Arcanum: of steamworks... advice needed

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Some technical and gameplay advice is needed please.

Technical - I exceed the requirements by lots, have the patch installed, yet its still slow in places, any advice?

Gameplay - I am a constant restarter, so I would like a good starting character, so any advice on stats, abilities, magic, technologies would be very welcome, the rest I will figure out as I come to it

 

I don't think I can help on that techincal part but I can offer some gameplay advice.

Never ever create a main character that goes meele. Allways have him use either firearms or a bow, playing a meele character will get very very annoying as there are monsters with the annoying habit of tearing your weapons to pieces. My personal favorite is an elven mage (specialized) armed with a bow. It can deal with slower (weaponbreaking) monsters quite easily with hit-and-run tactics and summon a couple of ogres to bash the life out of faster creatures.

I never liked the technology part too much for the main character. It seems somewhat weaker than magic and firearms are not much better than a bow. The schematics are nice but most useful items can be made only in the later parts of the game which makes the earlier parts too annyoing for my liking.

 

Those monsters are quite rare, though, and you can always bring with you a rusty sword or something with you to deal with them.

An Elf with skills in bows, dodge, necromantic white/dark magics and persuasion will be more than enough to get you through the game.
Spend the remaining skillpoints on whatever you want as long as it isn't skills involving technology, since it will make your magic less effective.

Good luck in playing this great game!

 

Try running Arcanum in Safe Mode (the option should be in the Arcanum program group) and see if the performance improves. The only thing you'll miss will be some of the spell animations, I think.

 

The problem with that is of course that rusty weaponry do sucky damage and fall apart even more easily than magical weapons. And yes there are not that many of these monsters, but there are couple of places swarming with them, and in those places a ranged weapon on your main character (and leaving the rest of the part behind while you deal with them) can spare you from a lot of frustration.

 

None of that magic elven pantsy. Take a dwarf specializing in guns, gun smithy and a technology of your choice. The schemes lying around in Arcanum are one of the best things of the game. As the description says, the elephant gun will take care of even a stampeding elephant when handled correctly

 

No way! A sniper rifle is waaaay better than a elephant gun!

 

Harm, Heal (and possible Great Heal), Cure Poison, Agility of Fire, Shield of Protection.

Stupidly powerful, if you want to go that way.

Tech's more fun, though, because it's not such a common RPG choice.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone!

 

From Steven W. Carters Walktrhough that can be found at www.gamefaqs.com

 

A pickpocket question - Is this a good skill worth investing in e.g. can you steal good items like BG2 (no details please!), and can you plant poison, potions etc on people and have them drink them?

 

The slowdown happens no matter your computer. It is a "bug". There were tmies I couldnt move around in hte capital city due to the lag like slow down. There is some bug fix that helps it a little but it never gets good.

 

Get the patch if you haven't already! Fixes a lot of bugs in the game and it also adds a new background!

Yes, there are a lot of good stuff you can steal.
Quite a few quest can be solved through pick pocketing.

 

Got the patch, then downgraded to DX8 and it works much better but I can live with the problem, as it seems to be a great game.

 

If your skill is high enough, you can plant ticking bombs in their pockets, run away and watch the fireworks

 

I was put off from this game because its interface was larger than the game view.

I need a new game, perhaps I'll try it again after I finish Mercenaries.

 

I never got round to finishing it. Is it actually as open a game-world as it appears? If it is, I'll have to divert some energy into completing it in the most ridiculous way possible.

 

I could never get past the fact that hitting the .exe and the game actually booting were separated by around 8 minutes. The patch didn't solve it, and it's definitely not my computer(Athlon 3200+ and 1GB RAM). If anyone knows a fix to this, I'd appreciate it, because this certainly looks like a great game.

 

Oh yeah, it took AGES to load the freaking game. You hit the exe and then went for a bit of a snack, a trip to the bathroom and when you went back the game might have started.