I just got the UWA, and am playing Wizardry for the first time since about 1984 (when the Apple II went into the garage!) I'd appreciate some comments about how I've structured my party for my forage through Proving Grounds.

I have a fighter, a samari and a priest with high strength in the first 3 positions. Following them is a bishop, and 2 mages. The last mage is a hobbit with neutral alignment. My plan is to turn her into a theif once she learns all her spells. I'll then take the party to Murphys ghost to level her up again before we attack the lower levels. I found that traveling with a character who can't do anything in battle (theif) was too annoying. I also figured that once she becomes a theif the bishop will be able to take over the high level mage spells once the theif runs out.

I tend to also play conservatively, so my characters don't stay in the maze for long periods. When I encounter chests, I use either the priest or bishop to calfo them, and then only open them if they're trapless, or a poison needle and I'm heading out soon. I have my highest hit point character open the poison needle chests and then leave. So far, I've had no trouble getting back to the castle in time, although sometimes I have to camp to revive the poisoned character.

Finally, since the only character who can cast Dialko is my priest, who is usually the one paralysed, I created a 2nd priest, sent him into the first level with just the two fighting characters and the other priest, and had the smaller group fight Murphy's ghosts a lot to get the #2 priest dialko. While he doesn't travel with the party, if someone gets paralyzed I head back to the castle, take the paralysed person and the backup priest to the bottem of the stairs, and cure them.

If anyone has any thoughts or warnings on this, please let me know. Also, at the moment the party is roughly level 8, and has just finished mapping the second level of the maze. How deep do you recommend I go with the current makeup? I'm very patient, and can bop around the higher levels for quite a while if need be.

Thanks much!

abby

• Well planned,ShadowCrust, 00:17 AM, Dec-29-01
• RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,Baek Doo San (Guest), 07:49 PM, Jan-30-02
  • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,wemery73, 01:46 PM, Mar-14-02
    • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,Baek Doo San (Guest), 07:18 PM, Mar-14-02
      • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,wemery73, 00:11 AM, Mar-15-02
      • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,V_code_V (Guest), 12:23 PM, Dec-11-03
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    • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,Neovalis, 09:46 PM, Mar-18-04
      • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,RavagingDragon, 07:49 AM, Nov-21-04
        • RE: Comments on my Wizardry 1 strategy,Brambo (Guest), 10:10 AM, Jan-03-06

Your party sounds pretty good for me, except that I'd make the Fighter a Lord in order to gain more curing spells. The drawback is, though, that he'll advance noticably slower. I like Thieves, so I always have one with me for reliable inspection. Eventually he can become a Ninja to fill up the third place for hack 'n slashers, but (at least in my imagination) as a Ninja his lockpicking capabilities are reduced.
Also, I had always exactly one party as I was too lazy to train more than six characters and deployed (or someone told me about it ) a backup strategy if one character got killed or worse: with every startup of the game, I copied the savegame file into a backup directory, so I had a defined state. If something went terribly wrong, I quit the game and called a backup.bat that would copy the savegame in the backup directory back in the game directory. Well, it's probably just me, but I don't like the idea that my characters are killed
One more point is that you might want to wait for some special items to change profession: there's the Thieves Dagger to change a Thief into a Ninja without level loss and a Ring of Something (I've forgotten the name) that can change about everyone else into a random elite profession, also without level loss. It has a quirk, though, sometimes your character dies changing classes.

Good luck for your characters and much fun for you

don't make samurai yet. make two evil fighters, one evil priest, one evil thief, and two evil mages. keep fighting in the first three rooms of level 1 until your mages learn mahalito. once your fighters can defeat the murphy's ghost in level 1 (13E5N), keep killing it to gain experience points faster.

super character training:
bring your best fighter and equip him with best outfit. take one mage with him and fight the murphy's ghost. both characters will gain experience very fast. once your mage learned all spells, change him into a priest and keep fighting murphy's ghost. in about 1-2 day real time you'll have a character who can cast all priest and mage spells! you can then change him into a ninja or bishop.

if your wizardry supports alignment change, change your all-spell priest to good by leaving the friendly murphy's ghost alone. you can then change him into a samurai or lord! you can then change the alignment back to evil by fighting the friendly murphy's ghost.

i did it this way. now i've one evil ninja (shuriken), one evil lord (lord's garb), one evil samurai (muramasa blade), and three evil bishops. all characters can cast all priest and mage spells. that's about the best team i can think of.

would u be willing to share the save game file?

Baek Doo San
"i did it this way. now i've one evil ninja (shuriken), one evil lord (lord's garb), one evil samurai (muramasa blade), and three evil bishops. all characters can cast all priest and mage spells. that's about the best team i can think of."

>would u be willing to share
>the save game file?

mine's emulated nes version, not uwa. if you want it, give me an email address.

ya please send just click on my email icon .....

think I could get a copy of that emulator file as well?

v_code_v@yahoo.com

SHEESH...then what's the point of even PLAYING that way?? (Though it would be a proud boast to have achieved such a party through, like, adventuring.) To each his own. Have...fun??

If you're going to keep playing after Werdna's dead, you may as well learn every spell w/ every character (and get a front-line of Muramasa Blade wielding Samurai, if you're very, very patient). But... Baek's style just takes the soul out of the game.

I agree. I like like to play with a party of 6 characters and no other paries around. And I mostly don't class change around a lot.

My parties are always:

Fighter => Lord
Samurai
Thief => Ninja
Priest
Bishop
Mage

Fighter => Lord
Samurai
Thief => Ninja
Priest
Bishop
Mage

This is exactly the party I just used to beat the game. I found a thieves dagger and noticed that it doesn't reduce stats when you change class (NICE!) so I rolled a Thief with a high bonus (25+) and changed him into a ninja. At level 7 he has more HPs and way better stats than my level 11 ninja (switched from thief at about level 9-10) that I completed the game with which kinda makes me sad but since I'm just fartin around at this point I guess its no big deal...he'll make a nice import into KOD.