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- Messages
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Fallout game boxes were never factory sealed in shrink wrap because you needed to have access to the cover flap.
-
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Game News Legends of Eisenwald Released
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
Good news for all "just wanna test" pirates. Thanks to Steam's new refund policy you can play any game in it's library for up to 2 hours and request a refund without questions asked pretty much.
No more need for shoddy cracks and dubious downloads.
No more need for shoddy cracks and dubious downloads.
Irenaeus II
Unwanted
Fallout game boxes were never factory sealed in shrink wrap because you needed to have access to the cover flap.
How many people did you kill to get those?
hivemind
Guest
Is this game good?
Viata
Arcane
As far as I know, the money is back to my steam wallet account and there's no way to withdraw it, so yeah, I did spend money for what I don't like if I can't use it outside steam.
FeelTheRads
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2008
- Messages
- 13,716
Fallout game boxes were never factory sealed in shrink wrap because you needed to have access to the cover flap.
Huh, yeah,that's correct. It only had those clear round stickers to seal the box.
Use it on the next game you purchase from Steam that you do like, or get another game refunded I suppose
Viata
Arcane
There's that. Will keep "demoing" AAA games then.
Use it on the next game you purchase from Steam that you do like, or get another game refunded I suppose
Monocause
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2008
- Messages
- 3,656
Aterdux Entertainment Played up to Chapter 4 with Heinrich (the knight). Overall I like it a lot! Will be restarting now with the Baroness due to some stuff mentioned later. Some impressions. Wall of text warning:
1) When designing maps for the next game, consider giving more options to speed up travel. In chapters 1 and 3 I had quite a few moments where I was just travelling across the entire map. Even at speed 4 it seemed to take more time than it should, and nothing interesting happened on the way at all. The wharves with ships offering fast travel along the river was a very neat idea - perhaps give more options like joining a caravan travelling between important landmarks in parts of the map? The player could be given an incentive to explore and clear off dangers in parts of the map by fe. introducing ambushes if the player joins a caravan without completing certain quests/killing certain enemies first. These would pit the player against tough foes at a disadvantage. It's probably not the best idea ever as it could introduce balance issues, but I'm sure you can come up with better stuff.
2) It's possible to fall off the difficulty curve, or at least it seems so as I reached chapter 4. I killed all the vassals in Ch.1, in Ch.3 I picked a fight with almost all of the knights that had 'mean' descriptions suggesting they're the ones who'd attack if I talk to them. The end result is my Heinrich is really a monster at this point and can carry a lot of fights on his own with minimal backup. Although that might be a problem with Heinrich himself - the knight character seems bit like easy mode as he can soak up a ton of damage right off the bat and many low level enemies can barely put a dent in his armor.
There's even a potential exploit where, once you get Heinrich's defences to a very high level (which you can do quite early) you leave all the troops in a castle and get Heinrich alone to scour the map for low-level parties or high level parties with small numbers and no stuff that can roast him (like a witch who can glue him at which point he's a sitting duck for bows and xbows). That results in a load of XP for Heinrich only, allowing to powerlevel very quickly. Just give him 2 HP+50 potions and see the XP count go wildly up.
Another exploit is auto troop levelling in castles. At the moment there's not a whole lot stopping me from cramming a castle full of troops, unpausing the game and coming back in 10 mins to get my compliment of ubermenschen and steamroll everything. It does seem like roaming troops level up and gain in strength as time passes as well, but it still makes the game a ton simpler and the fact that enemies are high level means better loot and more XP which in turn makes me even more overpowered. An easy way to balance this out:
- Only certain troop types will autolevel without player input, the same ones that currently populate the castles automatically (so infantry/guards and archers/xbowmen), also, they level up only up until a certain point (until level 3 so no sergeants etc, this would provide the player with a reservoir of not useless troops but prevent them from being too useful late-game)
- All the other troop types can be trained in some castles (that have a mustering field feature or some such) but the player has to go there, leave a troop type there and pay for the training + it will take a set amount of time. So I might want to leave my young noble there to train up to a squire, but can I afford the 1000gp it will cost me? Maybe he'd gain more experience over the three days it'd take by having him participate in fights?
The above solves the problem, introduces a moneysink and an interesting aspect to resource management.
