What we remember
Late in the game my heroes got worse. My fighters missed more, and I put it down to their age, since they had been at it a long time. Other players remember the same.
The manual backs us up. Under the character sheet it says, "Age adversely affects the adventurer's attributes after he reaches his declining years. Each race has a different life span; elves live about 3000 years, dwarves and gnomes live about 200 years, humans live about 80 years, and most others croak off after only 40 to 50 years."
What age does
Heroes do grow older. A hero ages a fortnight every time the party rests at an inn, by the days the party spent outside every time it arrives in a town, and by two months when he is fetched from another town to join the party. How old he starts depends on his race and, oddly, his luck.
And that is all. The character sheet prints his age in years, and nothing else in the program ever looks at it. No attribute falls, no skill fades, and nobody dies of old age. We checked every place in the program that names a hero's age, and each one makes it, adds to it or prints it. None of the dungeons' events looks at it either.
One trace is left. A debug editor, still in the program but never reached, lists a field called "MaxAge" next to "Age". Whatever the designers meant to keep there, no code uses it.
What really makes a veteran worse
Three things, none of them age.
Where they stood, the main one. A hero's bonus to hit comes from standing ahead of the party's average rank, not from his rank alone, so a party all on the same line gets no bonus at all. When you beat Nikademus, the game moves every hero to the front rank and leaves them there, and your fighters start to miss. I tell that story in Heroes on the same line lose their bonus.
Slash at 150. Slash splits a hero's Attack over more blows, one more for every 75 points. Below Attack 150 the game will not let him Slash at all, so the step a player meets is from Attack 149, two blows of 74, to Slash at 150, three blows of 50. Against an easy monster the extra blow makes up for it. Against a monster with a defence of 45, each blow's chance to land falls from 29% to 5%, and his damage from 4.7 a turn to 2.0. A veteran who takes up Slash at 150 can suddenly miss a lot.
| Order | Per blow, defence 0 | Per blow, defence 45 | Per turn, defence 45 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attack at 149, 2 blows of 74 | 74% | 29% | 50% |
| Slash at 150, 3 blows of 50 | 50% | 5% | 14% |
The Ranger at level 15. Training offers each skill a new value from a table. The Ranger's Attack entry for level 15 and up is 25, after 215 and 235, so every Attack pick a Ranger takes from level 15 on pulls his Attack down, and 240 becomes 149, then 104, then 81 in one training. The 25 looks like a typing slip for 250 or 255, but that is a guess. And a training pick cannot be declined, because Cancel takes the highlighted skill.
| Attack | Per blow, defence 0 | Per blow, defence 45 | Per turn, defence 45 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 240, 2 blows of 120 | 100% | 75% | 94% |
| 149, 2 blows of 74 | 74% | 29% | 50% |
| 104, 2 blows of 52 | 52% | 7% | 14% |
| 81, 2 blows of 40 | 40% | 1% | 2% |
At 81, each blow of 40 falls short of a defence of 45, and the game still gives it its lowest chance, 1%.
My recreation keeps Slash and the Ranger's table as they shipped. It has a fix for the training pick, Training can lower skills, which is one of my fixes. With it a pick never lowers a skill, so the Ranger's 25 can no longer pull his Attack down.