In the 80s Apple did well enough. 90s. . .well I remember leaving my LC3 behind for my first ever PC in 1994. Woosh!
Stronghold was funky but I liked it. There’s a large map and you sort of sprawn out from the central square by building structures and such. Most areas have creatures there you either need to win over via diploamcy or kill. Many buildings spawned people who could fight. It was a bizzare game in many respects, but had it’s points.
Just got two followers perma killed, including a healer I was starting to love. Didn’t even know that was possible. New stuff is constantly showing up, including a guy who it’s later claimed can build ballistas? Awesome. Some raiders also showed up while I was out adventuring and I heard a bunch of coin sounds, which was them stealing food and gold. I managed to catch up with them outside of town while they were fleeing, from what I could tell they had all the missing items which I was able to recover. Very nice.
I found a guard who could upgrade ballistats (iirc). I assumed it was a trait of all guards, but I dunno. Am I reading correctly that I can just leave items in the town stash and the appropriate professions will make use of them?
I had the same minimap problem, which was mildly annoying, but not too big of a deal. It only happened while I was in town. I just played a game on Easy and thought it was a lot of fun. It’s good to be able to finish a ‘whole’ game in under 2 hours. I like the feeling of accomplishment. Too frequently I start a game, save, only to return and start again. Anyhow, it sounds like the larger maps are more involved with regards to city building and take longer to complete.
Good work Tilted Mill. I’m glad you were able to pull this off! I hope it sells well.
Apparently all of my graphical issues, including the minimap, are related to widescreen resolutions. Dropping it down 1600x1200 fixed everything. Hopefully they will get this fixed sooner or later.
Just drag them onto the play area and it asks if you want to sell them. You might be able to shift-right click stacks to sell also, not sure.
Misc inventory slot on the individual. (Helm, artifact, ring.)
Drop it on the ground, anywhere in the world. That gives you a confirmation dialog. OR Shift click on it. (This is the same as destroying it, if you don’t have a merchant.
Note: You must have a merchant, and the guy buys everything for the same price. (Seems like a raw deal initially, but as you play the game more you will see why.)
Misc. inventory is the fourth slot for your characters. You can see the effectiveness of some of the tools by the amount of food/gold they produce when equipped.
Have not had a lot of priests yet. The ones I do, I usually leave to research. However, the light priest/acolyte will sit back and heal injured party members.
Prayers that are researched, if it doesn’t say specifically, do they work all over the map?
From my experience, they either say that they work for in town or throughout the map. THe ones throughout the map usually only work for your character. You should be able to tell what is active by the tooltip when you hove over the icon that is on the character portrait.
I wish that on the minimap it will show the corpses of your followers to let you find them easier to loot their bodies.
Could be a feature in a future patch or expansion.
4.Starting a game on difficult, I was not offered any food producers, there should be some kind of safe guard put in place so that you will always be offered a food producer from the start. edit: Didn’t know you could kick out visitors without a penality so never mind about this one then.
Do support spell casters level at all? It doesn’t seem right that they’re not getting any exp for keeping my guys alive.
Support healers and casters should level the same as melee, but I am not sure about the rate for healers or how equally it correlates to damage dealers.
What is the difference between random resources and all resources?
Random resources means you are not guaranteed to have every single one in a specific game. Say playing a medium game, clearing all 35 areas and you may never get iron to promote a craftsman to a smith or herbs so you can never recruit an herbalist. All resources mean there is at least one of each for that game.
When villagers are creating something (bows, potions, shields, etc) I would like to be able to mouse over the item to see what it does. Also I would like to tell them specifically what to make.
Well, you can do that, but only in town as that is where it goes. Unless you mean you want an alert that shows what is made. After enough playing, you will learn what each item does and will know when you are alerted he made “X”. For ex., there is a total of 4 bows (IIRC) that fletchers can make. Telling them specifically would be nice, but I think TM wants to keep as much randomness in the game as possible. It makes it all the more satisfying when something good gets made. (For me at least)
What does the blessed icon mean over my character?
That is a good question. Not sure I have had that. There is a lot of stuff crammed in there and you only get to fool with a small portion of it in each game.
Lastly I would like more information regarding enhancement items (plows, maps, traps, etc). Such as the difference between using a map on a hunter, and using a snare.
No - you have to manually equip them in their Misc inventory location—though it seems that this is something worth noting since a few of you are thinking the same thing, so maybe we can do something about that.
