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  • in reply to: Reputation and Contracts #12917
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Currently, missions to burn down parts of settlements are not assigned as part of evil/good alignment, only noble house trust level. If a noble house is at least Open (might be friendly, not sure which) with you, they may ask you to attack a neutral settlement to help induce said settlement to join their faction.

    in reply to: Gameflow: How you end up playing? #4656
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    5% Chance is very low. But it happens. I’ve had 2 swordmasters die in melee now.

    in reply to: Gameflow: How you end up playing? #4602
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    My issue with your design for your swordmaster is that his armor level is wayy too low.

    Minimum chance to hit is 5% – that means, no matter how much dodge you have, you’ll get hit 5% of the time. An Orc Boss can easily pump out 200+ damage on a hit, so armoring your swordmaster. to at least survive the freak hit happening is advisable.

    in reply to: My opinion about this game #3939
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    A mobillity demo of a guy wearing full plate

    I have seen guys do handstands in plate.

    I have run a mile with a 40 lb backpack on.

    That doesn’t mean the plate or the backpack doesn’t encumber us.

    in reply to: Gameflow: How you end up playing? #3931
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    In my current playthrough, I played very conservatively until I had an elite team of battle-hardened mercenaries. Even with my careful play, s*** happens. I’ve lost a founding brother, and at least half a dozen men.

    However, by now my party cannot be beat in an open fields formation. I have had one single bowmaster kill 21 (!) ghouls in one turn.

    Posted Before

    (I’ve posted this picture in another thread before, but it’s the same party.)

    The most critical key of my army are the members I call my ‘Sergeants’. One is a Fearless Apprentice who started with a incredibly high Resolve rating, 60ish, IIRC. The other is an squire who rolled a 54 starting resolve. At level 11, these men have a morale rating of 95 and 94 (!), respectively. This is before bonuses from Confident or Captain kicks in.

    With an enormous +23 (observed in combat) Resolve rating, even the most craven and worthless scum stand their ground like fanatical zealots.

    More importantly than that, however, is the ability to permenantly Rally The Troops. With the Sergeant’s shouting affecting each other, my entire front line can spam Spearwall + Shieldwall every turn. If my archers or other carries get unlucky on their first Perfect Focus run, they can just wait for a recharge from the Sergeants yelling at them.

    The Seargents start out with Heavier mail and billhooks. Early on, they basically act as a second line damage source once the ranks close. I level them up in a Melee/Ranged/Resolve pattern on even levels and Melee/Fatigue/Resolve pattern on odd levels. Late game, they are armed with two crossbows, a shield, and a billhook, and are armored in scale vests and fitted with padded kettle helms, however, they rarely do anything but use Rally The Troops.

    My army’s endurance is only limited by their ammunition and weapons durability now. In an open-order battle, as long as I am not completely boned by positioning, I can fight an Orc force up to 5x my size.

    The ‘Lieutenant’, whom quite appropriately is an naive noble idiot, is fitted similarly to the standard frontline defensive heavy infantry. I chose him to be the “Inspirational” Officer since he already has the Determined perk, allowing for a uniform Confident Start. The standard rotation of Melee Skill/Melee Defense/Ranged Defense works well for him, with a few levels devoted to Endurance. Since Nobles are idiots who don’t know the true threat of arrows, he must use a kite shield to compensate. You can see his exact setup in the first picture.

    The ‘Grunts’ I use 4 of. They are fitted at the beginning with basic mail, boar spears, and shields, upgrading to full mail, nasal helms and heater shields, then to plated coats and mailed flat-top helms. They level Melee Attack, Melee Defense and Ranged Defense, occasionally trading melee skill for endurance.

    grunts

    They prioritize the basic defenses and Rotation, then take a point in Sundering, then goes back into utility for Pathfinding, aiming for Brawny by level 10. I haven’t figured out what to put the final point into for level 11, but having the basic defenses, Rotation, Sundering, and Brawny makes for a very powerful lineup of tanky characters, that when armed with spears, will connect extremely frequently. These are the most expendable dudes in the army.

    Archaa

    Your bowmen are practically useless until they hit 70 weapons skill. Even then, you need to take Fast Adaptation to make Quick Shots useful, and even with Sundering, they still bounce off Armored Orcs.

