Since you can find both a lantern and some filament near the crash site, you could easily test it yourself by grabbing the lantern, wait until it's dark (or find a dark spot in the cave - destroy light sources if necessary), stand next to Virgil, press R to go into combat mode, hold the ALT-key down while targeting Virgil, and note the chance to hit. Then equip the lantern, and see if the chance goes up. Then make the lantern into an electric light, and see if that reduces the penalty more. Science! And due to science being so much fun, I just performed this very experiment! And came to a shocking conclusion! Electric Light is actually worse than the regular lantern! And it shows too, in that the light is slightly more red/yellow. Chance to hit Virgil in full light: 65% Chance to hit Virgil in complete darkness: 45% Chance to hit Virgil while holding a lantern: 59% or 61%* Chance to hit Virgil while holding an electric light: 55% or 58%* * Depending on attacker's position; diagonal positions yielded the worse number. That is, the positions straight left/right, up/down rather than straight east, west, south or north. For hitting targets at range while they're in darkness, I suppose one could use the Illuminate spell. I haven't tried it, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work even for a technologist. Then again, the darkness penalty isn't so bad that I'd consider spending a point on a spell just to get rid of it. Quick experiment with Magickal Aptitude 10 yielded this: Chance to hit Virgil in complete darkness: 40% Chance to hit Virgil while attacker is Illuminated: 40% or 44%* Chance to hit Virgil while he is Illuminated: 52% * Again depending on attacker's position. Hardly worth it for melee if the attacker has to cast the spell on each new target to get a decent effect, which is still worse than a regular lantern (allows the use of a shield though). I would've tried it with my half-ogre mage (MA 100), but for some reason he the darkness penalty never seems to show up for him. It shows up for my other half-ogre though, so I don't know what's up with that.
Wow, awesome work Gillsing. I've always wondered about the difference between the two lanterns but was always too lazy to do the work!
Would the effectiveness of the electric lantern depend on the character's technological aptitude? Someone with a 100 TA character ought to check.
Good point. Strange how I didn't think about that. I tried roughly the same situation with my technologists, and indeed, the Electric Light is brighter than the regular lantern for someone with Technological Aptitude 83 (the lowest I tried it with). After some strange results for my half-orc I realised that he has the Darksight background, reversing all lighting penalties. Silly me, but good for shooting monsters in dungeons. The results for my half-ogre with his TA 100 and Melee 0 showed the following numbers: Default chance to hit: 25% Regular lantern: 19 or 20% chance to hit Electric Light: 20 or 22% chance to hit Complete darkness: 7% (if I recall correctly - it wasn't my focus)
Another lantern / electric light question: In my current game I had too much weight on my weak dwarf and wanted to put the lantern temporarily in Virgils inventory - but he immediately equipped it in his 2nd hand together with the staff in his 1st hand. Isn´t a staff a twohanded weapon that should exclude him doing so? I´m only in Dernholm in that game and have never had to refill the lantern, nor ever had to put a battery in the electric light in my former game - just how often is that required? Because if they use fuel/electricity at all, then I would want them to be used / inhand only while it is actually dark...
You can't do nothing about it: if they want to equip or use an item in their inventory they will do it. Your only options are keep it in your inventory or sell/drop it. :/
