1) The Turn-Based Attack Time Bug

I first dubbed this bug The Magic-User's Bug because it is triggered by the use of Magic. It turns out that most actions with a Recovery Time will also trigger it. Here's the problem.

Any character who uses a Bow, Spell, Potion, Wand or Scroll will no longer have their Attack Time correctly implemented. These other actions cause the game to use the Recovery Time of that action instead of the correct Recovery Time from use of equipped Weapons.

This is especially serious beacause lost time means lost opportunity. One of the major objectives of the game is to develop your characters and their inventories so that they have lower Attack Times. This bug means that most of our efforts concerning Speed, Weapons, Armor, Shield, Skill, Ranking, and Enhancements are pointless.

This bug corrupts the game engine. If you do something that triggers the bug, then re-load or load another game, the character will still be afflicted. The corruption only clears after you close the program and re-load from disk. The save files are not affected.

The bug only affects Turn-Based play. Some people have noticed that their characters deal more Damage in Real-Time mode; this is why. It can be exploited if you're using slow Weapon combinations or have a big Armor Penalty -- but only if you don't use Spells with long Casting Times.

This doesn't mean that everyone should play Real-Time. As we'll discuss in the next part, there is another bug that affects both TB and RT play. The effects of that bug are overridden by this one. The TB player won't get the full benefits of their efforts, but game play can still be fun. Most TB players will find it easier to live with this Bug if they take some of the following special steps.

a) Don't use Weapons directly after using a Spell with a long Casting Time. A classic example would be casting Day of Protection. Any Attack your character made after that would carry the same 500 time unit Recovery Time -- until you reset it with a different non-Weapon action. Have your character use a Bow or cast something with a reasonable Casting Time before using a Weapon.

b) Don't have characters mix Weapon combat with other Recovery-based actions. Keep your strong Weapon-using characters free of the bug by avoiding use of Bows and Magic. They can have Spells and Scrolls cast on them, just not by them. They can't drink Potions or use Wands. You can keep this up for quite a while with one or two characters if the others are doing all the other work.

c) If you're in a situation where you want to rely solely on your strength in Weapons in the way the game intended, then you'll want to do the following: Drink your Potions and Cast your Supporting Spells, save and exit the game, then re-start the program, load your game and get ready to rumble.