3) Speaking of Heinrich - I've encountered a bug where at some point in Ch. 3 everyone started to address him as a lady and the game seemed to have become confused that I'm playing the Baroness. Initially I thought it might be an in-game joke as it seemed to have started happening when I put on the Splendid Brigandine on him (which admittedly doesn't look or sound very masculine) but it's either patch 1.04 that's done it or I messed up my save by accidentally loading an old baroness save and then immediately reloading a knight one.
4) So far I seem to be missing out on opportunities to recruit a fair few unit types. I've seen brigands, merchants, alchemists, warlocks - occasionally I see them as mercs but never as recruits. It's a shame as my party composition tends to be pretty samey as a result, and I shun away from using the Witch promotion subtree as they're impious and using them alongside priests, monks and paladins is a bad idea. Would be cool if I had the option to build my party around impious characters (possibly comes later in the game).
Speaking of which - I really miss a 'barbarian' unit type. Low defense but starts right off the bat, or early on in the tree, with the ability to use two handed weapons. As it is, if I want two-handers I need either Heinrich or need to go way, way up in the noble promotion tree, which occurs pretty late in the game. And it's a shame, cause zweihanders are good weapons and are also infinitely cool so I'd appreciate the option to form a front-line of wannabe-knechts with two handers, even if it'd be a terrible idea.
5) There might be a bug with how the crowbill penalty to armor stacks. Haven't checked but the "armor damaged" pop up seems to appear only once per troop, and the damage I deal doesn't seem to increase with concurrent strikes. Or is it designed so that it stacks between different crowbill troops?
Either way, it's a 20% penalty to armor. I see how this forms an excellent synergy with some troop types and might be great for archer heavy armies (or the duelist noble line which struggles a fair bit with heavily armored troops), but the 50% ignore armor bonus given by axes usually seems simply superior as the objective in combat isn't to stack debuffs on enemy troops but to take them out as quickly as possible so that they can't deal damage.
Also, another problem with crowbills is that I haven't seen any good crowbills on enemies/in markets so far. Thus other weapon choices always seem to be superior.
6) Hero upgrade trees need to be more diverse and offer choices and consequences. As it is now, the middle row (the tribute/merchant one) is clearly inferior to two others. Every player will want to invest in all the skills from the other two upgrade lines. However, the line that offers a bonus castle support slot is something I imagine most players will beeline towards, unless, perhaps, while playing the mystic who benefits a whole lot from the lower part of the tree. But even as a Mystic I'd probably quickly get two upgrades from the lower part of the tree and then fall back to the castle support beeline.
I just think it shouldn't be there. The extra castle support, particularly on higher difficulties, is such a great and important bonus that *every* player will want it. It has little contest, and therefore offers no choice. I'd say remove it from the upgrade tree and simply add castle support at certain level(s) - you can add a story justification. Sub it with something else that as a player I would like to have, but wouldn't feel like not having it would mean ridiculously gimping my character.
7) Troops actually dying happens way too rarely. Played for hours on difficult and I had a troop die on me only once so far - and he was a recruit I didn't care about at all. As it is I never feel threatened about my troops as all I need to do is to heal up after each fight and we're all good.
A number of ideas:
a) make it so that troops can bleed out on the field and die permanently if they get knocked out and the battle carries on too long. Other troops could bandage a knocked out troop keeping him alive, but it means they don't deal damage. Do I save my guy or do I take the risk and try to kill them off quickly? Choices!
b) Make it so that dealing very heavy damage has a chance of killing somehow. Today I've seen my Fencer at 10HP get rammed by a mounted knight for 90HP. Five minutes later he was patched up and happy. It's realism, but also balance - knowing that the enemy has a killing machine capable of one shotting my lightly armored fencer I should've planned for it and kept the fencer elsewhere. I simply didn't care.
c) Make it so that while wounds are relatively easy to get rid of, each knock-out leaves a minor disability of some sort which is very hard to get rid of. That way if I don't care about the survivability of my troops they get worse over time, to the point that I either have to replace them or spend a whole lot of gold to get them properly useful again.
d) Couple a tighter death system with introducing a withdraw option for the troops. If I have a wounded troop, or someone whom I want to get the hell out of there, I first disengage (one hex to safety), then withdraw which means automatically moving two hexes at a time to the border of the map where my support troops are. A withdraw order, once given, can't be rescinded. Cavalry could withdraw 4 hexes at a time. Each subsequent withdrawal causes the entire army to suffer temporary morale penalties that increase exponentially with each troop withdrawn (say, -2 attack, -2 willpower for 2 turns for the 1st guy, but -4,-4 for the 2nd guy and -8, -8 for the 3rd etc). You can safely withdraw a few troops but at some point it's full scale panic among your ranks so choose wisely as having -8 to attack for all troops even for a single turn can mean losing the battle.
