I'm about 3 hours in, and have realised that my randomly-created party is inadequate. I need a summoner.

Do I have to start over? (Not too much of a worry - but it would be nice not to have to)

If I let someone die can I pick up a new hero somewhere like a pub?

I love this game. It's the first game on IPhone that's really sold me on the platform.

Nope, can't change anymore. You gotta start from the beginning.

As a sidenote I gotta say I was a bit disappointed with my Summoner when I tried it. Maybe it was because I was strictly going melee style with shapechanging and my party had two other melee fighters.

Cheers Faeryan, appreciate the response.

I want a summoner mainly so I can make use of all these bloody skeletons left lying about the place.

I figure a warrior (kick-arse melee), the summoner, an assassin (ranged), and one I've yet to decide on may be the way to go.

You know, it's a hell of a long time since I've been motivated enough by a game to restart it after a few hours in, just so I can gain a small (possibly errantly!) perceived edge.
Over a decade I'm sure, maybe right back to Dungeon Master on the Atari STe.... Showing my age there.

What a bloody great game this is.

I was not very happy with my pure Shapeshifter summoner either. I felt like he took twice as many points to be not quite as good as a Priest or Warrior.

Putting all my points into Strength and Turn to Beast and wearing +Strength gear (156 buffed Strength) and wielding a 11-30 Staff listed my damage at 27-186 at level 16. He also has 1139 hitpoints - 10x that of my Warrior - but cannot use those hitpoints to create damage, and has enough to compensate for his 0 Fire Resist many times over.

In contrast, my level 17 Polearm Warrior had 9 Strength, 17 Polearm Expert, and when wielding a 16-30 weapon dealt 71-141 damage.

The Warrior is one level higher, but I think the comparison is still fair - the average damage of both characters is about the same, but with his extra points not spent in Strength the Warrior can get Totem of Pain or Round Strike and be a lot more effective and fun to play.

Now, if you make him a hybrid caster with max Raise Skeleton and get a modest amount of Turn to Beast for protection and split the rest between Str/Con then he is a very powerful and low maintenance (if boring to play) addition to the party.

Funny you should mention that. Only a week ago I went and downloaded me a Dosbox and the original Dungeon Master game. Still just as captivating as it was back in the days.

Great tips there bosco, I think I'll take your advice on the hybrid caster.

It did seem in my small amount if time playing that the warrior is really valuable. I wonder if 2 warriors is an option, maybe drop the assassin.

When I get to the fire monster, which I was gearing up for when I realised I should start again, is your only weapon the mage with his freezing spell? Because if the mage is not necessary maybe I can drop him.

So may options - I can see I may be restarting after another few hours!

Yeah someone needs to grab that IP and put it up on the app store in completely original format. Maybe make the buttons a little easier to hit with fat fingers.

Ishar too. And Chaos Strikes Back.... These games work so well with a touch screen.

I've always preferred an unarmed assassin over a warrior, but having two warriors doesn't sound bad at all. Might try to play the game with only two warriors some day.

I tried a mage when I first played the lite version of the game and I gotta say I wasn't impressed at all. All the mana hassle with casters and stuff. Used him mainly as a boss backup, hardly lifting a finger when I met regular monsters.
After playing the game through a few times I noticed that mage gets some fantastic gear. Almost makes me want to play an all mage party.

Back to off-topicness:
Those old C64 and early PC RPG's would really fit wonderfully for iDevice. They've already remade Myst, Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky and Monkey Islands (all of them a tad bit newer games that what we'd want) so it shouldn't be tough to do others as well.
I guess the RPG games don't sell that well nowadays, especially those more strategic turn-based ones. Of course all the action RPG's like Zenonia and Dungeon Hunter sell, but I'd hardly call them real RPG's.

The beauty of porting those turn-based RPG's over would be the simplicity of it. For sure you'd really mainly appeal to old farts who played the originals, but development costs would be tiny, just a few tweaks like including maps and enlarging buttons.

If UnderCroft is anything to go by, and considering some of the tat I've dropped a few dollars on, I could see myself buying damn-near every good port released. Save 'em up for my old age in the retirement home...

The Summoner's fire and cold spells are really nice, though. When I started using those is when my Summoner became the most powerful in my party. She's constantly at least 2 levels ahead of anyone else.



That's essentially what I'm using. My fourth guy is a priest, and my assassin isn't ranged necessarily, but he's got the shadow strike ability (I think that's what it's called) which let's him use his melee weapons as ranged.

The summoner is underpowered imho. He has nice spells, but limited spell points. As mentioned, he has his limitations in combat. I really hate having to get him to drink potions just to keep fighting.

But my pet peeve is the summoning. The summoning creatures is the best feature he has - he can easily get extra hundreds of hit points to act as cannon fodder and do extra damage. But the exp points these creatures earn are split equally. Yes, unlike other heroes whose spending on SP means the exp goes to them directly, the summoner has to share those exp with other people!!

Well, except that code of that era is probably atrocious, if the source even survives. You probably wouldn't be porting as much as recreating, and where things aren't made transparent to the player, it might be rather involved to figure out what's going on underneath.

So you couldn't run some kind of closed emulation? That would seem the easiest way, but maybe that is even more difficult.

I would like to see a few of those old titles brought over. Hell, if Dragon's Lair, Space Ace and Cobra Command can make it, there's hope for some more obscure titles for us old buggers!

Summoner has great ranged attack too - once you reach the level you can start to use the Thorns of Pain which is my favourite or the Plague Fumes (very diasppointing).

I gave up on Beast and Vampire Bite. Monster Bash and Raging Beast was also a disappoinment.