Reply To: feedback after 138h played

RusBear wrote:

1000 h +
Agree 100%. The biggest sad that in that moment( 11 level) when you can real start to get some results from your “building” you almost loose the ingame interests to do it. Stay only your own RPG motive.
Late game is not ready? yes but i think we need some more variants to upgrade max level fighters. I don’t hope that will be more perks now – to much work for balance, but it could be some special jobs, events, able to buy own donkey at least )

Yes. That’s exactly it. Until level 11, the talented brothers in the band are like precious ornaments to me. Then, shortly after they get to level 11, I start to lose interest in them and eventually try to kill them off so that I can spend the amassed excess of crowns on swordmasters, sellswords and hedge knights (plus some wildmen and hunters). I don’t completely lose interest in the campaign after the initial core reaches level 11, but I play differently and more intermittently and focus on seeking out exciting risk/reward battles that (even if victorious) would’ve ruined the company in its early days when there weren’t enough crowns and equipment to rebuild. I select the troops to take part in each battle, and their equipment, according to how hard/easy the opponent is. I might send off most of the veterans to fight orc warlords with only modest armour, so that there will surely be some casualties. Or I send a small group of newbies off to fight a horde of raiders/marksmen, with just a couple of veterans as security.

That’s the problem: the most exciting battles to fight are the bloody, tense ones where several brothers are surrounded and hanging on to a few hit points, but then an adjacent enemy is decapitated and the other enemies try to flee and get slaughtered before they can deal the finishing blow. But fighting these battles conflicts with the other most engrossing aspect of the game: dedicating lots of time and care to creating unique builds. It’s so exciting at the start of the game, when lots of people are getting new perks on a regular basis. Then, around the mid-point of the build, when each perk takes more time, you become cautious with the talented/lucky ones that have come through the opening ordeals.

I wish that the difficulty levels were graded according to the skill and prevalence of the enemies faced, as opposed to the scarcity of crowns, and I wish that you could gain experience points and level-ups more rapidly and select more perks (which would then be necessary to deal with more skilled opponents). That way, you could create experimental builds more rapidly without eventually losing interest in your veterans, but you’d still be more willing to risk lives because of the relative quickness of building up replacements. It’s more satisfying to build recruits from scratch, rather than recruiting level 4/5s, but it takes too long.

I also wish that there were some tougher bandits or other humans to fight in the later parts of the game, since humans are the most interesting opponents to fight, and they can be fought in many different ways. But with orc warriors there’s no use in any fancy manoeuvres; you simply must have lots of heavy armour (even though they only hit you on odd occasions) and you must focus everything on smashing through their mass of armour and hit points (which takes ages, even though they’re easy to hit). It’s monotonous and only gets exciting if several people are nearly killed but then finish off the orcs just before they bleed to death.

Resolve? In the olde days, all you needed to do was give someone Inspiring Presence, and then everyone else would be confident without doing anything. Now, all you need to do is give someone Rally the Troops, and then they just blow a trumpet in the first round of battle and most people reach confident morale without doing anything (inspired by the valour of this chap who hangs about at the back and never leads by example). I want a rallier who engages in melee and is more inspiring as more enemies are slain, but I also know that that way (the fun way) is “strategically unsound”.

Formerly, wavering morale meant -5 for all attack/defence skills. Now, it means -10%, which often means close to -5 from the actual value. When I first saw -10%, however, I thought it meant -10 from the actual value (and +10 to the actual value when confident), and thought it would be more worthwhile to worry about resolve. Maybe the risks/rewards of morale shifts should be greater, to make it more important.

In the olde days, you could get people to have ludicrously high melee defence without a shield, so that they could mostly do without a mass of armour. Now, it’s very hard to get it above 50-60 and such characters can still get hit lots of times in succession, meaning that (especially with the new risk of debilitating injuries) a mass of armour is a survival necessity (which in turn means that you have to select certain perks and sacrifice others). There needs to be a medium between those two states.

In the olde days, you could make most characters into unrealistic all-rounders who (without using any action points) could put away their sword and shield and arm themselves with a crossbow or a massive pike (which, till then, had been hidden away in some bag). Now, you almost need to specialize everyone or else it won’t be possible to fully realize their potential in any area. I do think the new perk tree is a big improvement, but I wish there was a way to make some realistic all-rounders.

The new perk tree does make throwing characters more viable than before, since (a) the mastery perk increases the damage done at closer range, and (b) the throwing weapons are one-handed weapons and therefore an additional 25% of damage can potentially ignore armour with the new Duelist perk (so that a javelin thrown from a 2-tile range will then do damage very similar to that of a crossbow). The only problem is that such characters will need to be close to the melee at all times and will be vulnerable to archers, and so will need lots of armour and ranged defence and max fatigue and … basically, it only just about becomes viable as you close in on level 11.

Weapon specialisms? I can never find much reason to specialize in cleavers, since they are only a little more damaging and only a little more effective against armour compared to swords, but they are less accurate and more fatiguing to carry and use. Against more lightly armoured opponents, the greater accuracy of swords will result in more hits to compensate for the greater eventual damage per hit done by cleavers. Against heavily armoured opponents, the greater accuracy of swords will result in the armour being worked through just as quickly. The only remaining difference is that, with mastery, swords are so light that it’s almost impossible to run out of energy to attack twice per turn, and sword mastery is also compatible with using some two-handed variants. You’d only choose cleavers over swords for someone with very high melee skill and plentiful max fatigue, but for that someone you’d also choose hammers or axes or maces over cleavers (or you’d choose flails for the thrill of one-shotting bandits in bandanas).

It would make sense if there were additional weapon mastery perks covering (a) all 2-tile weapons and (b) all 1-tile 2-handers. Then (e.g.) you could choose (b) and use a greatsword or greataxe or greathammer (but not 1-handed or 2-tile variants), or you could choose sword/axe/hammer mastery and use 1- or 2-handed variants of the specific type, or you could choose (a) and have less fatigue from all 2-tile skills (but without the hit/damage bonuses from the more specific masteries).