Balance feedback after 100h of play on highest difficulty

[JoyfulRogue]

1. Direwolf, Ghoul and zombie quests are pointless at rep 2000+

Those quests with 30 zombies or ghouls don’t even have a sliver of a chance against my company mid and lategame. It’s tedious clicking for free, easy money, which is a problem both because its boring and because it’s so easy that you can farm money like that risk-free on highest difficulty.

I don’t think you want to have “boring free money” quests in the game, it’d be terrible game design. These graveyard quests (AND DIREWOLF QUESTS TOO, SAME THING) should scale in a better way into mid and lategame, adding fallen heroes and skelly guards to graveyards and vampires to terrorising quests.

2. Keep quests for gobs and orcs are really bad value. Almost the same money for at least triple the risk!

First of all, make those dangerous keep quests give at least 100 renown instead of the same 50 you get for finishing a simple delivery ~.~

Second of all, make the rewards more enticing in some way or it just doesn’t make sense to do them from the strategic standpoint. Even discounts on armor aren’t enough, I’d rather kill 5 packs of werewolfs than 1 pack of orcs, and pay more for the armor in the shop. Safer that way.

3. Please let me walk though the caravan hands. It’s stupid how they block my movement in the forest defense and I lose the cart cause the caravan hand blocks the choke point.

4. Map generation – Island towns don’t work. You probably want to stop spawning them if possible.

Also you may want to guarantee every type of town on every map appearing at least once, I play a map without a forest town and it sucks ass that I can never recruit hunters.

5. Fix the exploit with the “give us the head of the bandit leader” event where you take the fight, run from it and are 100% safe.

6. bandits in forest have broken AI, they just step into the nearest high ground and stay there alone so I can slay them one by one, creating a very EASY and very TEDIOUS mission. Make them group together and wait at least, if they got ranged superiority, otherwise it looks very bugged and plays boring

[JoyfulRogue]

Also, initiative is a useless stat at the moment, even with the dodge perk we were bnrainstorming on my stream and never could come up with a reason why would anyone want to level initiative.

My suggestion for fixing it: make initiative increase your chances of dodging out of combat when you’re trying to run away from enemies in base contact.

[Wargasm]

Ghoul and zombie battles are also especially boring because the company is always scattered randomly around the bottom-left of the field at the start, and the ghouls and zombies just gradually appear in ones and twos, so that the tedium is even more prolonged (and the assurance of victory even greater). Even bandit battles in graveyards tend to be like this. At least direwolves always charge straight into you en masse at the start, and are a good challenge in the earlier game.

And yes, initiative is especially useless now that guys with high max fatigue and lots of heavy stuff can use Adrenaline to go first when they want to. It would make sense if every character always had a portion of their initiative (say 5-10%) added to their base melee and ranged defence, and if the Dodge perk enhanced this and didn’t disappear as soon as you receive a miniscule scratch.

[Jaffai]

There are 3 important stats already. Melee def, melee attack and max fatigue. There is no room to lvl up any other stat beside those ones. After those three i would lvl up, ranged attack and initiave.

Major balance issue for me is that opponents dont have tools to fight against heavy armored brothers. After I get scale armors game becomes grind.

I too try to avoid graveyards and forests.

Forest is bit too thick with too many trees.

Adrenaline, I guess you are using with rest perk. But you still lose your turn even if u get first turn next round. You need insanly high max fatigue too with that combo which makes brother lose pontetial ranged capabilities. I guess it could be used early game before you get heaviest armors and when every hit counts. But late game it does less dps.

[Wargasm]

I don’t think levelling up melee attack and melee defence every time is great when you’re only getting +1 or +2. If they don’t have a talent for it, I either (a) give them a sword/spear/pike so that they don’t need it to be so high or (b) give them an axe so that they can concentrate on smashing shields to lower the enemies’ defences. Then add in the Backstabber perk for everyone and their practical melee skill will be high enough when it matters.

Max fatigue is often very important, especially early on. Even still, once the game gets on and you have more resources, you can just give someone as much heavy armour etc. as possible and a weapon mastery that allows them to keep using basic attacks without building up fatigue, so that they don’t need much more max fatigue from then on.

Adrenaline doesn’t cause you to sacrifice the current turn, since it costs no action points. I was initially experimenting with Adrenaline+Recover, but I rarely used Recover, since that does require the sacrifice of a turn. I had a wildman with the Strong trait whose max fatigue was still over 100 with a hauberk, a metal+mail helm and a kite shield, and that was without the Brawny perk (which, in hindsight, I should’ve given him instead of Recover, since then his max fatigue would’ve been over 100 in scale armour). Adrenaline was most effective when lots of people used it en masse in melee in the 1st/2nd round of battle. The only trouble is that you need to choose it over other perks that are important early on.

