Extremely powerful party for C64

Flanimal · Post by **Flanimal** » Tue Feb 22, 2011 9:40 pm

My party lives again after having been recently revived from a twenty year old C64 tape.

These are the characters that I completed the tape game with back in the 90s.

I completed the game without any guide besides the manual, so these characters have explored every inch of the game - in real time, because I never discovered the scroll speed buttons!!

There is no bard in the party because I never discovered the bard's ability to breath.

The party is saved to this tap file under the imaginative name of "party".
http://www.prekladytextu.eu/c64/party.zip

For convenience, here is a link to a CCS snapshot with the party loaded.
http://www.prekladytextu.eu/c64/MyBards ... apshot.zip

The only cheats that were used in developing these characters were the gold pooling trick, item duplication and character duplications.

The eagle eyed of you might recoginse these characters originated from two members of the ATEAM default party.

Enjoy!

P.S. The English Bards Tale game taps can be found here
http://www.gamebase64.com/game...18&h=0

Thanks to ataribaby for hosting these pics.

Ether · Post by **Ether** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 6:22 am

Dang! I definitely didn't have the patience as a 13 year old to do that, and I still don't. Well done.

I'm guessing a C64 emulator is being used, and is considerably faster than the slower-than-molasses C64 itself.

I was always going to kill Mangar around level 25.

What's weird is I thought Bard's Tale 3 stopped the level advancement at 99; i'm probably wrong.

Flanimal · Post by **Flanimal** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:31 pm

Ether wrote:Dang! I definitely didn't have the patience as a 13 year old to do that, and I still don't. Well done.

I'm guessing a C64 emulator is being used, and is considerably faster than the slower-than-molasses C64 itself.

I was always going to kill Mangar around level 25.

What's weird is I thought Bard's Tale 3 stopped the level advancement at 99; i'm probably wrong.

Thanks.

The party was developed on real C64 hardware, and has only recently been revived from a 20 year old cassette. Admittedly I did develop the chars a few more levels under emulation, as I wanted to fish for better items now that I had a item list revealing the properties of the items.

I only played BT1, so I don't know whether BT3 had such a limit.

The party posesses the keys to go directly into Mangars tower, if you would like to defeat Mangar. Mangar is also in the special slot of this party, I wonder what happens when Mangar meets Mangar...

Ether · Post by **Ether** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 3:13 pm

Flanimal wrote:
Ether wrote:Dang! I definitely didn't have the patience as a 13 year old to do that, and I still don't. Well done.

I'm guessing a C64 emulator is being used, and is considerably faster than the slower-than-molasses C64 itself.

I was always going to kill Mangar around level 25.

What's weird is I thought Bard's Tale 3 stopped the level advancement at 99; i'm probably wrong.
Thanks.

The party was developed on real C64 hardware, and has only recently been revived from a 20 year old cassette. Admittedly I did develop the chars a few more levels under emulation, as I wanted to fish for better items now that I had a item list revealing the properties of the items.

I only played BT1, so I don't know whether BT3 had such a limit.

The party posesses the keys to go directly into Mangars tower, if you would like to defeat Mangar. Mangar is also in the special slot of this party, I wonder what happens when Mangar meets Mangar...

I noticed Mangar in there. Funny how weak he looks compared to everybody else.

This dawned on me after I posted last night: At what level was your party able to defeat the Soul Sucker in level 2 of the Catacombs? I seem to recall that even at level 25, my group just got mauled by that thing every time.

Flanimal · Post by **Flanimal** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 4:45 pm

Ether wrote:I noticed Mangar in there. Funny how weak he looks compared to everybody else.

You can party attack Mangar if you wat to see what he is capable of. He has an untra-low Armour Class, so he often gets the first strike in combat and is very hard to hit. He is an excellent spellcaster, often casting the Deathstrike spell, and he intelligently casts the Restoration spell to heal himself. Of course, he is susceptible to the Deathstrike spell himself, so six against one is a very one sided battle.

Ether wrote:This dawned on me after I posted last night: At what level was your party able to defeat the Soul Sucker in level 2 of the Catacombs? I seem to recall that even at level 25, my group just got mauled by that thing every time.

I do remember the soul sucker being a big problem for a long time (as was the dragon statue in Skara Brae). Unfortunetely I can't remember what level was required to beat it.

I do have a tap file with party saves for the full range of development, from beginning to end. PM me if you would like to try it.

Flanimal · Post by **Flanimal** » Wed Oct 26, 2011 12:19 am

Apologies for the double post, but I'm still developing my ridiculously high level party and am starting to experience some strange results which are probably related to the levels being higher than the programmers anticipated.

Once spellcasters go above level 160 or so, their Mind Jab and MindFist spells start to inflict more than 256 points of damage. This guarantees a kill as I have never spellbinded an enemy with more that 255 hitpoints. The anomaly is that the program (C64 tape version) must only use a single byte to report the amount of damaged performed, and so if you actually inflict 257 points of damage, the combat reports that you inflicted "2" points of damage. Sometimes I get the rather amusing "merlin casts a spell and fries enemy for 0 points of damage, killing him".

But that is nothing compared to what happened recently. My party contains two paladins. (I ditched my third paladin in favour of a monk who has the task of carrying the keys and the silver objects.) For a long time, these paladins have had 18 for all of their attributes, which I thought was the maximum value. However, recently, when levelling up these two paladins on two separate occasions, I was surprised to see the +1 text being output at the review board. Indeed, on viewing my characters, they both showed an previously impossible luck attribute value of 19!

Here are screenshots that I took:

I was worried that these luck values were going to be wrapped around to zero, making my paladins the unluckiest BT characters ever, but I have seen no evidence that this is the case - my paladins resist magic and traps just as well as before, and perhaps better than before.

I wonder if further leveling up is going to boost the other attributes to a previous thought impossible high?? BT is still exciting and mysterious after all this time!

Another weird effect that I am seeing is that the spellpoints of my three wizards increment by +1 in all dungeons, as if they were in the daylight of Skara Brea. This can even be combined with the mage staff for a rate of +2. Very cool, but totally mysterious.

EDIT ok, I have pinned that mysterious spellpoint incrementing to a bug in the game, nothing to do with my characters' extremely high levels.