With all due praise and respect to Dave Markell’s original thread, I thought the game deserved a fresh start and there is little usefull information related to any gameplay features in that thread. The few things that have come out I quoted below.
The tooltips and the brief list below of key functions is really all you need. The rest is just figuring things out as you go by looting, levelling and building.
If people object to a dupe thread, by all means let it die on the vine. Just giving folks the option.
Keyboard Shortcuts
ESC - Cancel current dialog, or bring up the save-and-exit dialog
Control-O - Open Options Menu
Spacebar, or P - Pause game
Tab - Toggle Region Map
T - Toggle the overhead view while in town
WASD - Move your character
1,2,3,4 - Use a healing potion (press 1 to heal your character, 2 to heal party member #2,etc.)
Shift - Prevent your character from moving (helpful when you want to click somewhere while being sure not to move closer to a dangerous situation)
Right-click - On an enemy, engage it (helpful when you want to be sure you attack, and not move, loot, or do anything else that left-click does)
Shift-click - On an item, delete it (or sell it to the merchant, if you’ve recruited one) immediately, with no confirmation
R - When placing buildings, choose another orientation (some lots only have one possible orientation; most have two)
Originally Posted by Rorschach You should start by hiring food producers first (farmers, herders, trappers). They make 2 food per day with the initial buildings and equipment. Each person consumes 1 food per day so you must have a food producer in the town for every non-food producer (including you). Once you take your lord out and start taking out the easy areas you may run across items that will increase their food output (snares, hoes, fertilizer etc.) Head back to your town and equip those immediately and then head back out to get more gold and loot.
Once you get your food situation under control (the food number is no longer red) then you can move onto your town gold and items production and working on training up more advanced townspeople.
No sir. Trips back to town are necessary, but as you are notified when something breaks, it is not a big deal. SOme of the tools take a while to break. The Oats and fertilizer are used up more quickly.
The second game is a lot more fun than the first one was :) I now have a Trapper, a Farmer, and a Herder so lots of food for all! I also have a hostel so I can entertain 3 visitors.
I still strongly urge TM to consider not letting fame drop below 0 and to start off the Easy difficulty level with more food, so that you have more of a chance to see what’s what before getting nasty starvation messages. And could they please leave out the ‘you’re a disgrace’ messages?
If you don’t have food producers (or some other necessary type of villager) in your visitors list click on the Advertise button at the top and it will deal you a new set of visitors for 2 gold per slot.
Different starting characters do start with different beginning resources. So if you want to be a baby about food, get one with higher resources and/or good food production.
Well, your fame won’t drop if you don’t get killed. :)
I ran out of food running around and then hired a farmer so I wouldn’t starve… and then he disappears… twice… so yeah I starved to death.
Food is consumed on a timer. If you have no food and hire a farmer, chances are he will need to eat before he starts bringing in the crops. If he tries to eat and there is none, he will bolt.
Early on, getting that food production going first is muy importante. Make sure you equip herders and trappers with the misc. tools if you get them (Like Rorshach said earlier). Or else, they will generally only produce enough food for themselves and there will be no net gain in hiring them as food producers. There are also specific weapons also that help all producers produce faster. The item will say so in the tooltip which villager it will aid, if it has that capability.
But the problem is that you do get killed. So why the horrendous penalty? I guess I was wrong about this game, I thought it was being billed as a strategy game similar to Majesty, where you aren’t heavily penalized for mistakes and the game play is casual and light and fun. Losing 20 fame from your start at 2 fame, meaning that you can’t get farmers, herders, etc and then losing the game to starvation because of that is just not fun. Who is going to grind enough fame to get back to 2 fame if they are at -40? You can’t fulfill any King’s requests that would get your fame back up because you can’t hire any visitors because you have no fame. You can grind 2 fame at a time but at -40 fame, that would take clearing 20 areas before you starved to death. I’m very surprised that this issue got through testing.
All any sane person is going to do is delete the character and start over. So why put them through that?
The initail creature set-up is also pretty random. Only go to the areas that have one little dot on them as those have only level one creatures. You basically have to clear some of those early areas out by being a little careful in order to get some gold and equipment to move forward. Many times, you also get fame from clearing areas.
The early stages are very much about managing gold, food, and your character’s health. Healing potions are not plentiful as in Diablo. Even when you get access to herbs and hire an herbalist you do not have a tidal wave of re bottles of yumminess. You can’t just wail on stuff hit the #1 key and clear half the map. Kill a few things, go back to town and rest. Upgrade a couple things and then repeat.
EDIT: I was kidding about you being a baby, btw. ;)
Indeed this just happened to me on my second playthrough and it made it a *(^^, took so long to get back my fame so I could hire a farmer that I was out of food again. Which seems to mean another restart!
Alot of these problems would have been solved for me if they actually told me how to play the game when I click on “How to play”
Edit: Am I the only one that seems to link the idea or raiders? They’re a convenient source of income that comes straight to you in the early game.
You do get 1 fame for each monster you kill, and higher level areas give more fame, so getting up from -40 to 0 doesn’t mean clearing 20 areas, but more like 5-6. Still takes some time, of course.
The answer here is basically that you can lose the game, so if things go really poorly you aren’t stuck grinding to pull yourself out of the hole, but the landing is soft, so that you don’t just lose instantly when you wanted to pull yourself out of the hole (like when a character you’ve played for an hour or so in a longer game gets into trouble).
95% of your time is spent watching your guys attack monsters and running between monsters and town.
Badly documented.
Interface needs work (right click on item to switch between inventory-town would be my first suggestion).
I made screenshots and notes, but the “first time played” AAR can be done quickly:
Hired different kinds of people. Some produced food, one produced worthless armour and weapons, one healed me.
Killed many monsters.
End.
I get the sense that the early adopters are still trying to figure the game out, due to a lack of any instructions/manual. Hopefully by later today we’ll see some actual impressions.
To be honest, all the questions are not convincing me I need to buy this right this moment. :-)
Edit: Therlun proved me wrong. Now let’s see what the reaction to his impressions are.
Protip for not getting killed: Any health potions in your inventory can be used with hotkeys. #1 is your lord, 2, 3, and 4 are mapped to your party members. So if you’re about to die, hit the #1 key and start running away.
Keep an eye on shields and swords (attack and defense). If the bad guy’s swords are more than your shields you’re going to take damage quickly. Level number is an okay estimation of power but if you’re fighting a group of baddies and one of them has high swords but low shields take him out first.
It IS an action RPG with an ability to manage your home base and party configuration. For me it’s a great beer-and-pretzels game with enough variety in game settings and randomness in the loot, monsters, world config, and available townspeople to give it high replayability.
In some respects it reminds me of Multiwinia or an XBLA game. Pick up and play, bash some stuff, come back to it when I’m tired of other games and try to build my next town in a different way.
So far I haven’t lost my lord to a fight yet, I almost did when a poison dagger almost did me in. I do agree though that having a negative fame is a bad idea, and setting it at 0 would be fine. What determines if a follower will run away or get killed?
Mostly it’s the rate of damage the follower is taking. I’m pretty sure they’ll always run when they get to a critical level of health, but the baddie may be able to get that last whack in and kill the follower. Boost their defense (shields, armor, misc) to give them a better chance of running away.
