, all of these are very useful in combat. I'll make at least a few of each. One thing to watch out for is that some of them use the components. So for example I don't want to use up all my orpiment making Fleadust and not have any left to make Thunderbolt. For each formula I'll explain what it does in game and what the ingredients are, because even I don't know what the heck half of these are. After all, this is edutainment. (It's been decades since I took chemistry so tell me if I write something stupid. And some of this I'm just copying from the manual.) Note that for each kind of potion there are 3 different formulas that can make it. They make increasingly high quality versions of the potion but also are more difficult.

First, let me explain the bases. Alchemy ties into the other sciences of the time, so of course the four elements play an important role. The bases are just common mundane stuff that is associated with an element. This stuff is cheap and very common. All the formulas at least one. I'll just copy the descriptions straight out of the manual.

MELANCHOLIC BASE: A variety of plants considered useful in alchemy, such as bell mushrooms, belladonna, camphor, hemlock, seed of sea holly, nightshade, thorn apple, henbane, turpentine, etc.

SANGUINE BASE: A variety of animal materials, such as eye of newt, toad tongues, bat claws, powdered unicorn horn, etc.

CHOLERIC BASE: A variety of acids and other liquids considered useful, including aqua fortis, vitriol and Roman vitriol, alcohol, distilled water, etc.

PHLEGMATIC BASE: A variety of common minerals, such as kupfer (copper), lead, lime (calcium oxide), quicksilver, and kohle (coal).

Fleadust

This reduces the skills of anyone caught in the cloud, affecting them more the heavier their armor is. This ranges from 10% if they're just wearing leather up to 50% if they're wearing plate. We have the highest level formula for Fleadust so the effects will last for 60 seconds.

This is a really useful one. Weapon skill makes a huge difference not just in hitting the enemy but also in defending yourself. The 60 second duration is enough time for me to send someone out to kill the guy before he recovers. It's less effective against poorly armored enemies, but I wouldn't be wasting potions on them anyway.

Orpiment is an arsenic sulfide mineral. It was used as a pigment for its striking yellow color. Some alchemists figured if it was yellow it must be somehow related to gold so they studied it a lot. Be careful with it though, it's extremely toxic.

Cinnabar is a mercury sulfide crystal that looks kind of like quartz. It comes in all kinds of colors. The red kind was used as a pigment. More importantly for us alchemists, pure mercury could be distilled from it. Why ours has to be white, I dunno.

Nickel was named by the miners of the Erzgebirge after a mischevious supernatural being that lives underground. (I wonder if we'll ever run into one?) They were pissed off because they would dig up what they thought was copper ore but it turned out to actually be nickel ore and they had to blame someone for it. In the 1400s it was a curiosity but there wasn't any use for it yet.

Breath of Death

Poison gas. We have the lowest level formula for this so our potions will do 5-12 damage to anyone caught in the cloud. Victims with higher endurance will take less damage.

That may not sound like a lot of damage but the cloud is pretty big so you can easily catch several enemies with it. Note that even though Redactor has the easiest formula, it's still pretty darn hard to make. We've only got a 31% chance each time we try.

Marsh Vapor A natural gas, whose medieval admixture produced a sharp smell. Acquiring and containing this vapor was extremely difficult because it is virtually colorless. It is also known as methane.

Aqua Regia A mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid. This is dangerous stuff as it can dissolve lots of things, including people. Alchemists were fascinated by it because it could dissolve gold.

Thunderbolt

A bomb. Anyone nearby is hit by a fragment. These are treated just any other missile. Damage and penetration depend on how close the victim is to the explosion, dropping off rapidly with range. In my experience, if you throw this into a crowd the guy who is actually hit will take significant damage but for the rest it will be less than 5.

Redactor only knows the lowest level formula, so it won't be terribly useful in combat. It may be better to just use an ordinary missile weapon instead. A longbow or crossbow might do a little less damage in total but it will all be concentrated on one target. However, there are a lot of non-combat situations where we might need to blow something up or just create a distraction.

Manganes You probably had a chemistry teacher light this on fire to show you how incredibly bright it is when it burns. Alchemists found that just as cool as you do.

Arabian Fire

Greek fire or napalm. It does about the same damage to the target as Thunderbolt and a few points to those nearby. It slightly reduces the quality of the target's armor.

I don't see this as terribly useful, especially the low level formula we have. In order to noticeably degrade the target's armor you'd have to hit them 5-10 times. I imagine it will have some noncombat uses so it'll be good to keep a few on hand.

Naphtha The lighter part of petroleum. This stuff catches fire very easily.

Conclusion

We spend a couple weeks camping out while Redactor churns out potions. I made 10 Fleadust as I expect this is actually the most useful in combat and several of the others. We've defeated two evil alchemists and looted their potions so now I think we've got the alchemical support we need to get into mid-game content. I've been dragging my heels a bit as there's a special event that plays when the game explicitly tells you that you're ready. I thought it would have triggered by now. Maybe next time we'll move along to a new stage in the plot.

What are you playing currently?