Couple of things. If you mouse over icons, numbers as well as read some of the text in the hire and talk dialogs you will get some hints about what people can evolve into what professions and what resources you need to see that happen.
Guard, who is better (faster) with 1h weapons can upgrade to a Watchman if you have access to Stone. He then loses the ability with 1h weapons as he sits like a fat cat near his tower- but his tower makes up for it.
Also, choose your Class well they have a huge impact on what you have to do for the first half hour to hour of play. Then again, the Short - Easy game is intended to be just the type of place to ‘test drive’ a Class and starting option. Playing as the Outlaw, is not that easy, on any setting!!
Blessed Icon? Whenever you mouse over an icon it tells you what the effect is. If you are saying that this is what you did and it said “Blessed” I am impressed. High Priest adventuring, not bad… It is a powerful buff that can do different things. (Speed, attack, defense- random of course but very large bonuses based on your ablities!) Bless will also cancel a curse, or vis-versa. (Though curse frequency needs to be turned up right now.)
Also regarding the Merchant…once you have him and say your fletcher or smith is making a lot of useless stuff, you can click on the craftpersons portrait and set him to Sell items he is making. THat way you will have additional gold income and the items he/she makes will not be cluttering up your limited town inventory space.
I had a blast with the first playthrough. I went easy difficulty as the Yeoman and was challenged but never to an absurd degree. The combat and movement is really fast. The game doesn’t focus on in-combat tactics too much (though pulling helped in some of the harder areas) but mostly focuses on giving the player lots of development choices, both for the city, the central character, and the followers. I spent more time equipping and figuring out who I wanted next in my city then auto-attacking nearby opponents. And I thought all the choices were interesting.
The game doesn’t teach players very well how to play it, certainly. I went through quite a few visitors before a Farmer showed up. So I assumed that my declining food supply with no means of gaining food was because I was doing something wrong myself, and spent a lot of the early game trying to figure out how to farm. But a full game on easy on a small map took about an hour and a half to play through, so I feel like it wouldn’t have been a big loss if I had ended up in the corners some of you described and had to start over.
My biggest complaint is there’s no economy or resource screen. I wanted to check my projected daily food income and usage on some screen so I had a better idea whether I should have been hiring more farmers or other professions. As it was, I usually paused the game and tried to come up with an estimate off the followers screen. But that’s not terribly accurate because I don’t know how much my items were increasing or decreasing various farmers.
Great first impression. If repeated playthroughs are this fun, I could see putting quite a few hours into the game. There’s still a lot of professions I have yet to see. And I really don’t think the first game is THAT hard without a manual. It reminded me a bit of my first game of Sins of a Solar Empire. Although I guess it’s a lot easier to screw yourself over before you know whats happening in Hinterland.
I noticed something else, once you select either a temple of good or a temple of evil, I think that forces you down that path until you demolish the building. Also a tip I found out, if a follower is killed , don’t destroy the building , you can buy the same follower for a discount as they use the same building as their home.
I do like the variety of loot that is showing up, I got some awesome drops when fighting the final group of raiders (level 13s). I ran into spiders on my second playthrough on hard, I think the spell casters are harder, as they wiped out my health faster during my medium game.
Yep, that discounted amount will show in parentheses (how the hell do you spell that) as the price when the same type of follower who died shows up as a visitor.
BTW, If all the visitors down the left side of the screen get in the way (You can have a max of five if you upgrade your Hostel all the way), you can click on the triangle in the upper left-hand corner next to the word “Visitors” to minimize those characters. You cannot do the same for your party, though.
Still can’t wait to play this, but I have to finish one run through King’s Bounty first. After the summer gaming drought, is nice to have these kinds of problems again.
Likewise with me. I hit ‘purchase’ with some trepidation, given the issues raised today in this thread, but just finished a two-hour visit to Hinterland and enjoyed it greatly.
Before starting, I left this thread and the official site’s ‘manual’ open in Firefox and expected to have to alt-tab to them as I played. But, I didn’t. I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Spent a lot of time rushing back and forth between the town and wilderness, and didn’t have problems with food supply after the initial hires. I did have trouble in combat by staying in battles I should have run from, and then finding my fame way way down. The UI could use some improvement, but I never found it a hindrance. I did have some graphical weirdness in the mini-map, as others have reported.
But, all in all, a good time was had, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. Nice job, Reed.