    Why not use Crossbowmen instead, who are semi-reliable with just 60 weapons skill, and dish out incredible anti-armor performance, instead?

    Firstly, the Hunting Bow outranges the Crossbow- it is very important that your own skirmishers can reply in kind to opposing skirmishers. Secondly, once you can reliably connect, the Hunting Bow will significantly out-DPS the crossbow. Finally, Perfect Focus builds plain just don’t work well with crossbows- the Fatigue/Damage ratio is just too poor.

    These factors, especially the last two factors, ensures that for an end game build, the Hunting Bow is the tool for specialists. With the powerful combination of Battle Flow and Perfect Focus, an skilled Bowmaster can singlehandedly wipe out entire armies of light opponents. Even better, the bow does not suffer degradation of durability, a huge bonus when comparing to melee Perfect Focus carries; I have had a Perfect Focus Hedge Knight shatter 3 greatswords (Original, Quick Hands, Beserk recovers AP for another switch) in one turn.

    That is not to say Archers are flawless- it is rare for your bowmen to kill an Armored Orc in one turn, and vs Skeletons they can only hope to chip away at your opponents armor. Indeed, they are so useless early game I often have 2/3 bowmen carrying their billhooks into battle instead. Still, late game, they are unrivaled vs light opponents that do not resist piercing .

    Early game, I have them just wear padded surcoats and other light armor. However, an battle with some heavy orc warriors saw my front line broken, my mailed Sergeants bleeding, but my unarmored Archers dead. Once my frontliners had enough endurance to swap to heavier gear, my archers were refitted in mail.

    The other two characters are my Glass Perfect Focus/Battle Flow Hedge Knight and my nimble Jedi Swordmaster. Their builds are self explanatory.

    Note of warning: You may be tempted to give your Jedi Swordmaster nothing but a sword and a woven tunic, to minimize encumberance and maximize Dodge bonus, for further Nimble Multiplication. Do not do this.

    No matter what your total defense skill is, chance to hit/get hit cannot fall below 5%. Eventually your extremely skilled, rare, and expensive asset will get hit.

    With his terrible HP pool and the absurd damage levels on late game weapons (My Hedge Knight, if using Split Man with an Orc 2H Axe deals 148-215 damage, 311-457 armor damage. He isn’t even Brutal…) he will probably die. Put some goddamn armor on your Jedi- it may not look cool, but it will keep his butt alive.

    in reply to: Suggestion: Student Buff #3826
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    I’d rather see that changed than having it be replaced with a perk that has the same problem.

    It’s not the same problem. Right now, people refuse to pick Student on the vast majority of their characters.

    The proposed solution would be a huge inducement to picking student at lvl 1, and a lesser inducement as the character leveled though. However, given the EXP bonus, the (few) people who would take Student already do it at level 1 or 2 anyways.

    Also, is Sky your less coherent sockpuppet?

    in reply to: Suggestion: Quest Stacking, Increased Rewards #3776
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Anyone seen this type of jobs? It’s the first time I ever saw one of these. Wish there were more.

    I had one of these early on in the game, except the Mayor was telling me about kids getting killed and villagers going missing too, and trying to guilt trip me by saying I have steel gear.
    I lost 3 brothers, including a founding member and my second best archer, as well as half the village militia (The pack was very close to town).
    Totally worth the role-playing experience though, esp when I picked “turn down the reward, they need it more”.

    Now your party costs 318, that mekes most of your men nobles hedge knights swordmasters and other strong backgrounds.

    I have exactly One (1) Hedge Knight, One (1) Swordmaster, and One (1) Noble. The Noble is somewhat underwhelming as well- I’d prefer to have a woodsman or even a monk in his place.

    This is an extremely powerful mercenary group. There is nothing that could possibly end you at this point. My testing party was made up by extremely low upkeep backgrounds with a daily upkeep around of 150s. And even they were almost impossible to stop. Last few times I changed things up to see how it is to have a high upkeep army that has stats far above the one I had before. Still in progress but even now when half of the team is low lvl(1-4) there is not much of a difference, they stand their ground agains orc hordes and undead swarms. This is a management aspect. And I do like it. A low upkeep is absolutely valid, while a high upkeep is an overkill for now. You got to manage what you are capable of and what is above your paygrade.

