Wargasm

[Wargasm]

Oh … something like this happened to me the other day, as well. The caravan was attacked by a mass of goblins and I paused the game to rearrange equipment, and as soon as I un-paused I was shown the pop-up informing me that I’d failed to protect the caravan. So I guess that all of the caravan guards/hands and even the caravan itself must have been auto-slain to compensate for my adjustments …

[Wargasm]

He’s holding a wooden club.

[Wargasm]

Does this indicate that there’ll be some performance-enhancing snuffs available to buy from settlements after the next update?

[Wargasm]

The Adrenaline perk can be great for solving some early problems (e.g. direwolves overwhelming you before you have much chance to act; orcs charging and stunning you; goblins netting/poisoning you before you can close on them; bandit pikemen punishing you if you move within 2 tiles of them and miss; remote targets being too obscured to hit with limited ranged skill; vampires disappearing elsewhere if you try to swarm them). The downside of it is that it’s of limited use for grizzled veterans, and then you wish you’d spent the perk point elsewhere. But it’s certainly worth considering for “expendable” characters that you don’t see being skilled enough to survive to veteran status.

[Wargasm]

Rahziel wrote:

Who would in their right mind go to the front lines having no head protection?

Hoggart the Weasel.

Or someone with 108 melee defence and the Reach Advantage and Anticipation perks.

[Wargasm]

I’ve seen something similar involving equipment (weapons and armour) in the past, which may or may not be related to the same underlying issue. It was nothing to do with auto-loot, since I had it disabled. Also, the inventory wasn’t even close to full when I took the loot. But certain weapons and armour remained stuck in the inventory and couldn’t be assigned to any character. I think it was possible to repair and sell them, but not to make use of them. I thought I knew what had caused it, but I was unable to reproduce it in the same campaign or in a fresh one.

[Wargasm]

I had another character like this. His dazzling array of injuries rendered almost half his perks pointless, but his melee skills remained remarkable despite a missing finger:

Unfortunately, he went on to break his elbow, so that then his melee skills were only moderately better than those of a raw recruit.

Attachments:

1. 

   Wulfram-the-Whipper.jpg
   

[Wargasm]

Merkwuerdigliebe wrote:

I actually like the fact that sometimes the tracks are hard to find – Just like in real life, sometimes it’s really hard to track the people/wolves you are looking for down.
And you know what you’re getting into when you accept the contract, so it’s up to you to evaluate the risks and benefits.

Yeah, but, in real life, you could use/develop some legitimate tracking skills to hunt them down, which might make it an enjoyable experience in itself. All you can do in the game when there are no visible footprints is either (a) stay still just outside the settlement until the direwolves appear and say “I say, we’re over here; would you mind awfully having a fearsome fight with us this fine day?”, or (b) head off in the general direction specified for the thieves’ location and hope you bump into them (or go to the top of a nearby mountain and hope you’ll be able to see them).

There’s not much risk/reward calculation about it. Usually the pay is relatively poor, but you want to take it because of the prospect of an enjoyable battle yielding plentiful loot. The occasions on which you actually fail to find the thieves are very few; it’s just that there’s often a long, tedious, monotonous, unrewarding, not very challenging and not very skill-based process to endure before you come upon them.

You don’t think: “will taking on this contract break the company”. You think: “we’re almost certainly going to win a battle and get some decent loot, but we’re probably going to have to endure an irritating waste of time first”.

[Wargasm]

Footprints already switch between lighter and darker shades depending on the shade of the terrain; the main problem, I think, is that they’re too small to be visible on some terrain types (despite clear visibility and colour distinction at a close zoom) once you’re sufficiently zoomed out. If footprints shrunk to a lesser degree than the rest of the terrain when you zoomed out, that might make them always okay.

[Wargasm]

Ooh – a slight text error in the description of Karl the Studious from the screenshot: it should say generations, not generation.