8) I've seen some people mentioning the need for a 'do nothing' button on your forums and elsewhere. I agree, and the reasons are simple. 1, there's often troops in counterattack mode and attacking with a weak troop is dying, and it's annoying I can't just wait for the other full HP guy to take the heat. 2, heretics have the unholy protection spell which sometimes I'd rather wait until it passes instead of attacking and putting my troops in harms way. On the other hand, this does seem to affect mostly low-level troops so it is logical in terms of both design and internal consistency (inexperienced troops, difficult to command, bit dumb etc).
Still, I'd at least suggest that the game points out to the player that, true to real life as well, the ability to patiently sit tight and do nothing when the situation calls for it is precious and comes only with experience.
9) Healers are OP, simply put. I can think of a huge number of different builds and army compositions, but there's simply no reason *not* to have a healer. A way to at least alleviate it would be to make the 'white' upgrade line impious as well ("enchantress" definitely sounds pagan!), so that if you want to have a pious army the herbalist is as far as you can go with upgrading. Another way to make them less OP is to simply limit the amount of health healed. With the willpower buffs I can heal up to 30-40 HP per turn on some characters. If I get three healers in my army and start stacking the healing with the medbh (sp?) buff, my army really does get invincible in some scenarios and a single character can keep ploughing through whole rows of enemies as long as someone deals a bit of damage to him so that I can heal again.
10) I haven't played with the mystic or necromancers to reach that point yet but from what I've seen the summon spirit skill should either be heavily retooled or removed from the game as it simply doesn't work with the combat system. You shouldn't be able to bind half the enemy army with that summon and enemies shouldn't be stuck there hacking away at the spirit even though they can't deal damage to it.
Make the binding a special effect so that the troop that the spirit attacked is forced to fruitlessly attack it next turn. That way the spirit can be used to deal some damage and root specific units from the enemies army - but as soon as the spirit switches targets, the other unit is free and can resume fighting your men. I think that way the spell would remain very, very useful but would limit the usefulness at least to the point of it no longer being totally bonkers.
1) When designing maps for the next game, consider giving more options to speed up travel. In chapters 1 and 3 I had quite a few moments where I was just travelling across the entire map. Even at speed 4 it seemed to take more time than it should, and nothing interesting happened on the way at all. The wharves with ships offering fast travel along the river was a very neat idea - perhaps give more options like joining a caravan travelling between important landmarks in parts of the map? The player could be given an incentive to explore and clear off dangers in parts of the map by fe. introducing ambushes if the player joins a caravan without completing certain quests/killing certain enemies first. These would pit the player against tough foes at a disadvantage. It's probably not the best idea ever as it could introduce balance issues, but I'm sure you can come up with better stuff.
2) It's possible to fall off the difficulty curve, or at least it seems so as I reached chapter 4. I killed all the vassals in Ch.1, in Ch.3 I picked a fight with almost all of the knights that had 'mean' descriptions suggesting they're the ones who'd attack if I talk to them. The end result is my Heinrich is really a monster at this point and can carry a lot of fights on his own with minimal backup. Although that might be a problem with Heinrich himself - the knight character seems bit like easy mode as he can soak up a ton of damage right off the bat and many low level enemies can barely put a dent in his armor.
There's even a potential exploit where, once you get Heinrich's defences to a very high level (which you can do quite early) you leave all the troops in a castle and get Heinrich alone to scour the map for low-level parties or high level parties with small numbers and no stuff that can roast him (like a witch who can glue him at which point he's a sitting duck for bows and xbows). That results in a load of XP for Heinrich only, allowing to powerlevel very quickly. Just give him 2 HP+50 potions and see the XP count go wildly up.
