Thanks! I’ll take the plunge.
Made it to act 2 and still enjoying.
Ouch, I just lost Sir Ector on a level 7 quest. I hope this doesn’t lead to a death spiral. I still have several extra knights, but he could cause some nice damage at range.
Ouch! Yeah, he’s been pretty much at the center of my strategies.
Having exactly the opposite reaction from the reviews I saw.
Battles strike me as diverse and highly satisfying. The other stuff I find meh. The map/mini-map I find annoying. And it just bugs me that battles begin in such arbitrary fashion – sometimes following one set of rules, sometimes another.
Still, battles are fun.
You mean because sometimes you get to choose deployment area/location and sometimes you are just in formation? I kind of interpret that is having been ambushed. Or perhaps you mean something else?
That’s what I mean.
Ambushed doesn’t quite fit for me, given that usually I can see at least one enemy ahead. But I guess I might as well try to think of it that way :)
My other biggest complaint is a UI thing. It is very easy to mistake which character is highlighted to act, and there is no undo button.
To your first point about ambushes, it’s more like the fights that have the red border around them? Those let you deploy. The rest of the battles are normal.
The user interface does sometimes muddy as to whom you have selected, but I find that has never been an issue since right click to move and left click to select character.
Are you playing on roguelite mode? It seems to me that the game was made with no savescumming in mind, mechanics wise.
I’m not playing in roguelite mode, I just didn’t want to reload so I let him die.
So far the game hasn’t been too difficult on hard, with a couple of exceptions. The mission I lost Sir Ector I mentioned above was one that was doable but a challenge. My biggest problem so far is The Return of the White Knight. I get wrecked in that one. It’s an optional quest that I’ve had to reload a couple of times and I still haven’t gotten through it. My knights are all the noted quest level too. I think I’ll pass on that one and hope another is more doable. I need to level up a couple levels before I take on the final main mission in act 2.
The repetition is starting to set in also, mostly because some of the more recent missions increased the difficulty by adding more enemies. It would have been better if the enemies were just tougher without having more of them. I’ll bump down to normal if I can’t proceed.
I’m fairly early in Act 2. Battles themselves remain interesting with various twists. Increasing number of opponents makes AOE attacks increasingly important. Which then leads to a lot of emphasis on getting enemies in position for AOE attacks.
On the whole, though, I feel like it’s a game on rails. A lot of choices outside battle do not seem to matter much, and of the others, most seem to have obvious right/wrong answers. To me, this is a game about tactical battles, with the rest being atmospheric fluff.
I just finished up Act 2 and put the difficulty down to normal for the last mission. It made it pretty easy. It would have been interesting to play it on hard and then play it on easy for comparison. I get the feeling it makes a big difference. Since I was rolling along early on I didn’t really worry about AoE attacks. I mean, I was using Earth Shaker and Cleave - but after losing Sir Ector I lost my Fire Blast.
I’m glad the side missions stay on the map when progressing to a new chapter because I skipped a couple, but may need them at some point. Like you said, Most stuff outside the battles don’t have a ton of impact. There are some castle upgrades that are useful. Opening up an extra slot or to for the healing buildings is nice, as is the training building. I can’t have enough armor, so the marketplace upgrades that give extra are helpful.
What difficulty are you playing on and do you find it a good balance between challenge and not being frustrating?
Yeah, Fire Blast is the most dramatic. But I especially like Earth Shaker because unlike Fire Blast, it gives a normally melee fighter the ability to whack some important enemy that is laying back – healers, for example.
I too have switched between Normal and Hard, depending on whether my mood is for relaxation or challenge. I think my IQ drops by 50 after supper :)
Just started. I saw the Chained God is seasonal, but I can’t see when it is going away. Do I need to play it before it goes or can i skip it?
I picked this up in the Steam Summer Sale and just started playing it a couple of nights ago. Thus far it’s everything I expected from a Neocore King Arthur game (I loved the old King Arthur strategy games), beautiful imagery, interesting story and fantastic musical score. I can’t decide if I like the UI yet or not, but I want to like it. The UI when you’re managing buildings and upgrading/equipping characters is very nice, but the UI in the tactical combat portion is taking some getting used to. The tutorial animations that pop up when a new gameplay element is encountered are absolutely useless as they’re so small you can’t even tell what is happening, so I’m just feeling it out as I go along. Thankfully it’s pretty similar to a lot of other tactical games, so facing, overwatch, action points, skills, etc. are all fairly intuitive.
I just finished the Bridge of Sorrows mission and I have Camelot rebuilt with the Hospice add-on. I appointed Kay as the regent for the loyalty bonus, and I assigned Lady Dindraine as the Hospitaller as she gave a nice bonus there. I will probably lose her before too long though, as I am heading down the path of Righteous-Pagan and she is solidly Christian.
I created a save game after finishing the main mission on Bridge of Sorrows but before leaving the mission. Has anyone opened the big “Do Not Open - Dead Inside” door in the mission? It’s optional, and Sir Balin vehemently warns against it, but I have to think there is something worth obtaining in there (other than just the xp for killing a crapton of dead squires, crossbowmen and villagers).
I don’t remember specifically, but every time something like this has popped up the reward is usually a loot chest with better than average rewards, often a Relic of some random sort.
I didn’t have any issue with the combat UI myself, what is throwing you off, out of curiosity? I just played this a month ago, and I did beat it (well, I saw credits, but I didn’t do the post-credit stuff as I was over 40 hours in and ready for a new game to play). I also don’t remember tutorials being “small”? What resolution are you running?
Nice. I’m going to open it tonight then and see what I get. Thanks!
I’m running 1920x1080 with graphics set to High. Most of the combat UI stuff that is throwing me off is small things that I will eventually get over. Stuff like needing to constantly use the view keys to swing the camera around in order to see into an adjacent room or past an obstacle to see the path for movement or ranged attack, or the lit up squares that define movement being dimmed by terrain features to the point where I accidentally move one step too far (from green into yellow) and then don’t have enough action points to attack or overwatch. I also haven’t found a way (if there is one) to give a character another healing potion if they’ve consumed theirs (between combats on the tactical screen, I can hand them a new one between missions on the equipment screen easily enough). I guess you can only use one potion per hero per mission?
The tutorial animation and description windows that appear while I’m cruising around on the battle maps are about the size of 1.5 character portraits and appear in the lower right corner of the screen. I can sort of make out what the animation is showing, but the text is tiny. I am also old though…so that could be half the problem! :-)
Pretty much - but you can equip TWO items per hero, including a second healing potion.
Ahhh! I’ll try that, probably with Balin since he seems rather…squishy.