!g*mers

Previous Iterations:

2024

2023

Other rDrama vidya content

Last week's game: Townscaper

Final Score: (10*1+9*1+8*1+7*1+6*0+5*1+4*2+3*0+2*0+1*0)/(1+1+1+1+0+1+2+0+0+0) = 6.71

All Previous Games:

Game to Discuss?

Supreme Commander is this weeks game. For those unfamiliar with the game, it's an interesting RTS, with more thought put into it than most. The physics are detailed, small rises in the terrain can stop shots, and some lategame units can crush others underfoot. Honestly a lot of fun, vote below in the pinned comment.

Future Game Discussions

November 3: Mudrunner

November 10: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

November 17: Touhou

November 24: Broforce

carp, capy, geto, donger pin please

LSF Thread https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1gdj7sk/tim_walz_was_g*mer_1/

!g*mers and !chuds in SHAMBLES

I just made my first batch of yellow science.

Blue circuit production and various other things.

Red circuit production with uranium processing barely visible on the left.

Green circuits (yes I am aware this is nowhere near enough production), science , my early coal power, and my newly minted nuclear reactor.

Solar power and accumulators. The scale is completely unnecessary now that I have nuclear power up and running but it will be useful again some day.

Smelting setup for a double line of copper plates.

Fluid processing. I haven't played in a while but fluid processing seems a lot easier than I remember. I spent like half an hour setting it up and since then I have barely had to even think about it.

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/692896320/gta-san-andreas-turns-20-today

!g*mers !oldstrags !zoomers !soyteens

Part 9 of our epic voyage through the classic 1992 RPG Darklands.

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

Thanks for making this @Losercel.

We ended last episode in Paderborn, having just been rewarded for slaying a raubritter and now we've got 16 florins to spend. We had some concerns about our weapons not penetrating armor well enough during that battle, so that's our first priority. Let's see what they have for sale here.

Equipment

OMG look at this. See where it says 38q next to the name of each item for sale? That means it's 38 quality. Weapons, armor, shields, alchemical potions, and various things like lockpicks have a quality rating which has a subtle impact on how well they work. For every 10 points of quality your weapon is better than their armor you get one extra point of damage. That may not sound like much but you get that bonus point even if you failed to penetrate their armor. That may not sound like much, but with a fast high quality weapon it can really add up.

Average items have a quality of 25. There is a shop in the marketplace that always sells 25q items wherever you go. But each city can have a swordmith, armorer, bowyer, and tinkerer (these sell certain specialized weapons) each with its own level of quality. So if you happen to be in a town with really good swordsmiths like we are now, you want to jump on that opportunity. You never know when you'll find that opportunity again.

One rule that I only just learned now after all these years while going through the hint book is that all the equipment you loot off of dead bodies drops in quality by 10. That explains a lot, because that crap is hardly ever worth using by the time you get your hands on it.

• Sasha - I'd like to get her a better quality longsword but they don't have any in stock.

• Redactor & Yuna - I'm going to replace their maces with military hammers. It does one point less damage than the mace but it has 5 penetration so it even matches plate. The main job of our impact weapons people is to penetrate heavily armored enemies, so that's my highest priority here.

• Nathan - There's not much selection of polearms here. I get him a pike, which at least has pen 4, but it's very slow. I'll keep that around just for heavily armored enemies.

The armorer here is only 23q so I'm ignoring that. Same with the bowyer. Paderborn isn't that big of a city so they must specialize in weapons.

As long as I'm here, I pick up some camomile for Redactor's alchemical experiments. One of my formulas uses it, and I have no idea when I'll find a store stocking it again, so I better get it while I can. Alchemey can be very expensive because you've got to hoard ingredients like this until you've collected every one you need for a formula.

At this point I'm just going to play for a while because we need more money before I can show you some mid-game content. Higher tier quests are quite a bit more difficult than anything we've done yet, so we're going to need good armor for the whole party. Also we won't get far without alchemy. I go on a couple more raubritter quests. If you want to maximize your earnings on these, go around to nearby cities and ask everyone for a job. A lot of them will want you to kill the same guy and there's no reason why you can't accept all of their offers.

Education

I end up in Leipzig. I managed to get a meeting with the mayor and he offered me a raubritter quest. This is a big win for us as the mayor pays out more than the merchants (20 florins I think?) and you get a huge boost to local reputation if you complete a quest for him. An especially big win since Leipzig is such an important city in this era, the most important marketplace in eastern Germany. As you can see, it's at the junction of roads leading in all directions. It even has a university.

Speaking of education, we've got 55 florins so we can afford to study for a while. We'll have to find teachers willing to take us in as students. Let's start with the monastery. They can teach us Read/Write, Speak Latin, and Religion. Usually these guys are pretty cooperative. They'll only refuse if you have little Virtue or local reputation.

Redactor has 40 in Alchemy, which is quite respectable, but you can never have too much skill. The higher it is, the higher the chance that you'll succeed in making potions. Let's see if we can get the alchemist to teach him. Nice. The alchemists are what we would today call "on the spectrum" so they often refuse. (Notice how the text here hints at which skills, attributes, etc. were being checked. You'll see this often all over the game.)

