Love the game, I’m at 750 hours playtime. I play exclusively Ironman, usually on veteran difficulty as I’m not good enough to make progress on expert.
I would like to present two things that, at times, make ironman extremely unsatisfying that I would like to address.
1. Resting on top of a walled town should prevent ambush. I have now wiped 3 campaigns at the day 100+ mark due to getting ambushed on top of a walled city while resting at night. I’m not talking about villages, that makes perfect sense to me. However, if the visuals in the game show that I am in a castle or walled fort, the idea that I can get ambushed by 20+ nachrezar or ifrit seems absurd to me. It’s a campaign ending scenario the player can do very little to avoid. Alternatively you could dramatically increase sight range while resting on top of a town so that player’s could at least have a second or two to react. As it is, the combat starts literally the same moment the enemy is revealed to you and it is very much not the player’s fault. Often when I’m resting on top of a town I’m in a “recovery” situation, and I’m more or less automatically doomed if combat starts.
2. This one is likely to be considered more controversial, but I strongly believe that you should somehow be able to preview the terrain of a fight before engaging in combat, perhaps through an expensive follower. Again this is in regards to rng that the player is unable to react to. I actually love the harsh rng aspect of the game, however the places where it doesn’t work for me are in situations where I don’t feel as though I’ve done anything wrong. I think the strongest example of this is attacking into goblins. If I attack a goblin camp, the variance of outcome decided by the terrain is extremely lopsided. I can have a crew of 8 of 12 guys at max level, but if the game happens to spawn me at the bottom of a steep hill, I will get absolutely rolled by goblin ambushers independent of circumstances. I have a friend who keeps presenting me with the fact that you can alt+f4 trick into favorable terrain. As I read online forums, it seems as though many ironman players use the alt+f4 trick “only in circumstances that are complete bullshit.” I understand from a development point of view, this is a hard problem to solve, but if the meta of the game is literally developing around force quitting the game and rerolling the circumstances, I strongly feel this is a problem worth addressing. My ideal situation is one where I can honestly approach an ironman run and not manipulate the software in order to get a “fair” set of circumstances. Using the alt+f4 trick really takes me out of the spirit of the harshness of the game and I don’t want to use it. However at times, the game really does seem to present you with a completely unwinnable situation based on the random terrain generated by the game. Specifically, hills and swamps, sometimes forest layouts but less so. I can imagine hovering over a battle and being presented with a preview window showing red squares where the enemy will spawn and green squares where the player will spawn. Wouldn’t a mercenary group look over the field where a battle is about to take place, and decide before going over there whether or not the terrain was too sketchy? It makes no sense that a bunch of battle hardened mercenaries would START a fight with such terrible positioning. Leading up to the battle these mercenaries would vie for a favorable position just as they do during the battle.
Thank you for reading my wall of text love the game!
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