Is it just me or does IVAN CVS seem absurdly imbalanced?

I consider myself pretty decent at the game and have beaten it a couple times. But I've just had a slew of characters one-shotted by either zombies or skeletons in UT. I haven't made it out of UT in fact. Usually 1 out of 4 of my games ends up decent on average.

I thought that CVS's lack of balance was a well known thing. What is CVS supposed to be anyway?

I've played it but I dont know what it is in relation to the normal version.

The CVS version is an in-between version. It represents the last work on the game by the original coders, and as such, it is not a complete release. It wouldn't exist at all but for some of us a long time ago accessing the code files, tying up loose ends (code-wise) to avoid having unfinished content breaking the game, and compiling it. I don't remember who was involved in that project.

well if it's not done I would not imagine that it would be very balanced.

You know what, actually I guess a large part of it is the Valdemar bug. A sip of healing liquid or troll blood could've easily saved me in most of these cases. I just fixed the script. There does seem to be an odd number of powerful zombies though.

What makes CVS hard is mostly due to:

1. As mentioned, too much Valdemar and not much of anything else that'll come in handy.
2. Various types of ghosts and zombies of different creatures that can spawn. They, like Valdemar, will occupy most of the spawns simply due to their sheer number of types, and many, reflecting the stats of whatever they were when alive, will be much stronger than your default ghost or zombie.

Great example: My aforementioned tale of being slaughtered by a zombie of a orc general on the entrance stairs to UT1.
Although that was in LIVAN. Not that it makes much difference.

Mustard Gas from the very beggining combined with hardly any healing potions does makes CVS a hard nut to crack. The only gas mask in the game belongs to Ivan, and wasting a wish to get one before GC 9 is too much.

Ah, but used wisely mustard gas can be a great exploit

Dont carry around mustard gas unless you want it to explode in your inventory and kill you.

While this is true in the early game (mostly due to booby trapped doors), since you're new here you probably haven't read my thread detailing the countless uses for such a dangerous substance
Also you can just keep the gas grenades in chests and you should be fine.

I actually did read that, and I know you can put them in chests... but I never do... so I just throw them away when I find them.

While dangerous, mustard gas granades are to usefull to be left behind. Ever made it past Elpuri's portal? The strange place made of rare jevels and magic metals? Gas Granades are the best and also safest way of getting rid of THE MAGE ROOM OF DOOM!!! placed there. They are also the best way to get your hands on Justifier, kill shops guards and clerks.

That's true, Zulox and 4zb4 make good points about the value of mustard gas. I have often had mustard gas grenades explode on me early on in the game and hated it because it would pretty well annihilate my character. It seems like mustard gas is the kind of thing to stockpile carefully for use later on against roomfuls of nasties.

Also mustard gas + gas immunity = lethal ninja smoke escape technique.

How can you get gas immunity other than the mask? Magic mushrooms?

Fountains are found early and can give a long-lasting one.

Also eating mushrooms, magic mushroom gas, and I think wand of wonderful smells gas (although that would be a bit ironic) can give you gas immunity. With a bit of luck, you could get a longer lasting effect.
Or you could polymorph into something without a nose. Say, a golem of some sort.

A what?

Staff, staff