Another exploit is auto troop levelling in castles. At the moment there's not a whole lot stopping me from cramming a castle full of troops, unpausing the game and coming back in 10 mins to get my compliment of ubermenschen and steamroll everything. It does seem like roaming troops level up and gain in strength as time passes as well, but it still makes the game a ton simpler and the fact that enemies are high level means better loot and more XP which in turn makes me even more overpowered. An easy way to balance this out:
- Only certain troop types will autolevel without player input, the same ones that currently populate the castles automatically (so infantry/guards and archers/xbowmen), also, they level up only up until a certain point (until level 3 so no sergeants etc, this would provide the player with a reservoir of not useless troops but prevent them from being too useful late-game)
- All the other troop types can be trained in some castles (that have a mustering field feature or some such) but the player has to go there, leave a troop type there and pay for the training + it will take a set amount of time. So I might want to leave my young noble there to train up to a squire, but can I afford the 1000gp it will cost me? Maybe he'd gain more experience over the three days it'd take by having him participate in fights?
The above solves the problem, introduces a moneysink and an interesting aspect to resource management.
3) Speaking of Heinrich - I've encountered a bug where at some point in Ch. 3 everyone started to address him as a lady and the game seemed to have become confused that I'm playing the Baroness. Initially I thought it might be an in-game joke as it seemed to have started happening when I put on the Splendid Brigandine on him (which admittedly doesn't look or sound very masculine) but it's either patch 1.04 that's done it or I messed up my save by accidentally loading an old baroness save and then immediately reloading a knight one.
4) So far I seem to be missing out on opportunities to recruit a fair few unit types. I've seen brigands, merchants, alchemists, warlocks - occasionally I see them as mercs but never as recruits. It's a shame as my party composition tends to be pretty samey as a result, and I shun away from using the Witch promotion subtree as they're impious and using them alongside priests, monks and paladins is a bad idea. Would be cool if I had the option to build my party around impious characters (possibly comes later in the game).
Speaking of which - I really miss a 'barbarian' unit type. Low defense but starts right off the bat, or early on in the tree, with the ability to use two handed weapons. As it is, if I want two-handers I need either Heinrich or need to go way, way up in the noble promotion tree, which occurs pretty late in the game. And it's a shame, cause zweihanders are good weapons and are also infinitely cool so I'd appreciate the option to form a front-line of wannabe-knechts with two handers, even if it'd be a terrible idea.
5) There might be a bug with how the crowbill penalty to armor stacks. Haven't checked but the "armor damaged" pop up seems to appear only once per troop, and the damage I deal doesn't seem to increase with concurrent strikes. Or is it designed so that it stacks between different crowbill troops?
Either way, it's a 20% penalty to armor. I see how this forms an excellent synergy with some troop types and might be great for archer heavy armies (or the duelist noble line which struggles a fair bit with heavily armored troops), but the 50% ignore armor bonus given by axes usually seems simply superior as the objective in combat isn't to stack debuffs on enemy troops but to take them out as quickly as possible so that they can't deal damage.
Also, another problem with crowbills is that I haven't seen any good crowbills on enemies/in markets so far. Thus other weapon choices always seem to be superior.
6) Hero upgrade trees need to be more diverse and offer choices and consequences. As it is now, the middle row (the tribute/merchant one) is clearly inferior to two others. Every player will want to invest in all the skills from the other two upgrade lines. However, the line that offers a bonus castle support slot is something I imagine most players will beeline towards, unless, perhaps, while playing the mystic who benefits a whole lot from the lower part of the tree. But even as a Mystic I'd probably quickly get two upgrades from the lower part of the tree and then fall back to the castle support beeline.
I just think it shouldn't be there. The extra castle support, particularly on higher difficulties, is such a great and important bonus that *every* player will want it. It has little contest, and therefore offers no choice. I'd say remove it from the upgrade tree and simply add castle support at certain level(s) - you can add a story justification. Sub it with something else that as a player I would like to have, but wouldn't feel like not having it would mean ridiculously gimping my character.
7) Troops actually dying happens way too rarely. Played for hours on difficult and I had a troop die on me only once so far - and he was a recruit I didn't care about at all. As it is I never feel threatened about my troops as all I need to do is to heal up after each fight and we're all good.
A number of ideas:
a) make it so that troops can bleed out on the field and die permanently if they get knocked out and the battle carries on too long. Other troops could bandage a knocked out troop keeping him alive, but it means they don't deal damage. Do I save my guy or do I take the risk and try to kill them off quickly? Choices!
b) Make it so that dealing very heavy damage has a chance of killing somehow. Today I've seen my Fencer at 10HP get rammed by a mounted knight for 90HP. Five minutes later he was patched up and happy. It's realism, but also balance - knowing that the enemy has a killing machine capable of one shotting my lightly armored fencer I should've planned for it and kept the fencer elsewhere. I simply didn't care.
