Avernum: Escape From The Pit

• Pick up everything that can be sold for money! You don't get a lot of money otherwise.
• When you fight someone out on the world map, the enemies will often drop an item or two that you can sell for money, and you need to make sure to send one of your people over to pick it up before you finish the battle or you won't automatically pick it up.
• Use Ctrl+Click when looking at items on the ground to send them straight to your junk bag! I was most of the way through the game before I figured this out.
• Just as the documentation says, the basic strategy for fights in this game is to use your casters to do the real damage (like artillery), and to use your melee people to keep the enemy away from your casters.
• I eventually settled on a strategy where I would give all of the Wisdom Crystals (which give free experience points) to my melee people to boost their HP / dodge chance, and I would spend most/all of my money on buying training for my casters at the trainers you see in the various towns. This is because there's no real way (as far as I know) to get your casters up to Level 3 (the highest level) with their various spells without getting them trained, whereas the training you can buy for your melee people is exactly the same as the boosts they get for gaining another level.
• I recommend keeping all of the unique / rare items you get, especially if they have some kind of resistance bonus. I never needed to do it, but I could see how you could end up in a situation where you might want to equip certain items when facing a particular opponent just to boost your resistance to their most-damaging style of attack (eg melee damage, fire, poison, lightning / magical (this one was a real pain for me), mind effects)
• I think it's a good idea to get the 'Negotiator' trait among all of your characters ASAP. I also got the 'Quick Learner' traits ASAP and I think it was a good idea.
• There are definitely skills / traits which seem useless. For example, I never really needed Cave Lore, and I only put a few points into Luck and still don't understand what exactly it does, but I don't seem to have hurt from it.
• Usually the best way I found to pick traits / stats was to pay attention to what my pain-points were, and to just allocate stats to relieve those pain points. The game is really good that way; it lets you do that, instead of throwing you into some completely-unpredictable chall

TIS-100

• Press F1 to show the different commands you have available to you.

Tasks

• Nathan Wailes: Write an article you can post to gamasutra proposing that gaming sites get revenue by being paid as consultants while the developers are making the game.
• Nathan Wailes: Write an article about how game reviews need to evolve. I think a Netflix-style recommendation system with Amazon-style reviews would probably be better. I think Steam already kind of does that. But I'm not sure how well it handles new releases.