Reply To: Long distance caravan contracts are basically suicide missions now LOL

[Sky]

Found caravans since the third gameday. Fighting with lowvies agains group of raiders. Wiii. On the sixth day a group of orcs wiiiiiiii. And sometime later on day around 16 on a long caravan was saved by a wonder when two remaining raiders ran away while my two basically dead brothers were like wtf why don’t you hit each of us once and we die…

So yes, as it is now the caravan quest seems to be a hard one by itself. The devs already said that the food will be provided. So far did not encounter multiple battles while on caravan mission. But that definitely is a problem since you can’t chose the pacing to recover from battles.

Now the new caravan compared to old one is like the old lvl up stat system to the new one. And that is bad. It became a blind rng not knowing when and who will be spawned to attack you (cuz there are definitely spawned in enemies just for you) and who will it attrack from the roaming parties. Earlier we had a choise of when how and to attack at all or just leave, now we have none. And that is a bad rng no doubt about that. It should be either only spawned in troops and free resources while in the mission or it shouldn’t spawn in additional troops. Or if both then the caravan should at least have guards to compensate instead of rags wearing knife/club peasants.

While the day 3 and 6 encounters were hard but doable and cost me few men each time, the third one was at an unfavoravle moment with fresh recruits not fully recovered group and they obliterated me. Now knowing this I will be more careful to accept a caravan mission. And ofc the not knowing how far the destination is, is also a bad factor. The gold amount it seems depends not only from the distance but the enemy strenght. Going to the next town gave me 110gold with no fight, while going a third of the map 290. That somehow does not feel right.

But the core of the problem is that this kind of mission just as the werewolf one is by default harder than the rest. A 1 skull one here can be compared to a 2 skull in any other one. On the other hand there are default lighter missions like the 2skull ghoul is easily a 1skull compared to other missions.

Maybe 3 skulls is not enought, perhaps 5 would be the magic number. So the wolves and caravans could start appear starting 2 or even 3 skulls first while the ghouls should be easily the weakest. And give the game a bit more pacing at the start when almost no missions are aviable. Bound to days. Like at the first 5-8 days you can only find a 1skull missions then 8-15 2skulls etc. Some more game start friendly pacing. That should do the trick and remove the frustration from the very start that can accumulate by new players. I belive this is one of the main reasons why there are so many posts from new players about how hard the game is. Independent on the difficulty. The pacing at the start is the most crucial and should be dragged out a bit. So to say a non scripted tutorial where the players could have few days to see what’s happening without being murdered by lots of things.

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