c) Make it so that while wounds are relatively easy to get rid of, each knock-out leaves a minor disability of some sort which is very hard to get rid of. That way if I don't care about the survivability of my troops they get worse over time, to the point that I either have to replace them or spend a whole lot of gold to get them properly useful again.
d) Couple a tighter death system with introducing a withdraw option for the troops. If I have a wounded troop, or someone whom I want to get the hell out of there, I first disengage (one hex to safety), then withdraw which means automatically moving two hexes at a time to the border of the map where my support troops are. A withdraw order, once given, can't be rescinded. Cavalry could withdraw 4 hexes at a time. Each subsequent withdrawal causes the entire army to suffer temporary morale penalties that increase exponentially with each troop withdrawn (say, -2 attack, -2 willpower for 2 turns for the 1st guy, but -4,-4 for the 2nd guy and -8, -8 for the 3rd etc). You can safely withdraw a few troops but at some point it's full scale panic among your ranks so choose wisely as having -8 to attack for all troops even for a single turn can mean losing the battle.
8) I've seen some people mentioning the need for a 'do nothing' button on your forums and elsewhere. I agree, and the reasons are simple. 1, there's often troops in counterattack mode and attacking with a weak troop is dying, and it's annoying I can't just wait for the other full HP guy to take the heat. 2, heretics have the unholy protection spell which sometimes I'd rather wait until it passes instead of attacking and putting my troops in harms way. On the other hand, this does seem to affect mostly low-level troops so it is logical in terms of both design and internal consistency (inexperienced troops, difficult to command, bit dumb etc).
Still, I'd at least suggest that the game points out to the player that, true to real life as well, the ability to patiently sit tight and do nothing when the situation calls for it is precious and comes only with experience.
9) Healers are OP, simply put. I can think of a huge number of different builds and army compositions, but there's simply no reason *not* to have a healer. A way to at least alleviate it would be to make the 'white' upgrade line impious as well ("enchantress" definitely sounds pagan!), so that if you want to have a pious army the herbalist is as far as you can go with upgrading. Another way to make them less OP is to simply limit the amount of health healed. With the willpower buffs I can heal up to 30-40 HP per turn on some characters. If I get three healers in my army and start stacking the healing with the medbh (sp?) buff, my army really does get invincible in some scenarios and a single character can keep ploughing through whole rows of enemies as long as someone deals a bit of damage to him so that I can heal again.
10) I haven't played with the mystic or necromancers to reach that point yet but from what I've seen the summon spirit skill should either be heavily retooled or removed from the game as it simply doesn't work with the combat system. You shouldn't be able to bind half the enemy army with that summon and enemies shouldn't be stuck there hacking away at the spirit even though they can't deal damage to it.
Make the binding a special effect so that the troop that the spirit attacked is forced to fruitlessly attack it next turn. That way the spirit can be used to deal some damage and root specific units from the enemies army - but as soon as the spirit switches targets, the other unit is free and can resume fighting your men. I think that way the spell would remain very, very useful but would limit the usefulness at least to the point of it no longer being totally bonkers.
Last edited:
Aterdux Entertainment
Aterdux Entertainment
1. In dev mode we have x12. But that's tough. Your propositions require a lot of work. Unlikely
2. You can also kill everyone with a Mystic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXgVlw5se4 The game gives you a lot of freedom. Do what you like. Auto-levelling is both for you and enemy. Getting XP in combat is still faster. Done to avoid a situation where a player will wait a few days, upgrade his army and then steam roll everyone. No plans to change anything major here. Maybe some smaller adjustments.
3. Yup, there is this bug, it reads the last hero class used. Will be fixed shortly.
4. We will look into expanding content and heroes if the game does well. Other troops to recruit is something to consider. Didn't want to change the setting too much but maybe.
5. I will check. Crowbills have to damage armor with each strike.
6. No plans to change. It all is done because we wanted to limit the amount of talents. By the way, people don't take extra castle support slot at all. It's needed only when you really suck at the game. Changes and additions here again depend on how well the game does.
7. Understand your reasoning, though again no plans to change. Might go with smaller adjustments. This is a lot of work.
8. No plans to change. Do nothing will be used by AI and troops will stand forever. Don't want to remove this option from AI and make it unfair.
9. Might do some adjustments. So far I heard no one complain. I think it's balanced pretty well atm. I played without healers completely and didn't miss them much.