    Eh. Had a nasty fight in the forest where my guys spawned in terrible positions, and had my armor break on two dudes. Losing a Sarge (High Resolve, Rally the Troops backliner) would probably cut my DPS in half, and losing both of them would render this team build unviable vs equal strength foes.

    in reply to: Weapon durability #3726
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    I’m not sure about this one. What do you folks feel about the current level of durability of weapons?

    I agree with you. I had a battle where my Swordmaster broke a Noble Sword before he even finished killing two Orc Warriors. It’s ridiculous; are they armored in Powered Armor or something? This is a Tier 3 weapon he’s armed with!

    From what I understand though, different levels of quality for weapons will eventually get introduced. So that should help you counter weapons breaking by spending more gold on higher quality weapons that (supposedly) are more sturdy. This is just a hypothetical though, as I don’t know how they plan to implement it.

    I would like this as well, but the developers just said no below.

    Different qualities for weapons was something we were discussing a while back, but we’ve decided to go instead with distinct tiers for every weapon type. So instead of having a Masterwork Handaxe with a few points more of damage or similar miniscule differences, we’ll have a clear progression from Hatchet -> Hand Axe -> Fighting Axe where it’s very apparent from just looking at the weapon how good it is. You’re equpping 12+ people in this game, so comparing a dozen items looking almost identical and having only very minor differences probably wouldn’t work out to the player’s favor in the long run. If you take into account the fatigue costs, it may even make sense to deliberately go with lower-tier weapons as backup as not to overly burden yourselves, just like you wouldn’t necessarily go with the heaviest of armors all the time. There are quite a few gaps in weapon progression currently in the game but we’ll fill them up as we go along.

    I understand this kind of thinking, and so far, I can tell the tiers of weapon apart very easily.

    The Shortsword looks very raw, like a thick sheet of metal given a crude edge and a crude handle. The Arming Sword looks like a standard Man-At-Arms issue weapon, while the Noble Sword looks like a refined masterpiece.

    That being said, why can’t I kill even 2 Orcs with the best sword? I’ve also had my Hedge Knight break 3 Greatswords in one battle!

    in reply to: Undead Orcs #3725
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Holy s***.

    ‘God’ has a good ideal.

    What is coming to this world?

    in reply to: pikes and the dreaded 80% #3682
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    I haven’t found a pike yet, in a 90 day game. Could you post a screenshot?

    in reply to: The Greenskin Menace #3677
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Until you have a Perfect Focus/Rally Troops killing engine, never fight Orcs unless you outnumber them.

    Once you do though, you can drown the orks in a crimson tide of DPS.

    in reply to: Heavy armour, Close helmet and retreat issues #3387
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Armor doesn’t protect you from getting stunned, or feared or other status effects. As sky said, relying purely on armor (esp for most of your men) is not the best of ideas.

    One issue I’ve found with the Brawny trait, however, is that it doesn’t seem to reduce the penalty from a helmet. Which is a huge issue, since I try to have helmets as 80% as durable a mercanary’s body armor.

    in reply to: Heavy armour, Close helmet and retreat issues #3375
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Currently, wearing anything heavier than Mail requires you take either Brawler or have a very high fatigue merc (Strong, Lumberjack, Hedge Knight, Iron Lungs)

    And wearing plate requires you have both.

    In reality, it took years of training for a man to be able to fight well in plate, and this is reflected in game.

    in reply to: Current Perk Balance #3271
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    Yeah, why post in the perk tree topics, that would be too convenient.

    Why so passive aggressive? Why don’t you just say what you mean?

    The perk tree topics are to discuss each perk tree, overall. This topic is to discuss what perks you feel are underpowered- a subtle but significant difference.

    I only hope you realise that a 100 melee defense is way way more than you actually need.

    Nonsense. I had a 117 Melee Defense Swordmaster get killed by an Orc Boss. Admittedly, he was surrounded by 6 Orcs, and the Boss was on higher ground, so the Overwhelmed penalty must have been enormous.

    Also, the minimum % hit chance is 5%, I think. Which isn’t a huge deal, unlike the minimum 1% to-hit in Vanilla JA2, due to the lack of rapid fire in this game.

    in reply to: Enemy Turn freeze #3255
    Avatar photoNewAgeOfPower
    Participant

    How do you do that? In theory the camera should be locked if it’s the AI’s turn.

    Mouse wheel, WASD.

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)