lfish

[lfish]

Well, like I said, I wouldn’t have a problem with HP being the tied skill; I just think it would be a little less interesting tactically. I’m willing to admit that with the fatigue issues in the current state of the game, it’s probably not worth the trouble to make any changes that further buff stamina. When more broad changes have affected the balance of the game I think it will be worth a look though.
Mostly I think players should have some access to character builds and decisions that can enhance a brother’s stun resistance. Indomitable perk seems a little too specific, and difficult to use effectively, and I don’t know if anyone actually takes it right now.

[lfish]

Dodge : Another possibility would be if it was always active, but would deactivate any time you’re overwhelmed. So very useful in one on one fights, not so much otherwise.

Deformed : Not entirely sure how it well it would fit without having a more specific example.

Rat-kin: They could fit in pretty well I think. Would have to make sure they were differentiated enough from goblins though. Seems like they could fit into the beasts faction.

Pastoral: I like the idea of defending a flock of sheep from a horde of werewolves or ghouls in the night. Get paid based on how many are still alive after the battle!

[lfish]

Well obviously the amount of stamina you have would still affect the stun % formula in my second example. The point is that it’s a locked spread, so the difference between someone with a ton of stamina, and someone with very little is less extreme, while still maintaining the overall change in stun vulnerability over the course of a battle. Someone with particularly high fatigue would still be able to fight longer with less consequences, but they wouldn’t start out the battle comparatively invulnerable to stunning. I agree that fatigue is currently too much of a no-brainer for level-up and background/traits, but I don’t think that is enough cause to dismiss any further ideas that are tied favorably to that stat. New needs and uses for other stats have to be introduced for the fatigue + defense + attack dominance to actually change.

The suggestion for using HP is another possibility and makes sense, but wouldn’t really make for much battlefield variability. Usually if you’re at the point where you’ve lost any health, you’re just going to get killed on the next hit anyway, so why bother with stunning?

I guess stunning seems overly arbitrary right now, as one of the only battlefield events that can occur that isn’t tied to any stats on either side. Why does a club have a %75 chance to stun regardless of any of the attributes, skills or equipment of the person swinging or getting hit by the club? It seems as arbitrary as saying that arrows always have a %25 chance to hit. Why does stunning from a charge work so completely differently than with a club or 2-handed sword? The current stun system works okay enough I suppose, I just think it can and should be improved.

[lfish]

These concerns are all legitimate, but with a little tweaking I don’t think they have to be as significant as you make them out to be. Having stun unaffected directly by armor would be fine for me; and the change to stun chance could be a spread calculated as a percentage of remaining stamina rather than directly related to the stamina number (say -10% at full fatigue, to +20% at 0 fatigue for a maximum 30% spread), so more stamina would still be better, but it would be a much less significant difference, and armor would actually increase your stun chance slightly.

There are also some different ideas for how stunning should work that have been talked about in other threads, including switching it to AP damage. These could give more granular control over how debilitating a stun is, possibly with different levels of stunning depending on the force of the blow. I’d be interested in whether there was a way of making stuns affect your initiative, and if it lowered your initiative enough, you would be dropped off of the turn order into the next one. This would make initiative more important in determining whether a stun was effective or not, but I’m not sure if there’s a way to make that work without creating a lot of initiative exceptions for stunned units.

Stunning is obviously irritating when it happens to your brothers, and overall slows battles down a bit, but currently it is only really a factor when facing orcs. It is one of the things that most quickly feels ‘unfair’ for new players if they don’t understand it. I would want it to remain fairly rare, but occurring in a wider variety of circumstances.

[lfish]

Maybe I’ve just been lucky, or my guys are just stone-cold killers; but I’ve never had any trouble with durability. I don’t think I’ve broken anything other than spears when I’m letting orcs whittle themselves down on a spear wall, and occasionally A sword if I’m going to town with ripostes against highly armored opponents. I always have backup weapons for my guys though (Everyone gets a spear and at least one other weapon).

I’d recommend some Maces and Flails for Orc Warriors once your spearwall is broken.

[lfish]

As far as weapon specialization goes, I think the current perk system works great. There are already lots of perk builds that greatly favor certain weapons, but don’t just give a boring ‘+5 damage to axes’; instead, axes naturally get a large damage bonus to headshots, and there are perks that increase your chance of hitting the head. Similarly, if you make a character with dodge and nimble it greatly increases you’re ability to make high damage ripostes with swords. Bloody flail is only useful with 2 handed weapons and flails.

I think more perks that favor certain weapon traits would be good, but am not interested in a simple ‘now you get +10% to hit with maces’ deal, no matter how it’s implemented.

[lfish]

GOD wrote:

I like it, but it also feels weird to have perks not do anything outside of vision range. Being heard is what’s important, but the orders wouldn’t be as effective if you couldn’t see who you´re ordering. How about halving the effect of the perks for every tile that they affect beyond your vision?
So let’s say you have vision 3 and Captain perk. Everyone within three tiles gets the full 20%, those four tiles removed get 10% and the fives tiles removed get 5%.