10. No plans to change. What you offer is way to complex to program and we don't want to make exceptions to the rules of the combat just to avoid what you think is a problem.
2. You can also kill everyone with a Mystic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXgVlw5se4 The game gives you a lot of freedom. Do what you like. Auto-levelling is both for you and enemy. Getting XP in combat is still faster. Done to avoid a situation where a player will wait a few days, upgrade his army and then steam roll everyone. No plans to change anything major here. Maybe some smaller adjustments.
3. Yup, there is this bug, it reads the last hero class used. Will be fixed shortly.
4. We will look into expanding content and heroes if the game does well. Other troops to recruit is something to consider. Didn't want to change the setting too much but maybe.
5. I will check. Crowbills have to damage armor with each strike.
6. No plans to change. It all is done because we wanted to limit the amount of talents. By the way, people don't take extra castle support slot at all. It's needed only when you really suck at the game. Changes and additions here again depend on how well the game does.
7. Understand your reasoning, though again no plans to change. Might go with smaller adjustments. This is a lot of work.
8. No plans to change. Do nothing will be used by AI and troops will stand forever. Don't want to remove this option from AI and make it unfair.
9. Might do some adjustments. So far I heard no one complain. I think it's balanced pretty well atm. I played without healers completely and didn't miss them much.
10. No plans to change. What you offer is way to complex to program and we don't want to make exceptions to the rules of the combat just to avoid what you think is a problem.
Monocause
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2008
- Messages
- 3,656
Cheers for the reply 
A foreword though - you seem to be addressing what I wrote as complaints on the game being broken, however I'd like to underscore that most of these are merely suggestions to consider for the next game, not ideas for fixes for patches in the foreseeable future. I realise part of these would be debatable and part, while neat, would end up being risky to implement and possibly even to code depending on how things are set up.
Like I said, I really dig the game and sinked 20 steam hrs into it already, and planning to sink more soon, so I consider these ideas balance improvements or quality of life improvements but hardly necessities.
1. Yeah, adding fast travel options to existing scenarios would require reworking a lot of tweaks to existing scripts and character placement and boosting max speed can probably cause a slew of issues on its own (I noticed that even 4x seems to cause problems occasionally, like movement animations not loading correctly); like I said, something to consider for the sequel or new downloadable campaigns (which hopefully will get put in the oven soon!)
2. Agreed - although I'll get back to the mystic video later as it ties into 9 and 10 a bit.
3. OK, although watch out lest the bugfix pisses some of the more passionate people on the internet off, like a certain backer-funded poem did in Pillars of Eternity Personally I found it quite hilarious when it first happened.
4. Would be neat!
5. Please do, although I'm not 100% sure it doesn't actually function as intended. What I am sure about is that the "Armor damaged" pop up fires only once, which definitely can be confusing for the players. Trying hard not to translate my work habits into private gaming sessions so never checked, although it does seem like the damage I dealt went up only after the first crowbill strike and stayed there.
6. Hm, it's interesting that people don't take it, although - do you have telemetry in the game implemented, or are you gauging it based on community feedback? The extra support slot is definitely not something you need to proceed/win the game, but to me it easily seems like the optimal route. Once I hit the fourth talent there I have a recruitment bonus in all future scenarios which opens up a lot of army composition options, allows me to get an extra troop which accrues XP right off the bat making him stronger and allows me to tackle stronger opponents earlier. In terms of min-maxing your character I don't see how there's other superior options there, although if you or anyone else would like to prove me wrong here please do.
7. I see. A simple tweak - maybe make the chapel healing more expensive, possibly on higher difficulty levels? I think even that would force the players to focus more on troop survivability.
8. Ah, fair point. Haven't considered the extra amount of AI coding this would entail and how it potentially could affect battle pacing. Suggestion withdrawn!
9 and 10 + the Mystic. I'll answer this with a King's Bounty (the new series) analogy. You had access to an excellent spell in one of the games (Armored Princess, I think?) - summon Phoenix. When playing as a mage I quickly found that the way for me to go through 95% of combat with no losses is to start off with summoning a Phoenix. With high enough spellpower that beast was so frigging powerful I no longer needed to think about tactics, and enemies I faced started being irrelevant unless the numbers were hugely stacked against me or they were fire resistant. It just worked *too well*.
The same applies to the summon spirit spell. In 95% of combat it allows you to completely ignore enemy composition. That knight on horseback with 120 HP who would be the doom of many of your frontliners? Doesn't matter anymore as he'll keep whacking away at an invincible spirit until you kill him. So will his buddies. Unless the enemy has a high level priest in the army, the summon spirit seems like an autowin feature.