As long as we're here, I'll try trading formulas with him. See, this is what I mean.

I go to the tinkers and ask them for a teacher as well. They teach Artifice.

Let's go to the inn and start studying. Sasha is going to work on her Artifice. This skill represents your technical abilities. It's used in lockpicking and many other situations. We'll have Yuna study Religion as that's her specialty. As for Nathan, none of these skills would really do him much good. When these skills are checked it's almost always against your best party member and we've already got people better than him. So we'll have him work. He earns 9 pfennings per day as a blacksmith. The occupation you work at depends on your abilities. In his case it's probably his strength that got him the job.

We study for a week and each of us picks up 2-3 points in our skill. That may not seem like much, but most non-combat skills are extremely difficult to increase through normal gameplay.

Random Encounters

I'm going to just play the game for a while now. I won't write everything I'm doing as it's is going to be pretty boring if you're not the playing. I want to show you guys how alchemy works, so I'm going to roam around to various cities buying new formulas and the ingredients we need for them. I'll just write about the random encounters I run into. There are many of these and they make up a big part of the game.

I'm going to try to sneak away. It's probably just some bandits that we could take care of easily but you never know. Besides, this is a rare chance to practice our Woodwise skill.

These guys have no idea who they're dealing with. I wipe them out without breaking a sweat.

Pagans. I hate these guys. Let's vandalize their stupid altar.

Uh oh. These are schrats, basically German bigfoot. It must have been their altar. Some schrats are good Christians, but just like humans many of them worship Satan. I may be in over my head.

Oh boy. That's a lot of them. They're so close, our missile weapons won't be much help. There's not much to do but just fight it out.

It's a very close fight, with both Redactor and Yuna getting knocked out. A prayer to St. Clare healed Sasha and kept her in the fight. Without that we would have lost.

Yuna gains some Virtue. Which makes sense since we all got beaten up really bad for doing that. We'll camp here and rest for a little while and then head over to Magdeburg to stay at the inn to get fully healed.

Frick this guy. I'll just pay him to avoid any trouble. I don't want the Dominicans on my butt.

Where should I wander around? It's nice to have a certain region that's your home base where you've got good local reputation. You can return there every once in a while to take advantage of the better prices and do your studying there. But you've also got to do a lot of wandering to find quests, alchemy ingredients, and new saints. Let's go into Bohemia.

I head down to Dresden, kill another raubritter, and achieve "local hero" reputation.

Notice that near Freiberg there's two mines. The Erzgebirge ("Ore Mountains") between Germany and Bohemia were extremely important at this time. Tin had been mined there since prehistoric times, but in 1168 silver was discovered near Freiberg and settlers flooded in. More discoveries were made in the late 1400s. During this period the mines of the Erzgebirge were on the cutting edge of technology, driving progress toward the Industrial Revolution.

The important thing for us is that we can buy alchemical components there. But first let's learn some more formulas so that I know what to buy. I keep striking out when I try to trade formulas with other alchemists, but we're rich enough now to just buy some.

Bad Alchemist

I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials. This guy may be a tough opponent but I think we can take him if we really have to.

His guards are poorly equipped. Like many of the thugs we've run into they're using falchions (basically machetes) which ordinarily would bounce right off our armor. But notice the plus there. That means they've been enhanced through alchemy. Depending on which potion was used, that could mean they can slice right through our armor. The alchemist himself would be easy to kill if we could get to him, but his guards will block us. They're even blocking us from using missile weapons against him. But he can toss potions over their heads at us. My first priority is going to be dispersing my guys because he's no doubt got some area effect attacks and I don't want us bunched up.

This is probably Noxious Aroma. It decreases all skills for several seconds before it wears off. He hits Redactor with the same thing and Sasha with tear gas which temporarily incapacitates her. When these get clear of the bridge I'm going to have Nathan try to get around them and go after the alchemist.

Sasha got tear gassed again. He tossed Stonetar at Yuna, which greatly slows down anyone walking through it, so she won't be able to get into the fight soon. Redactor is holding off two enemies while Nathan slips past them. I bet Nathan Chen could be a really good running back IRL.

He tries to slow down Nathan with stonetar but it's too late. He's run out of potions. Nathan kills him instantly with one swing of his halberd and the guards are easily mopped up.

This is some nice loot. He ran out of combat potions but he has a lot that can temporarily enhance our characters or their equipment. We'll save these to use in an emergency.

Notice how this combat was way more complex than just killing street thugs. Combat in Darklands is never going to be as intricate as Troubleshooter but once you get into the mid-game it's not just mindlessly slashing at each other.

Maybe in the next episode we'll finally do some alchemy. (Spoiler: we do!)

Bonus: which community is gayer and sucks bigger peepees

Blatantly stolen from Hexbear

This is it, this is what's making me join the black block. ABANDONWARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT!

That sub is 90% talking about dudes.

!g*mers !sophistry

!g*mers the IP is byond://24.80.37.222:52070