Holy.Death

[Holy.Death]

A few points: First, the HP gain you will obtain through Colossus is very marginal, and HPs are not all that useful anyways in terms of survivial in this game.

The amount you get depends on amount you have, so if you don’t level up HP per level and don’t have a character with good traits, then yes – increase will be marginal.

Second, more importantly, I simply do not understand why you would use a 2 hander on a unit not dedicated to DPS. No, I do not mean “offense is best defense.” I mean a non DPS character using a 2 hander will neither DPS well nor be survivable. It simply doesn’t make sense. Without Perfect Focus, you won’t swing a 2 hander more than once anyways in most cases. Even with Battle Flow, the swings won’t increase that much. And with Perfect Focus, you have no room to get into the Defense tree, because you need at least one Fatigue mitigating tier 2 Utility Perk. So explain to me what build are you trying to describe?

I don’t take Perfect Focus, because my two-handers would still be limited by their fatigue and restrict other uses (like shield splitting, for example). So I mainly pursue traits that help their fatigue, with survivability and damage being a bonus. It takes less points to do so. While they might not be DPS I don’t intend them to fill that role. They are my heavy hitters, shield crushers and tanks rolled into one. It works great, because I also have second line of billhooks and archers who fire from behind that safe line.

[Holy.Death]

Why in the world would you want your 2H damage dealers taking something from the defense tree? You simply don’t have the Perk room, if you want your 2H guy actually dealing damage.

Both Battle Forged and Collossus give you more survivability. Since two-handers can’t really effectively dodge it’s wise to have as much armor and life as possible to see them live through combat. Unless your concept is “offense is best defense”. Besides, both perks are at tier 1, so they aren’t very cost-intense. If anything I find Utility tree at tier 1 to be more a waste of skills for two-handers, but they need to spend at least 3 points to unlock Brawny, Weapon Master and Battle Flow. I think the whole concept of a skill tree should be reworked. Make it an actual tree (or trees).

Lost Souls?

Fortified Mind doesn’t protect user against morale checks when allies who don’t have this skill start running. Just saying.

[Holy.Death]

I find Brawny to be a great perk if I want to use heavily armored brothers: they really need all the fatigue boost they can get. It combines well with some heavier weapons and perks that increase damage as well.

[Holy.Death]

What about Fortified Mind? Most folks do use tanks; and tanks have enough Perk slots to get Fortified Mind. And a few Fortified tanks should handle them easily.

There are two problems with that – 1: taking a perk only to be able to fight a single enemy type shows how otherwise useless this perk is. 2: if I have to take Fortified Mind to be able to use any tactic against that particular enemy (other than “try to stab them with a spear and pray), then it shows that I am out of options. No other enemy present such a problem.

Minimum to hit them with ranged is not locked at 5 either, I’ve seen as good as 17% with a decent ranged guy and crossbow, no height advantage, 6 spaces out. I’m guessing with more specialization and better conditions that can go way up.

Interesting. I will have to check it out later. I thought that 5% chance to hit with ranged was kind of a racial perk for the Lost Souls (to make them more scary opponents) and didn’t bother with ranged since then.

And of course as soon as I post that I get this as a mission battle. :/

Welcome to the club, brother.

[Holy.Death]

Invictus73 wrote:

By the way, I don’t understand all the fuss about Lost Souls.
I just fought them and wiped them in 3 rounds, with zero armor damage even.
I guess it helped that all my six of tanks now have Fortified Mind (I changed the team again), but I could see a variety of other ways where these guys can be made trivial. For instance, the 4 Perfect Focus ranged guys set up may take them even in two turns, as Lost Souls melt in one hit.
A much ado about nothing.

They are annoying in a number of ways. First, the whole row screams at your men. Your men start running. They try to disengage and either get killed/damaged or they run away. Meaning you’ll have to reposition them again, meaning they’ll be exposed to disengagement attacks at beginning of next turn.

To sum it up: there are too many Lost Souls and it’s too easy to make everybody flee. I think Lost Souls shouldn’t be employed en masse and go as support with some other undead units instead. And there should be more ways to counter fleeing in panic except taking a perk. Even high morale can’t protect you against 18 Lost Souls yelling at you in a row.