In terms of healers - I appreciate that they are not mandatory, but they're just too good. With frontlines I have lots of choices. WIth the midline as well - do I pick archers, xbowmen? Or maybe pikemen? Or maybe even some infantry to keep in reserve should my front line start getting mowed down? With the back line, it's quite simple. The healer extends the survivability of the entire army insanely well and if you're playing the knight she's the employee of the month - and stacking the medbh blessing is a cheese tactic. Also, having a healer means a lot of savings as the more troops you keep alive and well, the less you need to pay to heal them.
When you play, which class do you play and which troop types do you consider a reasonable replacement for a healer in terms of "Bang for castle support slot" line of thinking? Keep in mind that what I say is strongly based on my experience with playing the knight who really, greatly, hugely benefits both from healing and from the medbh blessing which, particularly when abused and when fighting pike/spear/sword armies, turns him from a knight into a modern day 400 tonne bulldozer.
Also, another thing to consider for the next game - mayhaps give an option to turn the personalisation on for the enemies but keep it off for the player? I like how it makes battles less predictable, but on my end I find that with personalisation on I often scour recruiting sites and apart from ch.2 where you obviously can't do that I always ended up with a huge advantage due to personalisation being on. I appreciate that it's my problem that I've issues with self-enforced limitations but can't help but wish for an option to randomise enemy troops but keep mine stick to the book.
A foreword though - you seem to be addressing what I wrote as complaints on the game being broken, however I'd like to underscore that most of these are merely suggestions to consider for the next game, not ideas for fixes for patches in the foreseeable future. I realise part of these would be debatable and part, while neat, would end up being risky to implement and possibly even to code depending on how things are set up.Like I said, I really dig the game and sinked 20 steam hrs into it already, and planning to sink more soon, so I consider these ideas balance improvements or quality of life improvements but hardly necessities.
1. Yeah, adding fast travel options to existing scenarios would require reworking a lot of tweaks to existing scripts and character placement and boosting max speed can probably cause a slew of issues on its own (I noticed that even 4x seems to cause problems occasionally, like movement animations not loading correctly); like I said, something to consider for the sequel or new downloadable campaigns (which hopefully will get put in the oven soon!)
2. Agreed - although I'll get back to the mystic video later as it ties into 9 and 10 a bit.
3. OK, although watch out lest the bugfix pisses some of the more passionate people on the internet off, like a certain backer-funded poem did in Pillars of Eternity
Personally I found it quite hilarious when it first happened.4. Would be neat!
5. Please do, although I'm not 100% sure it doesn't actually function as intended. What I am sure about is that the "Armor damaged" pop up fires only once, which definitely can be confusing for the players. Trying hard not to translate my work habits into private gaming sessions so never checked, although it does seem like the damage I dealt went up only after the first crowbill strike and stayed there.
6. Hm, it's interesting that people don't take it, although - do you have telemetry in the game implemented, or are you gauging it based on community feedback? The extra support slot is definitely not something you need to proceed/win the game, but to me it easily seems like the optimal route. Once I hit the fourth talent there I have a recruitment bonus in all future scenarios which opens up a lot of army composition options, allows me to get an extra troop which accrues XP right off the bat making him stronger and allows me to tackle stronger opponents earlier. In terms of min-maxing your character I don't see how there's other superior options there, although if you or anyone else would like to prove me wrong here please do.
7. I see. A simple tweak - maybe make the chapel healing more expensive, possibly on higher difficulty levels? I think even that would force the players to focus more on troop survivability.
8. Ah, fair point. Haven't considered the extra amount of AI coding this would entail and how it potentially could affect battle pacing. Suggestion withdrawn!
9 and 10 + the Mystic. I'll answer this with a King's Bounty (the new series) analogy. You had access to an excellent spell in one of the games (Armored Princess, I think?) - summon Phoenix. When playing as a mage I quickly found that the way for me to go through 95% of combat with no losses is to start off with summoning a Phoenix. With high enough spellpower that beast was so frigging powerful I no longer needed to think about tactics, and enemies I faced started being irrelevant unless the numbers were hugely stacked against me or they were fire resistant. It just worked *too well*.