;

Probably fine, but wouldn’t that actually be an overall buff to the range ?
For me the logical portion is not so much about having direct line of sight to all affected soldiers, but more like overall battlefield awareness; I just think you’re going to be less effective as a captain when you don’t have much of an idea of the flow of battle, or generally what’s happening more than 5 feet in front of your face.

[lfish]

Alesch wrote:

As I see it, there are the people who want to have control over the story that their game tells, and the people who want to beat up RNGesus even if it means both of their hands are tied behind their backs. The later crowd, in my experience, has a lot more overlap with the achievement hunters of the world than the former does. Tying the achievements to playing without any character customization gives an incentive toward playing with whatever junk characters the RNG gives you, while players that want to use custom characters likely won’t care. Heck, if you really want to take a page out of Paradox’s book you could even toss out character customization as a 5$ DLC (queue an entire forum’s worth of outrage here).

As it is right now, I often find myself restarting a new game several times until I have a crew that I deem “playable”, and I doubt that I’m the only one who does this. That isn’t what a functioning system looks like, and if the main argument against incorporating some form of character customization is essentially “but that will make the game easier!” then I really think that locking the achievements away from people in playthroughs that use custom characters would nip that in the bud. After all, who cares if the game is easier for me, if it won’t mean that I can get the same “Congratulations on Winning the Game” picture more easily than the other guy.

Everyone wins. I get to play with characters that I want to play with. Achievement hunters aren’t having their achievements devalued by “easy-mode” players.

Seriously. Paradox already solved this. Do correct me though, if I am wrong.

Honestly I don’t think that most of the anti-customization people really care about achievements to any degree more than the pro-customization folks; it’s still about story telling, it’s just a desire for more open-ended storytelling created by mechanics and events rather than player fine-tuning. I certainly don’t care about achievements, and I’m more or less against customizing individual characters.

For me personally, I think there should be a system in place so that people have some choice over the backgrounds of the initial brothers, but I don’t think there should be any ability to know or tweak the traits or stats of starting characters. Changing faces/hairstyles I’m also somewhat against, but don’t particularly care about it one way or the other. The frustration of multiple restarts is something that should be dealt with though. Both a purchase system or semi randomized ‘tiers’ based on difficulty sound like they would be good. I think founding brother perk should probably be removed as well.

[lfish]

Double slash seems….a little boring as an attack? I mean, if you can slash twice quickly with a sword or knife, you could slash twice with an axe or mace. I get the idea of trying to make the knives seem like a quicker weapon, but if someone is using a knife to fight a sword, the difference in range makes the speed advantage go the other way. I think the knives could have a draw cut ability that either causes bleeding or some kind of debilitation effect, but does highly reduced damage to armor.

I agree the spearwall should be nerfed a tad, but I think a long range spear might be too powerful. Although, if it could only attack at range 2, that might work. Another idea would be that getting hit by a spearwall ends your turn, but doesn’t knock you back.

[lfish]

Yep, sorry about that.

Attachments:

1. log.7z

[lfish]

Also had this problem a few times. Can attach a save as well if that will help.

Attachments:

1. DxDiag5.txt

[lfish]

Passive skill gain systems too often lead to very ‘gamey’ behavior by players; i.e. not killing the last enemy so a player can move their troops around the field and build up their fatigue, or letting the last enemy hit their characters multiple times to build up hp gain. Might be possible to come up with an implementation that works better, but I’m not sure what it would be.

I think something like the perk system you described is planned for the game, although there aren’t any details yet as far as I know. I think that medals and maiming will allow the brothers to become more unique through battlefield actions.

[lfish]

I think any system with limitless leveling is pretty exploitable. It bothers me when the difference between high and low level characters is so vast that they don’t even resemble the same species. I think it makes long-term balancing even more difficult as well, because a system of slow long lasting leveling makes new recruits comparatively even weaker than they are now; making individual troops more precious than they probably should be. I like the idea of achievements and wounds continuing to add to the attributes and history of a character though.

[lfish]

Can’t you already influence that difficulty though by choosing the difficulty you start on? So far I’ve found that it is your starting gear that is more influential on how difficult the start is, rather than your traits (unless they’re utterly abysmal, which rarely happens). The difficulty setting changes nothing beyond your starting gold, so you’re essentially deciding how good your start is going to be. I’ve been finding myself appreciate that more and more. It’s a very elegant solution.

I think that the difficulty also changes the cost of items overall throughout the game, but I’m not certain about that. Difficulty right now only really affects the early game, since after a few large battles you get to a point where the starting conditions become irrelevant. There’s not really enough content and focus to the game at this point to know how hard it will end up being, so discussions about difficulty balancing are probably premature.

I do think that having a little more choice about starting conditions would help quell some of the dissatisfaction people have with a random start, without hurting the game’s theme too much. I do agree that it’s probably ultimately unnecessary though; more a concession to modern expectations about game design than a required feature.

[lfish]

Seems like Hold out and Fortified Mind could be combined, since they’re both rather weak on their own, and the ‘flavor’ of the skills overlaps a bit. I would like to have more skills that directly exploits or is tied to the resolve stat, and the defense tree seems like a good place to add those type of skills. Something that increases positive checks and doubles the effects of morale, on a unit (for good or bad) would be an interesting one.

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