Sure, if you have people who always hit anything they aren’t a problem, but we shouldn’t only look at enemies when we’re in the end game.

By the way, aren’t ranged weapons limited to 5% against the Lost Souls?

[Holy.Death]

They are ANIMATED bones. MAGIC involved. If you have skeletons – golems(or gargoyles) are not far away. How they move? They have no flesh, no muscles. They do not eat, no drink. They have no brain. Pure magic. For a non magic settings they are really poor choice.

What does make you think that low fantasy equals no magic at all? Fantasy is fantasy, after all.

The zombies. I don’t really mind them much. Thing is that they not fit that much in the settings. Sure they provide a generic enemy but that is all. They are now slow, low damage rather hard to kill enemy but only thing that they have going for them is their reanimation skill. Not mention that I am little tired on zombies(they shouldn’t really be in a medieval setting).

The very same argument could be made for orcs, or vampires, or goblins. Basically anything that is not human.

[Holy.Death]

I understand these are low quality weapons, but what’s the 4th one? The early version for a two-handed sword or scythe?

[Holy.Death]

I think this is a pretty good summary of High Fantasy:

The core elements of High Fantasy are:

Setting – A world other than ours. It may have a nominal connection with present day Earth, such as being our remote past or future, but this plays no role in the plot. Mythopoeia is often put into play to define the very metaphysics of the world. Nevertheless it often resembles medieval Europe, and is often peopled by People of Hair Color.

Scale – Epic. Power politics, wars, the death of nations, gods walking the earth, and the real threat of The End of the World as We Know It. This is what distinguishes High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy.

Great evil – An enemy which is near enough Evil incarnate or fundamentally abhorrent

Methods – Victory is not achieved through force of arms, the main feature distinguishing High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy. If Aragorn had killed Sauron in hand-to-hand combat, that would have been Heroic Fantasy. In short, a Supporting Leader or the Reluctant Hero will be offered up instead of the rough-hewn barbarian of, say, Conan the Barbarian or Beowulf.

And here are some good points on Low Fantasy:

Human dominance: worlds which are populated mostly (or even exclusively) by human beings rather than the usual Tolkienesque mix of elves, dwarves and other humanoids.

Plot scope: Tends to focus more on the survival and tribulations of one or a few individuals rather than the whole world. A villainous king who steals a magical artifact is less likely to be trying to bring back the Infernal Legions of Hell and conquer the world, and more likely to be trying to make himself immortal, or conquer a few nearby kingdoms.

Heroism: High fantasy heroes are usually all-around nice guys who stand up for the little guy and fight the bad guy. Low fantasy heroes tend to be bitter cynics desperately clinging to their broken moral compass or devil-may-care anti-heroes who save the woman from the evil sorcerer just for the sex. At the very least, they tend to be closer to one of the many shades of Anti-Hero than a Knight in Shining Armor.

Methods: Victories achieved through physical combat, not magical battles or moral superiority – the defining feature of Heroic Fantasy.

[Holy.Death]

I think hiring poor-quality brothers early on is more beneficial in the long run, because you don’t have to spend that much on hiring them and keeping them around. It means you can accumulate more money in the bank faster and if someone dies you can easily replace them with higher quality brother at that point. Other than that I have to say I too noticed that brothers with “better” backgrounds seem to be getting better traits more often than not.

[Holy.Death]

Point is not to have more races, but have varying enemy factions that would be in opposition to the player. Game doesn’t really has to have all canonical fantasy races if what we have accomplishes these goals. By not shoving “racial diversity” and by trying to keep their design somewhat realistic – as well true to the real medieval time period they aim at – they have managed to create a unique feeling of the world. At least I get that impression. How they handled enemies is part of this. Another is restricting the use of magic. It’s quite rare so far and I like it that way. Mages and magic became so commonplace in other fantasy universes that not having magic users spamming spells left and right is quite refreshing.

