You simply cast it on an enemy who's within mellee and you damage your party memebers as well

(come to think of it, I'm not sure if it damages all party members or only those within fighting range).

Damage is same as lightning bolt, according to manual at least...

You'll hit ALL your party members, not just those in close combat. Same goes with Web and a couple others. It's not really fair, because the enemy can throw fireballs at your melee-range fighters and not hit their own front row.

See, when I tried to do this the spell would just fail. It certainly seemed that it would only work on enemies who were not in melee range. To be fair, though, I didn't really try casting it on enemies in melee range much after my first attempts failed.

Yeah, you're right, sorry.

Thanks for clarifiying. Tested it myself, and you're right...

I've never had fireball fail... Acid rain on the other hand fails if there are no enemies outside mellee

I just killed Paul Pead (is that an easter egg or a reference to something by the way... the only character with a name and surname) easily w/o skill potions or anything, even though first time I tried ages ago my team was annihilated. Can kill 2 dragons too, even when coupled with other strong enemies. 3 dragons give me problems though if I don't kill any before they attack, their breath attack can leave me crippled.

Doing the quests for Lord hacker now.. I'm at the stage where he want Okrim's ring.

I figured what remove quest is for... since you can only have 1 quest at a time you can remove it if you find it too difficult, so as to get an easier one from someone else. But someone here mentioned there was a spoiler involved. Is there more to it?

Also, I assume xp decreases as you increase in levels, it appears as if enemies which were giving me more xp are giving little now. Might be my imagination though, coupled with the fact that many run away.

Also, how exactly does AC work. Does it decrease chance to hit, damage or both? I seem to be taking little damage from some enemies. Is it because of AC or high level?

Thanks in advance...

Maybe I am remembering other spells then, which fail if cast on someone in melee range... I suppose it's possible that I just never even tried to cast a fireball on enemies in melee range since the manual said it was only for enemies outside of melee range.

Does this work the same way in MM2? There was a question posted a while back about spell failures, where the player couldn't figure out why his spells were failing, and it turned out he was trying to cast spells on enemies in melee range when the spells were limited to enemies outside of melee range. I thought he mentioned Fireball as being one of the ones that failed, but I'm not sure.

From the manual: "The higher the number, the less chance that a character will sustain damage from an attack." I'm not sure exactly what that means, but don't enemies sometimes hit you but do no damage? That's probably due to having good AC. In my experience, higher levels make the biggest difference in the game though, increasing everything from your characters' chances to hit with attacks to the effectiveness of your spells (enemies resist spells less often when your casters are high level) and I wouldn't be surprised if a high level caused enemies to miss you more often.

Also, your Speed stat increases AC, so perhaps AC kind of rolls up both being able to resist damage as well as being able to dodge attacks (meaning enemies miss you more with high AC). MM1 is clearly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, where good AC meant enemies didn't hit you. But I think in D&D a "hit" was interpreted as doing damage, so with ridiculously good armor, people's attacks just bounced off you and were counted as "misses".

Armour Class (AC) is your chance to avoid getting hit altogether. I believe that there are some armours that reduce damage to your person, as well, and I have unconfirmed notions that high level translates into damage resistance.

I finally found one thing in this game that I completely don't like. The spinners in Okrim's lair. This is supposed to be a turn based game. Adding a "click-at-the-right-moment" element to it doesn't seem to add anything other than annoyance.

Okrim proved to be quite the challenge with dancing swords destroying my party too quickly. I ended up getting tons of skill and speed potions to finally bring him down only to discover that in order to get the ring one of my characters is erradicated.

Is there another way to get the ring without the erradication? Thanks.

I don't think so. But, if you take your character to a temple to get resurrected, you will avoid incurring a -1 Endurance penalty, so effectively there will be no drawbacks. Except an age increase, but that's easily reversed with the Rejuvenation spell.

And yeah, the spinners are pretty annoying... I think they might not have been so bad in the original game but running under DOSBox now it runs quite fast so it's hard to hit the forward button at the right time. In the original version of the game it probably moved much slower and would have been easier to deal with. When I played I found that just holding down the forward key would eventually get me off the spinner, with a roughly 50% chance of it being in the correct direction.

Also, once you know the layout of Okrim's lair, I think you can use the teleport spell to skip most of it and get right to him.

Something weird just happened. After realoading I answered "No" to okrim's request, and he still said the same thing and I got his ring. No one was erradicated.

Is it a bug or is it the way it's supposed to be?

EDIT: I reloaded and had my character erradicated, just to be sure I'm not taking advantage of a bug.
Healing at the temple did decrease my Endurance by 1, but since it was even, no biggie...

Really? I could have sworn that I tested that and it didn't happen to me. I guess I could be misremembering though.

Has anyone played around with Surrender. I tried it a bit in Sorpigal, and sometimes I'd get transported to prison. But otherwise, I'm just getting "These monsters don't take prisoners."

Does it work in any other areas, and is it actually good in getting somewhere that's otherwise inaccessible?

Also, at what age do skill start to deteriorate? do you get the skills back with rejuvenation?

This might be in the manual... I'm not sure I ever saw my skills deteriorate, but once a character is over 80 years old, there's a chance they will die when you rest. This definitely happened to me. Later MM games definitely have skills deteriorate with advanced age, but I'm not sure if MM1 had that.

I'm almost certain that any lost skills are fully restored if the character is rejuvenated.

I never really messed with Surrender. I doubt that it gets you anywhere that you couldn't get to with the Teleport spell though.

Been a long time since I posted here. Much has happened since... I've advanced a lot in the game.

Anyway, I noticed my cleric is 80+ of age. Figured it's some monster that has done it and cast a few rejuvenates on her and forgot about it.

After some time, it happens again. Again it's the cleric. And this time I don't remeber fighting any monsters causing aging. She's not really on the front lines anyway so it's a bit strange it's happening to her in particular.

What can be causing this?

Thanks.

Well, as far as I'm aware, the only other source of aging in MM1 other than monster attack is going up levels.

Whenever you gain a level, you age a year, so if the cleric's been gaining a lot of levels, that would explain her aging.