[Sarissofoi]

He is right though.
Front-line brothers have 3 important stats.
Fatigue so they can fight longer and carry heavy armor
armor>HP
Armor is also very helpful against archers
Melee defense to not get hit
not get hit>HP
Kite shields ad heavy armor make enemy archers annoying at worst(unless they have massive 40+ goblin army with plenty of ambushers,nets and shamans)
Melee skill to hit and kill enemy fast, no trick just brute force

Melee defense can be discarded on polearms users with footwork as they can just walk away from enemy and their heavy armor should protect them well from few attacks.
Ranged defense is useful on them as on ranged characters(main users) or nimble fighters but they are optional at best.
Ranged attack is for designated ranged and hybrids. But hybrids will need to drop some other stats. As they usually are polearm users its melee defense as they stay away from enemy.
HP lost its importance as with injures getting hit is often getting crippled. You can’t tank with HP alone and its much better to avoid enemy hits than suffer them.
not getting hit>plenty of HP

I was thinking about secondary stats some time and come to similar to OP opinions.
Current HP is welcomed but but not worth sacrificing other stats.
So what can be done to make it more important?
Currently Fatigue represent endurance and stamina of character. But where is strength?
HP could fulfill this role. It could be used as body strength.
Like making HP=50 base/normal strength Any more give some bonus to melee damage, any less penalty. It could be percentage bonus like 1hp more/less than 50HP count for 1% bonus/penalty to damage.
It could be based on current character HP so getting wounded would weaken strength of hits.
Initiative is more flicker but considering it its agility/quickness of character it could be used in similar way as proposed to HP bonus but with bonus to Melee/Ranged defense and hit chance.(?)
Like taking base 100(?) initiative and grant % bonus/penalty for any point more or less(capped at 25(?)%). It would also serve as a mechanism to simulate of soldiers getting tired and less effective.
At max bonus/penalty it could also grant 1more/less AP. Its no much but could be useful.

Problem with zombie/dire wolf/ghouls fights is that they scale to player level. But they lack any means to harm or out damage a player.
Zombies have staying power but nothing else. 1 low damage attack per turn. Tedious and boring.
Ghouls hardly attack en mass and even then they can be routed quickly and have no means to pierce armor.
Dire wolves are deadly early but after that they scale badly.

AD 5. Weren’t this fixed recently? I get impressions that enemy in events and when attack player on global map had switched their default behavior to charge.

[RusBear]

we need to understand that balance for Ironman mode and for those who download the game every failure and for selection of mercenaries – is 2 different balances…

[JoyfulRogue]

Why would you EVER balance the game around ppl who save scum RusBear? In the end they can reload until they win anyway, right? So how would you even attempt to balance it? Pointless.

[Wargasm]

I agree it would make sense if hit points contributed to increasing damage dealt and reducing damage received. But think what that would do to orc warriors and warlords?

I don’t agree that hit points are currently useless, although they certainly aren’t adequate by themselves, and being hard to hit and wearing lots of armour are indeed more important (but neither of these, alone or in combination, can make you invincible).

I’m pretty sure that more HP = reduced chance of getting crippled. Also, it’s no longer possible to have such high melee defence as to be semi-immortal (e.g. guys with a melee defence of 50-60 can still get hit several times in succession sometimes, and guys wearing heavy armour and forming a shieldwall with a heater can still get punctured by ambusher bastards’ curved daggers). If nothing else, HPs are still important as a safeguard against these things and can’t be ignored entirely.

Same for resolve: it’s not the most important stat, and useless on its own, but a safeguard for when HP are damaged and useful against a few specific enemies and also useful for getting everyone to confident morale with attack skills increased by some 6-8.

A build where you concentrated primarily on increasing everyone’s resolve and hit points would not be good for prevailing long-term against all comers, but it would at least make for some exciting battles where you’ve been pommeled but are still up for it and are able to shift the momentum in your favour.

[JoyfulRogue]

HP are actually a very good stat, I had some 50 HP lategame superawesome guys in plates that got 2-shot by goblins that stab through armor x.x

Initiative though… very hard sale

[Wargasm]

Yeah … I recruited a bargain wildman with some wonderful traits to enhance his basal wonderfulness, and he even had a rare talent for ranged defence … so I gave him some scale armour and a heater shield, and sent him off into battle against goblins, and he didn’t get shot by arrows and ran them down and trapped a couple of ambushers who were at a height disadvantage … and the bastards punctured him three times and he was dead …

I had a thief with very high initiative as well as high defence skills (and 3-star melee attack talent), and I gave in to temptation and gave him Dodge to make him less likely to die before progressing to awesomeness, but now that his melee defence is over 50 and he’s wearing heavy armour (and still has a Dodge bonus higher than +10, even though I’ve never leveled his initiative up), it’s still not uncommon for him to get scratched quite early in battle and immediately lose the Dodge bonus … but he survives without it, and now I wish I’d spent the perk elsewhere …

The only instance in which it seems worthwhile to raise initiative is when some bowman has a 3-star talent for it and doesn’t have much talent for other things that would be more useful. Then you might as well use it so that he can go first and be less likely to get caught in melee or get shot in an archery duel (and still have high initiative once wearing some decent armour).

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