I would say they can add more atmosphere/tactics/replayability by introducing more enemy types/weapons within already existing factions (which is already planned). We don’t need dwarves or elves. They’d either end up being token races (which would ultimately result in having low variety units/weapons/armors, etc. within their ranks) or soak resources that could be used to expand the already existing factions. By the way I love how undead are done in this game: their weapons and armors give them a lot of personality, even when all are skeletons who share an identical model. Zombies have even more personal touch due to their unique faces and the fact they are using an actually degraded human equipment.

[Holy.Death]

PipBoy wrote:

They do, but how often do you use the axes 360 swing? The 3 hex cleave and 2 hex swing from the greatsword seem to outweigh the axe’s increased damage.

I don’t, because more often than not I don’t have enough stamina to use other abilities, so the greatsword ends up being used mostly for standard attacking. That’s why I like the two-handed axe better. However, I do agree that in terms of potential the greatsword offers more tactical options.

[Holy.Death]

It doesn’t make attack a specific person? I thought that maybe some enemies couldn’t attack the taunter and that’s why they simply attacked whoever they were stuck in combat with, but if it doesn’t even matter if they can reach the taunter or not (when they can), then it’s really useless… I was thinking about making real shield brothers (focus on melee defense, perks into armor and shield, etc.) but without taunting making dedicated shield brothers (whose only purpose would be to gather attention of the enemy; for example to let ranged brothers to their work in peace) is rather pointless.

[Holy.Death]

GOD wrote:

, we ourselves were a badass guy going around killing everyone, we might even have had a title along with our name, but now all we do is direct our Battle Brothers around fighting humans, greenskins and even ungodly abominations. I find it kinda weird that we ourselves are a Battle Brother but we don’t do much battling. So i thought that maybe the Player could have the option to take the field and fight

And what happens when you die? Besides, “we” are in the game – just it doesn’t say which one of the three is the player and it doesn’t even matter as all of the founding members can die and game will not end. I would rather have the player to be a figure that is not fighting directly, rather “commanding” the battle brothers themselves. Perhaps there should be a hardcore ironman mode in which you generate a badass battle brother who’s supposed to be the player and when he dies the game ends?

[Holy.Death]

Disengagement could be done like this:

1 – Select a spot to which your brother is supposed to move to (but don’t confirm).
2 – Roll to determine which enemy will get an attack of opportunity (in case there are more than 1).
3 – Highlight the ground under the enemy with a red color (ideally this should only appear if you select a spot when engaged).
4 – Show a tooltip saying what chances are for being hit if you try to disengage.

[Holy.Death]

Thanks for answering.

PsenBattle wrote:

1. This is a gameplay decision to create a clearer funtional differentiation between weapons. We like it crisp and tight, so weapons have effects which are unique to them. It would be bit bland (allthough may be more realistic) if all weapons would damage shields with just variations in damage numbers.

I understand and agree with making weapons feel different. However, I don’t think that changing shields would make axes irrelevant: you can use an axe to shatter shield on purpose, with 100% hit chance. I’d even go as far as to say that weapons being able to hit the shield would further reinforce viability of shields (as you’d take shield damage), make them less “indestructible” AND make shield cracking even better choice.

Because as of right now you need to spend a ton of stamina only to get rid of a shield. I find it much better to use a two-hander, a flail or attack en masse. One handed axes are only useful against smaller shields at that point (and even then it costs a lot of stamina, leading to another issue: not enough stamina to fight and use abilities. That’s why I feel late in game shield busting loses a lot of value.

But that’s just my opinion.

6. So this is working as intended then Maybe I’m not totally accurate on this but the attack of opportunity should be a normal enemy attack. Shield wall or other defensive maneuvers increase your chances of dodging. This could eventually be made clearer to the player via UI improvements.

I am not arguing that disengaging should be a risky option. Rather I am wondering if there shouldn’t be more tactical info (or the UI improvements, as you yourself have noted) in regard to disengagement, so I can make a tactical decision whether or not I should risk the actual disengaging.

If I am going to risk 3 hits from a two-hander instead of 3 bites, then I am not going to risk it. Especially when all attacks will have 75% to hit me. However, if my chance to get out is around 40% I might, even if it means I may get hit with a two-hander. That’s the difference it’d make for me.

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