Wargasm

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No. They need to be able to catapult shitty bricks at orc warlords with a +30 chance to hit (+10% additional damage per tile of distance).

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Ah, but what if they drop all items but then (after running to the opposite edge of the map) rally?

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True, they only stun if their “charge” results in a hit, but the “charge” obviously has an elevated hit chance, and a hit itself doesn’t actually do any damage to armour or hit points, unlike stunning hits with a mace weapon.

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There are many sound strategies for defeating direwolves, but none of them are wholly applicable to low-level recruits with light arms and armour …

Fighting and defeating direwolves is very worthwhile, though, because it gains a lot of experience points and is a good indication that the company has made progress and is ready to take on tougher challenges.

Direwolves get 3 attacks per turn (if already in melee) and can quickly rip through any armour that doesn’t consist of scales or plates. If the company members have lesser armour than this, they’ll need:

— (a) very high basal melee defence, or
— (b) good basal melee defence and a shield and/or a dodge bonus, or
— (c) a shield and high max fatigue (to keep forming shieldwalls) and high melee skill (to make their one attack per turn count), or
— (d) very high melee skill and a brutal weapon with which they can decimate and demoralize the direwolves

If you don’t have good melee skill, using accurate weapons like swords and spears doesn’t compensate by itself, since they aren’t damaging enough to decimate and demoralize the direwolves before they do it to you. However, it is possible to combine perks like Fast Adaptation, Adrenaline and Backstabber so that you can get in a good amount of hits with big weapons despite having modest melee skill, but this of course can only be achieved after a decent amount of experience has been accumulated, and is not applicable to raw recruits.

Forming a shieldwall and using riposte with a sword is very effective, since it turns the wolves’ advantage (3 attacks per turn) against them, but again will only work with a skilled veteran with high melee skill, high max fatigue and sword mastery.

For a company of raw recruits in the early game with no perks and level-ups and not enough crowns for fancy equipment, you might prevail if you (a) give them enough armour/protection to stand a good chance of surviving the first 2 rounds, and (b) arm most/all of them with a bludgeon (cheap and readily available) that can stun the wolves. Individually, they may not have nearly enough melee skill and max fatigue to keep stunning the wolves round after round, but if all of them keep trying to stun at the start then there’s a good chance that some/many of the wolves will get stunned in the early rounds of battle, and then you can switch to using less fatiguing but more damaging attacks against them while they’re unable to attack you, and you might just come out of it alive and without permanent injuries …

Also, what Rahziel suggested (spearwalls plus repelling with pitchforks or shields) can also work (again depending on damaging and demoralizing them before getting exhausted and suffering the same yourself). Spears with nets is good, since then you can slow their advance, lower their defence skills, and use double-grip to increase the damage done.

Later on in the game, once you’ve already got lots of crowns and equipment, you could recruit a whole bunch of raw newbs from promising backgrounds (e.g. wildmen, messengers, prizefighters, farmhands, thieves, flagellants, vagabonds) and send them off to fight an equal number of direwolves without veteran support, and they should manage to win (not necessarily without injuries and/or casualties) so long as each of them has medium armour (head and body both at around 70-110), a good shield, and either a boar/militia spear or an arming/noble sword.

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The basic defence bonus from carrying a shield can be seen as merely a passive bonus that results automatically from having a hard piece of wood held in front of your body. The extra bonus from forming a shieldwall (which requires much more conscious effort) is cancelled while stunned. You could argue that merely holding a shield in front of you also requires some conscious effort, but still …

On the other hand, basal defence skills, without a shield, do remain entirely intact while stunned, which admittedly also seems unrealistic. Fleeing characters, by contrast, have all of their attacking and defending skill totals (including any from forming a shieldwall) reduced by 30%, which does make sense.

In a way, it would make sense if being stunned (in addition to cancelling any shieldwall) reduced a combatant’s total melee and ranged defence by some amount, similarly to lower morale states or being trapped in nets or swamps. The only trouble with that is that orc young and berserkers can stun automatically, without even doing any damage. So maybe it would be possible for stunning to only reduce defence totals if the stunning blow does damage to hit points? I’m not sure …

As for the original issue (morale checks while stunned), I can see it being plausible that enough consciousness is retained to feel morale effects (and to keep holding a shield and weapon without making any fancy moves), but I raised the issue because I wasn’t sure whether it had been intended that way.

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It inflicts 5 damage on two consecutive turns, resulting in a total of “10 damage over time”. If you take the mastery perk, it does 10 damage on two consecutive turns, and the text updates for the relevant character to say “20 damage over time”, I think. I almost reported something like this a while back, but I’m pretty sure it all turned out to be accurate.

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^ LOL.

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I’ve amassed over 2000 hours playing this game, and yet I seem to be the only person who has NEVER encountered the Fangshire Helm. Why is this? What am I missing?

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I like the general idea, but I’d prefer it if, early on, you could increase a higher number of attributes at each level up than is currently the case, with the number gradually decreasing over time – e.g.:

– Levels 1-3: perk + 5 attribute increases
– Levels 3-5: perk + 4 attribute increases
– Levels 5-7: perk + 3 attribute increases
– Levels 7-9: perk + 2 attribute increases
– Levels 9-11: perk + 1 attribute increase
– Levels 11-13: perk OR 1 attribute increase
– Levels >13: 1 attribute increase

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I agree. I’ve realized that footprints become much more visible if you have the camera zoomed in closer. If you have it zoomed out far enough that the marching figure becomes your company’s banner, however, you can no longer see contract-related footprints on some types of terrain.

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But if you’re taking screenshots and never playing them again, what’s there to lose anyway? You could always back them up in case of disaster …

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While I personally hope there never are bases or horses, I do think it would be cool if you could take on contracts from a much greater variety of people (i.e. not just nobles and trade representatives, but also independent groups of peasants, wealthy individuals, cult leaders, heads of religious/ideological factions or others wishing to assassinate them, necromancers as suggested, rival bandits immersed in internal disputes, etc. etc.).

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Ah, but have you ever tried swinging a double-headed flail?

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I think, actually, it would be fine if (quite simply) 2-stars talent meant a roll of 2-4 (for melee attack/defence and ranged defence) or 3-5 (almost all the others) or 4-6 (initiative), rather than always 3/4/5. That way, the average would be the same as now, but it would still be less predictable and you’d be more inclined to take a high roll for something else when you only get a 2 for one of the melee/defence skills. I agree, though, that the current way is better than it being utterly random like before.

Another thing is that it would be better if you could level up 4 attributes each time, since being able to improve less than half of them each time is another thing that almost forces un-balance.

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After writing that, I then kept firing like crazy at them, and missed almost every time …

But there’s something irritating about the hit chances and the number of multiple-repeat misses with chances in the 60s-80s. Some months ago, I decided to collect some data to prove that there was a bug. I recorded the hit chance of each attack, and sub-classified the attacks according to the type of attack (e.g. 1-tile melee, 2-tile melee or ranged), and recorded the outcome of each attack. Counting it up, there were definitely way more misses with high hit chances than there were hits with equivalent low hit chances, and yet (somehow) the average % of times hitting (for each sub-class of attack) matched up near-enough exactly with the average hit chance displayed when attacking …

Specifically, there were 15 total misses with a chance of 65% or higher, but there were 48 attempts, meaning that the successful hit % was actually about 68% …

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