[Wargasm]

The way the game currently goes, faster walking would increase the risk, because you’d have less time to pause/react in response to suddenly appearing enemy parties. I’m assuming that the appearance/movement of enemy parties etc. would increase proportionally.

[Wargasm]

“Beginner” level was called “Normal” until quite recently. I’m not sure whether the actual difficulty has been altered since then. Whatever the difficulty level, there can always be points in the earlier part of the game where you’re very short on crowns and tools and in danger of being swarmed by a variety of enemies within a short space of time. It’s just that, on Normal/Beginner difficulty, you’ll have probably spent/wasted crowns on more recruits and equipment, and your enemies will be not quite so numerous and (towards the start) not so well-armed/protected, so that you’ll be more likely to come through and eventually reach the point where potential “ambush” parties run away from you and you always have (or can quickly acquire) an excess of crowns to spend on almost any single item/recruit you desire. Depending on the luck of map generation, resources/opportunities close to starting location, suitable/awkward contracts/enemies spawned, the actual difficulty of individual campaigns on the same difficulty setting can vary quite a bit.

[Wargasm]

Should be tells instead of tell:

Attachments:

1. 

   Minor-Text-Error-01.jpg
   

[Wargasm]

Yeah. I agree. There are so many great aspects to the game that make me want to keep playing for prolonged periods of time (sometimes the greater part of several days on end), but, the more I play, the more frustrated I also become with the few monotonous/annoying aspects of the game, of which this is one. It’s not the squandering of resources that I mind; it’s just the continual going slowly back and forth around the same sequences of settlements, once the greater part of the map is revealed, looking for non-graveyard/caravan 3-skull contracts and/or level-4/5 recruits and/or rare items for sale. Sometimes, if you’re lucky with map generation, this isn’t so much of a problem, since there may be lots of ports all around the world which you can use to get wherever you want in a short amount of time.

Another annoying thing: when you enter a settlement for the first time in a while and spot a level-5 recruit or a rare item that costs a high proportion of your current crowns, and you think “I’ll just go and ransack settlement A or fulfil contract B first, and then come back to recruit/buy after selling off a new lot of loot”, but then you come back a day or so later and the recruit/item has already disappeared. Soo irritating and a good incentive to not use ironman mode!

[Wargasm]

I can never bring myself to dismiss my veteran mercs who’ve acquired permanent injuries – not even injuries that contravene the whole rationale with which I’ve built them up for so long. I might send them into battle and put them into perilous situations without much support, but they always seem to survive miraculously when I do that, and how can you then dismiss them after such heroism?

It really isn’t very realistic to just suddenly dismiss someone with no payoff and no repercussions involving other members of the band. Nor, for that matter, to send them into battle against orc warriors with a leather tunic and a wooden club, in the hope that they might not make it through …

Maybe, based on what perks they have, some suitable equipment should be retired with them (e.g. at least one top-tier weapon in accordance with their mastery, and a selection of shields if they were a shield expert, and some heavy armour and helm if they were brawny and/or battle forged), and/or they should get to take at least one trading item or piece of equipment for each perk, in addition to a minimum payoff (e.g. # of days times daily pay) that you can choose to increase (e.g. for someone who was originally a raw recruit with a low starting pay).

Unfortunately, the level cap means that you become disinterested in veterans once they reach level 11 and can no longer develop and improve. If the number of level 11 veterans and permanent injuries in the band both resulted in an increased rate of experience gain by newer recruits, that would give them some more value (though of course it wouldn’t solve the problem of not being able to recruit new people once the band is full of level 11s).

I wonder whether the Vererans’ Hall (still to come in early access) could have something to do with increasing the value of veterans by some auxiliary means …

If proper retirements were introduced, one good idea for a new event would be a retired veteran making a volitional one-off return to the fold for a cataclysmic battle during one of the end-game crises … and/or a level 8-11 veteran who was slain in battle making a miraculous reappearance (e.g. revived slowly after being left for dead, or brought back by some sort of surgery-cum-sorcery).

[Author]

Posts