The same applies to the summon spirit spell. In 95% of combat it allows you to completely ignore enemy composition. That knight on horseback with 120 HP who would be the doom of many of your frontliners? Doesn't matter anymore as he'll keep whacking away at an invincible spirit until you kill him. So will his buddies. Unless the enemy has a high level priest in the army, the summon spirit seems like an autowin feature.
In terms of healers - I appreciate that they are not mandatory, but they're just too good. With frontlines I have lots of choices. WIth the midline as well - do I pick archers, xbowmen? Or maybe pikemen? Or maybe even some infantry to keep in reserve should my front line start getting mowed down? With the back line, it's quite simple. The healer extends the survivability of the entire army insanely well and if you're playing the knight she's the employee of the month - and stacking the medbh blessing is a cheese tactic. Also, having a healer means a lot of savings as the more troops you keep alive and well, the less you need to pay to heal them.
When you play, which class do you play and which troop types do you consider a reasonable replacement for a healer in terms of "Bang for castle support slot" line of thinking? Keep in mind that what I say is strongly based on my experience with playing the knight who really, greatly, hugely benefits both from healing and from the medbh blessing which, particularly when abused and when fighting pike/spear/sword armies, turns him from a knight into a modern day 400 tonne bulldozer.
Also, another thing to consider for the next game - mayhaps give an option to turn the personalisation on for the enemies but keep it off for the player? I like how it makes battles less predictable, but on my end I find that with personalisation on I often scour recruiting sites and apart from ch.2 where you obviously can't do that I always ended up with a huge advantage due to personalisation being on. I appreciate that it's my problem that I've issues with self-enforced limitations but can't help but wish for an option to randomise enemy troops but keep mine stick to the book.
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Aterdux Entertainment
Aterdux Entertainment
These are all good thoughts, thank you. It's just most of the stuff depends on how well the game does. So far sells are OK but we are quite far even from break even. If sales don't pick up in a month or two, we will have to stop the work on this project completely with maybe some exception of minor bug fixing. I still remain cautiously optimistic though. Check out what someone wrote in the review on Steam:
If one of those bigger budget game companies released a game as well written and storied as this, they would get full 100% reviews louding them as the new "planescape torment". It's really that good. Even moderately good recent RPGS like Divinity, Wastelands2 etc, have'nt on staff any writer even half as talented as whoever wrote this game and its characters.
This is one of those rare gems so full of style, atmosphere, character, story... This is exactly what gaming really needs. The more you play it, the more it reveals itself to you as a deep setting, with a rich story and very deep characters that any other developer would envy.
At first I thought negatively of this game because of it's enormously lackluster combat mechanics. Yes, they are really simplistic and bad, forcing the same kind of repetitive mindless grind every single time. But this game is so much more.
GET IT!
If one of those bigger budget game companies released a game as well written and storied as this, they would get full 100% reviews louding them as the new "planescape torment". It's really that good. Even moderately good recent RPGS like Divinity, Wastelands2 etc, have'nt on staff any writer even half as talented as whoever wrote this game and its characters.
This is one of those rare gems so full of style, atmosphere, character, story... This is exactly what gaming really needs. The more you play it, the more it reveals itself to you as a deep setting, with a rich story and very deep characters that any other developer would envy.
At first I thought negatively of this game because of it's enormously lackluster combat mechanics. Yes, they are really simplistic and bad, forcing the same kind of repetitive mindless grind every single time. But this game is so much more.
GET IT!
I feel this game is hugely underadvertised. Every single retarded hipster pixelart platformer has vastly more exposure than LoE with its complexity and production values. Here's hoping sales will pick up when some more reviews come out.
Irenaeus II
Unwanted
Well, I'll buy the game some time soon.
Viata
Arcane
This. May buy it next month as I spent too much on summer sale.
Irenaeus II
Unwanted
I wasn't planning on it, but the story as told in the flowery sser review is too hilarious to pass up. I like peasants being mistreated by nobles. Reminds me of childhood/teenage years when I could dismiss poors, niggers and faggots without the SJW brigade breathing on my neck and deleting my Twister accounts.
Saxon1974
Prophet
Just started playing myself and I am impressed so far. I hope the sales have picked up for your team. Very impressive for such a small team and budget. I like the look and feel of the game, great atmosphere it really feels like I am walking around a medieval world. Good job on making us make a choice on which nobles to support and which not to, very realistic I think.
I just picked up the DLC the iron road, any chance you will tell us what you have planned down the road? I hope sales are good enough for some more DLC.
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