Jazerus

How exactly does pheme opposition work, then? I just cast a spell with Animal and Regenerate in it. Regenerate opposes Animal, but Animal doesn't oppose Regenerate (due to a bug, maybe). No automatic failure. Perhaps it made the roll harder or something? Regenerate does only Oppose Animal at magnitude 3, after all, and I added them to a Revision spell cast at a very high skill level, so if it added 3 to the difficulty I most likely still passed it easily. I then cast the same spell (after reloading) several times with Betwixt and Between added, and succeeded each time. These each oppose each other with magnitude 4, so (hypothetically) they might add 8 to the roll? Still something I might be able to pass with a good roll, but probably not several times in a row. I'm not entirely convinced opposition works.

I'm putting together a spreadsheet of typos, bugs, lore inconsistencies, etc. that I'm noticing as I play, since I'm finding enough that it would be unwieldy to post them all separately here. I thought I'd let you know, Legate, in case Y2 is anywhere nearby on the horizon - please inform us before you finalize the last Y1 patch so I can submit everything I've found so far at that time, if I haven't already.

I see, that makes sense. Is pheme Magnitude similarly a cut mechanic, or does it interact with spell type in some way? I know that some phemes supposedly oppose each other through the magnitude system and adding them to the same spell, supposedly, doesn't work correctly (although in most cases of opposing phemes I think there's no reason at all to ever put them in the same spell so you'll never really run into this in practice even if it exists).

What is an Affinity on an item? Based on context it seems to be related to phemes - does it enhance the associated pheme's effects? Reduce its difficulty?

Hi, there are a lot of questions I've had about Y1 over the years that I've never bothered to ask and which I'm not sure anybody has documented. At the very least, these questions won't be ones that are answerable through the wiki. I've forgotten a lot of oddities, but I've been playing again recently and thought I'd make a topic here to get some answers (hopefully straight from the Legate, who, since he is Orso, presumably knows everything...). I'll probably be posting questions sporadically for a while. Okay, first one - on some Social actions there is a toggle which (sometimes) appears called Blackmail. Its tooltip refers to using the Blackmail you have on a character to increase the chances of the action succeeding. 1. How do you accumulate this blackmail in the first place? I've never used any blackmail-related actions on this character although she is in my clique. 2. What exactly does this do, in hard numbers? Can you accumulate more than one piece of blackmail to gain greater advantage? Is this applying a CoS modifier or something less general? 3. Does using the toggle expend all of your blackmail against that character or is it reusable? 4. Does using the blackmail damage your relationship with the character? 5. Is there anything else noteworthy about this function that I haven't specifically asked about?

Yes, that's what I was asking. I'm glad to hear it. As long as there *is* a way to import from game to game I'll be using it - I've put too much time into figuring out Y1 to start wholly from scratch in Y2.

On the subject of Y3-5 - is part of the reason Y2 is taking so long that you are ensuring there's a solid base for faster work on the later games? Because, uh, no offense but if they take 10 years apiece I'm not sure anybody is going to be loading up a 40 year old game to actually start a character in Y1 and see them all the way through!

Personally I think that if you're asking for Y2 you're a real fan. Anyone else forgot about it years ago!

Alright, questions it is then I suppose. Have the broken/near-useless systems from Y1, such as crafting and dueling, been significantly improved? Is there a large variety of recipes to discover for crafting so that all of our more abstract skills can be put to use for things other than skill challenges? Are there combat encounters other than duels with other students?

Have you considered posting anything - anything at all - of Y2 so that people other than Rhialto and Schwarzbart can have a little bit of faith that the game even exists? I love Y1, and there are a lot of people out there who love Y1, but the decade-long wait for Y2 with not even a screenshot is tiresome and has been for years. This dance of "oh yes, things are being done and have been done" that the devs have you do, Legate, is bizarre. I understand not wanting to commit to anything, but a screenshot marked "pre-release, not all details are final" does not commit anyone to anything. I would, frankly, be a lot more inclined to buy Y2 when it comes out if I felt that the devs were at all inclined to hear player feedback or share things with the community. During Y1's post-development patch cycle, I think we did all feel that the devs were doing a pretty good job of interfacing with the community, and things like player-written events being added in patches reinforced that feeling (although I have to admit that I wish there had been some overhauls to the more broken Y1 systems like crafting - nevertheless, community engagement was pretty high at that time!) The secrecy legitimately made sense a few years ago, to an extent, but if Rhialto and Schwarzbart hadn't been asking questions over the years we would know exactly nothing about Y2. Despite their admirable persistence, we still know very little. Please, I'm begging you for your sake and ours - don't just stonewall every detail until launch day, whenever that is going to be, and then release the game with little fanfare onto Steam. This series deserves better.

Thank you! In a Y1 context, I was envisioning it as a 1 point background trait - perhaps along the lines of "Apprenticeship: Explorer's Guild" or "Prodigy: Self-Tutor" - that gives you special dispensation to skip afternoon classes (presumably by suppressing the discipline event for that timeslot).

On the topic of the class-skipping bug, I feel like this has definitely become an area where the playerbase likes both the intended behavior and the bugged behavior. Maybe a character creation option could be added - "strict or lax discipline?" - which would allow anyone to play under the rules they prefer. Certainly I like being able to skip classes - it fits with Orso's rather lax attitude toward rules and preference for students learning through exploration, independent study, and adventure - but I could see why someone would prefer an Academagia more along the lines of a Hogwarts-esque high school rather than a magic college, too. I raise this mostly because a lot of games - I'm thinking of Crusader Kings 2 in particular - have been pretty successful lately experimenting with changeable rulesets.

Arcanum was underrated at the time but is very, very good, though like Planescape, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and other western RPGs of that era, it has not aged as gracefully as I would have hoped. Still, most definitely worth the $5-$10 that it's probably selling for these days.

Continuing in the vein of improving the right-hand window, it would be nice if skill descriptions included the current level of the skill. Sometimes when I am looking at the end-of-day results I'd rather not hunt down the skill in the left-hand menu just to make sure it's the level I think it is. It's a lot easier than it used to be, since the parent skill is listed, but it could be made better still. Similarly, it's kind of unintuitive that stress and vitality maximums are not listed in their right-hand window descriptions but are rather only available through mouseover. In fact, reporting current level should be a functionality for every value with a right-hand window description, if possible, including parent skills and attributes. While the left-hand menu is very good for presenting large quantities of information in an organized way, the right-hand menu should be able to stand alone in functionality for small quantities of information rather than requiring frequent cross-referencing with the left-hand menu. Also, parent skills cannot be expanded themselves, so why do they have a "0 of 1" skill steps indicator at all times? This could be confusing at first to a new player, though I never personally had issues with it. The difficulty level of a spell should always be plainly spelled out in a field marked Difficulty Level, so that the effects of the addition of phemes (which all state their difficulty level, even though spells don't) can be made more plain. As it stands, the way in which additional phemes add to the difficulty of casting a spell is very unintuitive. Do they use the same roll as the parent spell, but just cause the required value to be higher? Because honestly, adding a pheme I get from (say) Religion to a Geometry-based spell and having that pheme use your Geometry skill does not immediately make very much sense. This needs additional documentation, as it is a basic gameplay element, not something that is fun to discover through trial and error.

The suspension procedures are also not very well explained...well, anywhere. You just kind of bumble along until the Praetexta Court expels you, from my experience; if suspension always results in expulsion, wouldn't immediate expulsion be kinder (to the player, at least)? If it doesn't, what are the criteria for redeeming yourself and how can they be achieved under the current regime of class-only actions?